Re: Questioning Democracy

I take on board what you are all saying about the stability of a democracy and the advantages the spread of power might have for preventing tyranny. I guess that these are empirical matters and we need to go out into the world to find out what the most stable and most free form of government is. Fine. I want to look at the more philosophical aspect of why serving the interests of the people should be the aim of government or even be a good idea generally. I have some prima facie reasons why it is not a good idea:

* The people are not automatically correct. For example, the use of petrol in cars is seriously bad for the environment, and I think that we should accept that the environment needs looking after. Hence let's say that the government should put a heavy tax on fuel so as to reduce usage and hence damage to the environment. But what if the self-interested public wants cheap petrol? Does the government now have some (moral?) obligation to reduce fuel duty and let the environment be damned because it's vox populi?

*The people's wishes might be immoral. If we are taking realism about ethics seriously (and, deep down, I think most of us do) then things can be right or wrong. Somethings should not be done. I agree that finding answers in ethics is hard, but ethics is some kind of a (non-empirical) science. People study it: they are called ethicists. They are better informed to make ethical decisions, than the public at large. Ethical decisions are arguably the most important ones, shouldn't we do more than contract these important decisions out to the laity? Suppose you have serious ethical objections to the death penalty, and yet you are a proper democrat. (The majority of people in the UK support capital punishment: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=23&did=210#ip04 I can't actually find the Guardian article it talks about). What do you do? You can be democratic or do the right thing. Democracy seems to require that sometimes you don't do the right thing.

*People don't always know what's good for them. We all look too much at the short term, even if screwing up our long term interests.

So there are some initial reasons against democracy being an ends in itself (rather than just a means to preventing tyranny). What reasons do we have to actually think that the people's wishes have some kind of legitimacy in themselves, just because they are people's wishes?

On 05/01/06, nj8 <nj8@ntlworld.com> wrote:

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I was shooting from the hip, rather (don't have a lot of time right now)
but WHY shouldn't the people have the power? they are the ones affected
by the decisions, after all.

There is an awful lot of political theory on how & why bureaucratic
democracies (in the +ve sense) work ... but it seems to me to come down
to stability: there are checks and balances. In a democracy, there is
probably more of a closed circle of accountability than in business. I
elect you in, I thereby give you authority to make the law for me (to
'lead' me if you like), but I can help to get rid of you if I don't like
the way you do it.

Of course, I don't get everything I want, but why should I expect that
when there are 60m other voices out there? If I don't like your abortion
policy, I'd rather have the chance to get rid of you than to be stuck
with you for ever (or until the men in grey suits, or sandals, decide
THEY want someone else...)

best
nj

Matthew Hodgetts wrote:

> OK, I admit that it might be hard to form a system so that everyone is
> always accountable. But that doesn't mean that we should shrug our
> shoulders and say, "Oh well, it might as well be the public." It just
> occurs that in a business everyone is accountable to someone higher
> than themselves: bottom-rung people to middle management to senior
> management to senior executives, who in turn are responsible (often
> but not always) to boards, whose members have their personal bosses.
> Nobody need not have anyone above them. But I think I am slightly
> twisting what you are saying Nick, You say
>
> > The thing about democracy is that it recognises that everyone has
> interests.
>
> You think that the specifically the people should have oversight. Fair
> enough, but be careful not to presuppose this (ie democracy) when
> trying to defend democracy. I want to know whether a government should
> even be trying to serve the interests of the people. I know that it is
> hard to decide what the 'right thing to do is,' but I would much
> rather have ethicists decide my countries abortion policy than the man
> on the street.
>
> Just on a pedantic note, it's not true that in a democracy politicians
> do not follow their own (or their party's own) agenda. Of course they
> do, we don't have the people's wishes served just like that.
> Politicians do things the people don't want ( e.g. the war against
> Iraq had a majority opposing it, yet it still happened, (not trying to
> comment of rightness or wrongness of that btw), and they fail to do
> things that the majority of people in this country want ( e.g.
> reinstating capital punishment).
>
> I think that we can say a lot about the failings of democracy and the
> possible advantages or disadvantages of 'meritocracy,' but I wonder
> what people think about the presupposition of democracy that
> government /ought / to be just trying to satisfy the wishes of as many
> of the electorate as possible? (Perhaps this isn't a good definition
> of what democracies are supposed to do, I don't know).
>
> Matthew

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