Précis of Democratic Autonomy*

Abstract

Democratic Autonomy's central aim is to characterize how, within democratic institutions, we may reason with one another so as legitimately to settle ends or aims of our joint, governmental activity. Standard conceptions of policy reasoning, such as cost-benefit and risk-benefit analysis, typically take ends for granted, as revealed by individuals in market behavior or as settled by the decision-makers. The book aims to describe how we, as decision-makers, can reason about ends of policy. To discharge this main task, book had to extend beyond topic of collective practical reasoning, in two directions. First, it is clear that our ability to reason together about policy matters is highly mediated by an institutional structure that parcels out authority and responsibility in complex and overlapping ways. Hence, any persuasive account of how we reason together, democratically, must be an institutionally rich account. One might take institutional setting of much democratic reasoning to be simply incompatible with joint reasoning. DA does not take that tack. Rather, it accepts that while institutional settings within which democratic reasoning goes on especially constitutionally protected public sphere, elected legislature employing majority rule, and administrative agencies do indeed present distinctive challenges to whether we can reason together about ends of policy, they also provide positive opportunities for an account of joint reasoning that accepts that this reasoning may be institutionally distributed. The second extension of book's scope concerned idea of legitimacy. Adequately to assess conditions under which joint, public reasoning about ends is legitimate, it turned out, required developing a broad account of democratic legitimacy, one specifying place that reasoning, of any kind, ought to have in democracies. Keeping this question central enabled DA, as I think, to shed new light on our multi-faceted ideal of democracy; and