The Authority of Democracy*

Abstract

D decision-making has two very different evaluative aspects that sometimes collide and usually complement each other to some degree. On the one hand, we judge democratic decisions from the point of view of the quality of the outcomes. We concern ourselves with whether the outcomes are just or whether they are efficient or protect liberty and promote the common good. This is sometimes called the substantive or outcome dimension of assessment of democratic procedures. On the other hand, we evaluate the decisions from the point of view of how they are made or the quality of the procedure. We are concerned to make the decision in a way that includes everyone who by right ought to be included and that is fair to all the participants. Here we may think that the method by which the decisions are made should be intrinsically fair. In my view these two dimensions of assessment are irreducible. But this is not the way everyone sees it. Some, whom I shall call monists, think that there is only one form of assessment and that other assessments are reducible to it. For example, instrumentalists or best results theorists like Philippe Van Parijs think that the way in which democratic decisions ought to be made is entirely a matter of what will produce the best outcomes. On their view, the only question to be asked in evaluating democratic procedures regards the quality of the outcomes of these procedures. Pure proceduralists, on the other hand, see outcomes as essentially evaluable solely in terms of the procedure that brought them about. There are two versions of this kind of view. One version of the view is attributed to some American legal theorists who wish to justify a rather strong form of judicial restraint with regard to the decisions of the American Congress. They argue that the Supreme Court of the United States ought to defer to virtually all The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 11, Number 2, 2003, pp. 000–000