Democratic Argument Research Articles

Milton and the Republican Politics of Paradise Lost

Milton was both a great poet and in his own time a well-known political writer. Reading Paradise Lost in the light of his republican political writings, however, presents a serious problem because it is Satan and his confederates who speak and act like republicans in that epic poem, as would have been obvious to his contemporary readers. Rather than try to explain this problem away as others have done, this paper argues that Paradise Lost advances a powerful republican argument continuous with Milton’s earlier political views. Specifically, Paradise Lost shows that monarchy and other artificial hierarchies are evil because they contradict the natural and equal right to freedom of all human beings.

Wealth, Political Inequality, and Resilience: Revisiting the Democratic Argument for Limitarianism

Wealth, Political Inequality, and Resilience: Revisiting the Democratic Argument for Limitarianism

The Suspension Problem for Epistemic Democracy

Abstract Recently, many normative theories of democracy have taken an epistemic turn. Rather than focus on democracy's morally desirable features, they argue that democracy is valuable (at least in part) because it tends to produce correct political decisions. I argue that these theories place epistemic demands on citizens that conflict with core democratic commitments. First, I discuss a well-known challenge to epistemic arguments for democracy that I call the ‘deference problem’. I then argue that framing debates about this deference problem in terms of work on epistemic defeat reveals a structurally similar but more serious challenge for epistemic arguments for democracy. Succinctly put, the problem is that if democracy tends to produce correct political decisions, then those in the minority might be required to suspend beliefs about political matters; however, this requirement conflicts with the pivotal democratic principle of self-government. Call this the ‘suspension problem’.

A democratic argument for animal uplifting

ABSTRACT Nonhuman animals are unable to exert any direct control over the functioning of democratic institutions –the decisions of which, nevertheless, have a pervasive impact on their lives. Their interests are therefore likelier to be set back or unfairly discounted, and their choices are more vulnerable to arbitrary interference. Because of this, some authors have suggested that we ought to redesign our political institutions so that they are more responsive to the interests of animals. We argue that this strategy fails to address the root of the problem, which is animals’ lack of robust political agency. We defend that, should it become technologically feasible, we have a pro tanto obligation, derived from the values that underpin democracy, to uplift, or radically enhance, the political agency of nonhuman animals, so that they can better participate in mass democratic politics, express their interests as they see them, self-organise to defend them, and hold their representatives accountable. Finally, we explain how our argument manages to resist the most important objections against animal enhancement and, in some cases, it does so better than alternative proposals based on the value of animal well-being.

Ulster Unionist Political Thought in the Era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968–1998

Abstract This article examines Ulster Unionist political thought, in its widest sense, against the backdrop of the Northern Ireland Troubles. During this period, Ulster Unionists sought to resist nationalist and republican arguments for the unification of Ireland and to articulate their position to supporters and wider audiences. As Direct Rule from London followed the suspension of the unionist-dominated Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont in 1972 and its abolition the following year, internal unionist debate intensified over the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. Defining Ulster Unionism broadly, at a time when its organisational forms were proliferating, the article considers the Ulster Unionist Party and its offshoot Vanguard, as well as the Democratic Unionist Party and the paramilitary organisations, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association, and their affiliated political bodies. The article analyses, in turn, the four competing unionist visions of the future: a return to majority-rule devolution; independence; closer integration with Great Britain; and power-sharing devolution. Not attempting a detailed consideration of the policy proposals, the article instead explores the connections forged between Ulster Unionist political ideas, some of them of long pedigree, and wider debates. It shows that, at a time of considerable change for the United Kingdom, Ulster Unionist argument reflected—much more than is currently understood, and sometimes in a pronounced form—a wide range of interconnected contemporary British disputes. These not only concerned the constitution, nationality and sovereignty, but also permissiveness, political parties, decline, the end of empire, Thatcherism and European integration.

A Critical Analysis of the Democratic Argument for Teaching Science: The Case of Cell Phones

A number of diverse arguments have been proposed by researchers of science education regarding the reason science should be taught in schools. These arguments inevitable play a key role in the curriculum designed by policy makers. The present study turns its attention into the democratic argument and tries to explore its validity through a distinct socio-scientific issue that citizen is likely to come across in their everyday life, that of radiation emitted from cell phones. In particular, it tries to study the required knowledge of physics that will enable individuals to deal with the emission of radiation from cell phones in an effective way. Moreover, drawing from sharp conflicts that have arisen during the last years around the world between citizens and cell phone companies regarding the installation of cell towers within residential areas, it tries to record information about different places in the world where the cell phone controversy has made headline news.

Can We Talk It Out?

AbstractResearch on the normative ideal of democracy has taken a sharp deliberative and epistemic turn. It is now increasingly common for claims about the putative cognitive benefits of political deliberation to play central roles in normative arguments for democracy. In this paper, I argue that the most prominent epistemic defences of deliberative democracy fail. Relying on empirical findings on the workings of implicit bias, I show that they overstate the epistemic virtues of political deliberation. I also argue that findings in cognitive and social psychology can aid in the development of a new and improved generation of epistemic arguments for deliberative democracy.

Dialectics, post-dialectics, and the democratic argument of Lysias XII

The theory of post-dialectics maintains that dialectical perspectives cannot account for the persuasive force of arguments which transgress dialectical norms. One particularly consequential form of post-dialectical argument, called “fascistic argument” by Paliewicz and McHendry, seeks to dominate its discursive space rather than to test claims and give reasons within the terms of that discourse. In this essay I affirm that pragma-dialectics can perceive and explain post-dialectical persuasive forces while retaining a fundamental commitment to dialectical norms. I support this claim with an analysis of the argumentative features of Lysias XII Against Eratosthenes, an instance of forensic oratory from fifth-century BCE Athens. The rhetorical analysis of Lysias XII identifies manifestations of each of Paliewicz and McHendry’s five elements of fascistic argument and describes these manifestations of fascistic argument using the pragma-dialectical terminology of strategic maneuvering. The argument practices of Lysias XII diverge from the theory of fascistic argument by negating disinterested choice instead of choice per se, so they are identified with the distinct but related concept of democratic argument. I further affirm that explaining post-dialectical forces from a dialectical perspective can be enabled by enhancing the generative partnership of rhetoric and dialectics in argumentation studies.

Caring about Other People

Caring about Other People

Constitutional proportionality and moral deontology

ABSTRACT I come to grips with the deontological critique of constitutional proportionality that asserts that this doctrine ignores rights and slips into the utilitarian maximisation of societal interests. I offer a four-pronged classification of the deontological structures underlying the settlement of conflicts of rights and principles. Two of these structures are scalar: balance deontology and threshold deontology. The other two are nonscalar: derogation deontology and hierarchy deontology. I argue that proportionality relies on the scalar structures, but nonetheless sets much store by rights. Therefore, the deontological critique of proportionality is misplaced. However, I claim that proportionality is similar to utilitarian balancing in its practical import. Like utilitarian balancing, proportionality allows judicial arbitrariness by recommending courts to adopt an intuitionist decision-making procedure. Based on this point, I offer a republican argument against proportionality. Instead of an intuitionist approach, I defend a committal method of constitutional adjudication based on hierarchy deontology. The point of this procedure is to introduce priority rules via moral deliberation. I submit that a rule-based kind of deontologism coheres better with rule of law values.

The virtues of truth: On democracy’s epistemic value

Drawing on Bernard Williams's Truth and Truthfulness and Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Justice, this article presents an epistemic argument for democracy on the basis of its ability to incentivize more people to display the virtues of truth required for the social production and aggregation of knowledge. In particular, the article compares democracy respectively with autocracy and epistocracy, showing that it is likely to be, within the context of a modern pluralistic society, an epistemically superior regime in the sense that it creates more favourable conditions for the pooling of epistemic resources. The article concludes with a multi-dimensional framework of democratic legitimacy, where democracy's epistemic value is directly tied with both the safeguard against elite domination and the development of citizens' ethical and intellectual capabilities. In this regard, the article also helps to bridge the gap between epistemic and non-epistemic approaches in democratic theory and unite what might be called the wisdom, power, and virtue of the multitude.

Kako predavati ustavno pravo u dvadeset prvom veku

Constitutionalist discourse has undergone a fundamental transformation at the beginning of the 21st century. New, major constitutional topics have been introduced, inspired by constitutional pluralism and constitutionalism beyond the nation-state. The systemic challenges to modern liberal constitutionalism have prompted a new understanding not only of the constitution, but also of constitutional law as a university subject. The crisis of key parameters of constitutional democracy commands a thorough re-examination of both the cognitive and performative dimensions of teaching constitutional law. For that reason, this paper seeks answers to the question what and how to teach in the epoch of postmodern constitutionalism. The paper advocates the viewpoint that the professor should not only describe phenomena, but also explain the essence of the problem: for example, the republican argument of classical constitutionalism’s irrelevance, or the difference between normality and pathology of constitutional systems in the context of democratic transition, or indeed the trans-nationalization of the constitution and the postmodern paradigm of constitution-building without constituent power. The need for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach, including co-teaching is demonstrated through the topics of monistic and pluralistic federalism, and constitutional guaranties of individual and/or collective rights. The paper concludes that teaching of constitutional law should be guided by global doubt, as the hermeneutics of truth and ethico-political consideration.

Pragmatism, Truth, and Democracy

Il y a un intérêt croissant pour la démocratie délibérative, en particulier pour sa version pragmatiste qui soutient que les libertés et les procédures démocratiques sont plus susceptibles de nous amener à la bonne conception de ce qui est vrai, équitable ou juste. Aujourd’hui, se concentrer sur la vérité est plus important que jamais. Nous (Robert Talisse et Cheryl Misak) avons proposé une argumentation selon laquelle les libertés et les procédures démocratiques peuvent être justifiées sur la base de raisons épistémiques. Nos pratiques de croire et de raisonner exigent que nous nous considérions comme des égaux sociaux et que les voix de tous soient prises au sérieux lorsque nous poursuivons la vérité. Annabelle Lever et Clayton Chin, tout en étant bien en faveur de notre projet général, ont exprimé leur crainte que nous ayons « tort de supposer que les considérations épistémiques soient mieux placées par rapport aux considérations morales pour justifier l’exercice du pouvoir coercitif ». En réponse, nous distinguons d’abord deux situations dans lesquelles la justification épistémique de la démocratie peut opérer. D’après nous, l’argument épistémique montre pourquoi nous devrions être démocrates. Mais la façon dont les démocrates peuvent justifier l’exercice de la coercition pose une question différente. Nous admettons que les raisons que nous mobilisons en tant que société pour justifier le pouvoir coercitif sur les citoyens seront, en effet, d’ordre moral. Notre argument a toujours été que nos croyances sur ce qui est moralement juste doivent – dans la mesure où ce sont des croyances motivées par notre quête de la vérité – être sensibles aux raisons d’autrui. L’argument pour la démocratie est seulement avancé dans un deuxième temps : la meilleure méthode pour atteindre la vérité est, d’une manière générale, une méthode démocratique. Or, les raisons qui seront mobilisées seront des raisons morales invoquant les principes d’égalité, d’autonomie, ou d’utilité.

The limits of limitarianism Why political equality is not protected by Robeyns’ democratic argument

The limits of limitarianism Why political equality is not protected by Robeyns’ democratic argument

Against Balancing: Revisiting the Use/Regulation Distinction To Reform Liability and Compensation Under Investment Treaties

Investment treaties generate mutual benefits for host states and foreign investors to the extent that they discipline opportunistic conduct by host states. Investment treaties do not necessarily generate mutual benefits insofar as they constrain states’ ability to respond to new information or to change their policy priorities. In a companion paper, we use the tools of law and economics to formalize and clarify the relationship between problems of opportunism on the one hand, and new information and shifts in policy priorities on the other. On this basis, we develop a proposal to reform the legal principles that govern liability and compensation under investment treaties that is narrowly targeted to solving the problem of host state opportunism. In this paper, we situate our proposal in relation to existing academic debates, explore its implications in practice and consider additional policy arguments for our proposal beyond the criterion of Pareto improvement deployed in our companion paper. In particular, we show that our proposal develops a line of scholarship which posits that a court or tribunal should distinguish government use of private property from government regulation of private property, with only the former requiring compensation. We argue that our proposal resolves many practical challenges with previous attempts to develop a workable jurisprudence based on the use/regulation distinction and show how our proposal could be operationalized in practice. We further argue that there are strong political economy and democratic arguments for preferring our proposal to the status quo.

Political Epistemology Beyond Democratic Theory: Introduction to Symposium on Power Without Knowledge

ABSTRACT Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge builds a critical epistemology of technocracy, rather than a democratic argument against it. For its democratic critics, technocracy is illegitimate because it amounts to the rule of cognitive elites, violating principles of mutual respect and collective self-determination. For its proponents, technocracy’s legitimacy depends on its ability to use reliable knowledge to solve social and economic problems. But Friedman demonstrates that to meet the proponents' “internal,” epistemic standard of legitimacy, technocrats would have to reckon with the heterogeneity of people’s ideas, which he presents as one of two aspects of a political anthropology of ideational beings. The other aspect is ideational determinism: the shaping of our conscious actions by our interpretations, and of our interpretations by “ideational exposures” (which are, to some extent, heterogeneous). For the most part, our symposiasts agree with this anthropology or leave it uncontested, but they fall back on democratic theory to point toward alternatives to technocracy. This raises the question, which Friedman does not ask, of whether his political anthropology undermines a certain brand of democratic theory: the liberal brand that attaches respect to people’s opinions as products of “free reflection,” i.e., as underdetermined.

Do populist values or civic values drive support for referendums in Europe?

AbstractRepresentative democracy gives voters the right to influence who governs but its influence on policy making is only indirect. Free and fair referendums give voters the right to decide a policy directly. Elected representatives usually oppose referendums as redundant at best and as undermining their authority at worst. Democratic theorists tend to take electing representatives as normal and as normatively superior. The nominal association of popular decision making and populism has strengthened this negative view. Public opinion surveys show substantial support for holding referendums on important issues. Two major theories offer contrasting explanations for popular support for referendums; they reflect populist values or a commitment to the civic value of participation. This innovative paper tests an integrated model of both theories by the empirical analysis of a 17‐country European survey. There is substantial support for all three civic hypotheses: referendum endorsement is positively influenced by attitudes towards participation, democratic ideals and whether elected representatives are perceived as responsive. By contrast, there is no support for populist hypotheses that the socioeconomically weak and excluded favour referendums and minimal support for the effect of extreme ideologies. The conclusion shows that most criticisms of referendums also apply to policy making by elected representatives. While referendums have limits on their use, there is a democratic argument for holding such ballots on major issues to see whether or not a majority of voters endorse the choice of their nominal representatives.

The social media commons: Public sphere, agonism, and algorithmic obligation

ABSTRACT This paper takes a unique approach to framing the political obligation social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have in a democratic society by casting the public sphere as a common-pool resource. Over the last decade or so much of our civic discourse has moved to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This paper argues that just as citizens have an obligation to one another, social media companies have an obligation to promote agonistic forms of civic, political discourse through their algorithms. This algorithmic obligation that social media companies have must be reconciled with social media companies’ formulation of their fiduciary shareholder obligations. We posit that a commons based view of social media discourse allows these companies to make both a democratic health and fiduciary interest argument.

A republican argument for the rule of law

ABSTRACTWhile the rule of law is surely a very important good, the familiar discussions found in the literature lead many to conclude that it is either a relatively trivial political ideal, or else a redundant one. What is needed is a new and persuasive defense of the rule of law that properly reflects its great significance for human well being. An important step towards building such an argument is to question a widely-shared but often unnoticed assumption that the rule of law should be understood as a virtue of legal systems. The path is then cleared for a republican argument built on two theses: first, the thought that an ideal society would be one in which no one is the master of anyone else, and second, the thought that our freedom from domination is not natural or pre-institutional.

Against Balancing: Revisiting the Use/Regulation Distinction to Reform Liability and Compensation Under Investment Treaties

Investment treaties generate mutual benefits for host states and foreign investors to the extent that they discipline opportunistic conduct by host states. Investment treaties do not necessarily generate mutual benefits insofar as they constrain states’ ability to respond to new information or to change their policy priorities. In a companion paper, we use the tools of law and economics to formalize and clarify the relationship between problems of opportunism on the one hand, and new information and shifts in policy priorities on the other. On this basis, we develop a proposal to reform the legal principles that govern liability and compensation under investment treaties that is narrowly targeted to solving the problem of host state opportunism. In this paper, we situate our proposal in relation to existing academic debates, explore its implications in practice and consider additional policy arguments for our proposal beyond the criterion of Pareto improvement deployed in our companion paper. In particular, we show that our proposal develops a line of scholarship which posits that a court or tribunal should distinguish government use of private property from government regulation of private property, with only the former requiring compensation. We argue that our proposal resolves many practical challenges with previous attempts to develop a workable jurisprudence based on the use/regulation distinction and show how our proposal could be operationalized in practice. We further argue that there are strong political economy and democratic arguments for preferring our proposal to the status quo.