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Justice, Disagreement and Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2012

Laura Valentini
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Abstract

Is democracy a requirement of justice or an instrument for realizing it? This article argues that the correct answer to this question depends on the background circumstances against which democracy is defended. In the presence of thin reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value democracy only instrumentally (if at all); in the presence of thick reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value it also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since the latter type of disagreement is pervasive in real-world politics, the conclusion is that theories of justice designed for our world should be centrally concerned with democracy.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 177 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

University College, London (email: [email protected]). The author is grateful to the participants at the UCHV Fellows’ Seminar (Princeton), the conference ‘Justice: Between Ideals and Reality’ (Frankfurt), the CPSA Annual Convention (Montreal), the workshop on ‘Justice and Equality’ (Exeter), and the Workshop on Federalism, Security and Democracy (McGill, Montreal) for discussion. Many thanks also to Sara Amighetti, Enrico Biale, Emanuela Ceva, Zsuzsanna Chappell, Thomas Christiano, David Estlund, Nannerl Keohane, Cécile Laborde, Patti Lenard, Andrew Lister, Joseph Mazor, Valeria Ottonelli, Alan Patten, Philip Pettit, Anna Stilz and Patrick Tomlin for their detailed comments on previous versions of this article. Finally, the author is especially grateful to Hugh Ward and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their constructive criticisms and suggestions, and to Christian List for his feedback and continued encouragement.

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49 Estlund, Democratic Authority.

50 Notice that a similar problem would not occur if the disagreement were only about whether policy X or Y is just. For we do not need to know what the substantive right answer is in order to decide whether a particular procedure is good at tracking the truth. (On this see Estlund's critique of Waldron in ‘Jeremy Waldron on Law and Disagreement’, p. 122.) What makes resort to epistemic procedures problematic is the fact that we lack an account of the truth conditions of statements about justice.

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