Browsing by Subject "Democratic theory"

In this dissertation, I develop a political liberal ethics of citizenship that reconciles conflicting religious and civic obligations concerning political participation and deliberation--a liberal-democratic ethics of citizenship that is compatible with religious integrity. I begin by canvassing the current state of the debate between political liberals and their religious critics, engaging Rawls's Political Liberalism and the various religious objections Nicholas Wolterstorff, Christopher Eberle, Robert George, John Finnis, Paul Weithman, Jeffrey Stout, and Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier develop (Chapter One). I then critically evaluate political liberalism's requirements of citizens in light of the religious objections and the religious objections in light of political liberal norms of reciprocity, concluding that some religious citizens have legitimate complaints against citizenship requirements that forbid citizens from offering religious arguments alone in public political discussions (Chapter Two). Next, I propose an alternative set of guidelines for public political discussions in constitutional democracies, the phased account of democratic decision-making, that, I argue, addresses the religious citizens' legitimate complaints without undermining a constitutional democracy's legitimacy or commitment to public justification (Chapter Three). Then, I argue that a religious practice of political engagement I call prophetic witnessing is compatible with the phased account, can serve as a canonical model to guide religious citizens' political participation, and can help religious citizens navigate the substantive conflicts between their religious and civic obligations that remain possible even in a society that follows the phased account (Chapter Four). Finally, I conclude by imagining three different democracies, each adhering to a different set of guidelines for public political discussions, in order to argue for the benefit of adopting norms that balance citizens' obligations to govern themselves legitimately with citizens' ability to integrate their deepest moral and religious commitments and their public, political argument and advocacy.

My dissertation seeks to clarify the stakes of recent calls to increase civic friendship in our communities by initiating a conversation between contemporary and historical theoretical work about the requirements and consequences of using friendship as a model for social and political relationships between citizens. Friends’ lives are bound together by shared activity and by mutual concern and support; in what ways do relations between citizens, who often begin as strangers, take up these attitudes and behaviors? What kinds of civic friendship are possible in our contemporary democratic communities? How are they cultivated? And what are their political advantages and disadvantages? These questions guide the project as a whole.

I begin by canvassing some recent and popular work by Robert Bellah et al., Robert Putnam, and Danielle Allen in order to clarify the claims they make about different forms of civic friendship. The chapters that follow focus on the work of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith respectively in order to respond to various gaps I find in the contemporary accounts. I assess what each thinker, contemporary and canonical, can offer us today as we continue to think about the most sustainable and fair ways in which citizens can relate to one another in vast and diverse contemporary democracies. Along the way I address several important over-arching issues: the relationship between self-interest and care for others; the relationship between different sorts of equality and civic friendship; and the different roles that reason, emotions, habits, and institutions play in the cultivation of various kinds of civic friendship. I conclude that equality and justice ought to be both prerequisites and consequences of civic friendship, that self-interest is not a sufficient source for robust civic friendship and that instead some kind of imaginative and emotional motivation is needed, and that civic friendship must be understood as both a moral and a political phenomenon.

Is imprisonment democratic? On the one hand, incarceration is a space of democratic inequality. Disenfranchised from voting, left off juries, and restricted in speech, the prisoner is excluded from the democratic community. On the other hand, incarceration has a long association with democratic self-rule, a place where the demos (or people) have condemned the guilty and strived to reform the redeemable. By turning to accounts of incarceration and democracy in Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Y. Davis, I analyze the prison as both a site of democratic inequality and constitutive of democratic politics. This dissertation reconstructs the long history of incarceration in democratic political thought, showing how the prison has been thought to instantiate democracy (Plato) and enhance democratic citizenship (Tocqueville), yet also criticized as violating norms of political equality (Du Bois) and political freedom (Davis) latent in democratic self-rule. I argue that this paradoxical relationship raises broader questions about the meaning of democracy and the future of incarceration in democratic politics.

This dissertation examines whether democratic citizens are responsible for the behavior of their governments. Through careful analysis of the political theory and practice of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Addams, I demonstrate that notions of democracy that are distinctly modern in their emphasis upon plurality and individuality can instill in citizens a sense of responsibility for public life. My analysis also calls attention to several challenges that make ethical democratic citizenship a demanding undertaking. In the final chapters, I construct an account of responsible democratic citizenship that addresses these challenges, drawing upon lessons learned from my discussion of Thoreau and Addams, as well as from more contemporary thinkers. Democratic citizens, I argue, do not fully control the circumstances in which they act, and thus they often become implicated in outcomes to which they have not explicitly consented. If they aspire to be self-ruling, however, they must accept some responsibility for political outcomes that affect their own wellbeing and are affected by their behavior. Furthermore, I argue that citizens are unlikely to recognize and discharge their shared responsibilities unless they cultivate particular attitudes, including curiosity, flexibility, sympathy, humility and courage. These attitudes enable citizens to learn about the problems for which they are responsible and cooperate with others to solve shared problems.

In this dissertation, I advance a new interpretation of the meaning and political implications of Isaiah Berlin's theory of value pluralism. My argument focuses on two puzzles within the literature on value pluralism: first, value pluralist political theorists advance a variety of differing political views on an ostensibly value pluralist basis; second, and more deeply, their writings betray significant ambiguity on what value pluralism means in the first place. I identify two central sources of these problems. First, two distinct sets of ideas in Berlin's work, which I label the "moral-practical" and "societal groupings" versions of value pluralism, are persistently conflated by both Berlin and more recent value pluralist theorists. Second, attempts to justify a political view on the basis of value pluralism run aground on a "priority problem" stemming from the central value pluralist concept of incommensurability. In my approach, I maintain the distinction between the moral-practical and societal groupings theories, focusing on the moral-practical version as a more original and less well-understood contribution of Berlin's thought. I also develop a strategy, which I call "giving incommensurability its due," that avoids the priority problem by focusing on metaethical (or second-order), epistemic, and procedural considerations. This strategy supports two major sets of political implications: a liberal-constitutional framework of basic rights and liberties, and a robust, vibrant form of participatory and deliberative democratic politics. This turn to democracy constitutes an important shift vis-à-vis the current literature, which has, up to now, been preoccupied with value pluralism's relationship to liberalism.

This essay explores majority decisions to give up majority power. In particular, it analyzes a majority's decision to institute judicial review as a method of final decision-making on questions of constitutional rights and contrasts that decision with the majority's election of a dictator. Both decisions involve a majority's voluntary transfer of power for certain matters in irreversible ways. Adopting the proceduralist viewpoint, the essay argues that these types of decisions--involving majoritarian renunciation of power--require a greater justification than decisions that do not alter future decision-procedures. That greater justification requires these types of decisions, decisions this essay terms "delegation decisions," to satisfy three legitimacy conditions. First, the majority can only legitimately give up power over issues that can be decided by procedures other than majority vote. Second, the procedural mechanism the majority gives power to must be a fair procedure. Finally, the procedural mechanism must also be appropriate for the decisions it is supposed to make.

The essay argues that majoritarian imposition of judicial review satisfies these three conditions. Majoritarian election of a dictator does not. First, the imposition of judicial review hands over only one set of issues to the constitutional court--bill of rights questions--that is capable of resolution by a nonmajoritarian procedure. Second, judicial review as practiced by an ideal constitutional court is a fair procedure for rights questions because it exemplifies qualities such as anonymity and neutrality that are central to procedural fairness. Finally, a constitutional court is appropriate for deciding constitutional rights questions because its virtues--particularly its transparency, deliberative capacity, principled reasoning, and impartiality--are relevant for these questions and mitigate distortions in the decision-making process concerning rights. On the other hand, an elected despot makes decisions on questions that the majority cannot legitimately relinquish power over, fails to instantiate values of procedural fairness, and is inappropriate for any number of the infinite questions that it has authority to decide. Proceduralists can thus resist the majority's election of a dictator without also having to resist its imposition of judicial review. And they need not abandon proceduralism in order to do so.