The Moral Underpinnings of Democracy and its Degree-Affected Variant

Motivated by some ideas that percolated around in the New Left, this essay argues that the core justification of democracy is not that it maximizes utility (which it often does pretty well) or even that it recognizes equality of citizenship (which is essential to any just political order), but instead that it is the best projection into the sphere of social decision making of the values of individual autonomy and liberty.  It follows that democracy keyed to the stake that each voter has in the outcome will sometimes realize democratic values more fully than does one citizen one vote.

From May through September, the city buses are almost always hot.  Disgruntled riders get up a petition to the city council proposing that air conditioners be installed.  The city council employs consulting experts to determine the cost of the proposal and of the fare increase necessary to cover it.  They calculate that the capital outlay can be financed and the increased fuel and maintenance costs covered by raising the $2 fare to $2.50.  Rather than voting on the question themselves, the council submits it to the bus riders in the following fashion:  From the beginning of March until the end of June, every bus rider is given a ballot each time he or she gets on the bus.  It may be marked and deposited when the passenger leaves the bus. 

This is an example of “degree affected democracy” in action.  That those most affected should decide was a principle of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the few New Left principles that has some attraction for a few small-government types on the right. There has been a revival of the idea of degree affected democracy, albeit in a jaundiced form, by the US billionaire who proposed that only taxpayers should vote and that they should caste a number of votes equal to the dollars of taxes they pay. 

As an instance of degree affected democracy, the vote-by-tax proposal, of course makes the assumption that the only significant way people are affected by the government is through the taxes they pay. Soldiers killed in action and civilians mugged in poorly policed neighborhoods might reasonably dissent on this point. (Perhaps our billionaire was not really interested in degree affected democracy, but was only seeking full realization of Marx's doctrine that the government is the executive committee of the ruling class, tax dollars being a tolerably good proxy for investment in this civic joint stock company.)

The elegance of the bus vote scheme comes from the fact that, unlike vote-by-tax, it covers reasonably well the two most important ways in which people can be affected by the decision whether to air condition the bus fleet: by enjoying the benefit and by paying for it. Those who never ride and so never suffer from heat and never pay, have no say. Those who ride once in a month have less say than those who commute daily. Of course the scheme is not perfect. A commuter may vote many times and then move away. The once-a-monther may change jobs on July 1 and become a regular commuter. There will be some who are significantly affected who will have no vote under the scheme, for example, the store owner who will have more summer customers (but perhaps fewer winter customers) if the air conditioners are installed and the fares go up. Also left out are all those who will be affected by changes in air quality if bus travel becomes more or less popular. (Other things being equal, this voting scheme should tend to increase bus use, although we can imagine circumstances in which it would not, e.g. if the demand function of the losing side were more elastic than that of the winning side.)

Even as it falls short of ideal degree affected democracy in these ways, however, per ride voting is attractive in this case, and it may tell us something about the justification of democracy to see what is the source of the attraction. One possibility is that what would be desirable about this instance of degree affected democracy is that it would have good consequences. If those who will be most affected in their comfort and in their pocketbook want the change, then very likely we will have a net gain by making the change. If the vote goes the other way, then probably the extra fare would have resulted in less value overall. This is the extension to the degree affected form of democracy of the most widely given defense of democracy in general – that it “works.”  Recall Churchill’s oft quoted remark, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." 

 

Despite its popularity, this utilitarian defense of democracy leaves it wholly vulnerable to some benevolently authoritarian rival that will operate so much more efficiently as to edge out democracy in desirability were we to look only to results. Utilitarianism also misses an important intuition that we have about the bus case. Its attraction is that it is so fair, not perfectly fair, because it disenfranchises those who are affected less but still affected, yet very fair. To give someone who rode rarely and paid little for the bus the same say on the question as someone who rode and paid every day would simply be less just, other things being equal.  We might have to settle for such a voting procedure for practical, logistical reasons, but in doing so we would be slighting justice.

I am going to argue that what makes degree affected democracy, where practicable, more attractive than one-citizen-one-vote democracy is exactly the chief thing that makes majoritarian democracy in other and more common settings the morally preferred social decision procedure.

Surviving the sinking of the yacht Ta-Keel-La, Ann swam to a small deserted island. There was nothing on the island save one small palm tree and an axe. I don’t know how the axe got there. These things happen on philosophical deserted islands; you just have to accept it.  The axe is sharp too. Sitting in the shade of the palm, our heroine, quite an analytical Ann, takes stock. There is no sign of fresh water on the island, and she knows that this part of the globe is in a dry season. She sees what may well be land to the north, but she cannot be sure because of the sea mist. She had not even glanced at the chart for the last five days, having left all navigation to Captain Jack, whose seamanship she now had some reason to doubt. While thinking things through, Ann appreciated the protection the palm gave her from the broiling sun. She saw that she would be able to count on that shade throughout the day, only having to move a little with the sun’s progress across the cloudless sky.  Even so protected, however, Ann figured that she could last at most a few days without water, and she had no idea when the next vessel might happen by. So she determined to chop down the palm, trim off its fronds, and use it as a swimming buoy as she set out to the north in hope of reaching inhabited or, at least, watered land.

Suppose now that instead of Ann, it was Bif who found himself on this same island in exactly the same circumstances. Bif considers the possibility of swimming north with a palm buoy, but likes his prospects better if he stays put in the shade and watches for rescue.

For a third supposition, suppose that Ann and Bif arrive at this island at the same time, and each reaches the same conclusion as in their respective solo cases. Neither can claim any particular expertise, and both admit that their preferences are merely matters of the risk they prefer to take and the way they prefer to die should it come to that. We would advise them to talk it through thoroughly, which they do, but without either persuading the other.

The choice between cut and (both) swim on the one hand and wait and hug shade on the other is classically binary with no possible compromise. If you suggest that they could wait for a day watching for a vessel, and then cut the palm, I regret to inform you that they are both agreed that the length of the swim is such that they would need to undertake it before being weakened by growing thirst and hunger. Moreover, the palm is far too meager to provide both a buoy for Ann with enough left over to be fashioned into any kind of shade for Bif. 

So there must be a decision. How should it be made? Consensus, of course, would be wonderful, if it could be reached, but Ann and Bif have already come to the end of that avenue. Requiring consensus, or unanimity, before taking any action gives all the advantage to the status quo, which here would be Bif’s position.   

It may well be that in many historical settings the status quo deserves an edge. There is the “devil you know” principle, which has social and psychological as well as an epistemic dimension. We accommodate to historic evils and we feel entitled to historic goods. These are all matters of fact, however, that decision makers can well take into account. To insist upon unanimity against all comers by way of decision procedure is to give the status quo too much weight. Here, in particular, there is not much of a status quo at all, the island society of Ann and Bif having just begun. For Bif to insist on consensus before action is just for Bif to insist on his own solution. Bif’s recasting his position in majoritarian terms, demanding half the votes plus one for action, obviously would here be no better.

Looking for other decision procedures, I am going to sweep aside, as beneath your consideration, those based on trickery, combat, age, or gender – even though you will find considerable support for each of these in the history of political theory broadly construed.

Only a little more slowly, out of deference to the standing of its defenders, should we dispose of any property rights theory – say giving the decision to whomever first saw, touched, or claimed the axe or palm, took sand to polish the axe, or shaved a strip of bark off the tree (thereby “mixing” his or her labor with axe, tree, or both). 

If Robert Nozick really believed, when he wrote Anarchy, State and Utopia, that individual rights exhaust the field leaving no room for social decision making, then he would have to insist that some form of “justice in acquisition” would settle our palm cutting question. This, however, seems almost too silly to take seriously.  

Moreover, if some talismanic act of acquisition could create a property right in Ann or Bif to tree or axe, it could be that Ann would be the sole owner of the tree and Bif of the axe, or vice versa. This state of affairs would mean, again, that Bif’s view would automatically prevail, as he could either forbid Ann to harm his tree or decline to loan her his axe. Conceivably Nozick would have found this a satisfactory resolution of the issue, but more likely, in a footnote, he would have conceded that it could not quite be right, and would have left the problem for another day. It was a tragedy for political theory and philosophy in general that Nozick was not given the days to pursue his footnote ideas.

Ann and Bif, not having the luxury of even one more day, they would, I submit, conclude that the only fair decision procedure was to flip a coin. One of them was going to have to be disappointed in the decision, and there is no reason to think the disappointment of either would be morally less weighty than that of the other.

Fourth case: It is Ann, Bif, and Lee who reach the island all at once. Ann and Bif form their views as before. Neither of them knows what Lee may be thinking.  Here the option of a majority vote after full discussion is enormously attractive. The procedure may initially appeal to both Ann and Bif because it suggests the likelihood of victory. Persuaded by the soundness of their positions, they may both feel that they will probably persuade Lee. A deeper reason in favor of the majority vote is its simple fairness. Each of the three has the same kind of stake in the outcome of the decision, and none has any greater claim than the others to precedence in its making.

Let us assume, for the moment, as seems very likely, that Lee is not indifferent between the two plans. Compare, then, a majority vote to some alternative decision procedures: consensus, flipping a coin, and drawing straws to determine one of them is to decide. As consensus will not be reached, this alternative procedure is biased in favor of Bif’s status quo position. It may well be that this frustrates the will of both others. As Bif has no standing to demand this priority, consensus is, again, an unfair procedure. Flipping a coin is not biased in favor of either course of action, but as likely as not will favor the position held by only one of them, and that one, still, has no standing to demand priority. Drawing straws to determine the decider-in-chief will not automatically produce a result favored by only Bif or only Ann, but it will one third of the time, and it is very hard for these same reasons to find a justification for taking that risk.

Looking deeper, the majority vote procedure here links up with values of autonomy and liberty in the domain of individual decision making. Just as it is a good thing that Ann could take a walk in the park back home when she chose and could make up her own mind whether to sail with Jack, it was a good thing in the Ann-alone-case that it was her own decision that would decide her fate. Autonomy is being the captain of your own ship of life, and here she would be captain at least of a palm float, and, more importantly, of her own destiny. If it were to turn out that the axe handle was rotten, and broke near the head on Ann’s first chop, the sphere of Ann’s autonomous choice, the size of the world subject to her control, would be smaller than she had thought. Her will would be frustrated. Classical liberals, Isaiah Berlin among them, would insist that Ann is just as “free” if her axe is defective as if it is sound, unless, of course, its defect is the result of extraordinarily sharp shooting by a misanthrope who happens to helicopter by, in which case she becomes unfree to cut down the palm, not merely incapable of doing so. (Does this strike you as a little arbitrary?)

Rawls would agree with Berlin that axeless Ann was no less free than Ann with axe, but would add, significantly, that the value of the latter’s freedom was higher. Although I think it is of the first degree of importance to political theory how this question about liberty is to be sorted out (see my book Positive Liberty), here it is enough to notice that Ann-alone loses something of importance to her in the liberty-autonomy complex when it turns out that she cannot use the palm trunk as a buoy and swim for it. 

Ann loses very nearly the same thing in the Ann-Bif-Lee case if the vote goes against her. She again lacks control over very important features of the world she finds herself in. However, Bif and Lee suffer no such loss. They are each in as much control of their world as if each of them had reached the island alone. Majoritarian democracy in this setting minimizes autonomy frustration. More generally, it is usually the best projection of the values of individual liberty and autonomy into the domain of social decision making. This, and not its arguable utilitarian advantages, is the real moral force behind majority rule.

I have up to this point suppressed a partially competing account of the appropriateness of majoritarian democracy when three find themselves on a deserted island. It does not look to autonomy concerns of the three persons any farther than to determine that there are three persons, and not, say, two persons one of whom has an android servant. Having arrived at the island with no prior relation to it or each other, all can claim the informal equivalent of equal citizenship rights in their new ad hoc society.

Equal citizenship is a foundational concept of political theory, slow as was its historical perfection in comparison to some of the concepts of the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights of 1689, and the US Constitution. (Full women’s suffrage came to the US only in 1920, to Britain in 1928, and to the Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden in 1991).  As Rawls argued, elegantly and in detail, equal citizenship is the only plausible basis upon which you would both agree to enter a society and could recommend with a straight face that all others do so as well.

At first blush, equal citizenship might seem to support majoritarian democracy for the same reasons that the minimization of autonomy frustration does. If Ann, for example, were to arrogate the decision to herself by chopping down the palm while Bif and Lee were napping (Ann a strong, quick, lumberjill) there would be a facial violation of equal citizenship. Equal citizenship does not by itself, however, get us to democracy at all. A state that co-opted its decision makers through a fair lottery might well count as having equal citizenship without having a scrap of democracy. Drawing straws to determine who of Ann, Bif, and Lee should make the crucial decision would be equal citizenship, and a good run could be made at the proposition that consensus decision making would satisfy equal citizenship as well. (After all, each is equally required to make up the consensus. That I happen to like the status quo, and you to hate it, makes no difference to our citizenship status, even though it does mean that you are more likely than I to be frustrated by a consensus requirement.) 

It is important, however, that Ann, Bif, and Lee are not merely formal citizens of their new micro-society, but persons with their own individual lives and the will to have those lives go as they choose. It is this fact, and with it the importance of minimizing autonomy frustration, that must be added to equal citizenship before democracy is required. If we want more than beneficial and formally fair decisions, if we want to have a hand as befits the circumstances in the making of decisions, then equal citizenship needs to be enriched by considerations from the autonomy side.

 

It should also be clear that, if equal citizenship alone supported democracy, it would not be degree affected democracy. Citizenship is a binary concept. It cannot by itself take us beyond one citizen one vote.

   

In the Lone Palm Island case, as so far stated, however, equal citizenship and autonomy based concerns yield the same outcome. Giving the case a little twist, however, can separate the two theories. Suppose, after hearing Ann and Bif individually and a full debate between Ann and Bif, Lee favors neither of them. “I think we are very likely to perish either way, and I don’t care which way I die.” In these circumstances, I think there would be good reason to flip a coin, rather than insisting upon majority rule and requiring, or even urging, Lee to cast a vote.  

A random resolution would be better than an arbitrary resolution, that might, for example, be a matter of a gender preference of Lee for Ann or Bif. Also it would be better to remove from Lee’s shoulders the burden of determining all their fates. Here we start with the presumption of majority rule because of the equal citizenship of all three in this micro-society. In the normal case where Lee has at least some real preference, majority rule is supported by the value of autonomy. Where Lee utterly lacks such a preference, however, where neither decision expresses Lee's autonomy, the “degree affected” analysis has it that the case is normatively the same as the Ann-Biff case, and a coin flip becomes appropriate.

  

This account of democracy does not authorize a majority vote or a degree affected vote on everything and anything that affects, or even that significantly affects, more than one person. To repair to a favorite example of Nozick’s, it should not be by majority vote of your family and friends that your spouse should be selected. (Remember Trollope’s Lady Glencora). It should not even be a vote among you and your many serious suitors. Growing out of the liberty-autonomy complex, democracy is justified only when the correct line is drawn between properly individual and the properly social decision making. This, of course, is neither easy nor uncontroversial, but it is a separate discussion.

There is, in any event, pretty clearly some proper domain of social decision making, and if I have given a roughly accurate account of the fundamental justification of democracy within that domain, then there is a direct argument for degree affected democracy in appropriate cases. My initial arguments about Lone Palm Island depended upon rigging the sphere subject either to the realization or frustration of autonomy to be the same for each of the potential voters. Obviously this would not be so in the bus case, where the world of the daily commuter is much bus-ier than that of the occasional user.  If we want to minimize autonomy frustration in the decision about air conditioning and fares, we need to take bus usage into account if that is logistically possible.

In setting out the Lone Palm case, I took each of Ann, Bif, and Lee to be solely self-interested. That is not essential to the case, however. Each might have had equal concern for all, their irresolvable disagreement being merely one of the probable success of the two courses of action.

They might even have been strictly altruistic, e.g. in the two person case, Bif being concerned only with Ann’s survival and Ann being concerned only with Bif’s. Any possible mix among the various players of other concern and self concern also works in the case. What is key here is the person’s autonomy or will, not his or her total good or any other good.

Because of the legitimate claims of equal citizenship, one citizen one vote is going to be the default decision procedure wherever citizenship or a related status is relevant.  Even this conclusion, I think, requires that we draw upon the liberty-autonomy vector explored here. Otherwise equality might be realized through leader lotteries or governance mechanisms using other devices that would minimize the leverage of the citizenry.  We could have equality at a low level of individual citizen input – one citizen one vote, but a rare or meaningless vote.

Perhaps we should not count as citizenship equality at a low level of individual input. Building democracy into the notion of citizenship is fine with me. However, I would insist that the reasons for doing that include centrally the autonomy-liberty values. Our having input into the decisions of the body politic is so important that we may well want to deny that we any longer have citizens if the level of that input falls too far.

The moral claims from the autonomy complex support democracy where social decisions are made but there is no state: associations, families (with some obvious modifications), and people who just happen to wind up functionally or spatially together, as on Lone Palm Island. In these instances autonomy underlies the appeal of democracy and the superiority of degree affected democracy where practicable.  Autonomy also must be drawn upon in explaining the moral possibility of non-democratic exceptions. The Catholic Church is governed by a self-perpetuating hierarchy, but church members know that when they opt in. (If they opt in at confirmation age, we may have some concerns about their degree of autonomy, but at least they can always opt out.) Adult Catholics are members by choice. Non-democratic associations imposed upon their members without opt-out are always morally objectionable.

When we get to the state level, autonomy-extending-democracy and equal-citizenship- democracy will sometimes pull in different directions, despite the commonalities in their justification. States are defined in terms of geographical areas. Equality of citizenship therefore militates in favor of one citizen one vote. However, importance-to-my-life-space does not overlap neatly with the political geography. This results in the appeal of degree affected democracy where it is appealing. 

Supporters of letting the whole transit district or its elected representatives decide the bus air conditioner and fare issue will often argue that everyone in the district is affected one way or another by the decision, and, although this may well be true, it is not the real reason they favor one citizen one vote. That reason is the independent force of equality of citizenship – all are to have the same voice with respect to the decisions affecting the territory of our voting unit. It is this consideration that isn’t negated by recognizing that even if everyone is affected by the bus decision, some are affected much more than others.

When does the equal citizenship side take precedence so as to rule out degree affected democracy even before we look to practicability? One place is in the election of officials. This could be explained by the observation that officials during their tenure in office will face many, varied, and partially unanticipable issues. We cannot possibly make predictions about who will be more or less affected by the career choices of an official. This, however, is, again, not the real reason. We can know that the wealthy person with a large family and drawing upon many services provided by the polity will be affected by officialdom more than the near-hermit who lives retired and off the grid. Yet, we feel no compunction in giving them each the same single vote in election of officials. Representation is at the core of citizenship, and equality controls.

I am inclined to think that certain momentous decisions reflecting the character of the state as state also ought be made one citizen one vote. A standing army, conscription, the existence of an income tax arguably fall into this category. Drawling the line between the momentous and the not quite momentous would, of course, be difficult at best. Fortunately or not, it is an exercise that need not be much pursued. Where equality of citizenship trumps differential autonomy considerations is a question that only arises in those cases for which there is some practicable degree affected voting scheme. Many practicable degree-affected opportunities will surely turn out to be non-momentous, and local, as in my bus case itself.

Still, I think we should be alert for such opportunities. A little ingenuity will turn up more than might be anticipated. There will be various procedures that will operationalize degree affected democracy in a way that would be reasonably accurate and fair. With state citizenship, democracy picks up a constraint of formal equality but that constraint is not total and the underlying moral force of all democracy is the extension, as best it can be, of individual autonomy into the realm of social decision making.