Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eric Beerbohm is professor of government and director of graduate fellowships for the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

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"Are citizens in a democracy complicit in the injustices perpetrated by a state that acts in their name? Yes they are, argues Eric Beerbohm.In Our Name is a major statement in democratic theory that develops a novel approach to the relationship between citizen and representative. This book will reorient our understanding of the nature of representation in a democracy and appeal to philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists alike."--Rob Reich, Stanford University

"In Our Name explores the moral and epistemic predicament of the democratic citizen, analyzing the ethics of participation, belief, and delegation that condition the responsibilities of citizens and their political representatives. Drawing on a distinctive theory of action, this account of complicity powerfully challenges the understanding of our duties as citizens."--Melissa Lane, author ofEco-Republic

"This book sets forth a highly innovative way of thinking about the meaning of democracy. Resisting the familiar claim that individuals have little or no causal impact on democratic laws or policies, Beerbohm makes the case for a compelling new vision of self-government. Emphasizing the centrality of individual responsibility in collective decision making, Beerbohm opens a path that other scholars working in democratic theory will have to walk through in the future."--Corey Brettschneider, Brown University

"This sharp and keenly argued book seeks to clarify the decision-making responsibilities of citizens and their representatives, given the complex ways in which they can be complicit in unjust political actions. Beerbohm offers a new ethics of participation grounded in the idea of citizens as political coprincipals and he provides institutional mechanisms to guide citizens' thoughts, decisions, and actions in democratic life."--Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College

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"Are citizens in a democracy complicit in the injustices perpetrated by a state that acts in their name? Yes they are, argues Eric Beerbohm.In Our Name is a major statement in democratic theory that develops a novel approach to the relationship between citizen and representative. This book will reorient our understanding of the nature of representation in a democracy and appeal to philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists alike."--Rob Reich, Stanford University

"In Our Name explores the moral and epistemic predicament of the democratic citizen, analyzing the ethics of participation, belief, and delegation that condition the responsibilities of citizens and their political representatives. Drawing on a distinctive theory of action, this account of complicity powerfully challenges the understanding of our duties as citizens."--Melissa Lane, author ofEco-Republic

"This book sets forth a highly innovative way of thinking about the meaning of democracy. Resisting the familiar claim that individuals have little or no causal impact on democratic laws or policies, Beerbohm makes the case for a compelling new vision of self-government. Emphasizing the centrality of individual responsibility in collective decision making, Beerbohm opens a path that other scholars working in democratic theory will have to walk through in the future."--Corey Brettschneider, Brown University

"This sharp and keenly argued book seeks to clarify the decision-making responsibilities of citizens and their representatives, given the complex ways in which they can be complicit in unjust political actions. Beerbohm offers a new ethics of participation grounded in the idea of citizens as political coprincipals and he provides institutional mechanisms to guide citizens' thoughts, decisions, and actions in democratic life."--Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College

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In Our Name

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.................................................................ixIntroduction............................................................1Chapter 1 How to Value Democracy........................................25Chapter 2 Paper Stones: The Ethics of Participation.....................51Chapter 3 Philosophers-Citizens.........................................82Chapter 4 Superdeliberators.............................................105Chapter 5 What Is It Like to Be a Citizen?..............................125Chapter 6 Democracy's Ethics of Belief..................................142Chapter 7 The Division of Democratic Labor..............................166Chapter 8 Representing Principles.......................................193Chapter 9 Democratic Complicity.........................................226Chapter 10 Not in My Name: Macrodemocratic Design.......................252Conclusion..............................................................278Notes...................................................................287Bibliography............................................................327Index...................................................................324

Chapter One

Our experience of democracy is intensely personal. As individual citizens, we don't interact with a system of decision making in a wholesale way. We interact with individuals in the retail of ordinary politics—we challenge those individuals on the opposing side at a town meeting, we provide identification to the polling official who directs us to the voting booth, we wonder about the authenticity of the lawmaker seeking our vote. There is nothing impersonal about being unjustly treated by a democratic society. Even regimes as undemocratic as apartheid South Africa and the American South before the Civil War relied on familiar tools of democracy—regular elections, a judge-oriented rule of law, lawmakers answerable to the enfranchised. If democratic procedures contain intrinsic value, you might have thought that it is somewhat less unjust for a large number of people to decide together to perform an injustice than for an authoritarian to order the same action. These citizens affronted the dignity of others, but at least they were free as holders of political power. On the other hand, an instrumental approach to democratic institutions will insist that, other things being equal, an injustice with a democratic pedigree is not morally worse than an authoritarian injustice. I think both of these answers are mistaken, but we need an explanation for this moral phenomenon. How can the fact that a serious injustice is democratically sponsored aggravate its wrongness?

The answer lies in the two kinds of relationships that a democratic system puts us in. First, we relate to our fellow citizens horizontally. We place demands on them—to organize with us or to reject a cause that we believe to be unjustifiable. When they fail to take our moral standing seriously, the felt attitude of resentment is not directed at an abstraction. It is the reaction of a participant in a seriously impaired human relationship. The object of our public protest is not impersonally conceived. We may critique an unjust or malfunctioning system, but we charge actual individuals with cowronging us using political means. Our signs and speech insist on their moral responsibility for directing state coercion to undermine our moral status. The relational character of democracy has a vertical dimension as well. We demand certain kinds of conduct from lawmakers we install in office and threaten to depose them when they violate our trust. Our managerial authority allows us to alter our lawmakers' treatment of other citizens. When they abuse their power to wrong others, our attitudes may range from indignation to the shame that we put them in this position. Here again there is an unavoidably interpersonal character to these demands. Citizens experience a bundle of participant attitudes—directed both horizontally and vertically—that provide us with raw data about the kinds of relationships that democratic institutions make possible. Our attitudes of indignation, resentment, and betrayal are reactions to wrongdoing. Their targets are agents and not mere institutional abstractions.

In this chapter I harness these participant attitudes. They can help us locate both the distinctive value and vulnerabilities of relating to each other as sharing authority over the coercive terms of our state. I develop a conception of democracy that appeals to a distinctive social relation that we bear to each other. My account identifies a mode of relating to each other horizontally and vertically—as cosubjects of the law and coauthors. In Hobbes's elegant picture, we have to understand ourselves as simultaneously "makers" and "matter." I argue that the justificatory nerve of democratic institutions is not to be found in the goodness of states of affairs that they tend to bring about. Nor does it reside in intrinsic properties contained in democratic procedures themselves. Instrumentalists and proceduralists, on my view, offer us the wrong kind of reasons. They neglect our role as "makers." Missing is how we can plausibly view democratic citizens as retaining a coauthoring authority. What we ultimately value about democratic practice, on my view, is that it makes possible for us to stand in a certain kind of relation with others—a relationship that recognizes them as mutually accountable, free, and rational persons. This is the sense in which democracy places us in an infrastructure of mutual liability.

My approach captures the moral value of democratic institutions in a way that is more purely nonconsequentialist than ordinarily supposed. I take this to be significant, because the phenomenology of moral life retains a strong deontological character. Think of the priority that we generally assign to avoiding individual wrongdoing, our experience of moral obligation, even our understanding of the point of our actions. These intuitions testify to an ethical outlook that is powerfully agent centered. If a conception of democracy makes use of these deontological ingredients, it may be in the position to dissolve puzzles generated by conceiving collective self-rule—and its correlative obligations of individual self-rule—in instrumental terms.

The argument proceeds by a process of elimination. Instead of cataloging the morally attractive features of democratic institutions, we will search for the most basic presumptive wrong entailed by denying democratic agency to coerced individuals or collectives. I argue that the neglected distinction between democracy as self-rule and democracy as answerable rule affects how we morally "score" democratic systems. This matters in assessing whether representative democracy is a pale attempt to mimic a more direct form of self-rule, or whether it can be construed as a first-best system. Auditing the value of democracy will create space for my relational approach. This way of understanding democracy can explain the dual roles built into the office of the citizen.

Two Concepts of Democracy

What's in a concept? You can always bypass an analysis of a political concept by fiat. Just insist upon a stipulative notion of democracy and delve right into substantive argument. I sympathize with this...