Agents of justice: power, agency, and the justification of democracy

Abstract

Speaker: Zsolt Kapelner, University of Tromsø In this paper, our speaker Zsolt Kapelner of the University of Tromsø presents a broadly Rawlsian justification of democracy according to which democracy is justified by individuals’ interests in the full and effective exercise of their sense of justice. The argument is not one that Rawls explicitly makes or would necessarily endorse in the form presented here, but it does rely on characteristically Rawlisan premises and draws heavily on his work. Similar arguments for democracy, invoking the sense of justice, have recently been proposed by Jeffrey Howard (2019) and Christian Schemmel (2021). However, their formulations are vulnerable to a critical objection which he calls the Public Power Objection. The Public Power Objection holds that since democratic participation involves power over others, it cannot be adequately justified by their interest in the effective exercise of their sense of justice. Zsolt argues that this vulnerability results from an inadequate account of the value of the sense of justice.