The irrelevance of benevolence: on the role of benign despots in political theory

The theoretical possibility of benign despotism plays a crucial role in many influential arguments in contemporary political philosophy. For instance, democratic theorists appeal to the counterfactual figure of the benevolent dictator to reject instrumental defences of democracy, while theorists of self-determination appeal to the counterfactual figure of the benevolent colonizer to motivate the value of self-determination. We argue that this argumentative strategy is not as benign as the non-existent despots upon which it depends. The appeal to hypothetical benevolent dictators and colonizers usually serves to demonstrate the intrinsic value of collective self-rule. If basic rights and other goods could (theoretically) be secured through authoritarian or colonial rule, then democracy and self-determination cannot be robustly justified on the basis of their tendency to generate such goods. Instead, we must turn to accounts that emphasize the intrinsic value of self-rule. In our view, this sort of argument forestalls one sort of contingency only by exacerbating another. Undeniably, defending democratic and self-governing institutions for their ability to generate certain goods (or forestall certain evils) makes their value contingent on empirical regularities. In practice, however, we argue that the regularities in question are historically robust, and thus not fragile in the way that the language of contingency implies. Meanwhile, arguments that rely on the supposedly more robust logic of self-rule are also contingent in a different, and not obviously less important, way. In particular, they rely on the assumption that the values appealed to justify collective self-rule, such as individual autonomy, are universally shared. But these values are not necessarily widely endorsed across cultures. In that sense, they are not so robust after all. By contrast, the normative concerns captured by instrumentalist accounts are far more widely shared. Furthermore, we argue that there are several overlooked dangers associated with this common argumentative move. First, it shifts our attention away from the concrete harms done by actual dictators and colonizers. Relatedly, it implicitly concedes ground to those who deny this fact, in a way that is clearly problematic in other contexts. For example, we ought not concede to “scientific racism” claims regarding natural inferiority in an effort to defend unconditional equality. Some grounds should not be conceded even for the sake of argument, and we argue that the hypothetical erasure of violence and abuse under colonial and despotic rule is one such instance. Finally, it implies that an entire category of reasons that have motivated resistance against despotic rule is simply mistaken—or, at least, not worthy of philosophical uptake. Though the intrinsic value of self-rule undoubtedly motivated some anticolonial and democratic movements, many were motivated also—if not primarily—by concerns such as poverty, inequality, repression, dispossession, and cultural or actual genocide. We argue that it would be a serious mistake to ignore the actual motivations and perspectives of oppressed political actors in our accounts of the values and institutions they have fought to achieve. We conclude with broader reflections on the use of history and empirics in normative political theory.