Justifying Democracy: Liberal Commitments and Permissible Ways of Life

Recent debates about the justification of democracy have been spearheaded by proponents of democratic proceduralism. This increasingly popular view holds that democracy as a decision-making procedure necessarily has some kind of non-instrumental—intrinsic or extrinsic—value and is thus desirable for its own sake (see Ziliotti, 2020; Destri, 2021). It seeks to explain and strengthen citizens’ robust commitment to democracy by showing that its core procedural features advance, constitute, embody or contribute to a certain (possibly higher) value or ideal (e.g.: Kolodny, 2014; Viehoff, 2014, 2019; Wilson 2021; Kapelner 2022; Lovett and Zuehl, 2022). One implication of this approach is that a fair democratic procedure has to be deemed preferable and authoritative irrespective of its outcomes, even if it happens to produce decisions that are unjust, epistemically bad, or contrary to basic liberal values. Naturally, those who are deeply committed to liberal political morality may find themselves discontent with this conclusion and question the basic tenets of proceduralist arguments (cf. Viehoff, 2023). In this paper, I aim to explore one overlooked challenge to democratic proceduralism which is grounded in a broadly liberal commitment to promote and maintain a meaningful diversity of ways of life in the social world (cf. Rawls 2005, p. 195-201). This commitment is rooted in the basic idea that citizens should have an equal opportunity to pursue various conceptions of the good, and they can do so only if they are able to freely shape and sustain their chosen ways of life. Liberals should therefore endorse only those political procedures which reliably maximize the amount of (permissible) ways of life available to citizens; call this "the social diversity test." Proceduralist justifications of democracy largely fail to pass this test since they subscribe to a "thin" interpretation of democracy as a political procedure: on this interpretation, democracy is constituted merely by the casting of (equally weighted) votes. In contrast, a full picture of this procedure should include constitutional constraints imposed on the parties of the decision-making process and, especially, on legislative/voting majorities (cf. Anderson, 2009). One potential problem with the social diversity test is that, if unqualified, it can be used to justify anti-democratic political arrangements. Namely, it might lead us to accept enlightened liberal autocracy as a preferable political procedure if it happens to secure a meaningful diversity of ways of life better than liberal democracy. However, as I attempt to show, this worry is largely unfounded because it needlessly presupposes that an idealized liberal autocracy can, in principle, secure such a diversity (which is not the case). In fact, even an idealized liberal autocracy, qua autocracy, necessarily has to forbid certain ways of life that are centered around political activity, understood as participation in political society’s collective self-government. Ceteris paribus, a similarly idealized liberal democracy is less restrictive than an idealized liberal autocracy: if there is, in sum, a hundred ways of life in a given social world, then liberal autocracy necessarily offers a (100-n) of them to its citizens, whereas liberal democracy offers all 100 of them.