Creative Self-Correction and Democratic Order: A Virtue-Ethical Account

This paper examines democratic self-correction through the lens of virtue ethics, contrasting stability-oriented and open-ended accounts of political order. Self-correction is understood as the capacity to identify and address errors by relying on internal resources rather than external intervention. In political theory, this capacity is most often conceptualised in institutional terms, structured through procedures designed to ensure continuity and renewal, such as elections and accountability mechanisms. However, institutional self-correction tends to prioritise 'correction' over the 'self': errors are treated as deviations from a known and stable order and evaluated against existing justificatory standards. Such accounts leave little room for genuinely transformative self-correction, which requires an emphasis on agency rather than mere adjustment. On the view advanced here, self-correction does not restore a predefined standard but instead revises it by interrogating its underlying value commitments. The virtue of creativity is central to this process, as it disposes agents to act under conditions of uncertainty rather than according to fixed criteria. Whereas stability-seeking forms of self-correction are reactive and confined to available standards, a creativity-centred, virtue-ethical approach is proactive and open-ended, making it a distinctive source of democratic vitality.