Ronald Dworkin posed an interesting hypothetical in class several weeks ago, and I think it's worth discussing. Imagine a country where there are no elections, but every two years a computer picks 1000 citizens at random, and those citizens become the national legislature for those two years.* Assume the system had adequate constitutional safeguards to prevent the legislature (who would not care about reelection) from becoming tyrannical. Assume further that all of the people chosen were capable of serving as legislators.
Such a system would, in all likelihood, have a legislature much more representative of the people and their views than any democratically elected legislature. Still, such a system would probably not be deserving of the name "democracy." The question I pose is: Should we care? Such a system would probably meet all the criteria for self-government, as I described it in my previous post. The governors would be under the control of the people (at least under the conditions I've stated), and the system, at least ex ante, treats all people as equals. So, is there anything worse about this system than a democratic one? If so, what is it?
*For a more ad absurdum version of this proposal, consider the Isaac Asimov story "Franchise," in which a supercomputer selects the most representative person in the country to be the elector for that year; based on the person's answers to a series of mundane questions, the computer figures out who the country "elects."
Monday, November 16, 2009
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Interesting problem.
ReplyDeleteI guess there can be legitimate, reasonable disagreement over what treating people as equals requires, especially on hot-button issues.
There can also be disagreement about what policies government ought to pursue. A government that is guaranteed to treat people as equals will only pursue policies that do meet that criterion in some general way, but will still usually have a range of policy options to choose from. Some of these options will be sounder than others, and the difference can't be settled by asking which of those treats people as equals.
The result of this is that even in a system where the treatment of people as equals is guaranteed, there are still choices to be made, and treating people as equals demands that those choices be left to individuals by allowing them to select representatives whose choices they approve of.