What Comes First in My Democratic Theory

 

Theological discussions have long been riddled with arguments between those who think God created humans and those who think humans created God. And, while it may not make a ton of sense to claim that although "the creator of the universe" didn't actually make human beings, It/He/She/They was the first to discover them, lots of people have believed that God was found by people rather than made up by them. 

It's unsurprisingly difficult to resolve a matter of this four-type ambiguity, largely because of the age-old battle between those who hold that ideas are constructed out of independent external things in the world (realists) and those who insist on the contrary that what seem to be outside "things" are actually fabricated out of ideas (idealists). Without fail, this fight fires up again in every new generation.

No doubt my readers will be delighted/relieved to hear that I don't intend to get into this hoary and likely unsolvable debate. Surely, I am incapable of  resolving it to anybody's satisfaction (including my own). But I must concede that, strange as it may sound, I (and everybody else) who writes about democratic theory has -- perhaps unconsciously -- assumed one (or more) positions on the various chicken/egg questions that can't fail to arise even in political philosophy. 

So, for example, I start my book with the recognition that one has to start somewhere, and in my view authentic democracy requires taking the position that what makes a public policy or elected official the "right one" is a matter of what a majority chooses. That is, there is no "correct" public policy that is independent of what the people want. Democratic policies are thus a function of prudential values -- what people expect (correctly or  incorrectly) will be best for them, given their options. This position makes me hostile to a popular view called "epistemic democracy." I explain why here.

On the other hand, I am ready to allow that the decision regarding "what came first" might not be the case for moral values. There, I say, it may well be that the moral truths are "out there" independently of what anybody happens to think. I'm agnostic about that myself: I simply don't know. But whatever may be true with respect to "objective morality," I don't believe that what makes something an actual law is a function of any alleged ethical truths that happen to be out there in the universe independent of what anybody wants or thinks. That decision makes me a "legal positivist." 

This stuff is hard to make clear -- at least it is for me. But maybe this music will help?