How Do We Justify Democracy? : proceduralism, instrumentalism and independent criterion

We live under democratic regimes. We don’t live too badly. We think this depends (in part) on the fact that we live under democratic regimes. Hence, we may find those regimes good in this respect. But is democracy really justified? And are we to take its outcomes as legitimate even though we may find them sometimes plainly wrong? In my paper I want to tackle two related issues that concern democracy: its justification and legitimacy. First of all, I intend to clarify a small confusion that happens to blur the debate: the one between single outcomes and democratic procedures. This may seem a minor point, especially because many democratic theorists declare manifestly to embrace it. However, they do not always follow consistently such intent, as I will try to show. Intuitively, such a distinction serves to understand that, while we can take certain democratic outcomes to be unjustified, their legitimacy hinges only on the kind of procedure that issued them, rather than on their objectionable content. This is particularly relevant if we aim to account for the so-called ‘circumstances of politics’: insofar as the ‘fact of disagreement’ is true (and I will assume it is), cooperation would be jeopardized if it were to fall or stand with unanimous agreement over what to do. Nevertheless, contrary to what Waldron seems to think, we disagree over decision-making procedures as well. Hence, if we take outcome legitimacy to depend on democratic procedures, these very procedures ought to become the new focus of inquire. Secondly, then, I turn to the justification of democracy, for which there are two well-known broad approaches: instrumentalism and proceduralism. My second aim in this paper is to propose a new ground to draw a line between these two and to reframe such opposition as instrumentalism versus intrinsecalism. While instrumentalism qualifies those accounts that view democracy as a contingent condition to realize some further value or interest, intrinsecalism takes democracy to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the realization of other aims. Therefore, I intend to argue that: (a) a proper justification requires to conceive an independent criterion that acts as justifier of democracy; (b) the connection between such criterion and democracy itself may be either necessary or contingent. Whereas, for instance, Fabienne Peter’s account qualifies as properly procedural or intrinsic, I take David Estlund’s account to exemplify an instrumentalist approach to democratic justification. However both of them misunderstand their standing in the debate exactly because they lose sight of the distinction between outcome and procedure, or so I try to argue. The paper is organized as follows. The first section regards the distinction between justification and legitimacy of outcomes. Section two introduces a reformulation of the possible justifications of democracy and proposes to use an independent criterion whose connection to democracy serves as qualifier of the justificatory approach. Finally, in section three I criticize Peter’s and Estlund’s accounts, while trying to argue for the relevance of my endeavor.