Democracy and the Problem of Fundamental Security

Consider the problem of fundamental security: the problem of reliably preparing for and preventing threats to citizens’ lives and basic needs such as existential risk, economic collapse, and political instability. Which political system deals with the problem of fundamental security best? For many of us, the obvious answer to this question is democracy. And yet democratic decision-making is significantly compromised by pathologies such as irrationality and short-termism which hinder democracy’s capacities to deal with complex, long-term social problems. And democracy’s superior performance to that of many extant authoritarian systems does not entail its superior performance to that of other kinds of political systems which are neither authoritarian nor democratic. Accordingly, the central argument of this dissertation is this: Because we have reason to doubt whether democracy always promotes fundamental security better than all other political systems, we have at least some reason to reject the claim—advanced, most famously, by John Rawls—that democracy is a requirement of justice. Rather than insisting upon such a requirement, we have at least some reason to adopt political experimentalism: an approach to political justice which permits experimentation with some non-democratic systems which may promote fundamental security better than democracy. I begin in Chapter 1 by replying to Rawls’ arguments for democracy as a requirement of justice—most notably, the argument from self-respect. In Chapter 2, I argue that considerations of existential risk—perhaps the most important aspect of fundamental security—give the parties in the original position reason to reject democracy as a requirement of justice in favor of political experimentalism. In Chapter 3, I turn to another important aspect of fundamental security—political stability—and reply to a potential objection from political stability to my argument. I contend that this objection fails and that neither considerations of political stability itself nor of other aspects of fundamental security count in favor of the requirement of democracy. I therefore conclude that the parties in the original position—and perhaps we ourselves—have reason to adopt experimentalism.