In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy

Chapter 7 The Division of Democratic Labor

C H A P T E R 7 The Division of Democratic Labor Suppose that you come to form the belief that your elected representative endorses public policies that pass the bar of justice. You recognize that your representative is not your equal on decision making at the intersection of policy and morality. She devotes an enormous amount of time and energy to reasoning about legislation. She can anticipate the consequences of law making that I would invariably miss. Her expertise isn’t supernal. She derives it from her institutional role—the time she is given to reflect on the issue at hand and her access to policy experts. Or maybe you have concluded that she consistently outperforms you in her decision making. It seems clear to you that she has a greater command of the cognitive virtues than you do. Why shouldn’t you offload the decision-making labor entirely—in just the same why you hand over decision-making powers to your electrician or plumber? After all, we can be knowledgeable about relatively few political decisions . It would take many lifetimes of study to become an expert in the component parts of the modern administrative state. We need a division of democratic labor sensitive to our decision-making powers. The virtueoriented approach of the preceding chapter aimed to be sensitive to our lived experience of political decision making. We saw how a citizen’s moral perceptiveness is often less a product of rigidly deductive reasoning and more an achievement of the balanced use of cognitive and affective equipment. The virtue-theoretic approach is vulnerable to the challenge we lodged against the ideal types in earlier chapters. On its own, it does not fully acknowledge the profound limitations in our capacity to exhibit the epistemic virtues on policy. Onora O’Neill sets our task: “What principles can a plurality of agents of minimal rationality and indeterminate capacities for mutual independence live by?”1 Even if we cannot realistically satisfy these decision-making virtues in every political decision we make, why shouldn’t we try? Perhaps citizens should attempt to be politically knowledgeable in an all-subsuming way. This is mistaken for two reasons. For one thing, such an investment would be hugely inefficient, forcing trade-offs among moral and nonmoral projects . It is not clear why we should place our concern to avoid error about political decisions in a wholly separate category from our nonpolitical choices. There can be trade-offs between our moral concern to live an TheDivisionofDemocraticLabor • 167 acceptable personal life and civic life. Second, an aspirational approach of this kind fosters self-defeat. Many areas of policy choice pose incomprehensible problems for nonexperts. This problem is especially acute for a theory built around our potential liability as accessories to injustice. Just as a proper account of citizenship must make room for culpably ignorant citizens, it must be capable of explaining a citizen’s permissible ignorance. The limits imposed by the moral thought—ought implies can—range over our mental activities as much as our actions in the world. We are in need of principles that show how citizens can honor the epistemic virtues without going it alone. Our epistemic dependence is too great and our cognitive bandwidth too limited not to turn to trusted citizens and lawmakers. This chapter extends our theory of citizenship to account for the institutional position of the citizen. First, I clarify the structure of the agency problem of representative democracy. The complexity of political life means that we cannot satisfy the deliberative virtues of independence and integrity simultaneously. We need to divvy up labor with our other citizens and public officials. There is no other way for us to humanely shoulder the decision-making responsibilities of citizenship . In the second section I offer a thought experiment designed to convey how demanding and disruptive our decision-making responsibilities would be in a plebiscitary democracy. The Colony suggests that democracy ’s agency problem is not generated by numbers but by cognitive complexity. The fact that we live in a polis of millions of people does not, in itself, make indirect democracy a nonoptional institutional choice. It is the sheer difficulty of the policy problems that we face that provides us with a decisive moral reason. In the next two sections I describe and defend three principles that can help citizens reduce the decisional burdens of their office. The third section argues that citizens only need to hold moral principles...