Perhaps the most common justification given for democracy is that it is essential to the protection of the general interests of the persons who are subject to the regulations or actions of the officials of a state. While these include freedom and personal development, they also extend to a broad array of desires, wants, practices, and rights that people in a specific society and historical situation may believe to be important.
In his Considerations on Representative Government, Mill presented the following argument:
1. A principle "of as universal truth and applicability as any general propositions which can be laid down respecting human affairs . . . is that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded when the person is himself able, and habitually disposed, to stand up for them. . . . Human beings are only secure from evil at the hands of others in proportion as they have the power of being, and are, selfprotecting."
2. People can protect their rights and interests from abuse by government, and by those who influence or control government, only if they can participate fully in determining the conduct of the government. 13
3. Therefore, "nothing less can be ultimately desirable than the admission of all to a share in the sovereign power of the state," that is, a democratic government.
4. "But since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town, participate in any but some very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal type of perfect government must be representative" (Mill [1861] 1958, 43, 55).
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Page 94 Though Mill's utilitarian assumptions are conspicuously absent from his defense of representative government, and though he had come to reject the simple
identification of happiness with pleasure espoused by his father and Bentham, he continued to believe that happiness was the supreme good. Consequently, he would have been obliged to say, I presume, that the protection of one's rights and interests is desirable because these rights can interests are instrumental to one's happiness.
Mill's argument, however, does not strictly require this assumption, and one need not be a utilitarian in order to accept it. For example, one might simply contend that even if the protection of one's rights and interests is not necessarily conducive to one's happiness, it is morally proper that a person's fundamental rights and interests should be protected. It is important to keep in mind, then, that the validity of Mill's argument and its implicit premise do not necessarily depend on the validity of any form of utilitarianism.
It is nonetheless true that classical utilitarians like Bentham and James Mill, as well as innumerable successors, have justified democracy on the ground that satisfying one's wants is conducive to one's happiness; and that democracy is desirable because, and insofar as, it is a political process by means of which people may best satisfy their wants. The general form of their argument is exactly like Mill's, except that this species of utilitarianism speaks of wants where Mill speaks of rights and interests.
Widespread though it may be, the attempt to justify democracy as instrumental to satisfying wants has been attacked by some democratic theorists. John Plamenatz argued, for example, that there is "no good reason for believing that, the more successful I am in maximizing the satisfaction of my wants within the limits in which success is possible, the more happy I am likely to be." Moreover, we cannot compare governments and, as a reasonable empirical judgment, conclude that "the policies of one have in general done more than those of the other to enable their subjects to maximize the satisfaction of their wants," particularly if the governments are not of the same type and the values and beliefs of the people concerned differ greatly. Finally, people do not and should not prefer democracy to its alternatives because they believe it is better at maximizing the satisfaction of their wants. "Neither its champions nor its critics are concerned with maximizing the satisfaction of wants or the achievement of goals. They favor it because it gives men certain rights and opportunities; or they reject it because it does not. But these rights and opportunities are not valued because they make it easier for people to maximize the satisfaction of their wants" (Plamenatz 1973, 163, 164, 168). 14
Now it is one thing to say that democracy cannot be justified on the ground that it maximizes wantsatisfaction and it is quite another to insist that democracy has nothing to do with what people want. To begin with, one need not accept the simple psychology of classical utilitarianism in order to believe that one's happiness is to some extent dependent on satisfying one's wants, or some of them. I cannot conceive how people could be happy if none of their wants were ever satisfied. In the same way, it is hard to see why people would value a government that never did what they wanted it to do. If, as Plamenatz contended, people value
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democracy because of the rights and opportunities it provides, then they must want their government to provide, protect, and enforce these rights and opportunities. If, in their view, democracy did not satisfy these wants better than any feasible alternative to it, then insofar as they were rational they would prefer the alternative.
To speak of people wanting their government to do certain things and to avoid doing others is no doubt a long way from "maximizing the satisfaction of wants." A's wanting to satisfy his desire for a hamburger is certainly not equivalent to A's wanting the government to maximize his opportunities to eat hamburgers. Probably no sane person would expect a government to satisfy, or try to satisfy, all his wants. What people want a government to do or to refrain from doing is a special subset, and for many people a small subset, of their wants. This subset can nonetheless be highly important. For example, it can include what Mill referred to as one's rights and interests and Plamenatz as one's rights and opportunities. To avoid confusing this special but often important subset with the multiplicity of "wants" people may wish to satisfy, let me call these "urgent political concerns."
A more reasonable justification for democracy, then, is that, to a substantially greater degree than any alternative to it, a democratic government provides an orderly and peaceful process by means of which a majority of citizens can induce the government to do what they most want it to do and to avoid doing what they most want it not to do. 15 Instead of a claim that democratic governments respond by maximizing the satisfaction of wants, we might claim instead that they tend to satisfy a minimal set of urgent political concerns. Now it may well be that as a practical matter we cannot determine whether this justification is valid by rigorously comparing the performances of democratic and nondemocratic governments with evidence showing what citizens want their governments to do or not do. We might nevertheless be able to arrive at a reasonable judgment by comparing the opportunities that the democratic process (both in ideal form and in actuality) provides a majority of citizens for influencing the government to attempt to satisfy their urgent political concerns with the opportunities that a nondemocratic government, both in ideal form and in actuality, would provide. And on the basis of such a comparison, we would decide whether the claim is justified.
This is a substantial undertaking. Among other things, we would need to specify the institutions that, in practice, the democratic process requires. These tasks await later chapters. Meanwhile Plamenatz's criticisms do not seem to me to warrant our rejecting either Mill's argument or the belief that democratic governments provide citizens with better opportunities for satisfying their urgent political concerns than any feasible alternatives to them.
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I suggested earlier that the Idea of Intrinsic Equality is subject to two weaknesses: First, because it does not specify what are to be counted as human interests or goods, the limits it sets on inequalities are extremely loose and vague. Thus it is not by itself sufficient to uphold a claim to political equality of the kind required for
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Page 96 democracy. The principle becomes more specific, and more closely related to the democratic process, when we interpret human interests to include claims to maximum feasible freedom, personal development, and opportunities to satisfy urgent political concerns more generally.
Even these goods, however, do not make the principle selfinterpreting. Who then should determine more specifically what goods or interests ought to be given priority? In short, who should rule? Might not one reasonably argue, as Plato did in The Republic, that only a highly qualified minority of experts on such matters is truly qualified to make these decisions and thus to rule? Indeed, the question may be asked even within a "democratic" system. Would we want to call a system a
"democracy" if the size of the demos is greatly exceeded by the number of adults who are excluded from the demos? Athens, as we saw in chapter 1, was just such a system, and the Athenians, who after all invented the term, called Athens a democracy. And for all their language of universalism, Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson, like Aristotle earlier and Mill later, shrank from accepting universal inclusion in practice. For in their judgments the number of persons qualified to participate in political life were in many specific instances fewer than those who might properly be compelled to obey the laws.
That they could believe in popular government and yet believe that "the people" ought not to include all the people does not demonstrate that they were necessarily inconsistent or hypocritical. It reveals instead an incompleteness in the Idea of Intrinsic Equality as a justification for democracy.
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Dalam dokumen
Robert A. Dahl - Democracy and Its Critics-Yale University Press (1989)
(Halaman 94-98)