In the last chapter, Advocate argues that people like Critic, who insist that substantive outcomes should have priority over the democratic process, need to explain how they know what these outcomes ought to be. Advocate's remarks suggest three questions. The first is epistemological. How can we know what a person's interests are, particularly a person's "fundamental" interests? The second is substantive. It is all very well to speak airily of interests so fundamental that they should be inviolable by the democratic process (or any other), but concretely, what are these interests and on what grounds do we justify their inviolability? The third is procedural or institutional. What processes or institutions can best be counted on to protect these interests?
How Can We Know?
One argument in defense of the democratic process asserts that the first question has no rationally justifiable answer. At the same time, however, it attempts to disarm the antidemocratic potentialities of this position by assuming it as a starting point: (1) If no moral claim is more valid than any other, then all such claims are on an equal footing. (2) But if all claims are on an equal footing, all persons who advance different claims are also on an equal footing: No one can be reasonably regarded as superior or inferior to another in the validity of his or her claims. (3) Hence everyone should participate as an equal in the process of arriving at a consensus. (4) And decisions that depend on moral claims should therefore be arrived at by a participatory process eventuating, ideally at least, in consensus. 1
A lethal defect in an argument of this kind, as some critics of complete moral skepticism have insisted, is that it is selfdefeating. If no moral proposition is better than any other, then (3) and (4), which surely are (or directly depend on) moral assumptions, are no better than any other. In short, why should people participate as equals? Would it not be just as reasonable to say that, since no moral statement is superior to another, to assert (3) and (4) is no more justified than to assert that the stronger should prevail?
Still, the question persists. How can we know what a person's interests are? Like both Critic and Advocate I reject the view that all claims to moral understanding are inherently invalid. I propose to say instead:
A person's interest or good is whatever that person would choose with fullest attainable understanding of the experience resulting from that choice and its most relevant alternatives.
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To say that it is in A's interest to have a fair trial in criminal cases is equivalent to saying that if A understood the consequences of having or not having a fair trial he would insist on a fair trial.
The criterion of enlightened understanding can now be given more substance by interpreting it to mean that persons who understand their interests in the sense just given possess an enlightened understanding of their interests. 2 By saying the "fullest attainable understanding" I have deliberately drawn back from the abyss of impossibility into which we would be drawn by saying "full understanding," since full understanding presumably would require one to undergo the actual experience itself, as well as its relevant alternatives, which is, in a strict sense, impossible in advance. 3
But is the definition vacuous? If not, how are we to apply it to another person? We can do so only by a process of enlightened sympathy through which we try to grasp the desires, wants, needs, and values of other human beings, and, by a thought experiment, try to imagine what they would choose to do if they understood the consequences of their choices. To the extent that we succeed in this effort, we possess an enlightened understanding of the interests of others. However, since we ourselves are limited by our own understanding, our thought experiments are inherently imperfect—based on our own inadequate knowledge and biased by our own views, convictions, and passions. Even our enlightened understanding is fallible.
Should we reject the idea of enlightened sympathy because of its inescapable fallibility? Does enlightened sympathy compel us to make judgments that are in any case impossible for us to make? The fact is that we do make judgments about the interests of others. What is more, we distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable judgments about the interests of others. How could we justify parental authority if we believed it impossible for parents to make better judgments about the interests of their children than the children themselves? In making such judgments we assume that we can employ enlightened sympathy. We also assume we can do so when, for example, we attempt to judge whether certain adults are so incapable of attending to their own basic interests that they should be placed under the care of a paternalistic authority. We also use enlightened sympathy post hoc in order to judge whether those charged with paternalistic authority have properly used their authority or abused it. Presumably, too, we use enlightened sympathy when we try to dissuade other adults—a family member or a friend, perhaps—from engaging in a course of action that we believe they will come to regret. Except by monstrously deforming our ordinary, everyday, garden variety human qualities we cannot avoid making judgments about the interests of others or reject enlightened sympathy as a means for doing so.
What I have just said is meant to be a solution to the epistemological problem of interests: how we can know what they are. One might wonder how this solution bears on the Presumption of Personal Autonomy, which, as I pointed out earlier, is not an epistemological assumption but a prudential rule to be employed in making collective decisions. But suppose we were confident that all citizens actually do base their judgments in collective decisions on an enlightened understanding of
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Page 182 their interests, including their concerns for others and for their community. How then could we possibly justify saying that what A is choosing is not in A's interests? To do so would presuppose that we possess privileged knowledge, not accessible to A, of an absolute standard independent of A's own enlightened understanding of her desires, wants, needs, and ideal values. But, as I have already said, in the past century all attempts to prove such a claim have crumbled under the attacks of their critics. Given the assumption of enlightened understanding, an appeal beyond A's own judgments to a higher court of independent judges armed with superior knowledge of A's good could never be justified.
Conversely, however, if we cannot assume that all citizens are guided by an enlightened understanding of their interests, then the claim to personal autonomy in determining what is best for oneself can hardly be treated as an epistemological principle. And it is precisely because we cannot assume that citizens are invariably guided by an enlightened understanding of their interests that the presumption of personal autonomy in collective decisions is not an epistemological assumption but only a prudential rule.
What Interests Are Superior to the Democratic Process?
What interests, then, can be justifiably claimed to be inviolable by the democratic process or, for that matter, any other process for making collective decisions? It seems to me highly reasonable to argue that no interests should be inviolable beyond those integral or essential to the democratic process. A democratic people would not invade this extensive domain except by mistake; and such a people might also choose to create institutional safeguards designed to keep mistakes from occurring.
But outside this broad domain a democratic people could freely choose the policies its members feel best; they could decide how best to balance freedom and control, how best to settle conflicts between the interests of some and the interests of others, how best to organize and control their economy, and so on. In short, outside the inviolable interests of a democratic people in the preservation of the democratic process would lie the proper sphere for political decisions. By means of the democratic process and all the requirements of that process, citizens would maximize their collective freedom to decide on the laws and principles under which they wished to live.
It is quite natural for A to feel that all his most deeply cherished interests and goals should be inviolable. And for B to make a similar claim. And C . . . Members of a highly privileged group are likely to claim that their interests surely ought to be inviolable, particularly since, in their view, their interests coincide with the interests of the society as a whole. Not surprisingly, therefore, property rights are often asserted to be prior or superior to the democratic process. Members of a disadvantaged group may also lay claim to a superior interest that ought to be advanced by other means if the democratic process fails to do so.
As Advocate insists, in protecting or advancing the interests of some persons, collective decisions generally harm the interests of others. Decisions on public issues are in large part decisions about allocating costs and gains, benefit and
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harm. In these contests it is highly advantageous to any group to succeed in putting its interests beyond the reach of collective decisions or, failing that, within the reach of a body of decisionmakers who are beyond the reach of the democratic process. But, given the extensive range of rights, interests, goods, and protections built into the democratic process, how can we reasonably justify going beyond the reach of that process?
Although I find this view attractive, it leaves open a disturbing question. Can we truly say that human beings have no inviolable interests beyond their right to the democratic process and whatever is essential to it? For example, does not everyone have a right to a fair trial in criminal cases? If so, should not this right be inviolable even by the democratic process? These questions bring us back almost full circle to the third question I posed a moment ago. If certain rights or interests ought to be treated as inviolable and therefore superior to the democratic process itself, what process or institutions can best be counted on to protect them?
This question moves the argument to entirely different ground. Because we now confront a conflict between fundamental rights, we need to find a process for resolving that conflict. If people possess a fundamental right to selfgovernment, then would it not be wrong to impair that right by placing restrictions on the scope of the democratic process, beyond the requirements of the process itself? When the right to the democratic process conflicts with another fundamental right, by what process should the conflict be decided? To offer a purely philosophical answer, such as that one must be balanced against another, is not enough. The conflict must be dealt with (I do not say settled) by a decisionmaking process of some kind—a "political" process in the broad sense of the term. And presumably that process would be embedded in political institutions.
Thus what begins by posing substance as an alternative to process must sooner or later turn to practical judgments about feasible alternative processes.
Dalam dokumen
Robert A. Dahl - Democracy and Its Critics-Yale University Press (1989)
(Halaman 179-182)