The Strong Principle: A Preliminary Interpretation

Page 98 the famous declaration that all men are created equal. And today we would want to interpret ''all men" as including all women, even though the authors of the renowned phrase did not.

Let us imagine, as we did earlier, that some human association, concrete or hypothetical, has a need for collective decisions binding on all members of the association.

Which members of the association are qualified to participate in making these collective decisions, and under what conditions? Suppose we could provisionally agree on the following assumption:

All members are sufficiently well qualified, taken all around, to participate in making the collective decisions binding on the association that significantly affect their good or interests. In any case, none are so definitely better qualified than the others that they should be entrusted with making the collective and binding decisions.

Notice that the assumption consists of two sentences that are not strictly equivalent propositions. The first asserts that all the members meet an acceptable standard of competence. The second denies that any members possess such extraordinary qualifications that they alone should rule. The first implies a hypothetical lower limit, a minimum level of competence, that all members reach, the second a hypothetical upper limit, a maximum level of competence, that no members reach. ¹

The set of persons to whom such a principle may be applied could be called the demos, the populus, or the citizenbody. Its members are full citizens. (For brevity, I shall ordinarily refer to them simply as citizens.) We have provisionally assumed that the demos includes all the members of the association, that is, every member is also a full citizen. But it is possible that some members who are obliged to obey the rules of the association are nevertheless excluded from the demos and therefore are not full citizens. Children are an obvious example.

If we were to deny that the Strong Principle of Equality could properly be applied to all the members of an association, it would be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, to make a reasonable argument that all the members of the association ought to be full citizens, that is, entitled to participate fully in governing the association. For if, as with children, some persons are definitely not adequately qualified to govern, while others are, then should not these more qualified members, even if a minority, govern the rest? Conversely, however, if the Strong Principle does properly apply to all members, then on what grounds could one reasonably deny that all the members should participate, as equals, in governing themselves?

A rational belief in democracy thus presupposes that Strong Equality exists among (full) citizens. But who should be citizens, that is, among whom does Strong Equality exist? We seem to find ourselves trapped in a circle: Strong Equality exists among citizens because those members of an association among whom Strong Equality exists are (or should be) citizens. How are we to break out of this circle? How should we decide on the range of Strong Equality? Depending

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on the answer, democracy could be universally inclusive or as narrowly exclusive as the Republic of Venice, in which less than two thousand male members of the Venetian aristocracy were entitled to govern over the several hundred thousand residents of Venice. And what of the interests of the excluded? Are they to be cared for equally with the interests of the citizens? If so, why and how? Evidently the moral value of democracy, and thus much of its justification, will vary according to its inclusiveness.

Although strong in implications within its range, then, the Strong Principle is weak in implications outside its range. The import of the Strong Principle, it seems, cannot be separated from its range: unless the range is specified we are hard put to judge its significance. At the same time, our willingness to accept the principle will depend on its range. Extend the range far enough—to include infants, for example—and probably no one will accept it. Yet one who rejects a range as too inclusive would probably accept some version of a narrower range. For example, a member of the Venetian nobility would doubtless have excluded most adult residents of the Republic from the range of the Strong Principle; presumably, however, he would have assumed that the Strong Principle was perfectly applicable to the male members of the aristocracy. Thus the validity of the principle and the value we attribute to it both seem to depend on its range. What we need then is some reasonable way of determining simultaneously whether the principle is justified and what its range is.

I believe that two propositions, taken together, will help to solve this problem. Both are assumptions of the theory of the democratic process that will be described in chapter 8. One of these is the Principle of Equal Consideration discussed in the last chapter. As we saw, however, that principle, like the general idea of intrinsic equality, is weak in its implications: by itself, it could as readily justify guardianship as democracy.

Although the Idea of Intrinsic Equality, standing alone, is too weak to support the Strong Principle of Equality, a stout foundation can be constructed by joining it with a second assumption that has been a cornerstone of democratic beliefs (as it has also been of liberal thought). This is the assumption that no person is, in general, more likely than yourself to be a better judge of your own good or interest or to act to bring it about. Consequently, you should have the right to judge whether a policy is, or is not, in your best interest. The assumption is, further, that what holds for you holds, generally speaking, for other adults. By a "policy" I mean a decision to adopt certain means to bring about certain results. ² On this assumption, then, no one else is more qualified than you to judge whether the results are in your interest—both the results expected from a decision before it is taken and the actual results following the decision. You may choose to delegate the choice of means to those you judge to be more qualified than yourself to select the most appropriate means. ³ But you could not, without acting contrary to the assumption, yield your right to judge whether the results (intended and actual) were in your interests. I am going to call this the Presumption of Personal Autonomy.

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Page 100 The Presumption of Personal Autonomy

It is much easier to interpret the Presumption of Personal Autonomy for individual decisions than for collective decisions. If we assume that under some conditions a collective decision may properly be made binding on those who disagree with the expected outcome because they believe that it will be harmful to their interests, then an individual's final choice cannot be decisive, as it can be with individual decisions. Such is often the case, for example, when binding collective decisions are made by majority rule: though the members of the losing minority may feel that the outcome is harmful to their interests, they may nonetheless be required to comply and indeed may even believe stongly that, having lost the vote, it is right that they be required to comply.

The implications of personal autonomy for collective decisions become clearer if we assume the validity of intrinsic equality and what it implies for the equal

consideration of interests. If in making collective decisions the interests of each person ought to be weighed equally with the interests of every other, who is to say what the interests of each are? By adopting the Presumption of Personal Autonomy, we agree that each adult person whose interests are involved in the outcome ought to have the right to specify what those interests are. As I indicated in the last chapter, if A holds that her interest is best served by policy x rather than policy y, then insofar as the rules and procedures are intended to take A's interest equally into account, along with B's, C's, and others', then what is counted as A's interest is what A—not B, C, or any other—says are A's interests.

To accept the idea of personal autonomy among adults, then, is to establish a presumption that in making individual or collective decisions each adult ought to be treated—for purposes of making decisions—as the proper judge of his or her own interests. In the absence of a very compelling showing of incompetence, then, the presumption is assumed to be binding. In short:

T

P

RESUMPTION OF

P

ERSONAL

A

UTONOMY

: In the absence of a compelling showing to the contrary everyone should be assumed to be the best judge of his or her own good or interests.

The practical effect of the presumption is to deny that paternalistic authority can ever be legitimate among adults, in either individual or collective decisions, except for presumably rare exceptions. And conversely, all legitimate authority relations involving adults must be consistent with—in that sense, must respect—the presumption of personal autonomy.

Unlike the Idea of Intrinsic Equality and the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests, which are moral judgments about as unalloyed as we ever encounter, are universal in their range, and so admit of no exceptions, the Presumption of Personal Autonomy could best be described as a rule of prudence. It is not an

epistemological principle: one could reasonably deny that A is acting in her own interests and still insist that the rule be upheld in A's case. Because a prudential rule is a mix of moral and empirical judgments it displays the inherent messiness of a contingent statement that is not derived rigorously from axioms or empirical laws. Instead a

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prudential rule draws upon a flawed and imprecise understanding of human experience. It displays all the imperfections of contingency. It does not lay down an absolutely inviolable right or duty, or purport to say what definitely will happen, or estimate precisely what is most likely to happen. It admits of exceptions. But it does tell us where the burden of proof must lie when a claim is made for an exception, that is, for replacing personal autonomy by a paternalistic authority.

Even among adults personal autonomy has sometimes been widely replaced by paternalistic authority. In the relation of master to slave, paternalistic authority was the general rule. And until quite recently half of all adults were legally subject to paternalism on grounds widely thought, and not merely by the other half, to be almost self

evident: that women were not competent to make decisions for themselves. Today, however, children are the only large group of people subject to comprehensive paternalistic authority; thus they constitute the only major exception to the Presumption of Personal Autonomy. For children, parents are the normal authorities, though in special cases paternalistic authority over a child may be awarded to other adults. For adults, on the other hand, paternalistic authority with respect to individual decisions is thought to be justified in only a small percentage of exceptional cases—persons so severely handicapped because of birth defects, brain damage, acute psychosis, senility, and so on that they are judged incapable of making the elementary decisions required for their own survival or minimal wellbeing. Even in these cases, the burden of proof is always legally placed on those who propose to replace personal autonomy by paternalism.

But why should we accept the presumption? Would it be just as reasonable to reject it? To reject it as a presumption for individual and collective decisions, however,

we would have to believe not only that (1) some substantial proportion of adults are quite unable to understand, or are not sufficiently motivated to seek, their most

fundamental interests, but also that (2) a class of paternalistic authorities could be counted on to do so in their behalf. An argument along these lines is subject to two

grave defects. First, in apprehending the good or interests of the self, every other tends to be at a disadvantage. Second, human experience provides strong reasons for

rejecting the second proposition.

Dalam dokumen Robert A. Dahl - Democracy and Its Critics-Yale University Press (1989) (Halaman 98-102)