Global democracy and feasibility

ABSTRACT

While methodological and metatheoretical questions pertaining to feasibility have been intensively discussed in the philosophical literature on justice in recent years, these discussions have not permeated the debate on global democracy. The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of importing some of the advancements made in this literature into the debate on global democracy, as well as to develop aspects that are relevant for explaining the role of feasibility in normative political theory. This is done by pursuing two arguments. First, to advance the work on the role of feasibility, we suggest as intuitively plausible two metatheoretical constraints on normative political theorizing – the ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’ – which elucidate a number of aspects relevant in determining proper feasibility constraints for an account in political theory. Secondly, to illustrate the usefulness of this feasibility framework, we sketch an account of global democracy consisting of normative principles which respond differently to these aspects and thus are tied to different feasibility constraints as well as exemplify how it may be applied in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Global democracy
• feasibility
• functional aspects
• fitness aspects
• feasibility constraints

Acknowledgments

The authors owe special thanks to the participants of the conference “Legitimacy Beyond the State: Normative and Conceptual Questions” in Bad Homburg (January 2017), in particular Nate Adams, Antoinette Scherz and Cord Schmelzle. In addition, Eva Erman thanks the Swedish Research Council as well as the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation for the generous funding of her research, and Jonathan Kuyper thanks Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the same generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For exceptions with regard to vagueness about feasibility in the global democracy literature, see Ulaş (2016) and Valentini (2014).

2. This section draws heavily on Erman & Möller, 2019, where one finds a more developed analysis of feasibility and the two metatheoretical constraints, albeit not in relation to global democracy (see also Erman & Möller, 2018, Ch. 7).

3. ‘Agent’ does not necessarily (and in political theory not even typically) entail a single person, but can be a group of persons, an institution and the like.

4. Furthermore, it has also been argued that a sought state of affairs must be relatively stable to be feasible (Cohen, 2009, pp. 56–57; Rawls, 1999, pp. 440–41).

5. For literature on ideal and non-ideal theory, (see for example Simmons, 2010; Mills, 2005; Farrelly 2007; Valentini, 2012; Sen, 2009; Schmidtz, 2011; Erman & Möller, 2013).

6. This line of argument – to let the nature of the target practice play an essential role for normative political principles – is common among proponents of practice-dependence in the justice literature (Ronzoni, 2009; Sangiovanni, 2008).

7. This point is similar to Christian Barry and Laura Valentini’s note that reasonable disagreement about the feasibility of principles is not sufficient to reject a principle (Barry & Valentini, 2009: 510–11).

8. Note that P1 does not say that only those who are significantly affected have a moral right to due consideration. It thus leaves open the case for including others on other grounds (e.g. children who are not significantly affected but for other reasons should have this moral right).

9. However, if one wished to give further justificatory support for the account as a whole, one could well include such a principle, say, a principle of equal respect for persons (e.g. labelled P0 in the scheme), aiming at regulating individual conduct between persons (practice-kind aspect) and perhaps construed under no feasibility constraints and thus, similar to fundamental principles in general, constituting what is sometimes called a ‘fact-insensitive’ principle (Cohen, 2003).

10. It is worth noting that the suggested feasibility framework allows us to see two allegedly competing criteria of inclusion – the so-called ‘all affected principle’ and the ‘all subjected’ principle – as compatible and as giving each other support. On our construal, being significantly affected by a decision does not ground a democratic say because there is no intrinsic connection between being affected in general and having a democratic say (Abizadeh, 2012; Owen, 2012). However, it grounds a moral right to due consideration. By contrast, being subjected to a system of laws does ground a democratic say (here in the form of P2). In our view, the ‘all subjected’ form of P2 is fitting for regulating law-making because it is able to capture the idea of autonomy as self-rule underpinning democracy, which says that we should only comply with the system of laws that we ourselves have authored. While being affected need not undermine autonomy as self-rule, being coercively and/or legally subjected does. Of course, the feasibility framework as such does not give support these arguments, as they must be settled on substantive rather than metatheoretical grounds. However, we illustrate how the framework opens up the possibility space for such arguments.

11. As noted in footnote 9 we might give the all-affected principle (P1) further justificatory support by demonstrating how it is an application and specification of a higher-level moral principle of some kind, such as the equal respect principle (P0) in contexts of decision-making.

12. This view is also congruent with the notion of ‘constituent power’ that has become more important in debates over democratic deficits at the EU and global level.

13. Of course, even well-developed democratic states have representational deficits due to how political systems weight votes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eva Erman

Eva Erman is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. She works in the field of political philosophy, with a special interest in democratic theory and methodology. She is the author of The Practical Turn in Political Theory (2018) and Human Rights and Democracy: Discourse Theory and Global Rights Institutions (2005). She has also published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Journal of Philosophical Research, Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, European Journal of International Relations, International Theory, and Human Rights Quarterly. Furthermore, Erman is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ethics & Global Politics (Routledge).

Jonathan W. Kuyper

Jonathan W. Kuyper is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Queen’s University Belfast. He works in the fields of political theory and international relations, often with a focus on democratic theory and practice. He has published work on these topics in the American Political Science Review, WIREs Climate Change, Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Relations, and Political Studies. He is the co-editor of a recent special issue of Environmental Politics which focuses on the normative and empirical aspects of the Paris Agreement for global climate governance.