Democratic respect and compromise

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Association for Social and Political Philosophy 2015 Annual Conference, University of Amsterdam, June 25–26, 2015; ‘Compromise and Disagreement’, conference at University of Copenhagen, May 27–29, 2015; and Fudan University, Shanghai, China, May 21, 2015.

Abstract

Compromise has attained renewed interest among political theorists writing on pluralism and disagreement. It is controversial, however, whether compromise is a mere pragmatic necessity or if it has non-instrumental value. This article argues that the reasons for compromise are inherent in the democratic ideal. Under some conditions, compromise can give greater legitimacy to public policy beyond what is achieved by a mere majority decision, and not merely because of the consequences but because of the very fact that the decision was a compromise. The reason for this is the democratic respect displayed by the act of compromise. Democratic respect goes beyond both the norm of treating one’s fellow citizens as equals and of respecting them as members of the same community. It is a conception of respect, which requires that we treat fellow citizens as co-rulers. Only the latter conception of respect is both sufficient to explain the moral importance of democratic procedures, including compromise, and an inherently democratic ideal.

Keywords:

• Compromise
• democratic theory
• respect
• disagreement
• pluralism
• co-ruler

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, Anders Berg-Sørensen, Hans Dabelsteen, Guo Dingping, Michael Freeden, Simon May, Tore V. Olsen, Theresa Scavenius, Daniel Weinstock, and Lea Ypi for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank Enrico Biale, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti and Federica Liveriero for editorial comments and my anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Association for Social and Political Philosophy 2015 Annual Conference, University of Amsterdam, June 25–26, 2015; ‘Compromise and Disagreement’, conference at University of Copenhagen, May 27–29, 2015; and Fudan University, Shanghai, China, May 21, 2015.

1. May (2005, pp. 318–19) similarly distinguishes between reasons for correction and reasons for compromise.

2. Or they ought to do so (Gutmann & Thompson, 2012).

3. After the election in September 2014, for example, the major Swedish political parties refused to cooperate with the far-right Sverigedemokraterna, which had attained 12.9% of the vote. This led to resentment among the voters of the latter and might have strengthened its electoral support.

4. cf. Jones and O’Flynn’s (2013, p. 120) definition of principled compromise.

5. In his 2011 paper, May speaks of ‘principled or non-instrumental’ reasons for compromise (May, 2011, p. 581).

6. Jones and O’Flynn follow May in calling this a principled compromise, while I call it an intrinsic reason for compromise.

7. It seems to me that democratic instrumentalism is parasitic upon a non-instrumental conception of democracy, but this is a large issue that I cannot go into here. I discuss and reject democratic instrumentalism in Rostbøll (2015a, 2015b, 2016).

8. Margalit’s (2010) concern is very different one than mine, and I only refer to his notion of rotten compromise in a rough manner to denote unacceptable compromises.