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Fallible Democracy: Comment on Bufacchi

In ‘Sceptical Democracy’, Vittorio Bufacchi offers a stimulating argument for a link between scepticism and liberal democracy (Bufacchi, 2001). Democracy is positioned between two extremes, each of which, he argues, embodies a mistaken doctrine about belief. The first is the belief in epistemic certainty, shared, he argues, among totalitarians, religious fundamentalists, and Alasdair MacIntyre. This aims ‘to ground society on infallible foundations’ (ibid., p. 23), and further believes that there exists an infallible epistemic route to those foundations. At the other pole is nihilism: in Bufacchi’s account, this consists in the claim that there can be no rational foundations for values, and is found in Nietzsche and J.-F. Lyotard. It is not part of this brief response to analyse Bufacchi’s interpretations of other philosophers, although it seems to me that any typology that puts MacIntyre’s moral philosophy in the same box as the Fuhrerprinzip is an exceedingly blunt instrument. Bufacchi rather intemperately describes both his dogmatists and nihilists as equally ‘cancerous’ threats to democracy, which has managed to carve out a space between them.