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REPLIES TO SAUNDERS, LISTER AND QUONG

In my book, Democratic Authority, I develop an account of democratic legitimacy and authority that departs from many other theories. Unlike many other approaches, I make no essential use of the idea of procedural fairness, and Ben Saunders argues, in his piece, that I go too far in the flight from fairness. The distinctive element in my view is the appeal to a tendency of democratic arrangements to make good decisions. However, I don’t claim that democracy is the best epistemic method available—only that it is (among) the best so far as can be determined within the space of reasons that are acceptable to all reasonable (or as I prefer, ‘qualified’) points of view. The ‘qualified acceptability requirement’ that I invoke for that purpose raises a number of questions. One is whether it applies to itself, and if so how this works. Andrew Lister argues that there are serious problems if it must apply to itself, and sketches some ways of avoiding self-application. The qualified acceptability requirement is a constraint on the use of political authority and coercion. Jonathan Quong worries that since, for many political choices, there will be authority and coercion either way, the requirement could lead to absurd results: that neither the policy in question nor its absence would be justified. Moreover, he argues that my account of these matters converts the requirement into a default preference for democracy, leaving us without the argument I claim to provide—from non-democratic premises—for democracy. There are far more interesting points and arguments in these three critical pieces than I can take up here. In what follows, I concentrate on the issues (and in the same order) I have just sketched.