Chapters 4 and 5 began to develop an argument, in the form of the civic education offered to the future citizens of Demopolis, for the legitimacy of basic democracy. Along with the basic legitimation demand that the coercive power of the state be justified to each resident, the question that potential citizens should ask, and that the program of civic education must answer, is why a rational person would choose to accept the comparatively high opportunity costs associated with political participation. Basic democracy's legitimacy rests on the claim that it provides both material and nonmaterial goods sufficient to compensate for those costs. Sustaining that claim requires answering “Hobbes's challenge,” by showing that collective and limited self-governance by citizens can provide both adequate security and welfare without a third-party enforcer of rules and agreements, and reasons to value nonmaterial democratic goods. I suggested that democracy can meet the challenge through its credible commitment to free exercise of the constitutive human capacities of sociability, reason, and communication. If the argument holds, material goods are provided via the provision of a democratic good.
It remains to explain how democracy before liberalism solves the fundamental problem of social cooperation, and how far a basic democracy can be scaled up. If ancient Athens, with its citizenship in the tens of thousands, represents the upper bounds for the citizen population of a basic democracy, the political theory developed in these chapters will be of very limited application, at least at the level of the state.
6.1 Conditions and Values
Long before liberalism ancient Greek democracies delivered prosperity and security without autocracy. But just how did they do it? And how might a city-state sized government be scaled up to the size required by a modern state? The value of addressing those questions extends beyond the intrinsic interest of discovering a mechanism for fitting normative and positive theory to observed facts about the world. In the absence of a satisfactory theory to explain how it is that democracy reliably and robustly solves collective action problems and produces good policy, democratic institutions remain vulnerable to challenges by supporters of autocracy. Since antiquity, democracy's critics have claimed that government by citizens is unreliable in the face of complex problems and severe crises.Footnote 1 The apparent advantage offered by “strong and centralized government, in the competent hands of a few true experts” appears more compelling if democrats can offer no answer better than “somehow, we always muddle through,” in response to pressing questions about how democracy deals with high-stakes challenges.Footnote 2
How can potential citizens be assured that the “outcome variable” of the historical successes experienced by democratic states arose from the “explanatory variable” of the merits of the system itself, rather than from some unobserved factor (e.g., luck) that may not persist into the future?Footnote 3 In addition to demonstrating the intrinsic value of democracy, for example, in the terms of free exercise of constitutive capacities, a basic democracy must include in its civic curriculum a satisfactory explanatory account of how it is that democracy provides security and prosperity under changing conditions. It must explain why the democratic social equilibrium is robust to shocks – both those that arise exogenously and those that emerge endogenously, from ongoing social development.
To answer those “how and why” questions, we return to the four “simple assumptions” sketched in the introduction to the previous chapter. I have so far addressed only the first of these, which concerned human capacities of sociability, rationality, and communication as preconditions of social order. In order to answer the question of how democracy robustly provides material goods, and to fill in the account of democratic goods, we now turn to the other three assumptions: methodological individualism, interdependence as an imperative for cooperation, and mutability of the environments in which societies exist. In the functioning of democratic institutions, the conjunction of these three assumptions is closely related to basic democracy's necessary conditions, briefly alluded to in Section 3.4: political liberty, political equality, and civic dignity.
This chapter focuses on civic dignity as the condition of being socially accepted as fully worthy of political participation and thereby immune from the disabilities of civic humiliation and infantilization. Civic dignity is a fundamental condition of democracy that, like the free exercise of constitutive capacities to which it is closely related, tends to be obscured within mainstream liberal political theory. Once civic dignity is recognized as an independently necessary condition (rather than being subsumed under the rubric of either liberty or equality), it can be seen to do a great deal of work in sustaining democracy. Dignity provides an answer, lacking in Hobbes's theory, for how a government can induce pro-social behavior from individuals who, as a matter of ingrained character (aka, the ordinal ranking of their preferences), gain greater utility from asserting their own superiority and having that superiority acknowledged by others than they do from other aspects of life. Such persons – in Hobbes's terms, those devoted to honor and motivated by “vainglory” – are a serious problem for Leviathan if they value the expression of self-assessed superiority and contempt for others over life itself. The imperative to defend dignity also provides a compelling justification for democratic rules mandating equality in respect to voting and other forms of political participation. And it provides a principled means to reject the claims in respect to distributive justice made by extreme egalitarians and extreme libertarians alike.
Personally, and in agreement with Kantian liberals, among others, I regard dignity, liberty, and equality as intrinsically valuable ends, rather than merely as necessary conditions or instrumental means to other ends. I assume that some of the citizens of Demopolis share that conviction. Others of the citizens may not share that conviction; as we have seen (Section 3.1), Demopolis's Founders had various reasons for rejecting autocracy and diverse value commitments. But my personal value judgments, and those of Demopolis's original citizens, are beside the point.
Basic democracy is, I will argue, good for producing and sustaining the lived conditions of dignity, freedom, and equality, and also likely to increase their value in the eyes of citizens, even if they are not highly valued intrinsically or ex ante. That is because, so goes the argument of the civic educators of Demopolis, in light of the assumptions about individuality, interdependence, and mutability, democracy is sustained in a high-performing equilibrium – i.e., will reliably produce adequately high levels of security and welfare – only under the political conditions of liberty, equality, and dignity. As such, liberty, equality, and dignity are not epiphenomenal conditions that may be optionally and ex post added to democracy if and when they are widely enough recognized as independently valuable. They are fundamental practical conditions that are required for sustaining a democratic social equilibrium. The reasons for that dependency arise from a consideration of the implications of individuality, interdependence, and mutability for the organization of knowledge within a democratic community.
6.2 Individuality, Interdependence, Mutability
Individuals with differing and potentially competing interests are interdependent because they must cooperate if they are to flourish in a mutable environment. This compound assumption follows from the primary claim, defended in the previous chapter, that human capacities prominently include sociability, rationality, and communication. As we have seen, both Hobbes and Aristotle recognized each of those capacities as necessary for human flourishing – although their recognition arose from very different accounts of moral psychology, placed very different emphases on each of the elements in the capacity tricolon, and drew different conclusions from their conjunction. Hobbes argued that the practical interdependence of individuals in a mutable environment yielded a unique solution to the problem of flourishing (or even tolerable) human existence, in the form of the unlimited political authority of a lawless sovereign. That argument proved vulnerable to refutation by reference to history. In this section we consider the three features of individualism, interdependence and mutability to establish how a nonautocratic social order might reliably produce security and welfare through mechanisms requiring certain forms of freedom, equality, and dignity.
The methodological individualism with which I am concerned here is a descriptive, rather than a normative, conception of human motivation. It is not to be confused with the ethical individualism that contrasts an autonomous will with external motives, and that underpins Kantian liberalism (Williams Reference Williams1993: Chapter 2). The individualism that matters to me here is not moralized, but it is opposed to sociological or epistemic holism. It assumes that every human group (including ancient Greek city-states: Murray Reference Murray, Murray and Price1990), no matter how apparently culturally and socially homogeneous, is a composite, consisting of diverse individuals, multiple minds, pluralistic identities, and thus, at least potentially, conflicting interests. Social identities are profoundly important to any descriptive account of social order, and no human can ever be uniquely self-invented. But, unlike ants or bees, individual humans are quite capable of identifying their interests as other than those of the community as a whole.
The inherent pluralism of every human community produces disagreement. As we have seen (Section 5.2), this fact was central to Aristotle's, as well as to Hobbes's conception of the problem that political order must solve. Under the right conditions, specified differently by Aristotle and Hobbes, the employment of the human capacities for reason and interpersonal communication will allow for those conflicts to be negotiated peacefully, and common interests to be identified. Hobbes regarded the “differences among private judgments” problem as solved by the unitary will of a sovereign – ideally an individual monarch. Aristotle supposed that it was solved by convergence among many virtuous citizen-rulers (as natural parts) on justice as the common good of the state (as a natural whole). Both regarded education, as a path to social identity formation, self-consciously organized as such by wise rulers, as essential to the goal of gaining agreement.
As Michael Bratman (Reference Bratman1999: 93–161; Reference Bratman2014) has shown, joint action can be explained philosophically as a complex shared cooperative activity. Bratman presumes that intentions are held by individuals: Saying that “we intend” to do something, together, means, first, that intentions held by two or more individuals are shared by those persons: X intends to phi and Y also intends to phi. Shared intention, unlike Rousseau's conception of a “general will,” allows for legitimate debate and potentially for substantial disagreement. But in order to act jointly, individuals must not only share certain intentions, they must mesh certain of their subplans, manifest at least minimal cooperative stability, and possess relevant knowledge in common. Bratman's model is predicated on positing a minimal-sized (2-person) face-to-face group undertaking a simple task (painting a house together). But, as Anna Stilz, Emilee Chapman, and other political theorists have recently argued, Bratman's approach to joint action can be scaled up to help explain the collective self-government by citizens of a large democratic state. Voting, for example, is a form of joint action that, when it is properly organized, manifests each of Bratman's conditions.Footnote 4
The next assumption is that humans are interdependent, and that, under high-stakes conditions, this produces a motive for cooperation. The interdependence with which I am concerned here is a minimum condition, the need that people in a community have for one another if they are to secure the conditions for human existence. Under the right conditions, networks of interdependence can broaden, extending well beyond the bounds of the political community and sustaining conditions far beyond mere survival. But survival comes first. The premises on which this assumption rests have already been discussed (Section 5.1), in reference to Aristotle and Hobbes on the question of the human capacity for social existence. The imperative of cooperation, for the kind of interdependent beings we are, is predicated on the need to create a workable society based on the exchange of credible commitments among its members. If a society is faced with intense competitive pressure or some other existential threat (e.g., severe climate change) and fails to find effective ways to secure an adequately high level of social cooperation, it faces potential elimination (see, further, Ober Reference Ober2008a: 80–84).
High-stakes conditions, i.e., those involving the existential question of individual and collective survival, increase the imperative to cooperation and thereby increase the likelihood that the members of the community will recognize a common interest in public goods essential to security. Both Aristotle and Hobbes predicated their respective discussions of the origins of human community on high-stakes assumptions. The relatively low-stakes conditions that apparently persisted for much of the post–World War II “end of ideology” era, for the relatively affluent citizens of developed countries, arguably blunted the urgency, for liberal political theory, of the relationship between survival and interdependence.Footnote 5 Now, in an age characterized by climate change, economic disruption, religious and ethnic violence, and mass migration, the fundamental “first question” of politics, so obvious to both Aristotle and Hobbes, may be returning to the forefront of theoretical attention.
The final assumption is that the environments in which human societies function are typically mutable. Changes in the environment come about via exogenous shock (new rivals, technological change, war, climate change, and so on). Change also comes about endogenously, through the ongoing development of institutions and norms. As rational and communicative human agents gain experience with institutions, both the attitudes of the agents and the institutions they create will change. Some changes may be subtle, others dramatic.Footnote 6 The success or failure of a society to innovate promptly and effectively in response to changes in external and internal circumstances directly affects the society's capacity to preserve the security and welfare of its members over time. It must be capable of revising the terms of social cooperation in ways that can respond effectively to new challenges, without crashing the cooperative social order.
The conjoined assumptions of individuality, interdependence, and mutability underline the point that in order to survive in a high-stakes environment, the citizens of a basic democracy must at least meet Hobbes's challenge, which means achieving and sustaining relatively high levels of social cooperation. When compared to absolutism, democracy lacks the resources of centralized command and control, and of unitary third-party enforcement of contracts – that is to say, democracy lacks the Hobbesian sovereign's devices for ensuring a level of social cooperation adequate to provide security and prosperity.
How, then, do democracies, composed of many diverse, interdependent, and masterless individuals, secure public goods substantial enough to meet high-stakes challenges in a mutable environment? Seeking to mimic the advantages enjoyed by a unitary sovereign in regard to centralized command and control is unlikely to be successful. Hobbes was right that a socially diverse demos, and especially a demos that is limited by law, makes a relatively poor showing at centralized command and control. Hobbes was not wrong to claim that, under the right circumstances (e.g., contemporary China) a sovereign unconstrained by law (in this case a small and cohesive group of rulers) can, at least for a while, provide security and increase the welfare of a large society of self-interested individuals. Hobbes's error (the source of his false prediction that no basic democracy could long escape the miserable conditions of the state of nature) was to suppose that the centralized command and control associated with the unitary sovereign is the unique solution to the problem of achieving social cooperation at scale in the face of individualism, interdependence, and mutability.
6.3 Knowledge and Collective Action
The rules by which a society is organized bear directly on that society's adaptive capacity. A well-organized basic democracy is able to confound Hobbes's prediction because, under the right conditions, diversity among the judgments of the membership is an asset rather than a liability. Diversity comes into play on the benefit side of the ledger if and when the problems of collective action are solved by a system of limited and collective self-government by citizens (as Aristotle argued that they could be). Under such circumstances, individual citizens possessing diverse knowledge and skills have an incentive to invest in themselves (by deferring short-term gains in favor of more education or training), thereby increasing their own comparative advantages, their community's store of aggregate human capital, and the joint stock of potentially useful knowledge. Once they no longer have reason to fear suffering a “sucker's payoff” (sacrificing utility by naively cooperating with a strategically uncooperative player) in a game with a potentially exploitative autocrat, citizens likewise have good reason to cooperate in solving problems bearing on their common interests in security and welfare by sharing what they know. Democratic conditions of freedom, equality, and dignity promote both rational human capital investments across diverse domains of endeavor, and the rational disclosure and exchange of useful knowledge that is made more valuable by those investments.
Because the total membership of a large and diverse society in which individuals have invested in their own education has ready access to a wider array of useful knowledge than any small and relatively homogeneous subset of that society (e.g., a ruler and his elite coalition), and because opening access to knowledge does not endanger the collective rulers of democracy as it does the ruling coalition in a limited-access, autocratic regime, a well-ordered democratic society may potentially be able to solve problems arising from a mutable environment more effectively than an autocrat. The growth of the stock of knowledge useful to problem solving can, at least potentially, offset efficiency gains associated with the autocrat's hierarchical chain of command, and any loss of efficiency inherent in the participation of many individuals in the processes of democratic government (Ober Reference Ober2008a). Realizing that potential, which requires managing available knowledge such that it is effectively deployed in problem solving, is a matter of institutional and mechanism design, to which we return, below.
But addressing the collective action problem comes first. In order for a democracy to gain the potential to solve major problems of common concern by employing the knowledge resources of a diverse society, the rules and associated cultural habits must give each citizen reason to invest in herself and then to cooperate in sharing what she knows without worrying about a sucker's payoff. Moreover, even after the collective action problem has (ex hypothesi) been solved, the relevant rules and habits must be structured so that the right sort of knowledge gets to the right place in the “solution space” and at the right time. A massive and indiscriminate “data dump” of “everything everyone knows” into a problem-solving context may be worse for the goal of devising the best available solution than a shortage of useful knowledge.
The answer to the conundrum of how to achieve masterless social cooperation that is reliably capable of producing public goods at levels adequate to sustain security and welfare through the management of deep, diverse, and dispersed knowledge resources is not simple. It requires each of the three interrelated conditions of liberty, equality, and dignity.
6.4 Political Freedom and Equality
The political conditions of liberty and equality are strongly associated with democracy as collective self-governance by citizens. For many people, freedom or equality (or both) is the point of nontyranny. But even if liberty and equality are not regarded as democracy's ends, when citizens are not free to communicate with one another, speaking their minds and disclosing relevant information on matters of public import, it is hard to say in what sense governance is by citizens.Footnote 7 If citizens are not in meaningful ways political equals, it is likewise difficult to say in what sense they are self-governing.
The close relationship of conditions of political freedom and equality to democracy is confirmed by the historical record: Liberty and equality were widely recognized as among democracy's core practices, as well as its values, by ancient Greek writers on politics. Both critics of democracy as it was practiced in Athens and other Greek states (e.g., Plato and other political philosophers) and those sympathetic to democracy (e.g., Demosthenes and other political orators) regarded a conjoined commitment to both liberty and equality as preeminently characteristic of democratic states. Liberty, in democratic city-states took the form of freedom of speech and association, as well as freedom from fear of unauthorized intrusion or arbitrary expropriation by powerful state magistrates or by powerful private individuals. Equality was exemplified by having an equal vote, an equal right to speak out in public, and equal access to law, offices, and other public institutions.Footnote 8
Political liberty and equality, shared by members of a diverse community of interdependent individuals who participate regularly and actively in common enterprises, can promote the production of public and private goods at high levels. Under the right institutional conditions, free individuals who need not fear expropriation by a tyrannical government or by rent-seeking elites will rationally invest in the development of their own special skills and talents, thereby increasing the collective return to specialization and comparative advantage, and growing the joint stock of human capital. Equal access to institutions (e.g., dispute resolution procedures) and to public information (e.g., laws governing commercial exchange) drives down transaction costs, by reducing both informational asymmetry and the tendency to partiality (judging similar cases differently) on the part of officials. As the costs of transactions decline, the volume of transactions and the mutual gain from each transaction increase, growing the aggregate wealth of society. Moreover, free and equal citizens who share a common interest in remaining so will, again under the right institutional conditions, rationally share useful information and specialized knowledge when jointly making policy on matters of their common interest. When dispersed and diverse technical and social information and knowledge are disclosed and shared it enables the community to devise better, more innovative solutions to challenges in a changing environment.
As the store of human capital grows, as transaction costs drop, and as better public policy is made on the basis of better information and shared knowledge, the aggregated benefits of social cooperation increase. If a significant part of the benefit is invested in public goods, and insofar as private benefits are distributed broadly (rather than monopolized by elites as rents), the community becomes, over time, more secure and more prosperous. This sequence of development is amply documented in the histories of Athens and other democratic Greek city-states.Footnote 9
We will return in Chapter 7 to the question of designing mechanisms that might enable knowledge to be effectively aggregated by a democracy, so as to produce overall better policy. The key to the design solution will be finding ways to employ expertise without risking elite capture of the government, and by paying proper attention to policy failures, as well as to policy successes. The prior question is, however, how a collectivity of masterless citizens can create conditions in which, first, each individual credibly commits to obeying rules requiring costly personal investment in practices that sustain public goods, and, next, each participates in costly punishment of those who break the rules.
6.5 Civic Dignity as Lived Experience
Security and prosperity are reliably provided by a democracy only when liberty and equality are reciprocally supportive and when neither principle is maximized at the expense of the other. Under such circumstances, citizens live without fear of expropriation or exploitation and can plan their lives accordingly. Their equal political standing is matched by a high social standing, so all “stand tall,” rather than cowering, either in mutual fear (in a Hobbesian state of nature), or in awe of an unconstrained ruler (under a Hobbesian sovereign). Democratic citizens are simultaneously secure in their political liberty, and in their legal and political equality, when majoritarian power and the powers wielded by individuals and groups are limited by constitutional guarantees ensuring immunity against arbitrary threats to persons or their property.
But, as was foregrounded by the American civil rights movement of the mid twentieth century, and as the experience of police harassment by vulnerable African-American communities makes painfully clear, constitutional guarantees are of practical value only when they pay off in people's lived experience. The post–Civil War amendments to the US Constitution promised freedom and legal equality to all citizens. That promise was belied by the system of indignity sustained by “Jim Crow” rules and racist norms in many American states. In order for freedom and equality to be meaningful, and thus in order for democracy to deliver the basic goods of security and prosperity, even the weakest and most vulnerable citizens must also be experientially secure in their dignity – in their worthiness as participatory citizens and their daily lived immunity from the disabling burdens of humiliation and infantilization.Footnote 10
I suggested in the first chapter that basic democracy has an implicit ethics. It is in the realm of dignity that the ethical demands of democracy become especially clear, and where the line between political and interpersonal behavior becomes most permeable. A citizen subject to humiliation by the powerful, whether it is a powerful public official or a powerful private individual or syndicate, is not free in the sense required of participatory citizenship. An adult citizen who is subject to having his speech or action treated as if it were that of a child is not in the relevant sense equal. And, as we have seen, without free and equal citizens, it is meaningless to speak of democracy.
The democratic imperative of securing the dignity of each citizen creates rules and habits of enforcement that push back against the demands of right-libertarians for maximizing personal freedom in ways that would effectively disenfranchise the weaker among the citizens. It likewise resists demands by left-egalitarians for maximizing social justice in ways that would endanger the security of citizens’ possession of personal property. An appropriate concern for dignity stands guard against the threat to democracy that arises from the employment of majoritarian power to maximize either personal liberties in respect to property or economic equality (Section 6.8).
Dignity also serves to fill in the value set of basic democracy. I have claimed that political forms of liberty and equality must be sustained by basic democracy, as conditions necessary for the regime's continued existence. But the political forms of freedom and equality that are required to sustain a basic democracy are likely to appear unpalatably “thin” to liberals of almost any stripe. Liberal projects typically take the form of thickening freedom and/or equality, by adding to their substantive social content, often under the rubric of autonomy, justice, inherent rights and respective moral duties. Attention to the independent requirements of civic dignity likewise adds substantive content – although not specifically liberal or moral content (contrast Christiano Reference Christiano2008: 138–154) – to the lived experience of democratic citizenship. It does so, moreover, in a way that promotes the development of a sustainable, self-reinforcing social equilibrium among a diverse population of rationally self-interested individuals. In brief, dignity makes basic democracy at once deeper and more robust: Democratic institutions defend dignity, while the habits of dignified citizens provide behavioral foundations for defending democracy and for improving institutions over time.
The concept of civic dignity, as a value and as a set of practices, will be prominent in Demopolis's civic education. The argument of this part of the curriculum is predicated on the idea that the rules defending dignity rest on a shared recognition that indignity is experientially bad for those who suffer it, and bad for democracy. Indignity entails, for the individual, suffering harms, or being liable to suffer harms, as a consequence of being treated with contempt or as a child. When I am subjected to humiliation, I am treated as an inferior by those who seek to assert their own superiority. When I am subjected to infantilization, I am assimilated to the category of those presumed incapable of judging and pursuing their own interests. Insofar as an adult life is characterized by humiliation or infantilization, or by persistent fear of being subject to those conditions, it fails to go well. While dignity may not be a sufficient condition for a life to go well, ceteris paribus, lives lived with dignity go better than lives lived without it.
Indignity is bad, not only for individuals, but for democracy as collective self-governance. Humiliation is incompatible with the sort of liberty necessary to sustain democracy because the individual who suffers, or is subject to, humiliation is not in a position to speak out or to associate with others in the frank and open manner demanded by participatory citizenship. If I know that speaking out on certain topics, or associating with certain others, will expose me to public humiliation, unless I am exceptionally courageous – as were, for example, many participants in the American civil rights movement in the mid twentieth century, I am likely to restrain my own speech and forgo those associations. I will defer to those in a position to humiliate me, looking for their permission before speaking or associating, cringing and groveling when I fear that the exercise of my formal political liberties might incur their displeasure. If I do enter the public domain with those who humiliate me, I am unrecognized, invisible; my presence is no more acknowledged than that of a servant at an aristocratic dinner party.Footnote 11
Likewise, infantilization is incompatible with the sort of equality necessary to sustain democracy. Democracy is a sham if, when I speak in public, my speech is treated as childish babble, if the information and arguments I advance are accorded no respect despite their salience to the topic of public discussion, or if I am denied access to the information necessary to form a reasoned opinion. Democracy is illusory when citizens are kept in a condition of tutelage, such that their votes are limited to choices among options that have been judged risk-free or have been preapproved by a paternalistic elite. Democracy as collective self-government is sustained only when citizens securely share genuine high standing – when they are free not merely from active interference in their chosen actions but from the threat of humiliation, when their voices are heard, their equal votes count in decisions on salient matters, and when they employ their own judgment in choosing among inherently risk-laden options. The twentith-century civil rights slogan, “I am a man,” rejected both humiliation and infantilization by demanding the respect and recognition owed to a adult worthy of participating as an equal in civic society.
Living with dignity involves the regard in which we are held by others, and how we are treated by them. Dignity is manifest in how we behave toward others, and in how they behave toward us. The dignity relevant to democracy is, in substantial measure, a matter of the respect and recognition we publicly accord to one another, through our words and our actions, as persons worthy of political participation. Civic dignity is robust insofar as it is sustained by rational self-interest, well-known and well-respected rules, and internalized norms and habitual behavior developed as a result of living according to those rules. Dignity is transformed in the civic realm, from a scarce resource gained in zero-sum contests or by the whim of a master, to an abundant common pool resource sustained by coordination among those with shared interests in its preservation. It is thereby distinguished from honor. While a basic democracy has good reason to recognize extraordinary public efforts with special honors (Section 6.6), civic dignity establishes a high baseline of respect and recognition for all citizens. By building common knowledge among citizens, and providing incentives for individuals to act in the public good, civic dignity resists devolution into a commons tragedy.Footnote 12
Recognition that their own lives do indeed go better under a regime of civic dignity, on the part of citizens who are at risk of suffering indignities under an autocratic regime, provides a rational motive for assuming costs in the defense of the dignity of others. Mobilization of citizens in defense of dignity is facilitated by rules (laws and norms) defining behaviors that constitute violations, specifying remedies, and thereby enabling individuals to coordinate their actions in response to violations. The institutions established by the democratic community must provide both well-understood mechanisms and adequate incentives for individuals (public officials and private citizens alike) to come to the defense of those suffering dignitary harms (e.g., the victims of police intimidation or hate crimes). When the rules are properly structured, any member, or group of members, of a civic community suffering indignity can expect aid from their fellow citizens – most obviously in the guise of their civic peers sitting as a jury in a court of law, but potentially in the form of direct action by individual citizens and by the citizenry collectively.Footnote 13
6.6 A Civic Dignity Game
A democratic civic dignity-preserving equilibrium can be modeled in a simple 2- or 3-player game. In this game we assume that there is a rule (law or norm) forbidding indignity and that the rule is common knowledge. We also assume that the society includes persons (of the sort Hobbes supposed were motivated by a prideful desire for self-aggrandizement) who seek confirmation of their own superiority through humiliating others. Assume that person 1 (P1) is a powerful individual (public official or elite private person) who is of that kind, someone who takes pleasure in humiliating relatively weak (poor, obscure, ill-connected) persons.
In the simplest 2-player game, P1 moves first, choosing to respect or humiliate a weaker third party, thereby violating the rule forbidding such behavior. If P1 humiliates, person 2 (P2), an ordinary citizen who knows the rules and witnesses P1's violation, chooses either to defend the third party or to ignore the offense. If appropriately motivated (per discussion, Section 6.5), P2 will choose to defend the third party rather than to ignore the offense. Recognizing that P2's motivation will lead P2 to defend the third party, and that this has blocked P1's most preferred outcome (humiliating without cost), P1 chooses to respect the third party's dignity over paying the high cost of confronting P2's defense. The equilibrium path is thus “P1 respects the third party”; the outcome of the game is “no challenge to dignity” – i.e., no humiliation of the weak third party. The game thus models a dignity-preserving social equilibrium (Ober Reference Ober2012: 832–835).
The more elaborate 3-player version of the game illustrated in Figure 6.1 adds the chance for special public honors to the equation. This game begins with the same assumptions as the 2-person game about P1 and the third party. As in the previous game, if P1 chooses “humiliate” rather than “respect,” P2 chooses whether to oppose the powerful P1. But in this 3-player game P2 requires aid of other citizens if her defense is to succeed. P2 may seek that aid by charging P1 with illegally inflicting indignity in a public trial. P1 and P2 are assumed to be rivals for special public honors (e.g., for reputation or political office), and so they both value public recognition. Player 3 is a Demos with decision authority over cases of illegally inflicted indignity, and over distribution of special public honors. If P1 respects the third party, Demos honors P1 or honors no one. If P1 humiliates the third party and P2 ignores the offense, Demos chooses whether to honor P2 or not. If P2 defends the third party, by bringing P1 to trial, Demos convicts or acquits P1. “Dignity defended” is the outcome if P1 humiliates, P2 defends, and Demos convicts. “Dignity lost” is the outcome if Demos acquits, or if P2 ignores the offense (whether or not P2 is honored). The outcome is “no challenge to dignity” if P1 respects the dignity of the third party (whether or not P1 is honored).
Figure 6.1 Three-player civic dignity game. Players 1 and 2 are rivals for honors. Player 3 is Demos. Preference orderings are shown as quantitative payoffs to each player (1, 2, 3). The dashed line is the equilibrium path. The dotted line is the equilibrium path of the two-person game (played by 2 and 3) if 1 goes off the path by choosing to humiliate. The dash-dotted line is the equilibrium path if 2 goes off the path by choosing to ignore after off-path 1 humiliates.
The preferences of each player over the possible outcomes of the game are indicated by the quantities listed in Figure 3.1. The quantity for each outcome represents the value of that outcome for each player (in the order P1, P2, P3: Demos): 5 is excellent; 0 is neutral; -5 is terrible. Each player seeks his highest payoff, in light of the anticipated moves of the other players.
P1's best outcome (payoff of 5) is to humiliate freely and see his rival (P2) denied honors; the assumption is that honors for P2 were proposed, but rejected by Demos. Next best (3) is acquittal; this is inferior to his best outcome because of the cost of undergoing the trial. Third (2) is to forgo humiliating but to gain valued public honors; the assumption is that P1, like P2, does desire public honors. Fourth (−1) is to gain the outcome of freely humiliating only at the high cost of seeing his rival honored. Fifth (−2) is to forgo challenging dignity without gaining honors; the assumption is that no honors were proposed. Worst (−5) is to incur the very high cost of a legal conviction.
P2's best outcome (payoff of 5) is to gain honors without cost to herself. Her next best outcome (4) is to defeat her rival and enhance her own reputation by gaining a conviction in the trial. Third, she is indifferent (0) to a world in which dignity is unchallenged and no one is honored. Fourth best (−2) is being denied honors. Fifth (−3) is seeing her rival honored. Worst (−5) is P1's acquittal, meaning that her rival gains his preferred outcome and gains in reputation at P2's expense.
P3: Demos most prefers (payoff of 5) the situation in which there is no challenge to dignity and pro-social behavior by citizens is honored. Demos prefers honoring over not-honoring because honors are expected to enhance the willingness of citizens to pay the potentially high costs of active civic engagement. Next best (4) is no challenge to dignity without granting honors. Third best (3) is convicting a violator: The gains (the spectacle of the trial, public revenue from fines) exceed the costs of mounting a trial. Fourth (−2) is an acquittal in the trial: Although Demos's authority has been asserted by holding a trial, P1 may violate again. Fifth (−3) is for dignity to be lost without a trial and P2 to be denied honors. Worst (−5) is for dignity to be lost and P2 to be honored despite her egregious failure to engage in the pro-social action of defense.
The equilibrium of this game is as follows: Since the ordering of Demos's preferences will lead P2 to defend if P1 humiliates, P1's best option is “no challenge (and being honored),” which is the predicted outcome. The equilibrium path (Figure 3.1, dashed line) is P1, respect; Demos, honor P1. As in the simpler 2-player game on which the 3-player game is based, this game is Nash subgame perfect. But if P1 goes off the equilibrium path by choosing to humiliate, in the resulting two-party subgame the equilibrium path (Figure 3.1, dotted line) is P2, defend; Demos, convict; and the predicted outcome is “dignity defended.” “Dignity lost” is the predicted outcome only if P2 goes off-path by ignoring the offense when off-path P1 humiliates; in this case the equilibrium path is “not honor 2” (Figure 3.2, dash-dotted line).
This extended game obviously oversimplifies the conditions pertaining in any real society, no matter how democratic. In the real world there will always be “off-path” behavior, because humans do not act as perfectly rational and fully informed agents. But through simplification the game illustrates how democratic institutions (rules forbidding indignity and Demos as collective actor), along with civic norms in which pro-social competition in the form of rivalry for public honors is validated, provide behavioral foundations for defending civic dignity.
As we saw (Section 4.3), persons with a passionate desire for recognition of their self-assessed superiority are likely to be malcontent in a society ruled by a Hobbesian monarch or coalition: The honor lover is reduced to an equality of low status in the presence of the sovereign before whom all are as servants before a master. Honors, when granted, and dishonor are at the sovereign's whim. Moreover, it will be difficult for the sovereign to prevent malcontents from acting on their desire for self-aggrandizement. The sovereign will find it difficult to monitor and thereby suppress the kind contemptuous behavior that will, as Hobbes recognized, lead to destabilization of the regime. The sovereign's agents cannot always be everywhere. Their own tendency to excessive pride may, furthermore, reduce the likelihood that they will loyally fulfill the sovereign-principal's wishes. Thus Leviathan is less stable than would be the case if human behavior were reliably predicted by a universal preference ordering in which fear of death invariably came first. Hobbes's own realism about human psychology threatens to undermine his rational contract thought experiment.
Basic democracy does not suffer those disabilities. The individual honored by the demos for extraordinary public service is thereby elevated, in public esteem although not in civic dignity, above others. The recipient of honors is not belittled by the inherent and unreachable superiority of a monarch or elite ruling coalition. As the game illustrates, the demos has good reason to honor and to withhold honors in a consistent and predictable way. Moreover, ordinary citizens can be virtually everywhere, always, as monitors and first responders to dignitary threats. And they have rational reasons to pay the costs of responding to those threats, if and when they occur. In a real society, of course, people may have reasons to defend the dignity of others that are not based in self-interest. A regime of dignity may be reinforced and extended by motivations of moral outrage or disinterested altruism. But the dignity-preserving civic order modeled by the game does not, in the first instance, depend on that reinforcement.
6.7 Dignity and Civic Virtues
Because calling to account individuals or corporate bodies that seek to humiliate others entails risk (the possibility of retaliation by the violators and their allies), it demands a certain level of courage. The defense of civic dignity therefore engages a corresponding virtue of civic courage (Balot Reference Balot2014). Yet civic dignity does not place an extraordinary burden of courage on individual citizens: No one need be super-courageous (in the way that some participants in the civil rights movement so clearly were) so long as other citizens can and will coordinate their actions, by establishing and supporting rules that enable a ready response to dignitary threats. As a citizen of a community with well-structured rules, I can reasonably expect members of my community to act (and to have acted, preemptively, by establishing the right institutions) in defense of my dignity. They do so, in part, because they recognize that it is in their own interest as individuals who (1) may in turn be threatened by the arrogance of the strong, (2) are concerned with the defense of their own dignity, and (3) recognize that defense of dignity requires the aid of fellow citizens. Civic dignity is thus at once virtuous, reciprocal, and rational.Footnote 14
In a basic democracy the responsibility of a group of civic peers to maintain the dignity of each and all is specified in law and in political culture. The law serves as a focal point (the term is that of Schelling Reference Schelling1980 [1960]) enabling the actions of officials and citizens to be effectively coordinated (Weingast Reference Weingast1997). Because the mutuality of responsibility for responding to dignitary threats is common knowledge, when I choose to act in another's defense I can assume that my choice accords with the preferences and interests of my fellow citizens, and that my actions will be coordinated with theirs. By coming to another's defense I am not, therefore, naively subjecting myself to a sucker's payoff. And so, once again, our collective dignity, as a citizen body, is guaranteed by the rational commitment of each individual to the system that guarantees his and her own welfare.
Sustaining a regime of respect and recognition among an extensive population of diverse individuals entails a second civic virtue: self-restraint (in classical Greek ethics: sophrosune). As citizens, we ought voluntarily to restrain ourselves from self-aggrandizing actions that compromise another's dignity. Once again, rationality limits the demands placed on individual virtue. As citizens, although we may each have an impulse to the sort of arrogant self-aggrandizement that Hobbes regarded as endemic, we rationally restrain ourselves from acting upon that impulse for three overlapping reasons: First, because we know the rules, and we know that many others are monitoring our behavior and will respond if we violate the rules: We expect to be punished for infractions. Next, because having been educated by the rules, our time horizon has extended: We have come to believe that it is in our real, long-term interest to deny ourselves short-term gratification at the expense of the dignity of others. And third, having internalized dignity as a motivational norm, acting arrogantly is no longer a simple source of pleasure: We are less likely to be gratified, at least in any straightforward sense, by behaving in ways that humiliate or infantilize others.Footnote 15
The key to sustaining a regime of civic dignity is a joint commitment to, and an agreement on the definition of, right action in respect to dignity and threats to it. Mutual recognition of our common interest in sustaining the system of civic dignity leads each of us to assume some responsibility for doing so. Each of us acknowledges that we have some duties to one another and to the community, and we each grasp that doing our duty is also a rational choice, given the established institutional and cultural conditions. If each of us does the right thing, acts correctly, and thus fulfills those duties, then our dignity is sustained in common. If we coordinate our behavior by using legal rules as focal points for aligning choices and actions, then no one is so strong as to be able to break the rules with impunity, and no one is left unprotected – no matter how individually weak he or she may be. Our commitment and agreement are strengthened when we each recognize that our dignity is sustained through coordination that is strengthened rather than weakened by competition on the part of the ambitious over a scarce resource – that is, public honors, rather than the nonrival public good of civic dignity.
The system is reinforced by reputation effects when citizens join in blaming and sanctioning those who fail to do their part in sustaining the regime of dignity, while praising and rewarding those whose service in its defense is outstanding.Footnote 16 Civic dignity need not be opposed to the desire to excel or to the expectation that individuals who do excel will be appropriately recognized for achievement. As the three-player game, cited above, suggests, civic dignity creates space for recognizing extraordinary merit and for according special honors to those who both desire and deserve them. An appropriately restrained version of competitive meritocracy may flourish within a regime of civic dignity, so long as the drive to publicly acknowledged excellence remains oriented toward pro-social ends.
Likewise, the concern for defense of civic dignity among a body of citizens need not dull the concern felt by citizens for the dignity of those outside the citizen body. Indeed, citizens have a rational interest in protecting the dignity of noncitizens when their lives are bound up in networks of interdependence and/or intimacy with those of noncitizens, or when citizens are not readily distinguished from noncitizens. In order to defend citizen interests, a basic democracy may extend legal protection beyond the ranks of the citizens themselves (Ober Reference Ober2005a: Chapter 5). Complacent or vicious forms of localism may emerge within a body of citizens (Kateb Reference Kateb2006). But by the same token, sensitivity to threats to civic dignity may lead to, or sharpen, recognition of the value of human dignity (Ober Reference Ober2012: 844).
The case of civic dignity demonstrates how democracy is sustained in a self-reinforcing equilibrium (however imperfectly realized) in a population of (more or less) self-interested individuals. The regime rests on the reasonably rational and well-informed choices of citizens who know that they themselves may be faced with threats. Each individual predictably acts in ways that sustain the regime, paying the costs of responding to threats, because each reasonably expects that his own life will go better if he does so. Common knowledge of rules enables coordination among a diverse set of individual social actors, while the opportunity to gain civic honors as a reward for extraordinary service encourages individual initiative.
6.8 Between Liberty and Equality
The citizens of Demopolis are expected to act, in their role as citizens, as responsible adults, and they expect to be treated accordingly. Thus the rules of Demopolis, and the education that is meant to justify those rules, are nonpaternalistic. To be treated as an adult, without being subject to paternalistic intervention, is to be free to make decisions that entail risks of a sort that a parent would rightly seek to prevent a child from taking, and to access information that a parent might keep from a child. The parent reasonably assumes that the child is likely to make relatively poor risk assessments as a result of an incompletely developed capacity to weigh potential costs against anticipated benefits or to make appropriate use of information. The parent's protective role will often include withholding certain kinds of information that might lead the child to act in ways likely to harm herself (e.g., how to turn on a stove, start a car, load a gun).
The adult citizen cannot be assumed to have an infallible capacity to assess risk or to process information. The government of a democratic state may seek to protect adult citizens against some risks without infantilizing them. It may keep some information secret for legitimate reasons of state security. It may require motorists to wear seat belts. Yet because dignity is a necessary condition of democracy, a democratic state cannot be a paternalistic state; it must as a rule allow citizens to make their own choices and must justify exceptions to that rule.Footnote 17
Making one's own choices in various domains (politics, finance, occupation, interpersonal relations, sport) entails risk. Taking risks, and accepting the consequences of making inherently risk-laden choices, is a basic condition of acting as a dignified adult and as a responsible citizen. If we are to live with dignity we must, therefore, have the opportunity to make, and participate in making, risk-laden choices that affect us, and our community, in important ways. Adults are expected to make generally better assessments than are young children. Yet we can never completely control our environment; everyone is chronically exposed to error (our own and those of others) and the vagaries of fortune. When making choices, we try to calculate risk by reasoning, communicating, and assessing the plans of others. Our assessments are imperfect, subject to bias, and contingency may upset the most careful calculation (Kahneman Reference Kahneman2011). But assessments of risk remain fairly rational insofar as they are based on good reasons and good information. They will be better yet, if we learn to recognize sources of systematic bias in our own and others’ reasoning. Information comes to agents in various ways; the information needed to assess risk and to control for bias comes from both private and from public sources. In a civic community, important public information includes well-publicized rules and common knowledge of norms and habits.
Civic dignity protects each citizen's authority to make personal choices affecting him or herself and, acting as a participatory citizen, to make public choices affecting the community. It enables adults to act as adults in using information and assuming risks. The role of civic dignity in forbidding the sorts of infantilization that would deny adults the opportunity to make risk-laden private and public choices is what enables democracy's dignity to play a beneficial regulatory role in respect to liberty and equality. Noninfantilization allows for judging between opposing claims of liberty and equality by preventing the hypertrophy of either condition when it threatens to treat adults as child-like wards. The demands of noninfantilization push back against the emergence of an intrusive nanny state bent on eliminating all vestiges of inequality on the one hand, and against the willful perpetuation of gross inequalities in the name of individual liberty on the other.Footnote 18
Living with dignity means that each of us must be free to make consequential choices in various inherently risk-laden domains. We must have the option to decide whether to do something or not and whether to vote for this or that candidate or policy, based on our own assessment of risk and advantage. Our dignity is preserved – we avoid the indignity of being treated as children who must be protected from knowing things that might lead us to take excessively risky courses of action – when each of us has adequate access to information relevant to our choices. Given the importance of public information in risk assessment, citizens (especially those serving in public office) are responsible for making relevant information available to one another. Our dignity is threatened by deceptions that trick us into accepting personal risks (e.g., dangerous investment decisions) or collective risks (e.g., dangerous public policies) that we would not have undertaken had we been in possession of better information.
Deception and obfuscation are especially destructive of dignity when perpetrated by public authorities. Officials infantilize citizens when they deny them access to relevant information, or present them with false information, e.g., when obscuring the risks inherent in a given course of private investment or public policy.Footnote 19 Yet, on the other hand, dignity is also threatened by public-authority paternalism that purports to eliminate all effects of chance and risk from our lives or choices. A system of public authority that deprives individual citizens of the opportunity to take certain courses of action or to vote in favor of them, based on their individual assessments of risk and chance of gain, assaults their dignity. It does so by treating them as wards, in need of a government-appointed guardian due to a presumed incapacity to employ reason and information when making choices important to themselves and to their community.Footnote 20
As we have seen (Sections 3.4 and 6.4), liberty (of choice, especially in respect to speech and association) and equality (of standing and opportunity, especially in respect to law and public decision making) are necessary conditions for democracy. But how does a democracy choose the correct course when the demands of liberty and equality come into conflict? How ought democratic citizens choose among policy options when freedom and equality cannot simultaneously be maximized? The way in which the principle of dignity constrains policy options within the distributive justice continuum by forbidding infantilization is illustrated in Figure 6.2.
Figure 6.2 Constraints on distributive justice. The continuum of distributive justice ranges from full equality (E) to complete liberty (L). The libertarian trajectory pushes to the left; the egalitarian trajectory pushes to the right. Dignitarian considerations set limits to how far either E or L can be pushed along those trajectories. The impermissibility of indignity for the democratic regime defines the limits to the ambitions of both egalitarians and libertarians. The Zone of Dignity, between the vertical arrows, is the range within the continuum at which noninfantilization is preserved for citizens. That zone thus defines the acceptable range of policy options for democratic distributive justice. The demos of a basic democracy may choose to set its distributive policy anywhere on the continuum within the Zone of Dignity, but not outside it.
The threat that paternalism offers to dignity provides one line of argument against mandatory forms of egalitarianism that seek entirely to eliminate the effects of chance from people's lives, whether by radically limiting the power of individuals to make their own risk-laden choices, or by completely obviating the effects of those choices. Policy that attempts to expunge all effects of chance upon opportunity (e.g., by eliminating all effects of upbringing or educational attainment), or that attempts to enforce perfectly equal outcomes, requires extensive paternalistic interventions in people's lives. Such interventions patently violate noninfantilization. Civic dignity is based on the equal public standing of citizens as members of a political community, but it sets strict limits on the scope of public paternalism as a legitimate means to achieve the end of distributive equality. Looking ahead, to the question of what “democracy before liberalism” can offer to liberals (as well as to nonliberals who prefer nontyranny; Chapter 8), a theory of basic democracy can therefore supplement arguments within liberal theory (notably Rawls's ordinal ranking) for why liberty's claims must sometimes trump those of equality.Footnote 21
By the same token, however, civic dignity requires a government to ensure that all citizens have access to resources adequate to enable them to make consequential public and private choices and otherwise to participate as citizens by taking up demanding and inherently risk-laden political roles in their community. Individuals who are deprived of the basic material goods necessary for them to live decently and to plan for the future are at least as limited in their choices as are the ward-like subjects of a nanny state. Redistributive public welfare policies that ensure that all are provided with adequate food, shelter, personal security, education, and health care promote dignity by enabling individuals to make meaningful personal choices, take calculated risks, and participate in the public domain. Securing the dignity of citizens requires public provision of resources adequate to ensure individual citizens both the opportunity for a reasonable level of calculated private risk taking (e.g., deferring short-term gains by investing in education that may, but may not, lead to greater future gains), and the opportunity for participation in public affairs.
Dignity thus provides a bulwark against excessively strong forms of free-market libertarianism. Dignity limits individual liberty insofar as it is necessary to ensure that all citizens can make consequential choices and participate fully, as citizens, in their community. In so doing, it provides at a minimum the basic material goods (the white box of Figure 3.2) without which lives cannot go even reasonably well.Footnote 22
By resisting extremes of liberty (state neglect) or equality (state paternalism), basic democracy seeks a middle ground in which each individual enjoys at least as much liberty and as much equality as is compatible with a dignified life for all. As noted in the first chapter, democracy before liberalism does not provide a specific conception of distributive justice. But it is provided with a principled mechanism for managing the opposing demands of egalitarian and libertarian conceptions of justice.
As with other aspects of democracy before liberalism, the theory of civic dignity offered here is supported (although not proved) by the historical record. Although the ancient Greek language lacks a fully elaborated vocabulary of dignity to match that of liberty and equality, the fundamental concerns regarding humiliation and infantilization, sketched above, are very well represented in democratic Athenian legal discourse concerned with honor (time), the act of “dishonoring” (hubris), and the appropriate personal and public responses to each. In classical Athens, citizens who actively sought honors through performing prosocial acts of exceptional public courage and generosity could expect to be granted formal public recognition (Whitehead Reference Whitehead1993; Lambert Reference Lambert, Lambert, Fisher and Cairns2011; Domingo Reference Domingo Gygax2016). On the other hand, acts on the part of empowered magistrates or arrogant individuals that were regarded as threatening to the high civic standing of citizens were subject to legal sanction, and likely to provoke a lively response on the part of responsible citizens.Footnote 23
In the next chapter, we turn to the question of how a direct democracy might sustain the institutions and practices of participatory self-government and civic dignity while simultaneously reaping the benefits of expert inputs into decision making and public policy, and avoiding elite capture. The historical example of classical Athens will, once again, provide a way to frame some of the issues involved in answering that question. But in order to make the argument that a theory of basic democracy is relevant to modernity, I will need to show that it need not be premised entirely on the directly democratic procedures or the small scale typical of ancient city-states.
