by Alexander Guerrero A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

344 Pages·2012·1.29 MB·English

by  Alex Guerrero

DEMOCRACY AND LEGITIMACY

by

Alexander Guerrero

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
New York University
May, 2012

___________________
Samuel Scheffler
© Alexander Guerrero

All Rights Reserved, 2012
DEDICATION

To Liz
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It has been my great fortune to accumulate many debts in my years at NYU.
Liam Murphy, Sharon Street, Ronald Dworkin, Peter Unger, and Jeremy
Waldron all have played significant roles both in my development as a philosopher
and in the early stages of the development of my dissertation. I owe Jeremy particular
thanks for continually pushing back against my more ill-advised paternalist and anti-
democratic inclinations. I owe Peter thanks for his encouragement and philosophical
conversation over the years, and particularly in the early years of my time at NYU.
Many aspects of the dissertation were influenced by my years at the NYU
School of Law. John Ferejohn introduced me to citizens’ assemblies in his democratic
theory course, co-taught with Jeremy Waldron. Barry Friedman and Samuel
Issacharoff have both read and commented on numerous drafts of parts of the
dissertation. Additionally, I owe a huge debt to both Barry and Jay Furman for the
ways in which my participation in the Furman Academic Program—as both a Furman
Scholar and a Furman Fellow—influenced my intellectual development and the
development of many of the ideas in this dissertation.
Conversations with fellow graduate students at NYU have provided me with
much of my philosophical training. I’d like to thank all of the wonderful people I’ve
known throughout my years in the philosophy department, and I’d particularly like to
thank Greg Epstein—a fellow traveler in philosophy and law—for his insight,
enthusiasm, and camaraderie over the years.
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I spent the last several years working on the dissertation predominantly in
Princeton, and I’d like to thank both Philip Pettit and Melissa Lane for their insightful
comments on much of my work, for allowing me to attend their courses (leading to
inspiration for several of the main ideas in the dissertation), and for being so
supportive of my academic ambitions.
It was my incredible luck to have both Samuel Scheffler and Japa
Pallikkathayil arrive at NYU while I was starting to work on the dissertation, in time
for both of them to join my dissertation committee. Japa provided excellent and
extremely helpful comments on all parts of the dissertation and I feel very fortunate
that I was able to work with her during her time at NYU. Sam served as the chair of
my dissertation committee and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for the insight
and guidance he provided over the course of writing the dissertation.
Thomas Nagel has read and commented on more of my work than any other
person, and I have learned more about philosophy from him—through his comments
on my work, his courses, and his own work—than from anyone else. I cannot thank
him enough for his patience, wisdom, and good humor over the years.
Finally, I’d like to thank Liz Harman—my wife and the philosopher whom I
most admire—for her love, encouragement, and brilliance. (Also, for bringing me a
daily source of amazement: our daughter, Annalucia.)

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ABSTRACT
Modern political philosophy has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas.
One is a belief that the proper and fundamental level of normative assessment, at least
for questions of political legitimacy and justice, is the level of political institutions.
The other dogma is a belief that there is a close, even conceptual relationship between
democracy and legitimacy. Many appear to believe, for example, that political
institutions are legitimate if and only if they are democratic, where “being democratic”
is identified with the selection of political officials through inclusive, egalitarian (“one
person, one vote”) elections, or through mechanisms—such as appointment—that
operate via the decisions of elected political officials.
This dissertation consists of four chapters that challenge these two dogmas.
These chapters cover a wide and diverse terrain: the rationality of voting, the ethics of
political representation, the ethics of legal representation, whether there is a best kind
of constitution, the perils of political representation in a complex world, the legitimacy
of the use of lotteries to select political officials. What unites these chapters, in
addition to other common themes, is that each embodies an effort either to challenge
these dogmas directly, or to see what profit there might be in suspending a
commitment to one or both of them.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ................................................................................................................................ iii
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. iv
Abstract .................................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1
I. The First Dogma: Macro and Micro Legitimacy ................................................................ 2
A. Legitimacy, Obligation, Authority ................................................................................ 3
B. Political Legitimacy, Macro and Micro ....................................................................... 13
C. The Importance of Micro Legitimacy .......................................................................... 22
II. The Second Dogma: Democracy and Legitimacy ........................................................... 30
Chapter One: The Paradox of Voting and the Ethics of Political Representation ........... 37
I. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 37
II. Manifest Normative Mandates ........................................................................................ 42
III. The Ethics of Political Representation ........................................................................... 45
A. Non-Moralism ............................................................................................................. 47
B. Conceptualism ............................................................................................................. 50
IV. Conflicting Norms .......................................................................................................... 50
V. Strong and Weak Representatives ................................................................................... 54
A. Weak ............................................................................................................................ 55
B. Strong ........................................................................................................................... 58
C. Summing Up ............................................................................................................... 61
VI. Support and Trustees ...................................................................................................... 63
VII. Does One Vote Matter? ................................................................................................ 71
VIII. Hopeless Candidates .................................................................................................... 73
IX. Objections ...................................................................................................................... 75
A. Votes Do Not Always Equal Support .......................................................................... 77
B. Absence of Votes Does Not Always Equal Absence of Support................................. 86
X. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 87
Chapter Two: Lawyers, Context, and Legitimacy .............................................................. 88
I. Law and Legal Ethics ........................................................................................................ 94
A. The Distinction Between Law and Ethics ................................................................... 94
B. A Brief Introduction to Legal Ethics ........................................................................... 97
II. The Three Contexts ....................................................................................................... 105
A. State v. Individual ...................................................................................................... 106
B. Individual v. Individual ............................................................................................. 114
C. Individual v. State ...................................................................................................... 118
D. Blended Cases ........................................................................................................... 120
III. The Value(s) of Lawyers .............................................................................................. 122
A. The Value of Individual Lawyers in the SVI Context ............................................... 123
B. The Value of Lawyers in the IVI Context ................................................................. 129
IV. Making Better Lawyers ................................................................................................ 133
A. The Decision to Represent ......................................................................................... 137
B. Legal Strategy and Tactical Delay ............................................................................. 152
V. Objections and Replies .................................................................................................. 183
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Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 186
Chapter Three: Constitutions, Context, and Legitimacy ................................................ 189
I. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 189
II. Autonomy and Political Legitimacy .............................................................................. 204
A. Autonomy and Equality ............................................................................................. 204
B. Political Action .......................................................................................................... 206
C. Legitimacy Without Actual Consent ......................................................................... 208
D. The Possible Agreement Requirement ...................................................................... 212
E. Putting the Possible Agreement Requirement to Work ............................................. 221
F. Purely Procedural Justifications ................................................................................. 225
G. Summing Up .............................................................................................................. 230
III. The Constitutional Solution.......................................................................................... 232
IV. Constitutional Holism .................................................................................................. 237
V. Constitutional Contextualism ........................................................................................ 244
VI. Non-Universalism ........................................................................................................ 254
VII. Implications and Objections ....................................................................................... 258
A. Normative Political Philosophy Cannot Be Done Purely A Priori ........................... 259
B. Investigating C, S, and the C  S  C Interaction ................................................. 260
VIII. Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 264
Chapter Four: Representatives, Lotteries, and Legitimacy ............................................. 266
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 266
I. The Perils of Representation ........................................................................................... 268
A. Evaluating Outcomes: Responsiveness and Good Governance ................................ 268
B. Perils of Representative Government ........................................................................ 270
II. The Lottocratic Alternative............................................................................................ 289
A. Agenda Setting .......................................................................................................... 295
B. Expert Presentations .................................................................................................. 296
C. Community Consultation ........................................................................................... 298
D. Deliberation and Discussion ...................................................................................... 299
E. Drafting Proposals and Comments ............................................................................ 299
F. Revising and Voting ................................................................................................... 300
G. Other Issues ............................................................................................................... 301
H. The Promise of Lottocracy ........................................................................................ 304
III. Legitimacy and Lottocracy ........................................................................................... 311
IV. Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 326
Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... 328

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INTRODUCTION

Modern political philosophy has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas.
One is a belief that the proper and fundamental level of normative assessment, at least
for questions of political legitimacy and justice, is the level of political institutions.
The other dogma is a belief that there is a close, even conceptual relationship between
democracy and legitimacy. Many appear to believe, for example, that political
institutions are legitimate if and only if they are democratic, where “being democratic”
is identified with the selection of political officials through inclusive, egalitarian (“one
person, one vote”) elections, or through mechanisms—such as appointment—that
operate via the decisions of elected political officials.
This dissertation consists of four chapters that challenge these two dogmas.
These chapters cover a wide and diverse terrain: the rationality of voting, the ethics of
political representation, the ethics of legal representation, whether there is a best kind
of constitution, the perils of political representation in a complex world, the legitimacy
of the use of lotteries to select political officials. What unites these chapters, in
addition to other common themes, is that each embodies an effort either to challenge
these dogmas directly, or to see what profit there might be in suspending a
commitment to one or both of them. In this Introduction, I hope to provide a general
orientation to how I understand these two dogmas and the key concepts they employ,
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to offer some reasons for questioning the two dogmas, and to describe how the four
chapters of the dissertation challenge them.
I. The First Dogma: Macro and Micro Legitimacy

The first two chapters challenge the dogma that concerns about political
legitimacy should be directed at the “macro” level—the level of the State, particular
States, and political institutions. These two chapters proceed by taking seriously (a)
that norms of political legitimacy apply not just at this “macro” level, but also at the
“micro” levels of particular political actions taken by particular political actors, and
(b) that there is no simple way of moving from the macro to the micro. These chapters
provide evidence, I think, of the profitability of thinking about how norms of political
legitimacy apply to particular individuals and affect what individual actors can
permissibly do, rather than taking it for granted that norms of legitimacy apply only or
primarily at the institutional level. Chapter One focuses on how norms of political
legitimacy (and political justification, which I will treat as a synonym of legitimacy)
affect the ethics of political representation—the issue of how elected political
representatives ought to behave when in office. Chapter Two highlights the crucial
normative roles that lawyers play in modern political societies, and demonstrates how
norms of political legitimacy affect the ethics of legal representation—the issue of
how lawyers ought to behave—depending on the kind of legal work in which lawyers
are engaged.
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