Political Pluralism, Disagreement and Justice

The Case for Polycentric Democracy

Julian F. Müller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315391007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book poses the question: How can we organize society in such a way that our disagreement about facts and norms works to the benefit of everyone? In response, it makes the argument for polycentric democracy, a political arrangement consisting of various political units that enjoy different degrees of independence.

It is argued that to progress towards justice, we first need to change our attitude towards reasonable disagreement. Theorists have always viewed reasonable disagreement as nuisance, if not as a threat. However, this work puts forward that the diversity of perspectives which underlie reasonable disagreement should be viewed as a resource to be harvested rather than a threat to be tamed. Resting on two key arguments, the author proposes the idea of polycentric democracy as the most capable method of making pluralism productive. The book explores what such a political order might look like and concludes that only an institutional system which is capable of profiting from diversity, such as polycentric democracy, might reasonably be expected to generate an overlapping consensus.

Continuing in the tradition of Karl Popper and Friedrich August von Hayek, this book lies at the intersection of philosophy, political economy and political theory. It will be of great interest to academics and scholars working in philosophy, politics and economics.

Part I

Escaping modus vivendi

1 The model

Debating friends

In this chapter, I want to expand on some of the basic concepts I touched upon in the introduction and bring into play an additional set of tools that will accompany us throughout this essay. First of all, I need to define in some more detail what I mean by ‘modus vivendi arrangements’ (Section 1.1). Furthermore, I want to explicate why modus vivendi arrangements obtain. To do this, I will present a novel taxonomy of political disagreement (Section 1.2). I will close this chapter by conceptualizing a jury device that allows us to identify what counts as a ‘successful escape’ (Section 1.3).

1.1 What is a modus vivendi?

In this section, I want to give a very short account of modus vivendi arrangements and some of their implications. Modern democratic societies are marked by profound instrumental and evaluative disagreement. Disagreement breeds friction and friction easily leads to conflict. Modus vivendi arrangements can be understood as social machinery for the settling of conflicts and for ensuring peaceful cooperation. In modern democratic countries, this machinery encompasses important governmental institutions, such as the constitution, democratic elections and decisions, the judiciary and so on. We can further distinguish between ‘modus vivendi arrangements’ and ‘modus vivendi bargains.’ In modus vivendi arrangements new modus vivendi bargains are negotiated all the time. While the modus vivendi arrangements are relatively stable, modus vivendi bargains shift over time as new governments introduce new legislation and the judiciary changes its interpretation of the law. The political process within a modus vivendi arrangement consists of negotiations, “bargaining, compromise, persuasion, a measure of give and take, cobbling together policies that may be effective but whose intellectual coherence is doubtful, strategies of avoidance, exploiting ambiguity, and so on.”¹

Modus vivendi arrangements are, furthermore, accepted² as a second-best by the parties to such an arrangement. Accepting a modus vivendi as a second-best has two sides to it. First, the parties agree to a modus vivendi arrangement because it secures some benefits for them.³ A modus vivendi is thus mutually beneficial for the parties. At the same time, every party to a modus vivendi would persuade the other parties to accept an alternative set of institutions, if it could⁴, meaning that none of the parties is fully satisfied with the arrangement, typically for both moral and non-moral reasons. Although the parties are dissatisfied with the institutions, they are dissatisfied for different reasons. Mia for instance might deem a particular modus vivendi arrangement unjustified because there is too much inequality, while Philipp might judge the same modus vivendi as unjustified because there is too much redistribution. In short, modus vivendi arrangements entail both mutual benefit and an overlapping dissatisfaction.

Let me add two comments here about the notion of ‘justification’ that this essay employs and the relation between ‘X being judged as a second-best’ and ‘X being judged as justified.’ In this essay, I am not concerned with the standards of justification. This essay is about the question of whether a diverse set of reasonable people, relying on diverse notions of justification, can conceive and concurrently agree on a social order that is better than the current modus vivendi arrangement. In this sense, I employ the notion of justification in a descriptive sense. A social order X is justified for the reasonable agent A, if the reasonable agent A judges that it is justified. Accordingly, a social arrangement is inter-subjectively justified, if every reasonable agent in the arrangement judges that, from her or his point of view, it is justified.⁵

Let us then take a closer look at the relations of ‘X being judged as a second-best’ and ‘X being judged as justified.’ Imagine this: A group of settlers has just arrived on an uninhabited island. Since they need to organize life in the new settlement, they begin to discuss different social arrangements. After a while, the set of proposals boils down to five. Mia orders the proposals like this: S_b > S_c > S_d > S_a > S_e. First of all, you should not assume that S_b, Mia’s favorite option, is the only one she deems justified. It might very well be the case that every proposed social arrangement is justified from Mia’s perspective. It might equally be the case that she only sees S_b and S_c as justified or, for that matter, that she sees none of the proposals as justified. This means: ‘X being justified to Mia’ and ‘X being Mia’s best option’ are two different things. Mia might grudgingly agree to any one of these proposals, since, under these circumstances, accepting some proposal is better than outright conflict, but she might judge nevertheless that the order is unjustified. We might imagine, for instance, that not one of these proposals allows women to hold an office and that all the proposals which allow women to hold an office are infeasible given the distribution of power in the new settlement. In this sense, from Mia’s perspective, all available proposals would fall into the categories of ‘unjustified’ and ‘second-best.’ Summarizing, we can then state that all proposals that A judges to be unjustified are second-bests, but not all second-bests are necessarily unjustified.

Let me add a final comment. Whether Mia views the social order as justified or not is not only relevant from a normative perspective, but also from a functional perspective. In general, if Mia sees a law or a social order as unjustified, the only reasons she has to honor its prescriptions and to punish digressions seem to be prudential ones. If Mia, on the contrary, views a law as justified, this gives her an additional reason to honor it and punish digressions by third parties.⁶ An example will be sufficient to illuminate this point: If Mia does not deem the tax code to be justified, her only reason not to cheat on her taxes seems to be prudential. This implies that Mia will cheat on her taxes as long as there are no countervailing prudential reasons (e.g. the fear of punishment). If Mia, on the contrary, deems the tax regime just, she would presumably have additional (moral) reasons to abstain from cheating.⁷ We can then tentatively conclude that there is a positive correlation between the stability of a social order and the degree to which it is viewed as justified.

1.2 Why does a modus vivendi obtain?

In this section, I attempt to answer the following question: Why does a modus vivendi obtain in the first place? Why do we, as human beings, not pull together, but instead waste so much of our time and energy in political tugs of war? I cannot attempt to give an exhaustive answer to this question since it involves a host of very intricate issues. Nevertheless, it is important for this essay to understand what sets people apart in the political sphere. In this section, I want to unearth some of the root causes of our political disagreements. My discussion about the root causes of political disagreement is a discussion about the disagreement between good reasoners. It is thus about people who are willing to think about a question and try to honor the rules of good reasoning. I am here and throughout the whole essay only concerned, unless I indicate otherwise, with ‘good reasoners’ and ‘reasonable disagreement.’ My understanding of reasonable disagreement is very similar to the definition by Christopher McMahon, who defines reasonable disagreement as “disagreement that survives the best efforts of a group of reasoners to answer a particular question – that is, to find a unique answer that is required by reason.”⁸ I am decidedly not concerned with pig-headed people, since pig-headed people are often not willing to honor the rules of good reasoning. Popper rightly notes:

Even a logical proof cannot alter the fundamental situation that only he who is prepared to take these things seriously and to learn about them be impressed by ethical (or any other) arguments. You cannot force anybody by arguments to take arguments seriously, or to respect his own reason.⁹

Since I will touch on different aspects of disagreement throughout this essay, I will confine myself here to two categories of reasonable disagreement: shallow and deep disagreement.

1.2.1 Lazy, shallow and deep disagreement

Let me start off by distinguishing three kinds of disagreements: lazy, shallow and deep disagreement. Most disagreement – especially about political matters – might correctly be classified as lazy. A disagreement is lazy if the reason that two people disagree is simply that at least one of them has either failed to take into account the available evidence or has failed to process the information correctly. In a case of lazy disagreement then, two people disagree about a certain matter even though the available evidence is sufficient to establish the truth of that matter beyond reasonable doubt. Thus, to resolve lazy disagreements, all it takes is for all parties to the disagreement to correctly aggregate the available knowledge. Lazy disagreement is simply based on ignorance and thus unreasonable.

Even though ignorance is certainly one of the major reasons why people disagree about politics, in this essay I am not concerned with lazy disagreements for the most part. This essay is mostly concerned with shallow and deep disagreement. So what is shallow disagreement?

Shallow disagreement occurs in situations in which there exists a truth about a certain matter, but our existing stock of knowledge is not sufficient to establish the truth of the matter beyond reasonable doubt. In cases of shallow disagreement, people evaluating the same evidence, the same body of knowledge, or the same set of claims with regard to a specific question come to different conclusions without committing any demonstrable mistakes. This is a common occurrence in the social sciences as well as in the humanities. In economics, for instance, experts on minimum wage disagree about its impact on poverty. The reason for their disagreement has to do with the fact that establishing the truth about this question is hard and the evidence inconclusive. The same is of course true for many questions in philosophy. For instance, philosophers theorizing peer disagreement disagree about how a rational agent/person should revise her belief about a certain proposition if she comes to k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Escaping modus vivendi
• Part II How to make use of diversity?
• Part III Polycentric democracy
• References
• Index