David Estlund

Sunstein argues that democratic theory has recently rested its normative claims on a vast but empirically uninformed optimism about the ability of collective deliberation to lead to morally and rationally better decisions. Once that question is considered empirically, he argues, deliberation turns out to be mixed at best, and a disaster at worst. I want to suggest that Sunstein exaggerates the claims of the deliberative democrats, and interprets the empirical literature against deliberation in a way that appears, even based on his own descriptions of the studies, to be unfairly biased against the value of deliberation.

Waldron argues that recent treatments of justice have neglected reasonable disagreement about justice itself. So Waldron offers a procedural account of democratic legitimacy, in which contending views of justice can be brought together to arrive at a decision without deciding which one is correct. However, if there is reasonable disagreement about everything, then this includes his preferred account of legitimacy. On the other hand, it is not clear that Waldron is right to count so much disagreement as reasonable. But then Waldron has not undermined the view he opposes in which some prevailing disagreement about justice is held to be unreasonable

The present thesis is intended as a contribution toward a Rousseauean theory of democracy. The central problem discussed is how the act of voting must be interpreted in democratic theory. The notion of a theoretical interpretation of voting is discussed in Chapter One. A theory of democracy must include an interpretation of the act of voting if any praise or criticism of democracy is to be possible. The theoretical interpretation is distinct from an empirical account of voting behavior, and also distinct from a moral or prudential imperative. It is left as an open question whether one ought, morally or prudentially, to vote in the way that democratic theory interprets voting, or indeed whether one ought to vote at all. ;Social choice theory typically assumes that votes are expressions of individual preferences--that each individual expresses his or her narrowly self-interested preferences, and a proper aggregation of these will yield a utility maximizing result. In Chapter Two it is argued that, for reasons stemming from analysis of the concept of democratic voting, no understanding of "preference" is acceptable as a theoretical interpretation of voting. Six such understandings are disqualified, and the interpretation of votes as statements on the common interest is argued to succeed where these fail. In Chapter Three Richard Wollheim's puzzle of the minority democrat is discussed in relation to several closely related puzzles which apply to both democracy and utilitarianism. All three puzzles are argued to be dissolved if votes are interpreted as statements on the common interest. The solution to Wollheim's paradox, called the Correction Solution, gives rise to the disturbing possibility that the minority is interpreted as simply deferring to the majority. This danger is discussed in detail in Chapter Four, and again the interpretation of votes as statements on the common interest is argued to be uniquely qualified to avoid it