Democracy is Bad

Immoral actions cannot be justified by the majority. Moral actions need no justification from the majority.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Suppose that Jeff lives in a town of 100 people. One day, 51 people in the town decide that they think Jeff has a stupid face, so they hold a vote on whether Jeff should be hanged. 51 people vote yes, so they drag Jeff out of his home and hang him. Some people think that democratic actions are legitimate, but I think that hanging Jeff is seriously morally wrong. I think that Jeff has rights, and it is morally wrong to violate those rights even if a democratic majority is on your side.

You might reply that we don’t merely have a democracy, but a constitutional democracy with specific guarantees of individual rights which cannot be violated even with majority support. But constitutional guarantees of rights are constraints on democracy. If the best thing you can say about X is that there are constraints on X, that makes it sound like X is not good. If the best thing about democracy is that democracy is constrained by constitutional guarantees of individual rights, then why not throw out democracy and just keep the constitutional guarantees of individual rights? We could have a government which was strictly constrained by a constitution to only perform the functions of police, courts and military - i.e. a government which existed only to protect individuals from encroachment on their rights by others.

Conversation about democracy is marked by extreme moral confusion. The media loves to celebrate when some country in the third world becomes more democratic. But we should not care whether the country is democratic. We should care about whether the country’s policies are good or bad. The fundamental idea of democracy is that actions are morally justified merely because they are popular. It is government by prom queen.

If Democracy is necessary or useful at all, it’s instrumentally valuable, not inherently valuable. There’s an argument that a corrupt and evil monarch is so bad, that democracy is the safer option. To be sure, history provides countless examples of bad kings. But there have also been bad electorates. In Democracy, millions of bums, criminals, drug addicts and simple oafs have as much say in how the government is run as the best and brightest and most conscientious citizens. The question of whether democratic or monarchical government yields better outcomes is an empirical question, and the evidence is not as clear as some people assume.

Furthermore, democracy and monarchy/dictatorship are not the only two options. Another option is sortition, a system in which leaders are chosen by lottery. We already use sortition for juries. My preferred system is constitutionalism; I would like there to be a government whose only legitimate functions are enumerated by a strict constitution. The government’s sole purpose would be to prevent people from infringing on other people’s rights, so the government would operate police, courts, a military and some kind of pollution control system - and nothing else.