Democracy of any degree inevitably involves the imposition of will, except it is the collective wills of the majority rather than that of a singular figure or aristocratic class. If someone thinks democracy is valid or even morally required because it avoids a person exerting their will over another, then they believe in something utterly contradictory! If a political system is valid, or even obligatory, it cannot be democracy, because the relativism of this framework is inherently opposed to strict alignment with reason and all that it entails, as reason is inherently true and thus what any moral obligation--including the one that makes democracy allegedly good--depends on in the first place. However, since any moral imperative can only be possible if it is consistent with reason, then democracy is erroneous by default.
Logic is inherently true because its falsity would still require its veracity. Democracy, though, is not aimed at adhering to the verifiable truth, much less in every aspect of governance. At best, whether it is pure democracy or that of a more nuanced democratic republic [1], a democracy has a 51% majority hopefully stumble in the right direction. It is about glorifying the subjective desires of a given population's majority, which is of course irrationalistic to its core. Something is not true because the majority wants it to be or believes it is, and no one has justification to believe in anything unless it is fully verifiable by logical self-evidence (axioms and one's own conscious existence) or by extended deductive necessity.
What many proponents of democracy also do not seem to ever seriously consider, besides the fact that it is by logical necessity relativistic and thus false, is that when the majority imposes its will, there is nothing about democracy that inevitably trends towards validity or benevolence. There is also the assumption that benevolence is good. Whether democracy is morally good depends on two entirely unprovable but possible things: that there is such a thing as morality and that morality is such that democracy in particular is good. Whether a given direction a particular democracy is headed in is good would further depend on the nature of morality, if it exists.
Because democracy being morally upright is already illogical for the aforementioned reasons, it is not even possible for democracy to itself be good because it can never be rational, and whatever moral obligations and righteousness might exist would reduce to a matter of logical possibility, since logical axioms cannot be violated. Many supporters of democracy I have spoken to, though, seem to think that with enough people involved or if they are "educated" sufficiently (rather than if they are rationalistic enough), democracy almost inevitably brings societies in a morally better direction and that this thus makes the political framework good; they do not seem to grasp the real ramifications of how, whatever they mean by morally better and whether or not their moral ideas are even true, democracy is always fragile. A society is a sudden majority vote away from going in a vastly different direction.
A slight majority is all that would be necessary for a purely democratic society to abruptly start killing every second-born child, for instance, or torturing someone the general public dislikes because it brings them pleasure. Democracy is not stupid and contrary to reason (and thus to any moral obligations that do exist, which would have to be consistent with reason to be true) because of this special potential for instability and viciousness. This potential is nonetheless ignored by many of those I know who are in favor of democracy, but the real problem is that reason cannot be false, and no one could possibly have a right or an obligation to be in the wrong by pursuing majority whim over necessary truths and actual justice, if there is such a thing as the latter.
No comments:
Post a Comment