Equality by lot

1. In order to be THE voice of public opinion the council advancing that claim would need to be unique and unchallenged. But if anybody can set up a rival council, that is impossible. If anybody takes it seriously, it will be challenged and rivals set up.

Answer. There are two stages in the proposal: a fully open public discussion and the council attempting to draw a practical policy from that discussion.

The public discussion will be unique if the Foundation sponsoring it has adequate resources to publish and render accessible on line every word that anybody thinks relevant to the problem under discussion. If anybody sets up a rival forum, all of its content will be posted on the original site, where it could have been posted at no cost. So if somebody refuses to allow certain material to be posted, they are refusing to offer it for public scrutiny.

How might they justify that refusal?

Perhaps it is copyright, and they demand to be paid for it. In a genuine case, the foundation might agree to pay whatever any other user would pay for it. In some cases a reference to sites on which it has been published might suffice.

In other cases the appeal might be to confidentiality, for example, in the case of survey documents. That sort of confidence protects the identity of contributors to the survey, not its content. When it comes to privacy about the actions of individuals and organisations, such privacy can never be invoked in a way that favours a competing open forum. It has to remain private.

Some may argue that the way in which the problem is described by the foundation in initiating discussion is subtly biased to exclude certain viewpoints. In that case they need to state their case and argue it publicly.

A completely open forum, including full documentation on the proceedings of the foundation, can be reduplicated, but the only point that could have was to try to exclude certain contributions. And that cannot be done with impunity.

2. Such a forum could generate an enormous mass of verbiage, much of which would be either uselessly repetitive or irrelevant or incoherent. Nobody is going to read most of it, much less take the trouble of sorting it out and replying to what calls for comment. So there will be a lot of verbiage, but no real debate. No grappling with the issues.

Likely answer: The foundation employs professional editors who classify the submissions by content and star those contributions that they judge to have something distinctive to say. The aim would be to arrive at a manageable set of texts that people could respond to with confidence that they have addressed all the significant elements of the problem. The editors, being true professionals, would strive to show impartiality. Even if they were personally biased they would recognise that their preferred view is most likely to survive discussion if it addresses the best that the opposing views can offer.

In any case, it would be open to those who wanted to support a contributor not awarded a star to detail the ways in which her essay was superior to the winner and invite support for her claim or at least demand that a reference to it accompany the star on the other text.

So debate could proceed, focussed on a relatively small number of texts. Like any rational debate, it will consist in arguing about the weight of the evidence pointing to certain conclusions. It is about the arguments adduced, not about counting numbers of supporters.

3. It is certain that many will reject that approach. They think that a democratic society must be guided by what people want, their desires, not some depersonalised rational process. Such a rational process is bound to reflect the interests and sensibilities of the elites rather than those of ordinary people.

Reply: It all depends on the scope of these procedures. It is often assumed that the proper role of politics is to protect (conservatives) or construct (progressives)”the sort of society we want.” Demarchy takes the view that that is a mistake. It is always in practice repressive. There are indeed many things we generally agree in some measure in wanting. But only in the vaguest sense is there such a thing as ” the society we all want” But that objective is used to repress people we don’t want. We can largely agree about specific measures needed to outlaw activities that threaten us individually or collectively in those particular respects. But societies, like ecosystems, consist of innumerable different activities that go far beyond our capacities to directs and control them. As in matters of our bodily health most of the processes that are involved in our organism and its environment must be left to look after themselves. We intervene only to avoid or treat something that is sure not to cure itself.

In most aspects of our lives in a modern open society we aspire to discover for ourselves, both as individuals and groups of various kinds what sorts of activities we want to pursue. In our interactions with each other as individuals, families and other groups we develop patterns of behaviour that involve a huge range of conventions, expectations and habits, most of which we take for granted most of the time, becoming conscious of them only when rules are infringed, expectations disappointed and old habits frustrated.

This complex and multi-stranded culture is constantly changing as patterns of behaviour and circumstances change. Particularly in moral and technological matters a good deal of that change comes about as result of critical and rational activity seeking to get people to change their behaviour by persuasion, not by force. The healthy organism or ecosystem changes by adapting to circumstances, pursuing new opportunities and relinquishing those that no longer work effectively. It cannot be planned because it is too complex and because to the extent that it involves deliberate choice it is directed to a variety of changing and undefined ends.

We cherish both our shared identities and our particular personal identities. So, although we can usually understand the consideration others advance in regard to a common problem, we are very likely to disagree about the weight we attach to various considerations. Nevertheless, discussion focussed on a well-defined practical problem regularly leads to convergence by sorting out the specific considerations relevant to the problem from other consideration that are less relevant, trying to construct an answer to the problem that gives as much as possible to each of the considerations involved. There is rarely such a thing as the right answer to a shared problem, but there are certainly many wrong ones. In cooperative discussion we can at least avoid the wrong decisions and agree to experiment with particular practical proposals that are generally acceptable.

Adversarial politics, in which people try not to accommodate the aspirations of others but to triumph over them, tends to favour such broad considerations as whether a proposal involves giving more power to the state or increasing taxation instead of looking at whether it is really advantageous to public needs or gives good value for money. A party hides its exclusion of any genuine attention to specifics by claiming that some general principle that favours what it wants trumps (pun intended) all other considerations.

4. Even when debate does converge on a conclusion which is generally accepted as emerging from a comprehensive and well conducted discussion, that conclusion may well be that any one of a range of concrete actions could be a reasonable way of proceeding in dealing with the problem, depending on one’s assessment of the practical situation.

I have always argued that the practical decision on what is best to be done should be in the hands of a committee that is representative of the major interests most substantially affected by that practical choice. One of the reasons for this procedure is that general public discussion, including expert discussion, involving many people who have little close acquaintance with the problem, may fail to realise just how seriously some people are affected by some of the possible choices. Notoriously people often feel that they are treated as laboratory animals in a social experiment.

The point is not to give them a veto over anything they don’t like. Whether or not the public accepts their judgement about the best option to choose will depend on their convincing people that the option they choose is best, when due account is taken of their justified concerns. These need not be selfish concerns. People close to the problems being investigated may be quicker to identify certain practical assumptions behind a proposal than those who have no direct experience of the situation. For example, such aspect of any practical proposal as how quickly it can be implemented and what training those who work on it will need are more visible from close at hand than from a distance.

However, not everybody will agree that such considerations are decisive. Many will prefer a panel of acknowledged experts. As emerges in the second part of my book, I agree that in some matters that may be the best solution. What matters for the credibility of any attempt to draw a practical conclusion from a public discussion that is convergent but not conclusive is its claim to select the best option from the point of view that emerges from the discussion. The authoritative decision rests with the government or other authority charged with that responsibility. The whole point of the discussion is to examine policy questions in an open way, not distorted by the machinations of political parties struggling for power.

It is inevitable that vested interest will try to hi-jack the demarchic process in any way they can. I have great confidence in the capacity of well-informed open discussion to uncover such attempts and discredit them. Whether that confidence is justified will emerge only if my proposals are given an adequate trial.

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition |