Lafont argues that normal people cannot be trusted with power

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Cristina Lafont, Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, presents her anti-sortition position as being based on participationist ideology. In a debate with Brett Hennig and Samuel Bagg, which took place in August 2022, Lafont initially makes the standard participationist arguments:

[T]he very idea of having something like a lottocracy, where we change the political system, my main concern is it is not democratic. It is a way of empowering the few, the very few the tiny, tiny few randomly selected people to do the thinking and the deciding for the rest of the citizenry. Whereas the citizens really are just supposed to blindly defer to whatever decisions they make. They have no formal tools of holding them accountable or of collectively shaping which political agenda we are going to have. They just can only blindly refer to whatever those very few people decide, and to me, that is really not democratic. Blind deference is quintessentially a non-democratic relationship of political inequality where you have just decision makers who are not accountable, they can decide anyway they like as they see fit, and then you have people who just follow and obey and have no other way of shaping their decisions. That’s my main concern.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Sortition | 140 Comments »