Daily Dialectic

Some justifications of democracy are egalitarian. According to philosophers like Peter Singer & Ronald Dworkin, democracy has value because it embodies political equality.

But equality is one of those essentially contested terms and a great deal hinges on exactly which conception of equality democracy requires. One way of fleshing out differences in the notion of equality is thinking of it as either procedurally or substantively.

Procedural equality requires treating relevant people the same. It is an agent-blind conception that doesn’t make distinctions between agents and treats everyone the same. Substantive equality, by contrast, requires that a process actually realises equality. It permits treating different people differently in order to achieve equality.

Procedural equality, however, is too weak a concept to do the necessary normative work of legitimating democracy. Why should we care if a process treats people the same when it doesn’t actually realise political equality? If it is actual equality that matters, then we must focus of substantive equality.

In this dialectic, I want to explore the relationship between procedural and substantive equality and answer the question: ‘Under what conditions does procedural equality map substantive equality, and under what conditions does it not?’. I will then attempt to demonstrate that egalitarian justifications of democratic authority fail under normal conditions because they cannot reliably produce equal outcomes.