Abstract
Say you and your fellow citizens democratically elected politicians who are now engaged in what you regard as an unjust war. Is it enough if you regret your poor choice? Can you simply declare that those whom you elected no longer act in your name? These are the questions Eric Beerbohm addresses—and answers in the negative—in his aptly titled book, In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy. In a nutshell, his claim is that the citizens of democratic states stand in a special agency relationship to their representatives and thus to the actions of “their” state: the “potentially hazardous office” (ix) of the citizen therefore comes with special responsibilities and demands that we can neither delegate nor easily abrogate.
Beerbohm takes his phenomenological cue from the shame and guilt citizens (sometimes) experience when they realize that their state engages in unjust activities—torture, unjustified wars etc.—and that these injustices are committed “in our name,” i.e., that they participate in them in at least a mediated way even if they have never explicitly supported these particular acts. These evaluative attitudes, Beerbohm suggests, are different from the ones we experience in the face of injustices committed by other states. The reason is that they track a special kind of (often unintended) complicity that is based in both our (usually small) causal contribution and our specific democratic role as citizens who stand in an authorial relation with regard to the political institutions and structures of the state, mediated by our representatives. Against this background, attempts to redirect all blame to elected and nonelected officials and shift the burden upwards or to extricate ourselves by retreating into the private realm do not only seem ethically disingenuous but based on a misunderstanding of democratic citizenship.
Beerbohm’s attempt to reconstruct the normative logic of democratic citizenship proceeds from the perspective of citizens as participants, immersed in “the retail of ordinary politics” (25), focusing both on the horizontal relations among citizens and the vertical relations between “ordinary” citizens and lawmakers. Both of these relations are, according to him, not abstract, but irreducibly interpersonal, presupposing and actualizing our dual role as “co-subjects of the law and co-authors” (26). This dual role is not normatively inert. It provides citizens with strong moral reasons to participate in elections—votes being “paper stones” for Beerbohm—and other forms of political activity. Since they coauthor and cosponsor the institutions under which they live, they can be accessories and even coprincipals of the injustices of that system and thus have reason to (try to) change the course of the state by the means available to them. These reasons, however, are context-sensitive in that they depend both on the structural features of the system as well as one’s position within that system so that not all citizens will have the same, or an equally strong, reason to participate: “inequalities in power, material conditions, and access to information powerfully bear on the distribution of responsibility [. . . and] create pressure to distribute individual responsibility upward the socioeconomic ladder” (247).
Beerbohm, however, is not only interested in the “ethics of participation.” In addition, he thinks the demands and liabilities that come with the office of the citizen also give rise to an “ethics of belief” and an “ethics of delegation.” In the first rubric—which acquires its normative relevance from the fact that complicity goes beyond “participatory complicity” and includes “epistemic complicity”—the question is what citizens can realistically be expected to aspire to short of the overly demanding ideals of the “philosopher-citizen” and the “superdeliberator.” What ways are available to satisfy our cognitive and deliberative responsibilities that take into account our limited resources and cognitive capacities, without discounting those responsibilities in such a way that cancels all their critical force? After an instructive discussion of the attractiveness as well as the limits of deliberative democracy, Beerbohm spells out the epistemic obligations of citizens in terms of the virtues of epistemic integrity and epistemic independence: taking deliberative care in avoiding self-serving epistemic mechanisms and making up our own minds without relying too much on the presumed authority of others. These two virtues, however, turn out to be difficult to reconcile in the face of the complexity of modern politics, although they can and should guide citizens’ decisions about which responsibilities to delegate to their representatives. The solution to this problem therefore takes the form of what Beerbohm calls “principled representation,” the core of his account of the “ethics of delegation” that concerns the division of labor in a representative democracy.
Accordingly, representative democracy is presented as more than a second best. It is not merely an instrument for reducing the costs of deliberation and decision making but also a nonoptional means for reducing the risk of moral and empirical error. For Beerbohm, it is not the size of the community but the complexity of the policy problems and the decisions that have to be made that rule out direct democracy. However, while delegation is both necessary and permissible, citizens cannot escape their responsibility to reflect and decide on the basic principles of justice that are supposed to govern the fundamental institutions of their society. This is their core responsibility and where their inalienable authority resides. All further delegations should be governed by the rule of thumb that the more morally relevant the decision, the stronger the moral reason against contracting out. “Principled representation” thus designates an agency relationship in which citizens’ moral principles are supposed to constrain and guide the lawmakers (their contracted agents), allowing them to strike a balance between the two extremes of giving up too much or not enough decision-making authority. This part of the argument, however, would have been much more convincing if Beerbohm had explicitly elaborated and defended the assumption of complexity rather than relying on a more or less intuitive understanding of it that has been frequently mobilized on behalf of elitist and technocratic depreciation of citizens’ ability to govern themselves. 1 As in so many other theoretical discussions, more direct and participatory forms of democracy are given short shrift. As we will see shortly, this is indicative of a certain “status quo bias” that—in the guise of “non-ideal democratic theory”—tends to constrain Beerbohm’s argument and the range of political possibilities under discussion.
If complicity is conditional neither on participation (because that would exculpate us too easily) nor on mere association (because that would implicate us too easily), how can citizens avoid or reduce it? In response to this question, Beerbohm discusses ways in which citizens can effectively distance themselves from state actions and opportunities for them to actively offset injustices. As he convincingly argues, extrication is not enough, and further participation in actively overcoming injustice is usually called for: “‘inner emigration’ from injustice” or “seeking hermitage is no answer to injustice” (81). Again, however, Beerbohm’s discussion of the alternatives remains somewhat limited and disappointingly thin. Why focus merely on “diversified forms of official protest, where they [citizens] can officially record their moral opposition to a particular policy or executive action” (253)? Why only discuss plebiscitary (initiatives, citizen juries, etc.), legislative (opt-outs, directed petitions, etc.), executive (off-sets with which citizens can voluntarily contribute to ends they think should be funded, etc.), and judicial avenues for distancing and participating? The book was probably finished before the Occupy movement revived the political imagination of both citizens and theorists of democracy, but surely the rich tradition of social movements, contentious politics, and civil disobedience provides enough material to conceive of the practice of citizenship in ways that go beyond official channels for citizen participation. Against the background of this tradition and its contemporary exemplars, the repertoire of political actions that Beerbohm focuses on—from voting to writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper to political reasoning—seems strangely sanitized and directed toward a political reality that is significantly more ideal than the one most European and U.S. citizens live in. Especially in the face of procedural and institutional democratic deficits, citizens often have to resort to nonconventional means of protest to make their voice heard. To mention just one example, in the face of the U.S. government’s indifferent and even hostile reaction to the escalating AIDS crisis, activists in the mid-1980s turned from accepted and reputable forms of political action—such as petitions, vigils, and writing their representatives—to more militant and confrontational forms of political activism, such as disruptive demonstrations and “die-ins.” 2 Examples like these should find a systematic place in a non-ideal “ethics of participation.”
This limitation is all the more surprising since Beerbohm rightly emphasizes the agency of citizens and acknowledges the structural injustices that can adversely affect this agency. One of its sources might be seen in his choice for a “microdemocratic” approach that “takes institutional arrangements as pretheoretically given and asks how the individual should act within them” (19). This choice seems to unhelpfully mirror the shortcomings Beerbohm convincingly diagnoses in standard forms of “macrodemocratic theory,” which almost exclusively focus on institutions and structures. One more way in which this lack of attention to structures seems to weaken Beerbohm’s argument is with regard to the distortions of citizens’ belief-formation. While he correctly points out that “the easiest way for citizens to be complicit in political systems is to fail to perceive the injustice that they nonetheless sustain” (142), and while his discussion of cognitive shortcomings is certainly illuminating, his focus remains fundamentally individualistic and leads him to underestimate the patterned and structured form of these distortions as well as their role in the reproduction of systematic injustice and domination—in short, those features of distorted belief formation that have traditionally been discussed under the label “ideology.” 3
Beerbohm’s book is as theoretically illuminating as it is politically relevant. Its discussion of the ways in which we as citizens are responsible when the state acts “in our name” leaves no room for individual or collective complacency. We cannot just shrug our shoulders and point out that we have no influence on what political elites do, and it is not enough to just declare “not in our name.” Both the diagnostic as well as the critical force of Beerbohm’s argument, however, would have profited from going down the road of “non-ideal theory” just a bit further and paying more attention to the structural obstacles citizens face in understanding and addressing the injustices in which they are involved more or less directly, as well as to the range of political actions that are—and should be—at their disposal in confronting these injustices.