Generative Democracy and the Dynamics of Social Orders

Which normative institutional theory can best explain the current ‘democratic malaise’? Questions about how to evaluate a social order and how to show that democratic orders perform well have been answered by two competing narratives. According to the proceduralist narrative, the value of a democracy, and a social order more generally, ought to be measured by the values instantiated intrinsically in its procedures. In the same vein, the values intrinsic in its procedures are what justifies a democratic order over others. By contrast, according to the instrumentalist narrative, the value of a social order is measured by the output it produces. In keeping with this output-focused perspective, instrumentalists believe that a democratic order is justified over others because democratic decision procedures tend to cause better outcomes. We will show that neither of these two narratives is fully convincing. The proceduralist narrative does not provide a plausible account of justification because the values intrinsic to the procedure are at best necessary but not sufficient. After all, a decision procedure that embodies the relevant intrinsic values but fails to produce any valuable outcomes is difficult to justify all-things-considered. This is not to deny that intrinsic values can make a procedure more valuable – the objection against proceduralism applied to democracy is rather that any convincing justification of democracy must at least pay some attention to outcomes. The instrumentalist account has different problems: First, it pays no attention to valuable intrinsic features like fairness, as the proceduralist correctly points out. Second, it struggles to explain how the standard used to measure the value of democracy is determined and justified. Strangely, this standard is often assumed to be fixed. Most epistemic justifications of democracy, for example, see democracy as a successful procedure in terms of its “truth-tracking”, where “the truth” to be tracked is some kind of fixed, procedure-independent set of facts. Such external standards, however, typically remain under-defined and, when fleshed out, look implausible. We will maintain that neither the proceduralist nor the instrumentalist view provide a satisfactory account of what justifies democracy. Instead, we propose a new method for evaluating social orders, i.e. the rules and procedures of society. We call this method Generativism: Generativism. The value of a social order (or part thereof) depends on its intrinsic features and on its effects on the outer, mental and normative state of society and possibly external effects. Which intrinsic and instrumental features matter and how they matter is determined by universal and contextual standards. Generativism is a broad church view – it acknowledges that the value of a social order can depend on both properties intrinsic to its procedures and on instrumental features reflected in the outer, mental and normative state of society. In doing so, Generativism can provides a handle on problems of democratic decay in ways that other normative theories of democracy don’t.