John Rawls offered a general set of principles of justice that were formally neutral across specific institutions. However, he also believed that the institutions of a "property-owning democracy" are most likely to satisfy the two principles of justice. So what is a property-owning democracy? In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) Rawls offered a more explicit discussion …
Feasibility conditions on social reform
Several earlier posts have raised the issues of social change and social progress (post, post). People sometimes want society to be different (change), and they want it to be better (progress). But not all outcomes are possible, and some possible outcomes are not sustainable over time. So how should we think about sweeping prescriptions for …
Social progress
What is involved in "making society better"? What do we have in mind when we aspire to improving society? I suppose there are several things we might mean by this idea. Superficially we might say that a society is better off when its members are better off; but is there more to the story? There …
Citizens’ assemblies
There is quite a bit of interest today in exploring better mechanisms for implementing the goals of democracy in more effective and broadly legitimate ways than most electoral democracies have succeeded in doing to date. A core democratic goal is to create deliberation and decision mechanisms that permit citizens to become sufficiently educated about the …
Appearance and reality in public life
So what kind of democracy do we have? Do our institutions do a great job of establishing the public interest over the medium term, or have our institutions been captured by private interests, leaving essentially no real power in the hands of citizens? The way it is supposed to work, according to Civics 101: Elected …
Democracy and agency in development ethics
Development ethics is an area of applied ethics that attempts to explore the moral issues involved in global social and economic transformation. Key to the urgency of the field is the fact of massive global poverty, hunger, and inequality. The current situation of the world's poor -- in Egypt, India, Mexico, Sudan, or Brazil, for …
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Business interests and democracy
The central ideal of democracy is the notion that citizens can express their political and policy preferences through political institutions, and that the policies selected will reflect those preferences. We also expect that elected officials will act ethically in support of the best interests of the public. This is their public trust. The anti-democratic possibility …
What do Americans think?
Public opinion research raises many difficult questions. (See an earlier post on this topic.) We would like to know what Americans are thinking about current circumstances and issues; we'd like to know how those attitudes differ across social groups; and we'd like to have a basis for attempting to explain changes in attitudes over time. …
How good is deliberative democracy?
The basic idea of deliberative democracy is an appealing one. Suppose we are faced with this basic problem of social choice. There is an important issue facing a community. There are a small number of policy options that might be chosen. The community wants to choose among these options "democratically." There are several ways in …
Power elites after fifty years
When C. Wright Mills wrote The Power Elite in 1956, we lived in a simpler time. And yet, with a few important exceptions, the concentration of power that he described continues to seem familiar by today's standards. The central idea is that the United States democracy -- in spite of the reality of political parties, …
Understanding Society 