Projects

Elections are supposed to legitimise governments. However, it is elections themselves whose legitimacy seems to be in question. Voters are increasingly unwilling to vote, even at national elections and, when they do, are attracted to parties whose stated platforms and appeal seem flatly at odds with democratic norms of freedom and equality. These developments raise a question-mark over the long-term capacity of elections to legitimize political institutions and policies in Europe. A response to the crisis of legitimacy surrounding democratic elections needs to understand the ethical dimensions of voting as these present themselves to citizens as voters. The general goal of REDEM, therefore, was to create a network of normative political theorists as well as of social scientific and non-academic experts on electoral democracy and voting behaviour in order to develop a voter-centred perspective on the ethics of voting. This voter-centred perspective on voting aims to offer novel approaches to diagnosing and ameliorating the problems of representative democracy in Europe.

Satire poses profound challenges to democracy. Although it can speak truth to power, it can also vilify minorities and foster stereotypes. It may even promote disinformation, especially in the age of new media. We have attempted to tackle these problems with an interdisciplinary team of scholars from philosophy, political theory, communication studies, economics, and cognitive science. We used philosophy of language to disentangle the relations between intentions, inference, content and context, to see when satirists communicate their intentions effectively – or when they ‘misfire’, generating indifference, bewilderment or anger at the satirist rather than at the object of the satire. We used content analysis of cartoons in France and the UK to see if the two countries have different approaches to satire. We used experiments in economics and cognitive science to test how satire influences people’s opinions and how people assess the potentially harmful consequences of cartoons. These empirical analyses have served as a basis for journal articles and a policy-oriented conference in Paris.

What if anything does recent interest in Peircean Pragmatism add to our understanding of the epistemic properties of democracy? This question is of practical, as well as philosophic, interest, because citizens care about the substantive properties of collective decisions – their truth, their reasonableness, their morality, their efficacy – and not just the procedural correctness and legitimacy of the ways in which they were made. There has long been an interest in Deweyan pragmatism and its implications for democracy – particularly in the area of democratic education and in philosophical debates about the best way to justify democracy or to think about political justification. However, the work of Robert Talisse and Cheryl Misak has drawn attention to the significance of Peircean epistemology for democratic political philosophy and, in particular, to the possibility that democratic commitments to freedom of expression, association and political choice might give us epistemic reasons to support democracy even when we are unsure about the morality of the policies or decisions which it generates. In short, Peircean pragmatism, at least as developed by Talisse and Misak, claims to illuminate the epistemic dimensions of democratic government in ways that shore up its legitimacy, and improve political practice. This project sought to determine whether or not Peircean pragmatism can provide the promised philosophical illumination and political guidance.

This project aimed to develop the building blocks of what I call ‘A Democratic Conception of Ethics’, or ‘democratic ethics’ for short. Its first purpose was to show that we can use the forms of freedom, equality, rights and duties implicit in democratic principles of government to bring clarity and focus to philosophical debates whose complexity makes it difficult to determine what follows, morally and politically, from the conclusions we draw. By distinguishing those conceptions of equality and liberty which are consistent with democratic principles from those which are not, it is easier to see which philosophical distinctions and findings are important, and which irrelevant, if we value democracy. The second objective of the project was to show that we can use democratic institutions and practices as models of what it means to treat people equally, and to foster, rather than impede, their freedom. Using political institutions and practices as models, in other words, makes it easier to identify and evaluate the practical implications of our philosophical premises. Thus my research concerns two ways in which we can improve ethical thought and practice, and democracy can ensure that the explosion of intellectually rigorous and sophisticated research in philosophy over the past fifty years adequately reflects our legitimate interests in democratic government.