Why is democracy good, or preferable to other systems of governance and political decision-making? Democracy has been argued to incorporate or promote central values, such as equality or freedom. On the other hand, many contemporary defenses of democracy have relied on arguments that attempt to show that democracy promotes or enables some second-order good, such as the validity, justification or legitimacy of political decision-making. Recent decades have seen the rise of epistemic arguments for democracy that belong to this latter type. (...) For example, David Estlund has proposed that democracy is epistemically preferable among the societal arrangements that could be acceptable to all citizens. In turn... (shrink)

:Justice can be approached from many angles in ethical and political debates, including those involving healthcare, biomedical research, and well-being. The main doctrines of justice are liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, luck egalitarianism, socialism, utilitarianism, capability approach, communitarianism, and care ethics. These can be further elaborated in the light of traditional moral and social theories, values, ideals, and interests, and there are distinct dimensions of justice that are captured better by some tactics than by others. In this article, questions surrounding these matters (...) are approached with the hermeneutic idea of a distinction between “American” and “European” ways of thinking. (shrink)

The precautionary approach has been widely considered reasonable for many issues in environmental policy, including climate change. It has also been recognized, however, that standard formulations of the precautionary principle suffer from many difficulties. An influential strategy to avoid these difficulties is to formulate a narrow version of the principle on the basis of the maximin rule. Rawls proposed that following the maximin rule can be rational under certain conditions. Defenders of this strategy argue that these conditions are approximated when (...) it comes to issues like climate change. In the first part of this paper, I argue that the Rawlsian conditions do not establish the unique rationality of the maximin rule, hence the precautionary principle cannot be defended on its basis. When the Rawlsian conditions are approximated, other principles can also lead to reasonable choices. In particular, a prioritarian principle can capture the precautionary approach and serve a useful role in climate change policy. I develop this proposal in the second part. (shrink)