Kant and Lottocracy

Under the one innate right of humanity, “our rights cannot be structured unilaterally” (Love 5). Instead, the omnilateral will, “a will representing the united will of all who will be governed by it,” is the tool for governance (Love 5). When the will of everyone in a society is united, no particular wills can dominate and restrict freedom. True omnilateral laws, free from domination, become social constructs that everyone gave to themselves. While the state is “the mechanism through which our wills are formally united,” some states are better at this unity than others. S. M. Love specifies the scope and limits of democracy, but not the specific structure. Using Love’s ideas, a case can be made that lottocracy is the only democratic process that can represent the unilateral will and the one innate right.

Love outlines three rights, each one a portion of Kant’s one innate right. Firstly, our right to freedom. Under the right to freedom, “decisions that structure our rights must be made through equal democratic processes” (Love 5). Next, under our right to self-mastery, we must “each take part in deciding how to structure indeterminate rights” (Love 6). Finally, under our right to equality, “we each take an equal part in making these decisions." I only have ~250 words and I’m not qualified enough to be a lottocratic advocate, so I will only focus on a few arguments inspired from the right to self-mastery.


If the one innate right necessitates that we take an equal part in decision making like Love says, then we must reject electoral democracy and embrace lottocracy. There is no other form of government that enables equal participation than lottocracy. Under lottocracy, every individual has an equal mathematical chance of participating–an equal chance for influence. This equality of probability ensures that every individual has an equal part in decision making because it removes the advantages of wealth, social status, charisma, etc.that are seen in electoral democracy. Lottocracy is a mathematical guarantee of non-domination while electoral democracies are inherently competitive. In electoral democracies, candidates marshal their advantages in order to ensure an unequal chance for influence. Because elections are necessarily competitive, they will always succumb to the arbitrary wills of the donor class. Even in an impossible world without an elite donor class, candidates would find other means to dominate one another. Further mathematical inconsistencies like Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem prove that voting cannot aggregate preferences into a unified omnilateral will.

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