Why We Actually Do Need Democracy

    In Love's investigation of the place for capitalism in a Kantian framework of ethics, she goes a step further than Ripstein in arguing that not only does a Kantian framework call for people's mandatory cooperation in a state, but it mandates democracy as the only system of government which adequately legitimizes private property. 

    In the most recent tutorial, we investigated Ripstein's claim that legitimate private property is facilitated by entrance into a state. He did this by differentiating between a unilateral or omnilateral claim to something, which Asher and I spent a lot of time discussing. Why, exactly, is an omnilateral claim to property more justifiable than a unilateral one? We knew that a unilateral claim to property was wrong in that it conflicted with Kant's Universal Principle of Right, but how was an omnilateral claim any different? 

    In my eyes, Love solved this quandary by explaining how legitimate omnilateral claim to property is only legitimized through a democratic form of government. She states that "within a Kantian Framework, our rights cannot be structured unilaterally... in determining that I have this right regarding this object, I am structuring all others' rights as well" (Love, 5). I agreed, and understood Ripstein as making the same argument. Love elaborated on this in a way Ripstein didn't, however, when she explained that "we must instead make these indeterminate rights determinate through an omnilateral will, a will representing the united well of all who will be government by it... representing us equally" (Love, 5). Love goes on to state that the only way to ensure this omnilateral will is through democracy, stating that "this right to have descisions that structure our rights be determined through an omnilateral will further entails a right to equal democratic citizenship" (Love, 5). 

    Given how much our class has been debating the merits of democracy as a form of government, I thought it was topical to invite us to dive deeper into Love's claim that Kantian ethics perscribes a need for this form of government. I found myself wondering to what extent our fulfillment of rights was necessitated by direct democracy. Under this framework, would representative democracy be infringing on our rights, if the representative made a decision that the majority disagreed with? Is the electoral college infringing on our rights by not listening to the literal majority? How can tyranny of majority, facilitated by this system of democracy, infringe on the right to private property which Love says is contingent upon democracy?  

Comments

  1. Dylan GonzalezFebruary 26, 2026 at 12:16 AM

    I like your point on the Electoral College infringing on the one innate right, but I think the problem goes deeper than the type of voting and is really the idea of voting itself.

    Property rights are only realized through the omnilateral will. The process of voting is incompatible with the omnilateral will to begin with. Voting (or at the very minimum, all ordinal voting) is not the omnilateral will, but instead a poor process of aggregating preferences. The omnilateral will is a normative ideal, not a tallying of votes. An alternative to voting is needed since it cannot ever be “a will representing the united will of all who will be governed by it," (unless of course you create a consensus democracy). When we vote, we aren’t uniting anything, just measuring which particular will has a larger number attached to it. Love might argue this is unilateral decision making. In my opinion, taking Love seriously means moving to a different model, something that is not electoral democracy.

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