Abstract
Most discussions of the relationship between liberty and security focus on the idea that enhancing citizens’ security may require imposing constraints on their civil liberties (e.g., freedom of association, of movement, of communication, and so on). This paper explores the question of how measures to enhance security stand vis à vis the idea of political liberty, i.e. the idea of citizens’ collectively directing the power of their state. It distinguishes two models whereby citizens might enact that ideal of self-rule and argues that with respect to issues of national security, the less direct model, which entrusts political agents to make decisions beyond direct democratic input, will often be more appropriate. It argues as well that various practices often seen as fundamentally at odds with the ideal of rule by the people (e.g., government deception, lack of transparency, covert action) are in fact consistent with a reasonable construal of that ideal. It concludes by outlining various criteria that would have to be met for such practices to be morally permissible in democratic states.
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Notes
A reviewer has suggested that while my argument for entrusted authority may succeed in the context of sufficiently large political communities, in smaller ones (e.g., those with more homogeneity and animated by a strong social ethos) the Rousseauian model might be more appropriate. Since a good deal of my argument centers on challenges created by the need for secrecy, I am not sure how far smaller states can escape the conclusions I defend, since the case for secrecy does not chiefly hinge on the size of the population. However that may be, my target here is not chiefly Rousseauians who argue for small-scale democratic communities, but is rather those who stress the Rousseauian ideal of direct citizen input as an important touchstone for the evaluation of political practice in existing democracies.
For the importance of this kind of argument in assessing political institutions, see Wall (2006).
In comments on an earlier version of this paper Federica Liveriero has raised powerful questions about the relation between democratic legitimacy and my argument in this paper—questions which a more comprehensive account would need to address but whose resolution is, for reasons just given, ancillary to my main purpose here. I am deeply grateful to Liveriero’s penetrating comments, both on that issue and on several other aspects of my argument, and to an anonymous reviewer of this journal whose comments have helped me clarify important points.
Philip Pettit has noted that freedom “requires the absence of subjection to another’s will” (Pettit 2017: 331). The key element here is subjection. Choosing to follow another’s will is in itself no constraint on freedom.
Here’s the quick response to this reductio: benevolent despotism as a form of self-rule is defeated not by the logic of moral concepts, but by certain proven empirical conditions. Were things in the world quite different, and despots on the whole quite different, then democratic election of a benevolent despot might make sense as a form of self-rule. But they’re not, so it doesn’t.
Here I adapt the distinction between express and tacit consent in Simmons 1979.
For example, in most democracies there exist neither easy means of recalling those who are elected nor a system of formal mandates whereby those elected are obligated to vote in certain ways. See the discussion in Manin (1997: 163–167).
Manin (1997) offers a helpful overview of how such concerns have played out across the history of both political thought and political practice. More radically, of course, one might follow Rousseau in The Social Contract (Book III, XV) and deny that any representative political institutions are consistent with self-rule: “The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.”
For an extended and illuminating discussion of selection by lot, see the first two chapters of Manin (1997).
Though Manin offers an argument that “attempts to deduce the inegalitarian and aristocratic effects from an abstract analysis of election” (135), his discussion too makes clear that elections function not to corroborate natural superiorities but instead to reward those who possess distinguishing features that lead citizens (for any number of reasons) to perceive them as superior. Here again it is not superiority per se that grounds political authority. See Manin (1997: 134–149).
One argument I do not take up here is Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that genuine freedom appears in the world only through the enactment of liberty in the political domain. See Arendt (1991).
Not to mention the requirements of working to maintain an economy.
Granted, entrusted authority does not assure that all citizens will be able to exercise that good; it only gives them a chance to do so. But this is true of many other aims citizens pursue.
Anscombe (1990).
As a reviewer for this journal has noted, my argument bears some resemblance to what Joseph Raz has called “the normal justification” thesis, according to which the normal way to justify an authority is by showing that those subject to it are likely to do better, in acting on the reasons that apply to them by following the commands of the authority than by deciding the matter themselves (Raz 1986: 53–57). I see my argument as analogous to Raz’s, rather than an instance of it, not only because (as noted earlier) I am not claiming to offer a general account of state authority, but also because my discussion focuses not on the duties that fall upon citizens in the entrusted authority model but on the permissions that model grants to government agents. Though Raz’s account focuses on the imposition of duties, he notes that authorities do all kinds of things that do not involve imposing duties on others. And while he does believe that all exercises of authority in the end refer back to the imposition of duties, that is a further question whose resolution my argument here does not depend upon.
It may be that approval through something like the Rousseauian conception is a necessary condition of the permissibility of the entrusted authority model in any one domain. That difficult question I leave aside.
These factors are not distinct to national security. Think of those entrusted with ensuring public health who may need to make quick decisions to halt the spread of a pandemic, or of areas where expertise is especially important (food and drug safety, the construction of bridges and dams, and so on).
Recall that I have distinguished between the wrong in political agents’ acting in ways that don’t reflect the will of their citizens, and the wrong in doing an action that is itself morally impermissible. Condition (4) captures the latter.
Here I assume that the public discussion of goals does not impair their successful pursuit. Should that not be the case, that would substantially complicate such public discourse.
Margaret Canovan (1990), for example, has suggested that liberal states rely implicitly on a healthy dose of myth-making, but nothing in her argument countenances the kind of deception in question here.
The issues here are complicated. Though I think agents are not permitted to do what citizens see as impermissible, it also seems right that citizens’ wanting their political agents to engage in impermissible acts does not make it permissible for state agents to so act. Impermissibility may transfer from principal to agent in a sense that permissibility does not. Some of these complications I take up in § 4 below, in discussing the question of objective permissibility, but I recognize that more needs to be said.
Bellamy makes a similar distinction between the uses of deception, and he, too, stresses the idea of trust between citizens and their political agents (2019: 7–10).
As Federica Leveriero has stressed to me, citizens can disagree not only over how their state should pursue agreed-upon ends but about which ends their state should pursue. Since my case for the entrusted authority model assumes a settled political goal, nothing in it suggests that the distinct measures that model countenances may affect the process through which citizens identify that goal.
This might be because we don’t think it’s a case of paternalism, or because we don’t think it’s objectionable.
The weaker phrasing of the requirement shares some affinities with Burke’s idea that representatives should be concerned more with citizens’ expressions of disapproval than with expressions of approval. See Pitkin (1967).
Thompson says that this private review does not provide “adequate democratic accountability” (Thompson 1999: 193).
Much of Chambers’ argument focuses on the challenge of what she calls “plebiscitory reason”, i.e. the tendency for public political discussion to be marked by features that inhibit rational assessment of the options.
For complications to this analysis, see Thalos (2018).
Further warrant for enshrining such constraints may lie in the all-too-human capacity for self-deception, which is perhaps a special danger for political actors entrusted with national security. For an extensive discussion of the dangers of political self-deception that makes excellent use of historical examples, see Galeotti (2018). My thanks to Federica Liveriero for alerting me to Galeotti’s work.
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McCabe, D. National Security, Self-rule, and Democratic Action. J Ethics 25, 181–202 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-021-09362-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-021-09362-6