from Part I - Values
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 March 2025
The political idea of self-government has a natural elaboration, which is that a society is self-governing when it is ruled by the will of the people of that society. A variety of attempts to vindicate popular will conceptions of self-government exist but I argue that they are fatally flawed. In its place, we need a conception of self-government that is deflationary (that is does not rely on the existence of a popular will) but nevertheless quite demanding. I discuss some deflationary accounts of self-government and I argue for an account that emphasizes an egalitarian collective decision-making process but that also recognizes the importance of outcomes. I argue that attention to the conditions necessary to the achievement of self-government of an egalitarian sort is essential to how we are to think of the proper aims of constitutional institutions. We need to attend to how information is disseminated to citizens and how citizens can have the sophistication necessary to understand information. An egalitarian conception of self-government can show how the constitution of a society should be structured so as to achieve equality in these two dimensions of the information system.
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