PO301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Instrumentalism, Harm Principle
4. Po301 lesson 16
5. What counts as equal say?
6. Count people’s preferences equally? Equality as a fair
aggregation of preferences? (Social Choice approach)
7. Ensure equal chance to influence collective deliberation?
(Deliberative approach)
8. Both?
Instrumental view
4. Arneson entirely instrumentalist - not balancing values in
outcomes and processes, only the former are relevant for
Arneson.
5. 'Democracy...should be regarded as a tool or instrument that is to
be valued not for its own sake but entirely for what results from
it'
Clarifying instrumentalism
• One could be instrumentalist and reject democracy - why not epistocracy
(rule of the wise)?
• This view doesn't imply that we can know what the right answer is in
advance of the procedure, might just have good reason to think that it's a
good way to find out what that right answer is.
• A procedure can be a way of increasing our knowledge, discovering things.
• Need not claim that a given procedure ie democracy ALWAYS gets things
right, only that it is more likely to more often than the alternatives.
Arneson therefore rejects 'right to equal say'
• People may have right to control and mess up their own lives
