by Tim Sommers
I usually begin my “Ethics” course by asking, “What is the difference between ethics and morals?” I used to begin by literally asking the students that question, until I realized no one is happy about your very first question being a trick.
So, here’s the difference. “Ethics” comes from Greek, “morals” come from Latin. That’s it. Particular philosophers sometimes make some kind of (potentially) useful distinction between the two words, but the bottom line is, absent some stipulation with a theory behind it, ethics and morals don’t differ in meaning. The same goes for a “democracy” versus a “republic.”
During the recent Washington State Republican Convention, one delegate received a standing ovation for complaining that “We are devolving into a democracy,” and suggesting that “we should repeal the 17th Amendment” (Senators are to be elected by a popular vote, rather than appointed by state legislatures). Lest you think this a lone voice in the wilderness, the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, the person holding the second most powerful political position in our system of government, recently said, “We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a constitutional republic.” Utah Senator Mike Lee also says we live in a republic and that “Rank democracy thwarts” human flourishing.
Frankly, this is a worrying line. For example, when Johnson approvingly describes “responsiveness to Biblical admonitions” as part of why our system shouldn’t be more democratic. However, more often, this is simply a rhetorical dodge – one that has been used by conservatives going back at least to the 1960s. Here’s Lee, again, for example, being dodgy. Having just rejected the idea that the U.S. is a democracy – which would thwart human flourishing – he goes on to say almost immediately, well, “Insofar as ‘democracy’ means ‘a political system in which government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, then of course that accurately describes our system.” Well, of course, if “democracy” means democracy, then, yeah, this a democracy.
It seems worth going to the dictionary on this one. Consider, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “democracy” – “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives” – versus “republic” – “a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives.” The difference? I don’t see it. At most it might come to this. Suppose someone is advocating a countermajoritarian policy (say, limiting direct ballot initiatives or appointing rather than electing certain judges or prosecutors). If someone else objects that the proposed policy is undemocratic, the countermajoritarian can always say, yes, but this is a republic, not a democracy. And they often do. This is basically a meaningless response, not only because there does not seem to be a definitional difference between the two as we’ve seen, but also because “democracy” is an “essentially contested concept.” “Democracy” is value-ladened all the way down, and defending one’s definition of democracy is inseparable from defending one’s preferred version of democracy.
On the other hand, for the same reason, any argument that a policy is wrong simply because it is less democratic than some alternative (in the counter-majoritarian sense) is not as decisive as it might seem either. For good or ill, our system has a wide variety of countermajoritarian features. It’s a representative, rather direct, democracy, the president is elected by the electoral college rather than a popular vote, each state gets two senators regardless of their population, many political positions are appointed rather than elected, government agencies lead by unelected officials have quasi-lawmaking powers, etc.
However, just as some philosophers will stipulate a distinction between ethics and morals, some political thinkers stipulate a distinction between a republic and a democracy.
The website of the Connecticut General Assembly, for some obscure reason, stipulates that “By definition, a republic is a representative form of government that is ruled according to a charter, or constitution, and a democracy is a government that is ruled according to the will of the majority.” It’s a free country. They can use words how they want; I suppose. But this is confusing because (1) having or not having, a constitution is not widely recognized as the difference between democracies and republics. (2) None of the contemporary disputes about the distinction are disputes about whether to have a constitution or not. And (3) If a constitution is majoritarian all the way through, then the distinction collapses anyway.
Here’s a more revered source – James Madison – stipulating a different distinction. In Federalist #10, Madison says that “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person” is a democracy (and he is against it). Whereas a republic is “a government in which the scheme of representation takes place” (and he is for that).
To start with, I don’t think anyone would now claim that whether the vote takes place in person or not is a definitional difference between a democracy and a republic. Furthermore, it’s kind of ironic for a man who owned over a hundred slaves, and wrote a constitution that made them 3/5ths of a person, to object to a government run by small number slave-holding citizens. But here’s what’s most confusing. He’s comparing an Athenian system that only allowed 10-20% of the population to vote with a system where a much larger number of people participate, albeit more indirectly. The Athenians called their system a democracy, I grant that, but today I think we would describe what Madison is calling a republic as the more democratic alternative to what he is calling a democracy.
Again, if there is any use at all to comparing a democracy to a republic, it’s not whether the government is representative or has a constitution, it’s how majoritarian a particular, specific policy is. Presumably, the more majoritarian, the more democratic. So, when republicans say that this is not a democracy, presumably, they just mean that more majoritarian choice is not always better. Which is not completely wrong. It’s hard to see how, for example, we could do away entirely with being a representative democracy. But a more fundamental problem is that it is sometimes literally impossible to resolve the question of which alternative is more democratic – even in the majoritarian sense. Here are some reasons why.
First, liberals and conservatives alike, hopefully, agree that the U.S. is a liberal democracy, meaning every person has certain rights, liberties, and freedoms which should be protected even from the will of the majority. There is probably no one right way to reconcile the various liberties and democracy entirely.
Second, the notion that any system could be a direct democracy all the way down is literally incoherent. How should we vote about what we are going to vote on and how often? Are votes all binary? Should we have rank voting or multiple rounds? To (slightly) paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges’ “Lottery in Babylon,”
“In reality the number of [votes that need to be taken] is infinite. No decision is final, all branch into others. Ignorant people suppose that infinite [votes] require an infinite time; actually, it is sufficient for time to be infinitely subdivisible, as the famous parable of the contest with the tortoise teaches it.”
That last bit, unfortunately, is, as you know, not really the case.
One last point: Arrows’ Impossibility Theorem. It’s a mathematical proof that there is no answer to the question of what the most democratic way to choose between multiple alternatives is.
“Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labor requirements among the members of a society, or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or ‘social’ ordering of the alternatives from better to worse? The answer is startling. Arrow’s theorem says there are no such procedures whatsoever—none, anyway, that satisfy certain apparently quite reasonable assumptions concerning the autonomy of the people and the rationality of their preferences.” Michael Morreau/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
When Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have got, a republic or a monarchy?” and Franklin replied, “A republic, if we can keep it,” neither meant a republic as opposed to a democracy, both meant a democratic republic as opposed to a monarchy.
There’s no such thing as pure, direct democracy nor is there a republic without majoritarianism. Personally, I think it would be better overall if we ditched some of the antidemocratic features of our system (particularly, the electoral college that has put two of the last four presidents into office despite the fact that they lost the popular vote and the fact that the 600,000 people who live in Wyoming have the same number of Senators as the nearly 40,000,000 in California do). But I don’t think it is particularly useful to phrase such debates as debates about democratic versus republican forms of government – or even which alternative is more democratic, simpliciter.
I’d go further than that, in fact. I would say that the vast majority of cases in which politicians invoke the idea that we are a republic to defend some particular policy, it’s really because they can’t defend the policy on its merits. “We are not a republic” is not an argument. It’s a confession that you haven’t got one.