Must Preferences Be Respected in a Democracy?
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In “Democracy and Shifting Preferences,” Cass Sunstein argues that democratic government must not take privately held preferences as the sole basis for its decisions—a view he criticizes as subjective welfarism—and that sometimes it is permissible or even obligatory for a democratic government to intervene in the formation of the preferences of its citizens. Thus, Sunstein seeks to cast doubt on the ideas that private desires and beliefs ought to be respected in all contexts and that they could be the unique source of legitimation for public action. In particular he argues that “in three categories of cases, private preferences as expressed in consumption choices, should be overridden. The first category involves . . . collective judgments, including considered beliefs, aspirations for social justice, and altruistic goals; the second involves preferences that have adapted to undue limitations . . . or to unjust background conditions; the third points to intrapersonal collective action problems that, over a lifetime, impair personal welfare.” Once we accept this claim, Sunstein suggests that we are committed to accepting a theory of democracy that is significantly different than the subjective welfarist view, which locates the authority for public action purely in its relation to privately held preferences. He means to criticize an economic conception of government that sees justifiable public action as aimed at remediating market failure and “is dominated by a conception of welfare based on the satisfaction of existing preferences, as measured by willingness to pay; in politics and law, something called ‘paternalism’ is disfavored in both the public and private realms.” A more serviceable democratic conception would recognize the central place of deliberation in promoting both individual autonomy and a richer conception of welfare. Sunstein introduces some specific examples in which the case for public action aimed at affecting preferences appears intuitively to be more or less persuasive. These cases include addictive behavior, preferences that are formed in miserable social conditions, broadcasting of high-quality programs, and the like. That the case for intervention is persuasive in each of these cases seems to require that we adopt an understanding of the relationship between the preferences of citizens and democratic rule that can account for these intuitions. Second, he claims that a republican conception of government can explain why it is that public intervention in preference formation is justified in these cases and that a subjective welfarist conception cannot. I begin by formulating two views that are characteristically suspicious of public intervention in the preferences of citizens. In the subjective welfarist view, individuals are supposed to be prefabricated independent moral entities who exist complete with well-formed preferences in some sense prior to and independently of society and the state. On the surface, in this case, state intervention in preference formation seems at best inefficacious and in any case of doubtful ethical status since the only source of authority in this view is individual agreement. I shall claim later on that, depending on how “preferences” are to be understood in this view, this (neoclassical or Hobbesian) theory need not generally resist state intervention in preference formation. What I call the Burkean view holds that while individual preferences are formed in social, economic, and institutional settings and might be, therefore, subject to alteration as a result (deliberate or not) of governmental actions, it is hard both to know what these effects are and, even if the effects were known, to believe that political actors will generally either wish or be able to make appropriate choices. The Burkean view does not take a foundational stand against political intervention in preference formation but, instead, is practically skeptical about such policies having good effects and is concerned about licensing a coercive agency in these circumstances. A conservative Burkean may argue that it is wrong for government to take actions aimed at altering preferences because government will tend as a matter of “fact” to get things wrong. But Burkeans are not committed to regard government with any greater suspicion than they do social or economic processes. In general, whether or not government intervention or nonintervention in preference formation is defensible depends on having a satisfactory theory that allows one to predict the likely results of such actions. In this sense the Burkean view hardly seems to provide a basis for rejecting government intervention in preference formation in favor of letting other processes work. Sunstein gives a number of examples in which he believes that government intervention aimed at influencing preferences might be justified. These include cases of addiction, in which individuals come to have preferences based on their consumption histories and which they themselves might see as preferences that are somehow harmful to them; the distribution of wealth or opportunity, which Sunstein argues might affect the sorts of things that individuals come to want by unduly constraining their views of what is possible for them to do or want in their lives; and the allocation of cultural political information that, he suggests, would not be provided at sufficient levels in the private economy.
Source Publication
The Idea of Democracy
Source Editors/Authors
David Copp, Jean Hampton, John E. Roemer
Publication Date
1993
Recommended Citation
Ferejohn, John A., "Must Preferences Be Respected in a Democracy?" (1993). Faculty Chapters. 807.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/807
