18 - Reflections on Democracy’s Fragility

Summary

The success of a democratic society depends, Rawls thought, on members having a shared sense of justice, a common basis for reasoning about what is right. Otherwise, disagreements born from conflicts of interest and identity – and associated “distrust and resentment” – will have corrosive effects on social cooperation. But can we reasonably hope for a broadly shared sense of justice? Religious and philosophical pluralism arguably leave hope for an overlapping consensus on a conception of justice sufficient to cabin those corrosive effects. But what about the pluralism of conceptions of justice themselves? I argue that, even on favorable assumptions about people and social cooperation, we should expect serious disagreement about conceptions of justice and the forms of democracy they recommend, as well as conflicts between and among the interests and identities of citizens who endorse those competing conceptions. Even on these favorable assumptions, then, we have reason to worry – as I think Rawls always did – about the fragility of democracy.