Question It's becoming increasingly clear that democratic societies are incapable of solving long-range, diffuse ecological problems such as climate change and peak oil, which, although indistinct and nebulous, pose what are potentially existential threats to whole populations. How serious a threat does this pose to the legitimacy of democracy? A related question, or perhaps the same question in different language: the inter-generational transfer of resources which democracies permit is clearly immoral, and profoundly so. At what point does this immorality trump the morality inherent in democratic institutions?

Accepted:
December 24, 2009

Comments

There is a hidden assumption in your questions, namely that we know another, non-democratic form of government under which distant ecological threats and intergenerational injustice would be adequately tackled. In my view, this assumption is false. Any government is run by human beings, and human beings have more togain by making decisions favorable to the living than by makingdecisions favorable to future populations.

But if you disagree, and know of a non-democratic form of government that would do the trick, I would like to know which this is and, more eagerly, what evidence you have for your view.

For the time being, I would then look elsewhere to a solution to the very serious problems you highlight. I would think hard about reforms of the present systems of democracy to make them more likely to take the more distant future into account.

How can this be done? First, we might institute an independent agency that, for any major piece of legislation, prepares a future impact assessment of it and of any plausible alternatives to it. This way legislators and the general public have a reasonably objective source of information about how much harm particular decisions we now take are likely to cause to the environment and future human beings. Second, we might try to impose some constitutional constraints upon cost-shifting into the future. (BTW, 2010 is a big cost-shifting year in the US, because this year people with high incomes can convert their traditional IRAs into Roth IRAs, which gains a few billion in revenues in the short term and loses hugely more in the long term.) Third, we should try to collaborate internationally on solving such problems. The reason is that collaboration can greatly improve the cost/benefit ratio. Each population is far more willing to reduce its excessive CO2 emissions by 15%, say, if this is part of a global effort that will result in a 10% reduction in global emissions than if this is merely a national effort that will result in a much smaller reduction in global emissions. Fourth, we should curtail political lobbying and legalized bribery of our elected politicians by well-heeled corporations and individuals, which tend to shift the political balance in favor of particularistic, short-term interests and against more widely shareable long-term interests.

I agree with Thomas that it would be nice if we could identify multiple forms of government that can handle these ecological issues -- it would be much better to be able to make comparative assessments of those forms of governments and their capacities and legitimacies than to contemplate, say, the prospect that no existing form of government may be able to handle these crises or that no combination of current governments may be able to work effectively together to tackle them in concert.

But does our ability to assess the impact, if any, of those crises no the legitimacy of our government depends on knowing that "another, non-democratic form of government" has the capacity and realistic prospects to address those issues?

On the one hand, knowledge of that sort could cause us to create a comparative assessment on which the urgency and significance of those crises makes that non-democratic form of government preferable to our own. Whether or not that sort of comparison could also motivate an argument that our democratic government has less legitimacy than we think it does, I'm unsure.

On the other hand, I think there is some plausibility in thinking that a strong case that our form of government lacks the capacity to handle those issues--and has little realistic prospect to reform itself to be able to address them in time to help prevent global catastrophe--may lessen its legitimacy. At least, I agree with the questioner that the existence of ecological catastrophes on a global scale would represent a fundamental challenge to governments, and having in hand a strong case that (1) there is a strong case that such global castrophes will occur unless there is effective governmental action and (2) the prospects for democratic reform of the sort that Thomas discusses are dim might well motivate an argument that would threaten the legitimacy of our form of government.

I don't know whether those two points can be strongly defended, but those are the two issues that I would address to investigate whether these prospective crises do effect the legitimacy of democratic governments, and I think we can do this without having already identified a different form of government that is able to handle those crises.