Leonard Li (St. Hugh's): 'Procedural Equality and Self-Regardingness'
Abstract:Democratic theorists have devoted much energy to arguing that procedural equality, or roughly speaking equal power in decision-making, has non-instrumental values. But how valuable is it non-instrumentally? I suggest that the answer depends on who can participate in decision-making and who are affected by it. For various reasons, often only some of the affected people can participate in decision-making. In this condition, I claim that the greater stakes those who cannot participate in decision-making have in the decision, the less non-instrumentally valuable it is that the decision is made in an equal manner by the decision-makers. More precisely, I propose and defend the self-regarding principle that the non-instrumental values of procedural equality are proportional to the decision’s degree of self-regardingness, which is understood as the share of decision-makers’ stakes in the total stakes for everyone affected. I argue that the self-regarding principle is true for two main kinds of non-instrumental values of procedural equality: its intrinsic value, and its constitutive value, or its value as a constitutive part of intrinsically valuable equal relationships.
