The Ethics of Importance: Specialization & Complexity in Democratic Citizenship

• In Event: Democracy and Representation

Abstract

What does it take to be a good democratic citizen? Many scholars emphasize that it is difficult to be a good citizen because there is so much citizens should know in order to participate in politics responsibly. These critics implicitly assume that citizens should be what Walter Lippmann called “omnicompetent citizens,” fully informed about all the issues of the day, candidates’ stances on them, and the relevant social science. I propose to replace this overly demanding account of citizenship with a more tractable model of specialized citizenship, whereby citizens need to know only about a small share of the political agenda, specializing their interest in politics to a just a few issues. I defend this model from the objection that specialized citizens thereby unduly neglect other important political issues by advancing a theory of political importance.

What makes issues important, I argue, are at least six things: impact on human lives; timeliness; proximity to oneself; reach of impact; severity of impact; and difficulty addressing the issue. I explain these categories of importance and address two sources of apparent but erroneous importance: novelty and popularity. Using this account of what makes an issue important, I argue that the impact of important issues justifies focusing one’s political concern on even single issues due to the structure of human agency and the equal worth of human lives. Adapting Bernard Williams, the argument is that agency implies a set of core commitments to which we must adhere, and among these is often love for particular people. When political issues affect those people, we are justified in prioritizing those issues in our practical reasoning and in the distribution of our concern and political attention even if there are other issues affecting more people more seriously. To do otherwise would constitute betrayal of the core commitments that ground our agency, undermining our ability to act politically altogether. This argument opens the door to justifying specialized citizenship as an ethically admissible form of democratic citizenship.

Author

• Kevin J. Elliott, Yale University