Perfectionism and Democracy

Abstract

I recently had occasion to take part in a debate on the enforcement of morals — I was cast as Devlin to my interlocutor’s Hart — in which I recapitulated some of the (non-Devlinesque) arguments for a perfectionist politics that I advance in my book Beyond Neutrality.¹ The gist of my remarks was, first, that the state can do a lot of good by adopting policies aimed at promoting excellence, virtue, and desirable forms of activities and relationships and, second, that there is no good reason (though there are plenty of bad ones) for voters, legislators, or other political agents not to enlist the state’s apparatus to promote the good as they see it. In his rejoinder, my interlocutor remarked that while these arguments may be fine in theory, I would be less inclined to make them if I were personally acquainted with the legislators in his (Pennsylvania) state house. His response was a bit glib — it got the intended laugh — but there’s obviously something to it. My aim in this essay is to get clear about why his remark struck so resonant a chord, and in so doing to clarify the relation between perfectionism and democracy.