| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 哲學所 === 96 === In this master thesis, there are five chapters. Chapter one starts from an empirical observation that there are various democratic theories proposed by different political philosophers, which poses three problems: First, why are there so many different democratic theories? Second, is it possible that those theories can be ranked as better or worse? Third, if it is, what reasons are there for us to believe that one theory is better than another? To answer the first question, I argue that there are two factors that together explain the diversity of democratic theories. The first factor has something to do with the limit of our conceptual schemes, and the second factor is that democracy is an interpretive concept. To answer the second and third questions, I follow Dworkin’s method of interpretation, which I think is a good way to make democratic theories comparable, and I will argue that we can get a better interpretive theory by the method of interpretation.
In Chapter 2, I show how the method of interpretation can be applied to the concept of democracy. I shall point out that there are some consensuses in democratic societies that can be taken as the starting point of my interpretative wok. First and foremost, all theorists agree that democracy is “rule by people”. Second, as Dworkin has argued in his book, Is Democracy Possible Here?, people in democratic societies recognize as their common grounds the fact of value pluralism and the principle of human dignity. Based on these consensuses, I will critically discuss two conceptions of democracy, partnership view and majoritarian view, to see how well each interprets concept of democracy. And I contend in the chapter two that these two conceptions fail to make democracy the best it can be.
In Chapter three, I put forward a better interpretive democratic theory, which is commonly called “Deliberative Democracy”. I show that Deliberative Democracy, compared with Partnership Democracy which Dworkin advocated, is a better interpretive democratic theory. In Chapter 4 my aim is to build a complete architecture of Deliberative Democracy, which includes all necessary elements of a deliberatively democratic society. Those elements could be constructed from our answers to three questions: What conditions ought a deliberatively democratic society to possess? How ought a society to practice deliberative democracy? Finally, what ends could a deliberatively democratic society accomplish? Namely, why is deliberative democracy valuable?
In the final chapter I would discuss some possible doubts to deliberative democracy. There are two parts in this chapter: the first part is to survey those difficulties and restrictions of deliberative democracy with the view of making a complete theory of deliberative democracy possible. Second, I would respond to the strongest criticism of deliberative democracy made by social choice theorists by contending that in addition to voting, public deliberation does increase political legitimacy.
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