[SydPhil] Lachlan Umbers: Against Lottocracy

[Kristie Miller]

Dear all, 


This week’s Current Project’s seminar, 3.00-4.30 in the Muniment room, will be Lachlan Umbers presenting:

Title: Against Lottocracy

Abstract: Popular dissatisfaction with contemporary democratic institutions has run high in recent years. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that political philosophers have begun to turn their attention to possible alternatives modes of political decision-making. The most interesting and plausible of these proposals all involve reliance on lotteries in some way or other – as a means of determining which citizens are to be enfranchised, as a means of selecting representatives, or as a means of making social choices. These systems promise improvements in the quality of decisions made, of the outcomes realised, or in the intrinsic fairness of the political process, while maintaining the egalitarian appeal of conventional democratic institutions. My aim in this paper is to defend the relative merits of universal suffrage, majority rule and electoral representation against these proposals. I argue that each of these ‘lottocratic’ systems would on the one hand be likely to yield undesirable consequences and, on the other, are inconsistent with individuals’ rights as equal, autonomous agents and are thereby objectionable on non-instrumental grounds also. These considerations give us reasons, I suggest, to regard conventional modes of democratic social organisation as the best justified among the set of inevitably imperfect alternatives.

See you all there…


Associate Professor Kristie Miller
Senior ARC Research Fellow
Joint Director, the Centre for Time
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and
The Centre for Time
The University of Sydney
Sydney Australia
Room 407, A 14

kmiller at usyd.edu.au
kristie_miller at yahoo.com
Ph: +612 9036 9663
http://www.kristiemiller.net/KristieMiller2/Home_Page.html















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