Justice, Disagreement and Democracy

Is democracy a requirement of justice or an instrument for realizing it? This article argues that the correct answer to this question depends on the background circumstances against which democracy is defended. In the presence of thin reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value democracy only instrumentally (if at all); in the presence of thick reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value it also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since the latter type of disagreement is pervasive in real-world politics, the conclusion is that theories of justice designed for our world should be centrally concerned with democracy.