“Value Consensus” in Democracy: The Issue in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates

The topic set for this panel is “value consensus” in democracy. I put the expression in inverted commas, not because I am here concerned with the validity of the fact-value distinction but because, even granting the distinction, I find it difficult to see why, in this context, “value” should be added to “consensus.” Democracy is the name we give to a certain form of political community, and every community, by definition, is constituted by the fact that its members hold certain things in common. A political community, I take it, is always constituted by the fact that its members hold certain political things in common. And a democratic political community would, by equal reason, be constituted by the fact that the political things its members hold in common are democratic. The problem of discovering what constitutes a democratic consensus, as it seems to me, is the problem of what things fellow-citizens in a democracy must hold in common, what they may hold in common, and what they may not hold in common, if they are to constitute a democratic political community. I think it would be confusing, at the outset, to speak of “values,” because, even assuming that we know what values are, we cannot assume that values are the principal things to be shared, or that non-values are not equally or more important than values.