Gerry Mackie
"Democracy Defended"

Tuesday, February 20, Time: 4:30
Location: Carnegie Mellon University,
College Conference Room,
Baker Hall 154R

Sponsored by the The Humanities Center, and the Carnegie Mellon University Department of Philosophy

Abstract:

Is there a public good? A prevalent view in political science is that democracy is unavoidably chaotic, arbitrary, meaningless, and impossible. Such skepticism began with Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and continued most notably with Arrow and Riker in the twentieth century. In this presentation, Gerry Mackie confronts and subdues these long-standing doubts about democratic governance. Problems of cycling, agenda control, strategic voting, and dimensional manipulation are not sufficiently harmful, frequent, or irremediable to be of normative concern. Mackie also examines every serious empirical illustration of cycling and instability, including Rikers famous argument that the US Civil War was due to arbitrary dimensional manipulation. Almost every empirical claim is erroneous, and none is normatively troubling, Mackie says.

Profile:

Gerry Mackie is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.   His Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago, and he has held academic posts at the University of Notre Dame, Australian National University, and the University of Oxford