Global democracy and feasibility

ABSTRACT

While methodological and metatheoretical questions pertaining to feasibility have been intensively discussed in the philosophical literature on justice in recent years, these discussions have not permeated the debate on global democracy. The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of importing some of the advancements made in this literature into the debate on global democracy, as well as to develop aspects that are relevant for explaining the role of feasibility in normative political theory. This is done by pursuing two arguments. First, to advance the work on the role of feasibility, we suggest as intuitively plausible two metatheoretical constraints on normative political theorizing – the ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’ – which elucidate a number of aspects relevant in determining proper feasibility constraints for an account in political theory. Secondly, to illustrate the usefulness of this feasibility framework, we sketch an account of global democracy consisting of normative principles which respond differently to these aspects and thus are tied to different feasibility constraints as well as exemplify how it may be applied in practice.