Shoring up democracy

In this chapter, I offer an ecological approach to moving towards greater justice on the ground, fleshing out the 'comprehensive consequentialist' position articulated in my earlier 2017 book (Morality and Power: On Ethics, Economics and Public Policy). By 'ecological' I mean a step-wise approach to progressive, mutually reinforcing reductions in actually-existing injustice, brought about by recognising and utilising the interactions of diverse views, interest and resources in full comprehension of the 'circumstances of justice' that actually prevail and are likely (though not guaranteed) to continue to do so into the unforeseeable future. I outline a progressive program for a reconstructed social democracy that instantiates a structural bulwark against the undermining of representative democracy regimes by the extant forces of capitalist class inequality and political order. Only within a radically re-engineered social democracy can social justice emerge and only in just societies can democracy be sustained against the forces – internal and external – that would undermine it.