Democratic Lawmaking and Political Representation

In this paper Rehfeld claims that there is no particular ethics of political representation, that is, no particular ethics of what representatives should do on account of their being representatives. He argues that the purported ethical obligation of representatives, captured in the “trustee/delegate” distinction, obscures 3 subsidiary distinctions of aims, sources of judgment, and motivation critical to answering the question, “how should representatives vote on legislation?” When we put the problem in these terms, the central substantive question of what representatives should do reduces to the familiar conflict between democratic authority and substantive justice; that is, the conflict between doing what in some sense ought to be done in cases where those to whom it is done do not approve. But in the end, this turns into a problem for the exercise of power in general, whether using political representation or not. Treating the “trustee/delegate problem” as unique or even particular to political representation is thus a serious conceptual error.