Muguerza, Javier - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

108 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Tanner</strong> <strong>Lectures</strong> on Human Valuesthat the basic institutions of society and the fundamental politicaldecisions would be willingly approved by all those affected bythem if the latter were able to participate - freely and equally -in the processes of the communicative formation of the will,[but] democratization cannot mean an a priori preference for aspecific type of organization.” 69But whether we are dealing witha participatory or a representative democracy, or with a combinationof the two, the collective decisions that are made there willhave to recognize in some way or other the prevalence of someversion of the “rule of the majority,” something that, with goodreason, Professor Elías Díaz never tires of reminding us of in ourcountry. 70Still, as Díaz is the first to recognize, the rule of the majorityis far from guaranteeing the justice of the decisions it enables. Intruth, nothing excludes the possibility that the decision of a givenmajority may be unjust, and the fact that decisions that are notmajority ones may also be unjust - and, very likely, or certainly,even more unjust - does not provide us with any ethical solace,especially if what we hope to do is use Habermas’s imperative(or the Habermasian version of the Kantian principle of universalization)to ground human rights. When it comes to puttingit into practice, the sophisticated consensualism of Habermas, orof Apel, unfortunately does not seem much more useful than conventionalism,or, if one prefers, Bobbio’s consensualism.Take, for example, those human rights having to do with therequirements of liberty and equality of which I spoke at the beginningof this lecture. Habermas seemed to take them for grantedwhen he affirmed that in argumentative praxis we would have toconsider the possibility, even the necessity, that all those potentiallyinterested participate (precisely as free and equal and in noother way) in the cooperative search for consensus. In which case,69 Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion, 252.70E. Diaz, Da la maldad estatal y la soberanía popular (Madrid, 1984), 57ff.