Abstract

The idea of equal respect for persons as a procedural ground for democracy runs into a dilemma: if understood in purely formal terms, it fails to account for the distinctive features of democratic political rights and the role they grant on citizens qua decision-makers; if the principle is filled with a more substantive content, pointing to some quality that is actually respected in the citizens as apt decision-makers, it becomes parasitic upon an instrumentalist justification of democracy, and looses its appeal as a purely procedural principle of legitimacy. As a solution to this dilemma, I propose the view that equal respect is a procedural principle of democracy because it requires to treat and publicly represent citizens as equally capable of making apt political choices, while not assuming that they actually are.