Constitutional Democracy and Public Judgements

This paper proposes a new conceptual framework of a liberal social order, which emphasizes the freedom of action in social interaction and the freedom of participation in social rule-making process. Our articulation of public decision-making process can be interpreted as a formal way of capturing the essence of constitutional democracy, which is an impure mixture of constructivist rationalism and evolutionary rationalism, since we are bringing what is spontaneously evolved through individual experiments into the stage of public design and social choice of a new institutional set of rules. It is also construed as an impure mixture of perfect procedural fairness and pure procedural fairness, since the public judgements to be formed through public deliberations should pay due attention to the intrinsic value of procedures in conferring agency freedom to individuals, as well as to the instrumental value of procedures in expanding well-being freedom of individuals.