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consequences, it is essential to choose our goals well and to be able to
communicate with each other in the interest of realising them.
But how are we to choose good goals and cooperate if everyone wants
something different? If the entitlement of individual claims is no longer
self-evident, but instead requires justification, then someone has to
evaluate, and if needs be rank, the arising claims in the name of the
community, considering the finiteness of resources. It is self-evident
that in this case we will be much more sensitive to the method of
decision-making and the legitimacy of political bodies. In The Green
State,'°? Robyn Eckersley endorses the view that the overbureaucratised
liberal state is no longer suited to the new situation and increased
responsibility. The governmental decisions appealing to neutral (and
effectively uncontrollable) expertise in reality lean very much towards
the perspective of technocrat reasoning, consumerist mentality and an
egoist-individual conception of basic rights. According to Eckersley,
true pluralism presupposes a mechanism of decision-making in which
all perspectives get an equal say and the affected can participate directly
in setting common goals. “Voters in liberal democracies are in some
sense free to vote for whom and what they choose, but their votes will
not be effective unless they are cast for one of those alternatives defined
for them by the political elites”, warned Alasdair MacIntyre earlier as
well." When our children and grandchildren will ask us where we were
when our future was sold, we cannot shift the responsibility to either
the government or to all-powerful economic necessity. First person
politics requires that decisions be made in public debate, following the
careful considerations of the opportunities and consequences. Andrew
Dobson expresses the conviction of the overwhelming majority of the
Greens when he claims that, from the perspective of realising ecological
interests, participatory democracy is the most suitable decision-making
system. It ensures that those representing competing convictions will
engage in open debate, in which truth still has a greater chance of
prevailing than in the decisions of the specialised apparatus lacking all
oversight or in the market automatisms of supply and demand.’
13 Robyn Eckersley: The Green State. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2004.
104 Alasdair MacIntyre: Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good. In Kelvin Knight
ed: The MacIntyre Reader p.236. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana,
1998.
105 Andrew Dobson: Ecologism and Other Ideologies. In Dobson: Green Political Thought.
Routledge, London, 2007.