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114 | Tue Puitosopuy oF Eco-Potirics 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.
