CAN AN ACCURATE DERIVATION OF THE GENERAL WILL BE ACHIEVED?

David A. Keith

In this paper I am going to argue that an accurate derivation of the General Will cannot be achieved. [1] This is an important problem because, according to Rousseau, a true democracy cannot exist without the derivation of some idea of what the General Will's contents are. According to Rousseau, the General Will is based upon goals or desires that are common to all people (p. 96). Rousseau also implies that there can be not factionizing of the population; the whole population, all individuals, is to be considered in the derivation of the General Will; no one person or group of persons can be excluded (p. 96). This General Will, Rousseau states, is not the "will of all", which would be a simple sum of those wills, but based upon a commonality within the desires and goals of all of the people (pg. 96). Rousseau then sets up the conditions under which a truly democratic State could exist based upon his description of an understanding of the General Will.

"First, a very small State, where the people can readily be got together and where each citizen can with ease know all the rest; secondly, great simplicity of manners, to prevent business from multiplying and raising thorny problems; next, a large measure of equality in rank and fortune, without which equality of rights and authority cannot long subsist; lastly, little or no luxury - for luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary:..." (pg 97).

Rousseau finishes by stating that the only truly democratic government would be a government of gods due to the notion that Rousseau finds the conditions that he describes wholly unachievable by men.

In my opinion, Rousseau need not have stated such conditions as stipulations for the possible existence of a truly democratic state if these conditions are based upon Rousseau's description of an understanding of the General Will. These conditions or stipulations would be necessary if there was not another problem which supersedes them all as a condition of a truly democratic state given the consideration of the importance stressed on the understanding of the General Will.

There is a condition, alluded to by Rousseau, which must be met in order for these other considerations to come into play. The condition that I speak of is the condition in which someone would be able to accurately identify the content of the General Will. It is my position that someone would need to have access to all of the individual wills of members of society and that if all of those members' wills were not accessible, then the derivation of a General Will would be incomplete, and, therefore, inaccurate. This does not mean, as indicated by Rousseau, the "will of all" in that all particular wills are summed up (pg. 96); but if no particular wills of the members of a class of people which are members of a larger population unit can be known, can it be said that anything can be known about the General Will of that particular class of population members? I do not believe that we can make that assumption or claim.

If we know little or nothing about the wills of the members of any particular group of population members, can we know anything about the General Will of the complete population? I say "No!" and will deal with this issue in some detail before presenting the actual classes of people in question. The example (class of people) will be examined in an effort to determine what is known of their wills or of their General Will, or, for that matter, the General Will of the complete population of which they are members.

We can start by considering an extreme position and the effects that position has on our theory of a General Will. If we do not know the will of any human being, none of them, can we say that we know something of the General Will of these beings as a whole? We can probably guess that they need food, shelter from the elements, water, heating or cooling and other physiological necessities, as well as any other visually detectable need that the organisms would require, but without directly accessing the particular wills, desires, wants and goals of the individuals, going any further would seem to lessen our guarantees of accuracy in the determination of their individual, particular wills. Then we would also need to make comparisons comparing our findings concerning one member's will with those of other members of their particular group to gain a general understanding of those wills. How can we compare things that we do not know for certain in search of something else that we want to be certain? We cannot. How can we guess anything further? We would have very little in which to base our suppositions; once again, it is my position that we cannot.

It would appear to be the case that in the context of Rousseau's argument that the opinions of the individuals do matter to our analysis of the General Will (p. 96). We cannot exclude all members of the classes we are having difficulty with. We cannot exclude half of them, or even a single one of them. It seems to be an important notion that each point of view can have a bearing on the general point of view. Excluding them does not seem to be an option. Without the analysis of the wills of the particular members of a society, we can have no idea of what the General Will can consist of as it applies to the population at large.

It could be sufficient to gain an understanding concerning the wills of some of these individuals and apply those toward an understanding of their General Will as a group and, therefore, make adjustments to the General Will of the complete population. This, of course, cannot happen if the number of sample cases concerning access to these individual's particular wills is zero. The other difficulty concerning the derivation of a General Will in such a manner would be to have sample sizes that were too small for the accurate depiction of attributes that we would want to state as being common to all of the population, namely, their wills, or at least some portion of those wills. Too little data, and we would not be able to derive anything with any degree of accuracy.

How are we to assess the interests that are common to all, if there is a section or numerous sections of the population which are not able to voice their opinions? Once again, we cannot for the reasons already stated. Rousseau also states something to this effect in that, "...each citizen should express only his own opinion." (p. 96).

If someone else spoke for them, that would be a representational form of democracy rather than a true democracy and have little if anything to do with the General Will. The true opinion of the members in question, who cannot directly voice their opinions as far as their wills are concerned, is a mystery; instead, we are given someone else's interpretation or representation of what those wills actually are or what these representatives think those wills are. We cannot exclude them and we cannot represent them. It would appear that it is crucial that every citizen be able to voice their own opinion so that the General Will can be discovered, or derived, accurately. Without these individually based opinions, the General Will cannot be derived at all.

Who are the members of these groups that I say have no opinion voiced that is truly theirs and which cannot of their own power contribute to the derivation of the ideal democratic General Will? There are actually quite a few to consider, but I will attempt to focus upon a single class of people to prove my point.

As humans, we are born into this world wholly dependent on the aid of our parents. This assistance, or dependence, is all-encompassing. Infants cannot do anything for their own good for a measured period of their lives. Someone else has to see to their needs. As this dependence applies to the questions at hand, do we know what the wills of infants are? I say, "No." We have no direct access to the minds of these children. How can we know their individual wills? We can know that they require extensive hygiene care and feeding, as well as a lot of other things, but we have no idea what the infant really wants, desires and what its goals are.

For that matter, does the infant, itself, know what its likes, dislikes, desires and wants and goals will be, or what these things currently are in the present? How can it know these things? The infant has not even been exposed to the real world, outside of the womb, long enough to understand what it does like or dislike, which are, incidentally, very important to the individual's determination of what its goals and wants within the context of the present as well as the future will be. Perhaps this is a criterion by which these members of society are excluded from being considered in our derivation of the General Will. They have no wills of their own, to speak of, yet. They may require time and experience with the world in which they live in order to develop one. We may need not consider their points of view, or wills, until they actually develop them.

Many parents can tell stories of their child's infancy and days, early in the child's life, where the child would cry and cry; no matter what the parents did, the child would continue to cry until it cried itself out. Is this a case of the parents knowing the will of the individual child? I do not think so. Therefore, is it a case of the parents not having access to the will of the child? I would think that this was a more likely question to answer, but there is another. Is this a case in which the child itself does not know what it wants or needs, so there is little difficulty in understanding the parents dilemma concerning the understanding and placation of the child's will? Either possibility can be true. The prior could be a case for the dismissal of the possibility for an accurately derived General Will based upon an inability to be truly understanding of what that General Will can or should consist of, while the latter could be a possible case for the dismissal of the infant group based upon the nonexistence of a particular, individual, will per child and, therefore, the nonexistence of the General Will concerning the group containing as members infants. This could then be seen as reason to believe that the nonexistence of that group's General Will, so to speak, makes that group inapplicable to the equation required for the derivation of the General Will for the complete populace.

What happens when these infants become young children and have entered an educational or socialization system, and they have begun to discover their wants and goals for themselves? At this point do not their desires and wants which are their own, their own wills and no longer the wills of their parents, need to be taken into account in the derivation of the General Will? I believe that the answer to that question is, Yes.

At some point in time, these children will have to develop and discover their identifiable wills. If the adults have particular identifiable wills and it is determined that infants do not, we would have to develop them somewhere along the way. These developing wills should be considered when one is trying to discover the General Will which is common to all. After all, these members of society would have individual wills which can be considered to be no less important than our own, or our own have also been lessened in the process of making such an argument.

Where in the lifespan would this development be completed enough to say that we can now access the accurate content of the General Will for this group, and, therefore, the applicability of this group to the derivation of the populace General Will. If the will develops, there could possibly exist an earliest point at which we can access these developed wills. Could it be a matter of fact that humans develop at various rates in their physiology and psychological processes and that this also effects the development of their particular wills to a point where we cannot set a lower limit? Is this why the voting age is eighteen? Is this, age eighteen, the identified upper limit to the development of the particular wills? Or is this the identifiable lower limit at which the individual wills develop into something that we can consider to be part of the General Will? Voting rights and privileges may in fact be suggesting the answer to the last question. That interpretation, if proved, could be dangerous in that there could be a problem in which these children do not develop wills which have anything in common with the derived General Will of the populace. This also seems to leave open the suggestion that the General Will of others is used as a standard at which we admit the use of the General Will of others to our equation. This latter problem seems to not be about any General Will before or after the equation is completed due to the fact that a portion of the population's common General Will is used to determine the rest. Rousseau, as well as myself, cannot conscionably consider this kind of equation valid at all.

What about the developing wills? Should consideration of the process of particular will generation and development be attempted in the hopes of adding more considerations to the General Will derivation and, therefore, add more accuracy to our depiction of what the General Will consists of in its entirety? Science is based upon the understanding of development processes, using this information, ultimately, to make predictions with a high degree of accuracy. I tend to believe that anything less would not be truly accurate in its assessment or predictive power.

I do not know for certain that we could or should attempt to use the fact of a particular generation of a will as a consideration. I believe that the questions that pertain to this issue are all very hard questions to answer if they are questions that can be answered at all with any amount of clarity and understanding.

It seems to me that we have a great deal of reason to believe that the exclusion of the infant class from the derivation of the General Will drastically effects the results of such computational effort. The consideration of the development process and where it begins to become part of the commonalities of all people seems to do nothing but confuse the accuracy of the derivation concerned. This single class of individuals seems to make the accurate derivation of the General Will of a populace totally impossible.

Similar problems occur with some elderly persons who are deemed to require someone with the 'Power of Attorney' over them to make important life decisions. Except for the fact that these people know, or have known for some time, their own wills in some cases, but are not allowed to express or are not capable of freely expressing that will, whatever that will may be, like the aforementioned children, these people are also represented by someone and the accuracy of the depictions of these peoples' wills falls into question.

Is the will that is presented for analysis the actual will of the elderly person or is it a facsimile? We could possibly analyze past decisions made by these persons in an attempt to assess the accuracy of the represented point of view, but there is no guarantee that those decisions would remain constant through a person's lifetime. As we get older, other considerations come into play. Each disease or injury that we pick up along the way has the potential to change the reasoning processes, as well as their end-resultant decisions. Every day has the potential for presenting an experience which can likewise alter our wills in various ways. I do not believe that a reliance on the past decisions of these individuals would bear fruit in our search for what these persons' actual wills are today. Things have occurred between then and now that could have changed the particular wills of these people. The most obvious is the change from being able to voice their concerns, their wills, versus the present condition in which they cannot do so. This condition change has to affect the will because it is directly connected with the person's expression of that will.

To expect the nonexistence of change in an organism we would have to know the nonexistence of physical and physiological changes in the organism as well as the absence of change in its environment. The change from free expression of the particular will to the nonexistence of such freedom must be granted. We already know that aging is a physiological change. We also know that nature is far from being static; it is in a constant state of change at one rate or another. There appears to be a great deal of reason to believe that our decision processes will be effected by other considerations which have not manifested themselves in our own lives as of this date. Change happens in the external world, change happens in the internal world.

I, personally, do not have the slightest clue as to the will of any elderly person who is unable to communicate to me their individual wants and desires, the goals they have at this particular stage in their life. The same would be true of any person who had been injured to the point of requiring similar representation by someone with the 'Power of Attorney' to make those peoples' decisions for them.

Other population groups which may also figure into the difficulty that we are having would include the mentally challenged, the physically challenged, as well as the socially challenged. The first and second groups could have a great amount of difficulty in trying to get people to understand their positions due to the lack of common ground for comparisons concerning questions like - What is deemed as convenient or inconvenient? What is deemed as appropriate and inappropriate? These things would confuse the issue of perception of the likes and dislikes and, therefore, the wills of the peoples in question in that these considerations effect the accuracy of our understanding of their wills, particular as well as generalized. The last group may have difficulty in expressing itself at all in that they may be anti-social, but may not be disabled enough to require the assistance of others as representatives. If they detest contact with other humans, can they accurately describe their goals or wills to another human? All around these groups present more problems than they do solutions for the derivation of the General Will. Exclusion tactics with these groups would effectively remove a sizable proportion of the population's wills and, therefore, severely limit the accuracy of the derivation of the General Will.

In short, I believe that if any individual persons, or groups of individual persons, are not allowed to voice or are incapable of voicing their opinions, there is a violation of the procedure for the accurate derivation of the General Will. The General Will would then become an unknown as it applies to the commonalities of all of the population members due to the fact that there would be particular wills which had not been assessed and/or considered. These particular wills would need to be assessed in order to derive a General Will common to all children, elderly persons, handicapped, and so on, which then can be added to the equation consisting of the General Wills of all the other groups. (All of which are necessarily combined in the search for commonalities in all of the peoples' particular wills and for the accurate derivation of the General Will of the society as a whole.) Anything less would result in the inaccurate derivation of the General Will of the people. 

With respect to 'true democracy' Rousseau adds the following words:

"Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men." (p. 97)

This last quotation would seem to state that the possibility of a 'true democracy' as nonexistent. At best, men could try to achieve a limited type of democracy, but the totality of the ideal democratic principle does not seem to be achievable. The limits that presently existent democratic governments must adhere to has been partially set forth in this paper with respect to the possibility of accurately deriving the General Will of those governments' peoples. Other limitations may also be present as well, but this is work for other philosophers.

References

Rosen, M. and Wollf, J. (eds). 1999. Political Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.