CEPS Seminars - May 28th - Victor Tadros - Democracy by Agreement
Giorgio Airoldi
May, 28th, 2026, at 15:00 am (WET) – on-line event
We are pleased to announce our next CEPS Seminar, which will feature a talk by Victor Tadros (University of Warwick).
Title: Democracy by Agreement
Abstract: In this paper I defend a view of democracy based on consent and affirmation. Democracy is valuable when, and because, it secures the consent and affirmation of people for just government – both for the implementation of just substantive policies, and for the government who implement them. Those seeking to govern are required to seek, and preferably secure agreement. Democratic justice occurs when they achieve this through democratic elections, as long as the government is substantively just. Because consent and affirmation are morally important without making a difference to substantive justice, democracy can make a society more just. However, because consent and affirmation make substantively unjust policies worse, democratic injustice is worse than democratic justice. Nevertheless, I argue that democracy based on consent can sometimes justify suboptimal government.
Bio: Victor Tadros is Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Warwick. He was educated at Oxford University (BA Hons) and at King’s College, London (PhD). Prior to joining Warwick in 2006, he held lectureships at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh, and in the fall of 2015 he was Carter Visiting Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School. From 2010-13 he held an AHRC Research Grant, with Antony Duff, Lindsay Farmer, Sandra Marshall and Massimo Renzo, to work on criminalization. He held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2014-2018, and was elected as Fellow of the British Academy in 2018. Victor has written extensively on the philosophy of criminal law, just war theory, and on a range of issues in moral, legal and political philosophy. He is the author of Criminal Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2005), The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2011), Wrongs and Crimes (Oxford University Press, 2016), To Do, To Die, To Reason Why (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Consent and the Sexual Revolution (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
The seminar will be held online at the zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/95430963757?pwd=Xqy6SFSSl0c24ztaF02Bng8Szo7q8P.1
If you have any question regarding this event, please send an email to gair...@elach.uminho.pt
Regards,
Giorgio Airoldi, Ph.D.
Full Time Researcher
CEPS - Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society
Universidade do Minho
https://ceps.elach.uminho.pt/cpt_team/giorgio-airoldi/
ORCID-ID: 0000-0003-1535-674X
CIÊNCIAVITAE-ID: C91A-73E8-03E8
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