Democracy revisited

As the title implies, this post is related to the earlier one about what we mean by democracy.

But first, a brief interlude to my college trip out West last Spring. Two of the schools I visited, Harvey Mudd and CalTech, prided themselves on a strong honor code in the student body, which allowed teachers even to give all tests as take-home, at CalTech, with no fear of the students cheating. What intrigued me about both, though, was their elegant one-line formulations that summed up the entire honor code. At Harvey Mudd, it was "Don't be a jerk", and at CalTech the slightly more rigorous, "No member of the CalTech community may take unfair advantage of any other". I like the latter especially, because, in one simple sentence, it sums up the ideals behind every aspect of the Tech community, behind what is considered "right" or "wrong" in basically any context. That's not to say it's unambiguous -- "unfair" leaves a lot of room for argument. But it gives a universal starting point and guideline.

Linking back to the first topic, it strikes me that this is exactly what most or all governments, and our conception of democracy, lack. We speak of democratic ideals, of liberty, of freedom, and so on, but we don't even have an abstract definition of any of these terms. Members of the legislature therefore are all working from differing conceptions of the principles guiding them, with no way to debate or even accurately convey these differences. I think, ideally, that the legislature should have a mandate to legislate in a way to promote some explicitly worded fundamental principle. Like CalTech's, it should be open to interpretation. But it would give a common starting point, and a way to get at the real core of disagreements of ideology, rather than quarreling over various practical consequences of these beliefs. It's probably unrealistic, but I'm not about realism here.