Is Democracy the ‘Least Worst’ Form of Government?

The question assumes that government is for some purpose or set of purposes, and that the only dimension of assessment of different forms of government is how well, or how badly they accomplish their objectives. However, if a political philosopher were to put forward the argument that democracy is the only acceptable form of government — for example, that our duty of obedience to the state can only hold if the state is ruled by a democratically elected government — then it would not matter if democracy was the worst of all possible arrangements for getting things done.

That is not the only principled argument for democracy. Another argument is that the fundamental assumption of human equality is inconsistent with any form of government other than a democratic one.

Are there limits on the duty of obedience to the state? — This is the classic question of political philosophy. Roughly, the reasons given fall into two main categories. Either we are morally obliged to obey the state, in which case the question is how far this obligation extends before it is overridden by other, conflicting moral obligations. Or it is in our own best long-term interest, all things considered, to obey the state, in which case the question is under what circumstances one might make the well founded judgment that disobedience was in one's best long-term interests. My own inclination is towards the first, rather than the second strategy.

On the view that our obligation to obey the state is a moral obligation, it would seem to be that there can be other moral obligations which override it. When a moral claim is overridden, that does not imply that the claim itself is invalid. However, the moral obligation to obey the state is itself conditional on certain requirements being fulfilled. Consider the case of the Israeli who gave away his country's atomic secrets. It is possible that he simply believed he was responding to an overriding moral imperative? An alternative explanation is that he believed that his government, in secretly stockpiling weapons without a democratic mandate had forfeited its moral claim on his obedience.