Book Proposal

August 25, 2004

Democratic Authority:

A Philosophical Framework

David Estlund

Brown University

Precis

Traditionally, democracy has puzzled philosophers, or even repelled them. The most momentous decisions are put into the hands of everyone, including common people without any special training or aptitude. Why think they would make good decisions? Justifications for democracy tend to emphasize procedural fairness, or rights to equal status of certain kinds. But this fails to answer the traditional challenge to democracy: since some people are more capable of ruling than others, why put power indiscriminately in the hands of all? In this book I argue that democratic theory can answer this challenge. Partly, democracy does have epistemic virtues of its own, at least compared with procedures that aim only at procedural fairness without regard to the quality of decisions. The difficulty persists, though, sincethere are probably political arrangements—empowering the wiser or more able—thatare epistemically better yet. Nevertheless, since political justifications must be addressed to all reasonable points of view, and there is bound to be reasonable disagreement about who the wiser people are, such other epistemically superior arrangements are disqualified. Being more capable of making the right decision is not the same as having a right to rule, a mistake I call the expert/boss fallacy. Still, the epistemic goal matters—that is, expertise is some support for a claim to authority—sinceit allows a more robust account of authority than the usual accounts resting on mere procedural fairness without regard to the quality of political decisions that result. It also posits a different model of political practice, one whose aims cannot be achieved without self-conscious promotion of justice rather than pressing one’s own interests as if the procedure would look after justice on its own. This is one of a few practical implications, but the aim is to construct a philosophical framework for democratic theory. Few institutional specifics are offered here, leaving for another occasion the task of integrating the complex pragmatic issues with the most adequate normative and philosophical account of democratic authority and legitimacy.

The argument brings the ancient Platonic idea that the wisest should rule into engagement with modern liberal principles of individualized justification. The result is a democratic political philosophy that differs not only from ancient aristocratic views, but also from the leading contemporary schools of democratic theory which largely eschew the epistemic dimension—the orientation of politics toward achieving solutions or answers that are good or correct by procedure-independent standards. The classical aim of organizing political rule so that good decisions are made is philosophically integrated into a liberal democratic theory of political authority.

The book integrates and expands ideas I have developed in previous papers, adding several chapters that introduce new ideas that round out the theory. I will aim for an average of 15-20 pages each for the 14 chapters, with a total around 250 pages. An asterisk (*) signifies that the chapter is based to some extent on an existing paper or draft, though no chapter is a reprint of a previous publication. At the end of this proposal I list the previous work that forms the basis for the starred chapters.

Chapter Plan

Preface

Part I. Introduction

  1. Overview: Democratic Authority

Part II. Authority and Justification

  1. * Authority And Normative Consent
  2. Justification, Truth, And Acceptability (Or “Who Made You Boss?”)
  3. * The Case Of A Soldier In Doubt

Part III. Procedure and Substance

  1. Minimalism, Fairness, And The Democracy/Morality Analogy
  2. * The Flight From Substance
  3. * The Possibility Of Epistemic Proceduralism
  4. * Why Not Epistocracy?

Part IV. How Democracy Knows

  1. What Democracy Wants To Know
  2. * How Democracy Knows: Rejecting The Democracy/Contractualism Analogy
  3. * How Democracy Knows: Rejecting The Jury Theorem
  4. How Democracy Knows: Public Intelligence

Part V. Democratic Practice

  1. * Deliberation Down And Dirty
  2. * Political Quality

Aims of the chapters:

Chapter 1: Overview: Democratic Authority

In this chapter I provide a self-contained summary of the main issues and lines of argument of the book. It is not just an outline of arguments to come, but an essay in its own right that is capable of standing alone. I conclude with some methodological points. One is to explain what I intend by a philosophical framework. Political theory is sometimes expected to result in specific institutional prescriptions. There are few of those in this book. I believe there is not enough patience in political theory for development of philosophical principles and frameworks within which the complicated and changing facts about political life might be brought to bear on institutional choices. A second point concerns the common charge that democratic theory of the kind in this book is blissfully ignorant about what can be expected of real political actors. This charge is as baseless, and I try to rebut it in a brief way.

Chapter 2: * Authority and Normative Consent

Along with this approach to justification, I develop a novel approach to political authority—the moral power of one agent to require actions of others by commanding them. The new approach, “normative consent,” is a form of hypothetical consent theory. It argues that authority can arise from the fact that the subject would have been morally wrong to refuse to accept new authority if the choice had been offered. In that case, (with certain other conditions in place) the subject is under authority just as if there had been consent. The idea is that refusal to consent would have been wrong and so null in any case.

Chapter 3: Justification, Truth, and Acceptability (Or “Who Made You Boss?”)

This chapter develops an account of an appropriate “general acceptability requirement,” one that blocks epistocracy but does not block an epistemic account of democracy. My treatment of this topic begins with Rawls’s “liberal principle of legitimacy,” but argues that a similar idea is present and appropriate in a wide range of theoretical perspectives, not just Rawlsian liberalism. Rawls’s concept of “reasonableness” is one particular version of a more general approach, which is more easily defended. I substitute the generic idea of “qualified” points of view for Rawls’s “reasonable” comprehensive conceptions. This makes it possible to present a strong case for a theory of justification that has that same structure, in which justification depends on general acceptability of the doctrines, principles, claims, and inferences used to defend exercises of political power.

Chapter 4: The Case of a Soldier in Doubt

Authority means little if the subject is never, in the end, required to do anything but rely on her own judgment about what to do. I argue that it is plausible to think there is authority of a particularly strong kind under the right conditions. The question would then be how to account for it. Many clues are provided by reflecting on the context of a soldier commanded to fight an unjust war, but only in ways that are normally permissible in war. I argue that just as a jailer is wrong to substitute his own judgments of innocence or guilt, the soldier would be wrong to substitute his own judgment of the justice of the war. But in both cases this depends on the nature of the process that led to the command, and I argue that the example of the trial that precedes a jail sentence strongly suggests an epistemic element. This points the way to an analogous epistemic background producing orders to go to war, but in the more general political arena. It does not follow that commands are only authoritative when they are correct, so it becomes important to be clear about the way in which epistemic considerations can feed into an account of authority.

Chapter 5: Minimalism, Fairness, and the Democracy/Morality Analogy

I show how many approaches to democracy try to avoid the epistemic dimension altogether, usually preferring some conception of procedural fairness. I argue that these approaches either turn out to generate little more normative weight than a coin-flip (also a fair procedure), or they introduce epistemic elements without acknowledging them. I look in detail at the two most influential approaches to normative democratic theory, what I call “normative social choice theory,” and “deep deliberative democracy.” This sets the stage for a more explicit role for epistemic considerations.

Chapter 6: The Flight from Substance

Democratic theory has recently converged, to a remarkable extent, on a certain flight from substance, in favor of intrinsically procedural values. My goal in this chapter is to explain the extent of this flight from substance and critically explore both its philosophical motivations, and the tenability of the theories that are generated. The influential approaches that I will call normative social choice theory and deep deliberative democracy are deeply antithetical on many matters, but they surprisingly converge on a fundamental philosophical commitment: there is no normative standard (such as justice or the common good) by which democratic choices can appropriately be judged other than their being genuinely democratic in their source. I argue that these views do not confine themselves to intrinsically procedural values after all, as they claim to do. Moreover, views that do remain intrinsically procedural, such as what I call fair proceduralism, are normatively too thin to account for important normative convictions about democracy. This supports my overall argument for including an epistemic dimension in accounting for the authority of democratic procedures.

Chapter 7: The Possibility of Epistemic Proceduralism

Epistemic approaches can be too directly epistemic. A theory that says legal commands are only authoritative when they are actually correct would lead to very weak political authority since so many laws and policies fall short of justice. But that is not the only way to incorporate the epistemic goal. I explicate the structure of an epistemic proceduralism according to which a law’s authority stems not from its correctness, but from its source in an epistemically valuable procedure. It can have that source even if it is mistaken, even if the procedure has erred in that particular case. It is then a further task to explain how such an epistemically valuable source could produce authority even when it errs. My approach is to advert at this point to normative consent theory (the theory of authority I described above), to argue that in the presence of the right kind of epistemically valuable political procedure (where the epistemic value is generally acceptable) it would be morally wrong to refuse to accept the process as a new authority merely on the grounds of its fallibility. If so, normative consent theory (described in Chapter 2) implies that even such a fallible procedure can retain authority, and so retains it even when it errs.

Chapter 8: Why Not Epistocracy?

My argument hypothesizes that the joint operation of an epistemic goal for politics, added to a general acceptability constraint on political justification, yields democratic conclusions of a certain kind. It is helpful, then, directly to confront what I take to be the most formidable challenge to that hypothesis, namely, the suggestion that those with a better education will be wiser rulers and that this claim is not open to reasonable or qualified disagreement. If this were correct, the principles on which I rely would have no way to object to political arrangements in which the more highly educated were entitled to rule, or at least, in Mill’s version, entitled to more votes than others. This would be one form of epistocracy. I argue that there is a fatal demographic objection to such an argument: the danger that some epistemically distorting characteristic (akin to social class, for example) might well travel with the characteristic of having achieved more education means that it would not be unreasonable for some citizens to deny the claim that those with more education are better able to rule wisely. They might be wrong in denying this, but I argue that it would be difficult to disqualify such an objection as beyond the range of competence and conscientious disagreement. For this reason such epistocratic arguments fail after all, and if they fail there is reason to think no epistocratic argument could succeed.

Chapter 9: What Democracy Wants to Know

Some topics for political decision are much more important than others. So we wouldn’t know much just by knowing democracy’s rate of accuracy. What if it got most things right, but none of the most important things? A theory of the weighted importance of different topics along with an account of the weighted rate of accuracy is intractably complex. For several reasons, it is useful and legitimate to narrow our focus to a few especially important matters, primary social bads: war, famine, economic collapse, epidemic, and genocide. This list is meant, a.) to be a selection from among the very most important matters that politics can affect, b.) to list matters that are highly important on any reasonable view of the ends of politics, and c.) to include issues different enough in kind so that a politics that performs well on these is likely to be robust over many other important matters too.

Chapter 10: How Democracy Knows: Rejecting the Democracy/Contractualism Analogy

Several theorists in the “deliberative democracy” literature employ a democracy/contractualism analogy to support the tendency of democratic procedures to produce just decisions. Understanding justice in terms of contractualist moral theories—those that explicate moral rightness in terms of what would be mutually acceptable in some hypothetical collective choice situation—they argue that deliberative democratic institutions could be enough like the hypothetical contractualist procedure that resulting decisions would tend to be just. I argue that the democracy/contractualism analogy is too weak to support these claims. Contractors in a contractualist theory of justice do not address justice but only some narrower question, such as what best promotes their own interests, or what is best supported by their own personal reasons. Without the veto characteristic of contractualism, democracy cannot approach just results unless many voters address justice itself. Any tendency of democracy to promote just decisions, then, depends on a decisive departure from the analogy with contractualist moral theory. With the Jury Theorem and the democracy/contractualism analogy put aside, the source of democracy’s epistemic value is so far still in question.

Chapter 11: How Democracy Knows: Rejecting the Jury Theorem

Epistemic arguments for democracy have been discussed before (though generally not with the distinctive structure I call epistemic proceduralism). I critically discuss two approaches to the question of what provides democracy’s epistemic engine, its alleged ability (under favorable conditions) to produce substantively good decisions. One widely discussed approach relies on a remarkable mathematical fact, Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. This theorem shows (oversimplifying here for brevity) that if voters are on average better than random on a yes/no or better/worse question, the group under majority rule will be highly likely to get correct answers. I argue that it is inappropriate to rely on this point to support the epistemic potential of democracy. There are several reasons for this, but one I will emphasize is the difficulty of knowing the average competence of the voters. It would not be at all surprising if they were worse than random, since that could easily be the effect of systematic biases or cognitive errors.

Chapter 12: How Democracy Knows: Public Intelligence

Aristotle argues that many intelligences contributing to a political decision can lead to better performance than an individual or a small group. But unlike Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, this idea depends on interpersonal communication, shared topics of deliberation, the capacity to rationally persuade and to be rationally persuaded, and diversity of points of view. In this chapter I sketch how an account of this kind might be integrated with democratic politics, and consider the philosophical commitments this would involve. I consider how this approach might support democracy’s tendency to avoid the primary social bads.

Chapter 13: Deliberation Down and Dirty

The theory developed so far shares much with contemporary “deliberative democracy” theories. But it differs in two important ways: One, which is discussed in Chapter 6, “The Flight from Substance,” is that the present account accepts that there are procedure-independent standards by which the performance of political should be judged and compared. Another, the subject of this chapter, is that the importance to real political practice of calm rational modes of deliberation is often exaggerated. Historically, many of democracy’s more impressive achievements, especially in avoiding or remedying certain primary social bads, have crucially depended on sharp and disruptive political practices such as disobedience, protest demonstrations, and so on. In this chapter I develop a theory of the moral point and limits of such political uses of power in lieu of reason, elaborating an interpretation of certain points in Marcuse, Habermas, and Rawls. Protest demonstrations and other non-discursive exercises of political power can be given a respectable place in an epistemically oriented democratic theory, and so without assimilating them to brute competitions for power or benefits.

Chapter 14: Political Quality

Contemporary democratic theory often prefers the ideal of a fair procedure to any epistemic aspiration. That approach based on fairness commonly leads to support for a principle of political egalitarianism, requiring that each individual have equal opportunity for political influence. But requiring equal political input would rule out even inequalities that increase input for everyone. Under favorable conditions a greater quantity of input might improve political decisions, a value relatively ignored by fairness-based approaches. It would be proper to object to inequality of influence that was based on invidious comparisons among citizens’ political capacities. But modest inequalities that significantly increase input for all without any implication of disrespect might legitimately improve the tendency of political decisions to be substantively just and proper. If so, political egalitarianism is mistaken. Finally, incentive structures such as what I call progressive vouchers may be practical devices for pursuing this liberal epistemic conception of political equality. On that proposal, people would pay a premium if they contribute more political input than others, where the premium goes to subsidize those with less, increasing the overall quantity of political input, keeping inequality within certain bounds, but leveraging a small amount of inequality in the service of more political input overall. The result of more quantity under these conditions is likely to be decisions of higher quality.