Abstract
Epistocracy—a political system in which formal political power is distributed on the basis of expertise—may produce better outcomes than democracy. Yet, David Estlund contends that epistocracy is incompatible with public reason liberalism. This essay argues that, contrary to Estlund, epistocracy can be justified within public reason, even if, as Estlund argues, reasonable people cannot all agree on just what constitutes political expertise or who the experts are.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting here that this is why Gaus prefers democracy. He believes some principles can be publicly justified, and democracy is a fair and reliable method for adjudicating among our competing interpretations of publicly justified principles.
- 2.
However, Gaus (2008) denies that democracies are incompetent. This paper critiques Caplan’s (2007) argument that democracies make systematic mistakes about economics. Caplan (2008) responds that Gaus focuses on high-level controversies among experts and ignores that laypeople make systematic mistakes about the uncontroversial, “low-hanging fruit” of economics.
- 3.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger have famously shown that incompetent people are unable to identify who the most competent people are. Instead, the incompetent view themselves as competent, and when asked to select more competent people, they tend to select those who are just slightly more competent than themselves. See Ehrlinger et al. 2008; Dunning et al. 2003; Kruger and Dunning 1999, 2002.
- 4.
Caplan (2007) claims that voters tend to vote for candidates whom they believe will promote the national common good and increase national prosperity. However, voters are irrational in how they evaluate candidates by this standard. Voters have the right standards for selecting candidates, but at terrible at applying these standards. See also the previous note.
- 5.
See Dahl (1994, 14–16). Using a variation on the Venetian system, here is one way a democracy might reliably and fairly select a legal doctrine of competence. The process begins by randomly selecting 500 citizens from all adult citizens. A second lottery further cuts this 500 down to 100. These 100 randomly-chosen citizens would then produce a list of 100 other citizens from the original 500, whom they wish to serve as potential electors. To make it on the list of potential electors, each elector must receive 66 approving votes from the 100 previously selected citizens. The list of 50 potential electors would then be cut by lottery down to 25 electors. The 25 electors would then put produce a list of 100 citizens from the original 500, whom them wish to serve on a council that will be charged with determining a legal doctrine of political competence. Each of these 50 citizens would need to receive, say, 18 out of 25 votes. Finally, the 50 selected potential council members would be randomly cut to 21 actual council members. These 21 council members would then deliberate and select a formal, legal conception of competence. This conception would then becomes the legal definition of competence (for some period of time), and would be used to create an epistocracy of the competent. The Venetian system was convoluted by design. Sortition reduced bribery, corrupt campaigning, demagoguery, and special-interest rent-seeking. Voting (in this case) introduced an epistemic element.
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Brennan, J. (2014). Epistocracy Within Public Reason. In: Cudd, A., Scholz, S. (eds) Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy in the 21st Century. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02312-0_14
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