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Fact-Dependent Policy Disagreements and Political Legitimacy

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Abstract

Suppose we have a persistent disagreement about a particular set of policy options, not because of an underlying moral disagreement, or a mere conflict of interest, but rather because we disagree about a crucial non-normative factual assumption underlying the justification of the policy choices. The main question in the paper is what political legitimacy requires in such cases, or indeed whether there are defensible answers to that question. The problem of political legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements has received almost no attention in political philosophy, which has focused mostly on value disagreements and proposed theories of legitimate coercive legislation in valuedependent disagreements. The paper presents an argument showing that under certain plausible assumptions regarding legitimacy, there are serious difficulties in identifying legitimate choices in fact-dependent policy disagreements. This may be unsurprising to political philosophers preoccupied with value-based disagreements, perhaps because it has been assumed that legitimacy-related concerns are irrelevant (or do not apply) to fact-dependent policy disagreements. The paper argues that this response is premature. If we should care about legitimacy et al.l, then it is by no means clear why we should ignore issues of legitimacy in policy-disputes that depend on factual disagreements. The paper ends by defining a set of possibilities that merit further exploration in search of a theory of legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements.

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Notes

  1. See http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/26/section-7-global-warming-environment-and-energy/

  2. Eurobarometer (2010) Special Eurobarometer 354: Food-Related Risks, Brussels: European Commission, p.30.

  3. Eurobarometer (2010), Special Eurobarometer 341: Biotechnology, Brussels: European Commission, p. 18.

  4. See Nobel Laurates Letter Supporting Precision Agriculture (GMOs) at http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html (accessed August 11, 2016).

  5. Cf. (Bergmann 2009, 338).

  6. See Nagel’s remarks about when coercion requires a legitimizing justification (Nagel 1987, 224)

  7. See, for example, Kitcher who considers what he calls chimeric epistemology, which is an epistemology ‘including two methods of certifying that can deliver opposing verdicts about acceptance and rejection’ (Kitcher 2011, 157), see also (Kitcher 2008). Kitcher suggests that ‘if this chimeric epistemology were brought into the open and scrutinized, it would be seen as a very uncomfortable position’ (Kitcher 2011, 157).

  8. See (Bergmann 2009) for a useful discussion of the social epistemology of this sort of situation. See also (Lynch 2010; Lynch 2012).

  9. Thanks to anonymous reviewers for raising this issue.

  10. Thanks to a reviewer for raising this issue.

  11. See (Nagel 1987; Rawls 1993; Wall 2002; Estlund 2007; Peter 2009) for this way of conceiving of legitimacy. Note that Rawls assumes that constitutional essentials are the primary bearers of legitimacy, whereas individual policies earn their legitimacy only derivatively by being adopted by the proper institutions in the right sort of way. For the sake of conducting a systematic discussion surveying all the options, I don’t go along with this assumption. See further discussion of this issue in section 6.

  12. I talk interchangeably about the concept of political legitimacy and the property of political legitimacy, but nothing hinges on this.

  13. Cf. Wall on the insufficiency of correctness-based justification in fulfilling what he calls the ‘reconciling function’ of public justification, (Wall 2002, 387). See also (Estlund 2007, 99ff).

  14. Note that despite the Distinctness Requirement, the properties of being legitimate and being morally right or just can be extensionally equivalent in that they apply to the same set of policies in the actual world

  15. See (Estlund 2007, 99ff) for a discussion of a similar constraint in his defense of epistemic proceduralism. See also (Estlund 2007, 112ff) for Estlund’s remarks on how to spell out the notion of an epistemically good (accurate) procedure.

  16. In one respect, the term ‘Non-arbitrariness’ is misleading. What is required is not just that a procedure is marginally better than random. Suppose that we have two procedures to choose between, both of them non-arbitrary, but one considerably more reliable than the other. In such a case it would seem wrong not to choose the most reliable procedure, other things being equal. These complications will not affect the argument below. Thanks to Martin Marchmann for pressing this point.

  17. For discussions the uniqueness principle, see (White 2005; Feldman 2006; Christensen 2007).

  18. Note that the concept of the epistemically reasonable is very different from Rawls’ concept of the reasonable, cf. (Rawls 1993, 48–54). For Rawls, being reasonable is, in part, a moral property of individuals comprising among other things the readiness ‘to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so’ (Rawls 1993, 49). Rawls also distinguishes the reasonable from the rational, where the rational concerns the choices of means for ends, among other things. Epistemic reasonability, by contrast, only concerns the way we form beliefs about the world.

  19. This is similar to views on epistemic reasonability defended in (Talisse 2008). See the discussion in (Jønch-Clausen and Kappel 2015)

  20. Thomas Nagel assumes a somewhat similar view in (Nagel 2008)

  21. See (Rawls 1993, 224)

  22. See the discussion in (Jønch-Clausen and Kappel 2016).

  23. As is well known, not all voters need be competent. It suffices if the average probability that voters are correct is above average. So probability that they are right should be above 0.5, provided that non-competent voters (those with a probability of less than 0.5 of identifying the correct answer) vote randomly. These details do not affect the argument. Another challenge concerns the independence of voters. The Condorcet’s Jury Theorem requires that voters be independent, yet actual voters will typically not be independent in their views on factual matters , because they depend on the same sources and influence one another. For discussion of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, see for example (Estlund 1994; List 2001).

  24. Such a view is commonly attributed to Weber, see (Weber 2011).

  25. Apart from Rawls’ own concern about the burdens of judgment, see related discussions in (Larmore 1987) and (Barry 1995).

  26. Thanks to a reviewer suggesting this objection.

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this material were presented at Copenhagen University, Tilburg University, Oslo University and Aarhus University. I would like to thank all audiences for comments and discussion. Special thanks to Amelia Godber, Christian Rostbøll, David Estlund, Fabienne Peter, Jacob Elster, Kai Spiekermann, Karin Joench-Clausen, Martin Marchmann, Philip Pettit, and Wlodek Rabinowicz for suggestions. Support for this work from the Velux Foundation and the Carlsberg Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. A precursor of the paper is published in the ARENA conference proceedings, see (Kappel 2014).

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  1. Section of Philosophy, Institute for Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Vej 4, 2300 S, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Klemens Kappel

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Kappel, K. Fact-Dependent Policy Disagreements and Political Legitimacy. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 313–331 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9770-1

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