Debate: Why Exchange Reasons? Rejecting the Epistemic Inference
Michael Hannon
Philosophy, University of Nottingham, UK
Democracy is not just about the aggregation of individual preferences. To be legitimate, political decisions must emerge from processes of public reasoning among free and equal citizens.1 According to this deliberative conception of democracy, citizens should give reasons for their positions, listen to other perspectives, and remain open to changing their views when better arguments are presented.
What is the point of such deliberation? Why care about public reasoning rather than preference aggregation? One influential answer begins with an observation about the goal of deliberation. When citizens exchange reasons with one another, they typically cite evidence and assess the accuracy of competing claims.2 They are, in other words, trying to figure something out. This activity presupposes that some answers to political questions are better or more accurate than others. From the claim that deliberators must aim at truth, some theorists draw a normative conclusion about deliberation’s justification. I call this the epistemic inference:
The Epistemic Inference: Since aiming at truth is constitutive of deliberation, an adequate justification of deliberation must include an epistemic component.
This is a widely cited consideration in favor of epistemic conceptions of democracy (as I’ll show in Section II), and it is the target of this article.
My aim is not to show that epistemic justifications of democracy fail. Rather, I want to show that one common argument for requiring such a justification does not succeed. The key distinction I rely on is between the aim of an activity and its purpose. I grant that participants in democratic deliberation must aim at discovering the truth, and that the purpose their deliberation serves could not be realized unless they did. However, that purpose need not itself be epistemic; it could instead lie in purely procedural values such as equality, freedom, and mutual respect. Whether there are other independent grounds for an epistemic component in the justification of democracy is a question I leave open.
My argument proceeds as follows. First, I describe the core commitments of deliberative democracy (Section I). I then outline the epistemic inference and explain its role in the normative justification of democracy (Section II). Next, I distinguish the aim of a practice from its purpose and apply this distinction to democratic deliberation (Section III). Finally, I address three objections to my proposal (Section IV) and offer concluding remarks (Section V).
I. DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
Deliberative democracy requires political decisions to be justified to those who must live under them. Jürgen Habermas envisions politics as governed by “the unforced force of the better argument,” with participants influenced by the rational cogency of reasons — not by threats, manipulation, or bargaining power.3 Joshua Cohen likewise takes democracy to center on “free and reasoned agreement” among equal citizens.4 The core idea is that legitimate political authority requires public justification. Instead of imposing our will on others, we must address them as rational agents who can evaluate reasons for themselves.
Epistemic and procedural considerations may both contribute to the justification of deliberative democracy. Epistemic democrats need not deny the importance of equality, respect, or other procedural values. As Robert Goodin and Kai Spiekermann put it, having “considerable epistemic virtues is not the only, and maybe not even the principal, thing to be said in favour of democratic procedures. Still, that is definitely a major good-making feature of democracy.”5 The claim at issue is not that deliberation has an exclusively epistemic justification. It is that the justification of deliberation must include an epistemic component, and that the truth-directed character of deliberation is what demonstrates this. My target is the last of these: the claim that deliberation’s truth-directed character implies that an epistemic component is necessary. Blocking this inference removes a prominent argument for making epistemic performance a necessary condition of democratic justification.
II. THE EPISTEMIC INFERENCE
On influential epistemic accounts, democratic procedures are justified, at least in part, by their tendency to produce correct political decisions.6 The central idea is that democracy’s capacity to track procedure-independent truths about justice, the common good, or correct policy contributes to its justification.
The epistemic defense of deliberative democracy has intuitive appeal. When we argue about politics, we do seem to presuppose that some answers are better than others. We cite evidence, point to consequences, and assess the accuracy of competing claims, all of which suggests an orientation toward getting things right rather than merely registering preferences. Indeed, deliberation seems to have intrinsically epistemic elements. It is hard to make sense of presenting and assessing arguments, being faithful to evidence, and exchanging information unless these activities are in some way oriented toward truth.
José Luis Martí develops this observation into an argument. He contends that “as a discursive process based on reason, deliberation assumes… both the existence of rightness (or impartiality, or some other equivalent) in political decisions and the possibility of knowing which is the right (or impartial) decision.”7 To argue in favor of a decision, on this view, is to try to show that it’s the right decision, or at least better than the alternatives. Since providing and confronting reasons “conceptually means appealing to some intersubjective standard of rightness,” deliberation presupposes both an ontological thesis (that standards of political rightness exist) and an epistemological thesis (that these standards are knowable).8
As we have seen, deliberation presupposes that participants aim at discovering the truth. On this basis, epistemic democrats often conclude that the legitimacy deliberation confers cannot be grounded in procedural values alone.9 David Estlund offers a forceful statement of this challenge.10 The theory of deliberative democracy, he argues, wants to explain why deliberation is required in addition to fair procedures of voting, without ever appealing to procedure-independent standards for better or worse decisions. Its task therefore becomes “the odd one of explaining the central importance of substantive public discussion of the procedure-independent merits of possible political decisions, without ever granting that there actually are any procedure-independent standards.”11 This, Estlund suggests, is an untenable position, “an embarrassment for the dominant strand of deliberative democratic political philosophy.”12
Fabienne Peter raises a similar worry. She maintains that “non-epistemic accounts of democracy have no real argument for why the exchange of reasons matters.”13 If democracy is about procedural fairness, why care whether the reasons citizens offer are any good, or whether there is any discussion at all? That we care about such things seems to presuppose that we are trying to get something right. Hélène Landemore presses the same point: “there would be no point in reasoning about politics” if there were not “better and worse answers” to political questions.14 Robert Talisse likewise argues that engaging in moral disagreement and argument commits us to treating our judgments as answerable to truth and responsive to reasons.15
One might doubt that these theorists actually treat deliberation’s epistemic aim as grounds for rejecting a purely procedural justification. Perhaps the “epistemic inference” does no justificatory work and merely describes a feature of deliberation.16 However, the textual record suggests otherwise. Martí, for instance, moves directly from the premise that deliberation conceptually presupposes standards of rightness to the conclusion that a deliberative democrat cannot consistently remain a pure proceduralist.17 Estlund draws the same conclusion in the form of a dilemma. Because procedural fairness alone cannot explain why we should deliberate rather than flip a coin, he argues, deliberative democracy “is either an inadequate refinement of Fair Proceduralism, or it is led to base its recommendation of democratic procedures partly on their performance by procedure independent standards.”18
Landemore reasons in a similar fashion. The epistemic turn, she writes, “makes deliberative democracy more coherent with its own premises” by making explicit the assumption that “deliberation, to be motivated, must have some kind of epistemic properties” — that is, “some ability to track a procedure-independent standard of correctness.”19 Without this epistemic rationale, she maintains, the justification of democracy rests on “the arguably shaky ground of its intrinsic, expressive, or purely procedural value alone.”20 And Talisse, following Cheryl Misak, offers a related argument at the level of belief itself.21 Because believers as such are committed to truth, we are committed to the political arrangements that answer to this commitment. Democracy is “the political entailment” of “the folk epistemic commitments each of us already endorses.”22
These arguments differ, and some invoke premises beyond deliberation’s epistemic aim. Talisse, for example, also appeals to the social and institutional conditions of responsible inquiry.23 My objection concerns the inference from an epistemic aim alone to a requirement of epistemic justification; it does not rule out independent arguments for such a requirement. The challenge for defenders of a purely procedural justification of deliberative democracy is to explain how deliberation can have an epistemic aim without its justificatory force depending on achieving that aim. Otherwise, they must concede that deliberative democracy rests, at least partly, on epistemic foundations. In what follows, I argue that they need not make this concession.
III. ANSWERING THE EPISTEMIC CHALLENGE
The epistemic inference conflates two distinct questions: first, what participants in an activity are trying to achieve (i.e., the aim of the activity); second, what renders the activity important or worthwhile (i.e., its purpose). Once these questions are disentangled, we see that deliberation may be guided by epistemic aims even if its purpose does not depend on the extent to which these aims are fulfilled. In other words, the fact that deliberators must be committed to truth establishes only that deliberation must be conducted from an epistemic standpoint; it does not demonstrate that epistemic criteria are needed to justify the practice. That participants earnestly try to track procedure-independent truths is what makes their deliberation sincere rather than performative. Nevertheless, the value of exchanging reasons may lie in the procedural goods realized by the deliberative process itself.
A. Aim and Purpose
C. Thi Nguyen’s work on games and aesthetic engagement helps illuminate this distinction. He writes, “The goal at which we aim during an activity is not necessarily the same as our purpose for taking up the activity, nor is achieving that local goal the only possible source of value for an activity.”24 The goal, in other words, is not always what makes the activity worth pursuing; the purpose may be. We often adopt an aim within a practice that differs from the considerations that explain or justify the practice’s existence.
Consider rock climbing. The rock climber aims to reach the top. This aim structures his activity and determines what counts as success or failure from within the practice. But the purpose of rock climbing (what makes it valuable) can be quite different. It might be improving physical fitness, the experience of challenge or flow, or simply enjoyment. For these goods to be realized, however, the climber must genuinely aim to reach the top. The purpose of the activity cannot be achieved by directly pursuing it while ignoring the aim.25 Yet the purpose is not reducible to the aim, and the activity’s value does not depend on achieving it. The same is true of many games: a chess player aims to checkmate her opponent, and a poker player aims to win the pot, yet the value of playing these games may lie in the challenge, the company, or pure enjoyment.
Democratic deliberation arguably exhibits the same structure. When participants offer reasons, evaluate evidence, and respond to challenges, they are typically aiming to get things right. Indeed, this truth-directed aim is constitutive of deliberation, for the activity would collapse into mere bargaining or preference-aggregation without it. Still, the fact that participants aim at truth does not entail that the point or value of democratic deliberation must be understood epistemically. As I’ll argue in Section III.C, it’s entirely possible for the value of deliberation to be located in its procedural goods, despite the fact that citizens who deliberate must genuinely aim at truth.
There are, of course, important differences between politics, on the one hand, and games and rock climbing, on the other. In the latter cases, the outcome is relatively inconsequential. The welfare or rights of others rarely depend on whether the climber reaches the summit or a team wins its match. Political outcomes, by contrast, matter a great deal. The laws we adopt and policies we implement shape the lives of many citizens. One might worry that this difference undercuts the analogy.26 If political outcomes are high stakes, shouldn’t the quality of the outcomes figure into any adequate justification for democratic procedures?
Two replies are available. First, these analogies are intended to make a more modest point, namely, that the aim of an activity can come apart from its purpose. This is sufficient to show that an activity’s aim does not by itself establish how the activity must be explained or justified. Second, the aim/purpose distinction does not require that outcomes be inconsequential. We can find a similar distinction in high-stakes domains too. Take religion as an example. Believers hold their convictions about God, the soul, or a cosmic order because they take them to be true. On naturalistic accounts, however, religion exists and is practiced because it serves certain vital social and psychological functions — for instance, it bonds societies together and promotes moral and altruistic behavior.27 Although religious belief aims at the truth about ultimate reality, this aim is different from the underlying function of the practice.28
In response, one might press the high-stakes worry in another form. Specifically, one might argue that if deliberative procedures consistently produced terrible outcomes, then we would surely have strong reason to seek another way of making political decisions.29 Would this show that epistemic success is necessary to justify the practice?
We can grant that persistent disastrous outcomes would give us reason to reject a decision-making procedure.30 But that concession does not vindicate the epistemic inference. Any requirement of epistemic success would then rest on an argument about the importance of outcomes, not merely on the fact that deliberators aim at truth. My claim concerns the latter inference.
B. Antecedents in Social Theory
Robert Merton’s distinction between “manifest” and “latent” functions provides a useful antecedent to the aim/purpose distinction.31 Both kinds of function concern the consequences of a practice: manifest functions are intended and recognized by participants, whereas latent functions are unintended and unrecognized. As Paul Helm observes, however, participants may recognize a consequence without intending it.32 Helm also distinguishes consequences that depend on achieving an intended outcome from those that arise from the activity without requiring that achievement.33 This latter distinction is especially relevant here: the goods realized through deliberation need not depend on deliberators reaching the truth. My question is also normative, however. Identifying a social function does not establish that it makes a practice worth having; we must still explain why that function supplies a reason to value the practice.
Ana Tanasoca and Jensen Sass use Merton’s framework to characterize “ritual deliberation” in politics, which refers to a procedurally proper discursive practice whose participants lack any sincere deliberative motivation.34 Such deliberation does not typically have an epistemic end; it is valuable because of its latent functions, such as signaling commitment to democratic norms or equalizing symbolic power. I grant that much actual political deliberation is ritualistic in their sense. However, the deliberation I have described is not ritualistic. As Tanasoca and Sass observe, “for deliberation to be genuine, participants must share a genuine desire to get to the bottom of a collective problem… and be willing to change their views and learn in the process. In ritual deliberation, they do not.”35 What my view shares with theirs is the structural thought that a deliberative practice need not succeed at its ostensible function in order to perform an important one. What I deny is that deliberators lack sincere motivation, at least in the cases that are my focus.
Jon Elster’s discussion of states that are “essentially by-products” helps explain why realizing a good may require sincerely pursuing an aim which is distinct from that good.36 Some goods, on his account, can be secured only indirectly, through pursuing something else. His examples include sleep, spontaneity, forgetting, and self-respect. These goods evaporate when we aim at them directly. Elster extends this insight to political institutions through his reading of Tocqueville.37 Jurors, he claims, deliberate with the aim of determining guilt or innocence, but the latent function of the jury may be civic education. To serve this educative purpose, however, jurors must take their adjudicative task seriously. The same holds for democratic participation more broadly. On Elster’s reading, its benefits depend on participants engaging seriously with the substantive political task rather than treating those benefits as the main point.
The jury also illustrates a possibility absent from the rock-climbing case. In rock climbing, the aim and the purpose belong to the same person, and trying to reach the top can serve an end the climber has anyway. In a jury, they belong to different parties. The aim of determining guilt or innocence is the jurors’, while the purpose of civic education is the wider society’s, and that purpose is served whether or not any individual juror has it in view. Democratic deliberation is more like the jury rather than the rock climber. Citizens must aim at the truth, but the social purpose their deliberation serves is not one they need to be pursuing, and it does not require that they succeed in their quest.
C. Deliberation and Procedural Values
I have suggested that democratic deliberation exhibits a similar structure to the cases surveyed in Sections III.A and III.B. Participants in deliberation aim at discovering the truth, and this epistemic orientation is not optional or incidental. As Michael Neblo puts it, “Just as poker is no longer poker if we are not trying to win, rational discussion is no longer rational discussion if we are not trying to find the right answer.”38 Epistemic democrats are right, then, that deliberative exchange would seem pointless to participants who did not think there was something to figure out. But it does not follow that the purpose of the practice must be epistemic.
What, then, is its purpose? Several familiar non-epistemic candidates are already central to deliberative democratic theory. I will not defend any one of them here but simply illustrate how they could justify democratic deliberation. On the account I am exploring, sincere truth-seeking and fair participation jointly realize a social purpose: citizens governing one another as free and equal persons. The epistemic aim belongs to their deliberation, while the justification for requiring that deliberation can lie in the relations it establishes among them. Those relations need not depend on their reaching the correct answer.
First, deliberating with others is a way of expressing respect for them. When we provide others with reasons for our political opinions — rather than simply asserting those opinions or imposing them by force — we treat fellow citizens as rational agents whose assent matters.39 If we imposed a political decision without offering reasons, we’d be treating those subject to it as mere objects of policy rather than genuine co-authors of the laws under which we all must live. Goodin highlights this dimension of reason-giving in democratic practice.40 As he notes, citizens may make many different demands when they ask policymakers, “Why?” They may want reassurance that a decision is not arbitrary or to hold officials accountable, for instance. Yet the most basic demand is for recognition rather than information. To ask why, in the limiting case, is simply to demand “to be treated as a human presence” — “I am a person, not a stone: talk to me!”41 A government that refused to give reasons would fail its citizens in a way that has little to do with the epistemic quality of its decisions.
In this way, deliberation embodies Kant’s familiar idea of respecting persons as ends in themselves. This kind of respect is partly constituted by the practice of deliberation itself. To deliberate with others is to listen to their reasons, respond to them, and submit our own judgment to their scrutiny. Thus, deliberation already treats others as rational agents. The truth-directedness of deliberation is what makes this a form of respect, since we take others’ reasons as bearing on a question that we are jointly trying to answer. Similar points apply to the goods of equality and freedom discussed below. One might think this dependence on truth-directedness is a problem for my view. The reverse is true. On the account proposed here, these procedural values are realized through a practice whose participants sincerely aim at truth.
Second, deliberation is arguably essential to democratic equality.42 When citizens disagree about the right course of action or the common good, providing them with equal votes is not sufficient for treating them as equals. They must have equal opportunities to contribute reasons, influence public debate, and shape collective decisions. Thomas Christiano articulates the underlying egalitarian principle, arguing that democratic decision-making is “the unique way to publicly embody equality in collective decision-making under the circumstances of pervasive conscientious disagreement in which we find ourselves.”43 Deliberation extends this principle beyond voting by requiring that reasons be taken seriously regardless of who advances them. A decision produced by such a procedure can claim an authority over citizens that a decision imposed by a subset of the citizenry cannot possess, regardless of how knowledgeable or well-intentioned that group may be.
Third, deliberation is essential to democratic freedom and autonomy. The exercise of freedom requires more than protection from interference; it requires citizens to have the opportunity to participate in determining the laws that govern them. The right to vote is not enough. On Christian Rostbøll’s account, citizens exercise self-legislation through participating in public justification, rather than merely receiving justifications from those who govern them.44 To enjoy non-domination is not merely to be treated as a person who can recognize and respond to reasons. One must take part in producing, examining, and authorizing those reasons. This requires deliberation. When citizens exchange reasons and justifications, they exercise collective control over the laws that bind them. Understood in this way, the exercise of collective self-rule does not require that citizens reach the correct answer.
These accounts offer several ways to justify deliberation through the relations it realizes among citizens: respect, political equality, and freedom understood as collective self-rule. The aim/purpose framework thus allows us to capture what is right in the epistemic democrat’s observation that deliberation is oriented toward truth, without accepting the further claim that the justification of democratic decisions depends on epistemic achievement.
This framework also explains why deliberation is not interchangeable with a lottery or coin toss. It engages citizens’ rational capacities, and this engagement can be valuable even when it does not yield the correct outcome. Jeremy Waldron’s comparison of majority decision with coin tossing provides a related argument. Majority decision gives “positive decisional weight to the fact that a given individual member of the group holds a certain view.”45 Although judgments may help determine a lottery’s options, majority decision additionally counts each individual judgment. My further claim is that deliberation can respect citizens’ judgment by requiring them to engage with one another’s reasons.
One might object that this argument trades on a trivial point. Grant that if deliberation had no epistemic value at all, then of course epistemic considerations would drop out of its purpose. The harder question is what to say in the more realistic case where deliberation does have some epistemic value. Why, in that case, should those considerations not figure in the practice’s purpose?46
In response, let me clarify what my argument is intended to show. As we have seen, many democratic theorists claim that deliberators aim at truth and infer from this that purely procedural defenses of deliberation must fail. But this inference is invalid. Indeed, it is invalid even granting that deliberation has epistemic value. Nothing in my argument implies that epistemic success plays no role in justifying democratic procedures. There may be other grounds for thinking that epistemic performance matters. If there are, they must be established separately; they cannot be read off from the mere fact that deliberators aim at truth, since that fact is compatible with non-epistemic accounts.
IV. OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES
The account I have offered faces several possible objections. Here I address what I take to be three important ones.
A. Reflective Instability
What happens if citizens learn that the “real” purpose of deliberation isn’t truth? Can they continue to deliberate sincerely? It might seem psychologically unstable, or even a form of bad faith, to ask citizens to aim at truth while recognizing that truth is not what ultimately justifies the activity. One might therefore wonder whether my account requires something akin to a “noble lie,” on which citizens must be shielded from the knowledge that truth is not what justifies the practice. Otherwise, citizens may lack any motivation to take the epistemic goal seriously — or so the objection goes.
Two considerations help to defuse this objection. First, certain familiar practices remain stable even when participants recognize a distinction between their aim and an activity’s purpose. Jurors need not stop trying to reach a correct verdict upon discovering that the jury system is partly designed to serve non-epistemic values. Nor are athletes irrational in striving to win while accepting that the value of sport lies elsewhere, say in fun and exercise or the cultivation of virtue. In none of these cases is there any inherent irrationality or bad faith in pursuing an aim that one does not regard as the ultimate justification for the practice. Anyone who thinks that reflective citizens cannot engage in democratic deliberation as I have described it owes us an argument.
Second, the aim/purpose distinction operates at different levels of reflection. When citizens deliberate about political matters, their first-order aim is truth. By contrast, reflection on the justification of democratic procedures is a second-order activity. Citizens need not reflect on the philosophical basis of democratic justification while deliberating, nor need such reflection undermine their commitment to seeking truth. Nothing in my account requires them to hold incompatible beliefs: they can aim at truth while regarding the practice as justified by procedural values.
B. The Revision Problem
If the justification of democratic decisions rests on procedural considerations, why would it ever be valuable to revise decisions that emerged from fair deliberative procedures? What could motivate revision if the original decision was justified? It seems we need a standard of correctness to explain why revision might be called for. If a decision is justified simply because it emerged from the right procedures, what grounds the thought that we might do better next time?
The aim/purpose framework provides a ready answer. Citizens aim at truth, even though the point of democratic deliberation may not depend on achieving it. They may therefore believe, qua deliberators, that a better answer is available, and this gives them reason to seek revision. On a purely procedural account, the decision’s authority need not depend on its substantive correctness. A decision can therefore be legitimate in virtue of emerging from fair procedures and yet remain open to revision because citizens regard it as substantively mistaken.
Understood this way, calls for revision need not allege a failure of legitimacy. They are an expression of the epistemic aim of deliberation. While the procedural justification underscores why a decision is binding in the meantime, the aim of truth explains why citizens may continue to contest it. Anyone who believes that a political outcome is mistaken will have every reason to try to revise it. But believing that the decision was wrong does not imply that it lacks justification.
C. Moral Hazard
One might worry that my framework licenses bad decisions. If the justification of democratic decisions depends only on procedural considerations, can we really say that a democratically enacted injustice is justified? This is a familiar challenge to procedural accounts of democratic authority.47 Slavery presents a stark example: could its enactment through the correct deliberative procedures make it legitimate?48 A theory that allowed this would seem to get the relationship between legitimacy and justice exactly wrong.
My argument does not establish that procedural considerations are all that matter for a democratic justification, so whether proceduralism can fully answer this objection is not a question I need to settle. Still, proceduralists have resources here. They will argue that justification and justice may come apart; a decision may be justified by being properly arrived at through procedures that respect the rights of citizens, but still be substantively unjust. This is not a defect in the concept of justification. Its job is to settle what we may legitimately do together amid widespread disagreement about what justice requires, and it could not do that job if it simply tracked justice. Proceduralists can add that most procedural accounts of democratic authority already build in substantive constraints, such as the requirement that majorities respect the basic rights of all, in order to ensure that majority judgments are not entirely determinative.49 Whatever the fate of proceduralism on this front, the fact that deliberators must aim at truth does not itself necessitate an epistemic theory of democracy.
V. CONCLUSION
Deliberation makes sense only if participants take there to be better and worse answers to political questions. Many epistemic democrats infer from this truth-directed aim that the justification of deliberation must itself be epistemic, at least in part. I have argued that this inference fails. Epistemic democrats are right that aiming at truth is constitutive of deliberation, but it does not follow that epistemic success is what makes deliberation worth having. Citizens must aim at discovering correct answers when they deliberate, and yet the purpose their deliberation serves need not be epistemic at all. It may instead lie in procedural values such as respect, equality, and freedom. A sincere commitment to truth and fair procedures may therefore serve the same social purpose, without that purpose supplying an epistemic justification of deliberation.
Notes
- Cohen 1989; Habermas 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1996. [^]
- People often give reasons for their position that offer no consideration in favor of its correctness — “I’ll lose my seat otherwise,” say, or “here I stand, I can do no other” — and they can give reasons for speaking that are not reasons for belief at all. Following the usual focus of deliberative democratic theory, I am concerned here with epistemic reasons for belief, rather than explanatory or prudential ones (Goodin 2018). [^]
- Habermas 1996, p. 306. [^]
- Cohen 1989, p. 22. [^]
- Goodin and Spiekermann 2018, p. 312. [^]
- Cohen 1986; List and Goodin 2001; Estlund 2008; Landemore 2013; Goodin and Spiekermann 2018; Benson 2024. [^]
- Martí 2006, p. 29. [^]
- Ibid., p. 30. [^]
- The challenge concerns deliberation’s role in justifying binding political decisions, not merely its value as an activity. Deliberation may promote mutual understanding or express respect, and few epistemic democrats would deny these benefits. The harder question is why decisions reached through deliberation have a greater claim to bind citizens. I take up the latter question in this article. [^]
- Estlund 2008. [^]
- Ibid., p. 30. [^]
- Ibid., p. 30. [^]
- Peter 2009, p. 116. [^]
- Landemore 2017, p. 284. [^]
- Talisse 2009, p. 109. [^]
- Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this challenge. [^]
- Martí 2006, p. 28. Martí’s two “basic theses” also connect epistemic reliability with legitimacy. This reliability premise goes beyond the claim that deliberators aim at truth. According to the second thesis, democratic deliberation “is in general the most reliable democratic procedure in order to identify which are the right political decisions, and therefore it is the adequate method to make legitimate political decisions” (Martí 2006, pp. 34–35). [^]
- Estlund 1997, p. 263. [^]
- Landemore 2017, p. 286. [^]
- Ibid., p. 290. [^]
- Misak 2000. [^]
- Talisse 2009, p. 121. [^]
- Ibid., pp. 121–125. [^]
- Nguyen 2020, p. 1142. [^]
- This structure is familiar from the paradox of hedonism. Mill (1873, ch. 5) gives the classic statement, holding that “those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness” and that, “aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.” Sidgwick (1874, bk. II, ch. 3) drew the moral that a rational pursuit of pleasure must to some extent put pleasure out of sight. Elster’s notion of a state that is “essentially a by-product,” discussed in Section III.B, is the descendant of this idea. [^]
- Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point. [^]
- Durkheim 1912; Norenzayan 2013. [^]
- To be clear, I am not claiming that the social functions of religion justify the practice, and I am certainly not proposing religion as a model for democracy. One might think that religion’s latent benefits come at unacceptable epistemic and social costs, and nothing I say here rules that out. [^]
- Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point. [^]
- There is a further question about how such a verdict could be established. Applying this objection to democracy would require grounds for judging its performance sufficiently poor to undermine its justification. Reasonable disagreement about justice and the common good can make that assessment contentious: citizens may disagree both about which outcomes count as correct and about how competing procedures perform. This difficulty does not establish that epistemic assessment is impossible or irrelevant. It does, however, mean that invoking the possibility of bad outcomes is not yet an argument that democratic procedures fail an appropriate epistemic standard. [^]
- Merton 1968. [^]
- Helm 1971, pp. 51–52. [^]
- Ibid., pp. 52–54. [^]
- Tanasoca and Sass 2019. [^]
- Ibid., p. 158. [^]
- Elster 1983. [^]
- Elster 1997. [^]
- Neblo 2015, p. 106. [^]
- Valentini 2013. [^]
- Goodin 2018. [^]
- Ibid., p. 992. [^]
- Cohen 1989. [^]
- Christiano 2008, pp. 75–76. [^]
- Rostbøll 2015, p. 272. [^]
- Waldron 1999, p. 113. [^]
- Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this challenge. [^]
- Beerbohm 2012, p. 36; Brennan 2016, p. 12; Estlund 2008, p. 110. [^]
- Christiano 2008, p. 260. [^]
- Ibid., p. 260. [^]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Elise Woodard, Bob Goodin, and two anonymous referees for substantial feedback on previous versions of this article.
COMPETING INTERESTS
The author declares that he has no competing interests.
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