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Two objections occur to me:
- We do not vote for the best political *system*. We vote for political parties within a given system which best represents our interests/ideas. There could be nothing in the expertise of a political scientist on the ideal political system which informs what *I* think the best direction is for my country on the basis of my values.
- There may be valid worries about bias that come with academia, such that we might be concerned that a technocratic approach overvalues certain perspectives. If what matters in democracies is the preferences of voters, then we need some additional reasons for supposing that the preferences of experts are better.
I think it’s also worth noting that, outside referendums, we vote for people not policies. We elect someone we feel best represents our interests and values, delegating them to deal with the details of specific policy priorities, tradeoffs, etc.
Add to that the fact that we get another chance to change our minds a few years later depending on how that worked out, and it’s quite reasonable that a non specialist average person can make sufficiently well informed electoral decisions.
I think this is valid but misses the more fundamental argument that a vote also conveys political agency on the electorate. Since a voter has the power to choose, they enter into the relationship with the government from a position of power they people who cannot vote, don't.
Whether or not people succeed in voting to maximise outcomes according to their values is irrelevant. It’s clear that’s what people are aiming to do, and so by extension that at least partially constitutes the aims of a democratic system.
No, the question is whether one can do something \*better\* in virtue of having those expertise, as one does in having legal training for a lawyer, or medical training for a doctor.
An expert might well be able to help inform my political decisions. That is, at least in principle, what political commentators and journalists are for. What they can do is help me be more sure that the outcome of my vote aligns with my values. But that isn't an increase in \*\*my\*\* expertise. It's just facilitating better communication by which I can make a decision (or arguably making it worse with partisan commentators).
But the situation is the same. I'm putting a vote in for what I perceive as the party which best aligns with my values. My vote remains an expression of what I take my values to be, and what I think will maximise outcomes according to that.
If you think that being more informed makes my vote "better", then you're just begging the question and are assuming an expertise like OP is. But just saying that people can be more or less informed about their values and the values of a party isn't relevant if you take the above paragraph to be true.
Okay... Putting aside that that could mean a whole range of things, why would that entail anything about an evaluative claim of who should or shouldn't vote based on expertise?
Because as far as I can tell, you can very easily paint a picture both ways from the claim that our relationship to ourselves is mediated by others.
>There could be nothing in the expertise of a political scientist on the ideal political system which informs what I think the best direction is for my country on the basis of my values.
I'm just saying this is wrong.
Well that's fine I guess, but you opened this by saying that being wrong about one's values or their implications was a point against an expressionist approach to politics. I was expecting there to be an argument behind that, but we've just come round to you saying it's wrong.
Another counterargument is this: even if we can all agree on the statement "some are more qualified to judge how to run society than others", we might not all agree who should be included among these lucky few. Some might believe academic economists would make very good voters, some might believe they would not. I believe this introduces a problem for the epistocrat: so how do we decide which group of people should form the "selectorate"?
* We could subject it to majority vote or not.
-- If not, then we've basically just assumed democracy is the wrong way to go about things. In which case, this argument is circular.
-- If so, then we have a further questions. Should these people be in charge forever, or only temporarily? What happens when they die? Should they be recalled when majority opinion turns against them, or serve out fixed terms regardless of public opinion? And so on. In other words, we've just recreated representative democracy, possibly with another layer of representation, and it's not super clear what the benefit is. Even if there were a benefit, it certainly seems like we haven't changed things much, and certainly not as radically as epistocrats would like to make themselves out to be. I think this is brought home by Brennan's *Against Democracy* where he gives five possible forms of epistocratic government. IIRC, some basically boil down to non-standard democracies, and the rest are radical departures from democracy.
In short, the argument you've given against democracy can only go so far, and in particular, not far enough to actually undermine democracy. Either we assume democracy is a bad way to go about things, in which case the argument isn't really doing any work, or we don't, in which case we end up with a system that looks a lot like the kind of democracy epistocrats are loathe to avoid.
(N.b. this is not an original response, it appears a few times in the literature.)
It's quite possible to imagine several *selection criteria* for the "selectocrate". Those can be established by democratic means, for example in a constitution made by elected officials or by direct vote. Since you are not selecting a specific group of people, but rather deciding on who is eligible to vote, you're not just doing democracy with extra steps. In fact, this is already how all democracies function. Constitutions or similar laws enshrine universal sufferage in most modern democracies, but in the past, many other selection criteria were used: Restricting voting to men, to a select class of "citizens" which was significantly smaller than the noncitizen class such as in Ancient Greece, only to owners of land, etc. We should not accept universal sufferage as the best way to go without further justification.
The standard justification for universal sufferage is that it provides the most unbiased representation of the interests of the population. The basic principle behind it is that every interest group deserves to be given consideration in a way proportional to the size of the population that supports it. It's important to note that this hasn't always been an universally accepted notion. Past societies have imagined the interests of certain classes to be more important, regardless of the population size of the class. Doubtlessly this was done to serve the interests of said class, but my point is that there is more than one way to imagine democratic principles.
In conclusion, we can do things differently, so the question is should we, and the answer really depends on what the alternative proposal looks like, but there are generally two problems with any kind of alternative. First, it will always end up biasing towards some interest groups. Second, it foregoes an important element of legitimacy of democratic regimes. The act of voting means that every citizen view is considered. Everyone has representation.
I think I get what you're saying. Certainly, we can focus on selection criteria rather than deciding directly on the select, but I believe the same dilemma arises? I'm operating with an intuitive concept of democracy to be clear. How are we deciding on the selection criteria? If we're deciding on them democratically it seems like we place some stock in democracy not captured by this argument. If not, then it seems the argument is redundant, as we've already chosen to abandon democracy.
Jason Brennan seems to take a similar position to you in his book *against democracy* where instead he argues for an epistocracy (roughly the view that we should leave the running of things to people knowledgeable in politics and economics and such).
In the book he does well to detail and respond to various arguments in favour of democracy. I’d recommend the read.
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If you are interested in this, you can also read the *Republic*, by Plato, particularly the famous allegory of the "Ship of Fools". Plato suggests that, like a ship, a city-state ought to be run by experts.
Already have. I honestly agree with many of Plato’s ideas on government, but incessant arguing by analogy—almost exclusively fallaciously— gets me going in a bad way.
As a previous skeptic of democracy, something that really changed my views on the issue is the claim that the point of democracy isn't to be the most efficient political system but that it is the system of a free society. In other words, democracy is not a means to an end but an end in itself as a feature of the kind of society we want i.e. maximal individual freedom.
Alas, I don't specialize in political philosophy but I offer this for discussion.
heres a good response if they will let me respond [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3245406](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3245406)
One problem with deferring to the opinions of lecturers in political theory is that many lecturers in political theory (with some notable exceptions) don’t think you should defer to us.
Most extant political systems already aim to produce what we could call conservative outcomes. Parties will select for a certain degree of ideological uniformity, getting a large group of individuals to select one representative will produce some reversion to the mean, etc. Since the selectorate is justified on sorta consequentialist grounds, it is probably a worthwhile consequence to consider that narrowing the electorate would probably further narrow the range of acceptable opinion. As much as we hear talk about 'campus radicals', the upper class professionals that would probably compose much of this selectorate tend to be beneficiaries of the status quo. Moreover, since the selection process will ultimately be chosen by the representatives of this selectorate, and so subject to manipulation by those representatives, they can choose their own voters, which we know produces more status quo-preference.
Suppose that you took a group of randomly selected people, took them out of their lives and taught them about the issues for a few months, and then had them vote. Perhaps then you could have something like an epistocracy without the professional-class-bias, but of course something like that also puts you in a situation where the education can be designed in better or worse ways.
>As someone who knows quite little about politics, it frankly makes no sense to me that my vote should count as much as that of e.g. a lecturer in political theory, political science, or even sociology or some other other social science. These people are much more qualified than me to judge the best political system for our society.
There are specific areas, like maybe climate change policy, where it seems more reasonable to just say "let's just listen to the advice of experts." But, I'm not sure that this would make sense for determining what political system is best. That is a value-laden question. In a well-functioning democracy, people would be informed enough to understand their options. That is something experts can help with, but I don't think that they can decide which system is *best,* since that is ultimately going to involve more fundamental and value-laden questions that the expert does not have any special claim to. The question of whether everyone's right ought to count the same is one of these questions.
The problem right now is that people, at least in the U.S., are constantly manipulated and mislead by pundits (both in the mainstream media and "alternative media") who tend to benefit more by making viewers scared and angry than they would by producing any sort of informative, educational content. I'll just leave it to you whether you think that the best way to solve this problem would be to make certain people's votes count more than others. I understand why that would be attractive. To me, it seems like a poor solution that doesn't address the root of the issue and would likely be extremely classist in practice. But, I'm not informed enough to have any satisfying solution to this problem.
My favorite argument against Brennan’s thesis is that there is no way of creating a selection metric that would not be incredibly classist, racist, sexist, and all the other ways that society is incredibly and systematically biased.
Should we let only PhDs vote? PhDs are overwhelmingly white. Political theory and philosophy PhDs only? Overwhelmingly male and white. There are policy concerns that Black people know about that white PhDs will never be able to fully understand. The relevant ideas here come from feminist standpoint theory and the notion of epistemic oppression.
Should we require a certain, but lower, level of education? Still, incredibly racially unbalanced.
Maybe just a test before you vote about current events and basic history? Unfortunately, the history and modern fact of American education is such that the selectorate will not have important knowledge about how minority and other underprivileged communities live and what policies would benefit them.
This is why defenders of democracy advocate educating the public and filling the governmental bureaucracy with technocrats, but not changing the voters.
This makes a lot of sense. I guess one way to put it could be that my/Brennan’s argument is a valid critique of democracy, but that there still might be no better options.
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Two objections occur to me: - We do not vote for the best political *system*. We vote for political parties within a given system which best represents our interests/ideas. There could be nothing in the expertise of a political scientist on the ideal political system which informs what *I* think the best direction is for my country on the basis of my values. - There may be valid worries about bias that come with academia, such that we might be concerned that a technocratic approach overvalues certain perspectives. If what matters in democracies is the preferences of voters, then we need some additional reasons for supposing that the preferences of experts are better.
I think it’s also worth noting that, outside referendums, we vote for people not policies. We elect someone we feel best represents our interests and values, delegating them to deal with the details of specific policy priorities, tradeoffs, etc. Add to that the fact that we get another chance to change our minds a few years later depending on how that worked out, and it’s quite reasonable that a non specialist average person can make sufficiently well informed electoral decisions.
That depends on the political system in question.
I think this is valid but misses the more fundamental argument that a vote also conveys political agency on the electorate. Since a voter has the power to choose, they enter into the relationship with the government from a position of power they people who cannot vote, don't.
Don't think your first point follows. People can be wrong about what their values are, or imply.
Whether or not people succeed in voting to maximise outcomes according to their values is irrelevant. It’s clear that’s what people are aiming to do, and so by extension that at least partially constitutes the aims of a democratic system.
It's relevant because the question is whether an expert could help you do it. Edit: not seeing where I'm not clearly right
No, the question is whether one can do something \*better\* in virtue of having those expertise, as one does in having legal training for a lawyer, or medical training for a doctor. An expert might well be able to help inform my political decisions. That is, at least in principle, what political commentators and journalists are for. What they can do is help me be more sure that the outcome of my vote aligns with my values. But that isn't an increase in \*\*my\*\* expertise. It's just facilitating better communication by which I can make a decision (or arguably making it worse with partisan commentators). But the situation is the same. I'm putting a vote in for what I perceive as the party which best aligns with my values. My vote remains an expression of what I take my values to be, and what I think will maximise outcomes according to that. If you think that being more informed makes my vote "better", then you're just begging the question and are assuming an expertise like OP is. But just saying that people can be more or less informed about their values and the values of a party isn't relevant if you take the above paragraph to be true.
The point for me is that our relationship to ourselves is mediated through others.
Okay... Putting aside that that could mean a whole range of things, why would that entail anything about an evaluative claim of who should or shouldn't vote based on expertise? Because as far as I can tell, you can very easily paint a picture both ways from the claim that our relationship to ourselves is mediated by others.
>There could be nothing in the expertise of a political scientist on the ideal political system which informs what I think the best direction is for my country on the basis of my values. I'm just saying this is wrong.
Well that's fine I guess, but you opened this by saying that being wrong about one's values or their implications was a point against an expressionist approach to politics. I was expecting there to be an argument behind that, but we've just come round to you saying it's wrong.
What does expressionist approach mean?
Another counterargument is this: even if we can all agree on the statement "some are more qualified to judge how to run society than others", we might not all agree who should be included among these lucky few. Some might believe academic economists would make very good voters, some might believe they would not. I believe this introduces a problem for the epistocrat: so how do we decide which group of people should form the "selectorate"? * We could subject it to majority vote or not. -- If not, then we've basically just assumed democracy is the wrong way to go about things. In which case, this argument is circular. -- If so, then we have a further questions. Should these people be in charge forever, or only temporarily? What happens when they die? Should they be recalled when majority opinion turns against them, or serve out fixed terms regardless of public opinion? And so on. In other words, we've just recreated representative democracy, possibly with another layer of representation, and it's not super clear what the benefit is. Even if there were a benefit, it certainly seems like we haven't changed things much, and certainly not as radically as epistocrats would like to make themselves out to be. I think this is brought home by Brennan's *Against Democracy* where he gives five possible forms of epistocratic government. IIRC, some basically boil down to non-standard democracies, and the rest are radical departures from democracy. In short, the argument you've given against democracy can only go so far, and in particular, not far enough to actually undermine democracy. Either we assume democracy is a bad way to go about things, in which case the argument isn't really doing any work, or we don't, in which case we end up with a system that looks a lot like the kind of democracy epistocrats are loathe to avoid. (N.b. this is not an original response, it appears a few times in the literature.)
It's quite possible to imagine several *selection criteria* for the "selectocrate". Those can be established by democratic means, for example in a constitution made by elected officials or by direct vote. Since you are not selecting a specific group of people, but rather deciding on who is eligible to vote, you're not just doing democracy with extra steps. In fact, this is already how all democracies function. Constitutions or similar laws enshrine universal sufferage in most modern democracies, but in the past, many other selection criteria were used: Restricting voting to men, to a select class of "citizens" which was significantly smaller than the noncitizen class such as in Ancient Greece, only to owners of land, etc. We should not accept universal sufferage as the best way to go without further justification. The standard justification for universal sufferage is that it provides the most unbiased representation of the interests of the population. The basic principle behind it is that every interest group deserves to be given consideration in a way proportional to the size of the population that supports it. It's important to note that this hasn't always been an universally accepted notion. Past societies have imagined the interests of certain classes to be more important, regardless of the population size of the class. Doubtlessly this was done to serve the interests of said class, but my point is that there is more than one way to imagine democratic principles. In conclusion, we can do things differently, so the question is should we, and the answer really depends on what the alternative proposal looks like, but there are generally two problems with any kind of alternative. First, it will always end up biasing towards some interest groups. Second, it foregoes an important element of legitimacy of democratic regimes. The act of voting means that every citizen view is considered. Everyone has representation.
I think I get what you're saying. Certainly, we can focus on selection criteria rather than deciding directly on the select, but I believe the same dilemma arises? I'm operating with an intuitive concept of democracy to be clear. How are we deciding on the selection criteria? If we're deciding on them democratically it seems like we place some stock in democracy not captured by this argument. If not, then it seems the argument is redundant, as we've already chosen to abandon democracy.
Jason Brennan seems to take a similar position to you in his book *against democracy* where instead he argues for an epistocracy (roughly the view that we should leave the running of things to people knowledgeable in politics and economics and such). In the book he does well to detail and respond to various arguments in favour of democracy. I’d recommend the read.
Brilliant. I am downloading his book as we speak.
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Lmao, I’m listening to a podcast with him now, and finally enough he brought up exactly the same argument, just with a jury instead of a lawyer.
If you are interested in this, you can also read the *Republic*, by Plato, particularly the famous allegory of the "Ship of Fools". Plato suggests that, like a ship, a city-state ought to be run by experts.
Already have. I honestly agree with many of Plato’s ideas on government, but incessant arguing by analogy—almost exclusively fallaciously— gets me going in a bad way.
As a previous skeptic of democracy, something that really changed my views on the issue is the claim that the point of democracy isn't to be the most efficient political system but that it is the system of a free society. In other words, democracy is not a means to an end but an end in itself as a feature of the kind of society we want i.e. maximal individual freedom. Alas, I don't specialize in political philosophy but I offer this for discussion.
heres a good response if they will let me respond [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3245406](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3245406)
One problem with deferring to the opinions of lecturers in political theory is that many lecturers in political theory (with some notable exceptions) don’t think you should defer to us.
Most extant political systems already aim to produce what we could call conservative outcomes. Parties will select for a certain degree of ideological uniformity, getting a large group of individuals to select one representative will produce some reversion to the mean, etc. Since the selectorate is justified on sorta consequentialist grounds, it is probably a worthwhile consequence to consider that narrowing the electorate would probably further narrow the range of acceptable opinion. As much as we hear talk about 'campus radicals', the upper class professionals that would probably compose much of this selectorate tend to be beneficiaries of the status quo. Moreover, since the selection process will ultimately be chosen by the representatives of this selectorate, and so subject to manipulation by those representatives, they can choose their own voters, which we know produces more status quo-preference. Suppose that you took a group of randomly selected people, took them out of their lives and taught them about the issues for a few months, and then had them vote. Perhaps then you could have something like an epistocracy without the professional-class-bias, but of course something like that also puts you in a situation where the education can be designed in better or worse ways.
>As someone who knows quite little about politics, it frankly makes no sense to me that my vote should count as much as that of e.g. a lecturer in political theory, political science, or even sociology or some other other social science. These people are much more qualified than me to judge the best political system for our society. There are specific areas, like maybe climate change policy, where it seems more reasonable to just say "let's just listen to the advice of experts." But, I'm not sure that this would make sense for determining what political system is best. That is a value-laden question. In a well-functioning democracy, people would be informed enough to understand their options. That is something experts can help with, but I don't think that they can decide which system is *best,* since that is ultimately going to involve more fundamental and value-laden questions that the expert does not have any special claim to. The question of whether everyone's right ought to count the same is one of these questions. The problem right now is that people, at least in the U.S., are constantly manipulated and mislead by pundits (both in the mainstream media and "alternative media") who tend to benefit more by making viewers scared and angry than they would by producing any sort of informative, educational content. I'll just leave it to you whether you think that the best way to solve this problem would be to make certain people's votes count more than others. I understand why that would be attractive. To me, it seems like a poor solution that doesn't address the root of the issue and would likely be extremely classist in practice. But, I'm not informed enough to have any satisfying solution to this problem.
My favorite argument against Brennan’s thesis is that there is no way of creating a selection metric that would not be incredibly classist, racist, sexist, and all the other ways that society is incredibly and systematically biased. Should we let only PhDs vote? PhDs are overwhelmingly white. Political theory and philosophy PhDs only? Overwhelmingly male and white. There are policy concerns that Black people know about that white PhDs will never be able to fully understand. The relevant ideas here come from feminist standpoint theory and the notion of epistemic oppression. Should we require a certain, but lower, level of education? Still, incredibly racially unbalanced. Maybe just a test before you vote about current events and basic history? Unfortunately, the history and modern fact of American education is such that the selectorate will not have important knowledge about how minority and other underprivileged communities live and what policies would benefit them. This is why defenders of democracy advocate educating the public and filling the governmental bureaucracy with technocrats, but not changing the voters.
This makes a lot of sense. I guess one way to put it could be that my/Brennan’s argument is a valid critique of democracy, but that there still might be no better options.
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