David Estlund

Controversy has recently erupted, at least in a recent story in the Independent, over the question of whether Brown's Philosophy Department has been inappropriately exclusionary of courses in other departments, of diverse philosophical traditions, and of non-white philosophers. These are questions well worth asking, although the article's critical stance requires some scrutiny. It is worth supplementing the article with some information that might help students think about whether they ought to call for changes in the Philosophy Department's policies or practices. As a member of that department, I certainly welcome students' opinions and suggestions on these matters.

It is often argued that if one holds a liberal political philosophy about individual rights against the state and the community, then one cannot consistently say that a state that violates those principles is owed the right of noninterference. How could the rights of the collective trump the rights of individuals in a liberal view? I believe that this debate calls for more reflection, on the relation between liberalism and individualism. I will sketch a conception of liberalism in which there is nothing awkward about saying that associations, as such, have some moral rights to noninterference. If liberal associationism is compelling in general terms then, if states can be shown to be associations in the relevant respects, then liberalism itself will supply the moral basis for a right of that kind, held by a state or people as such, to nonintervention.

Economic equality can easily seem to depend on participants caring more for impartial values such as distributive justice than they are morally required to do. A liberal morality in which partial concerns for the interests of oneself or loved ones are given some scope might seem to permit people to refrain from doing what is impartially best unless they are compensated. The compensation would cancel the prerogative, but would often produce inequality, since the compensated costs are not just the agent's but often others she is close to or cares about. If, instead of reducing the agent's burden with compensation, society enhances the impartial value of the proposed work, her option to refrain might still be cancelled, but this time without producing any inequality. This idea of ‘leveraged enhancement’ has important normative consequences both for personal morality and for the design of social institutions with an eye to distributive justice.

Political equality is in tension with political quality, and quality has recently been neglected. My thesis is that proper attention to the quality of democratic procedures and their outcomes requires that we accept substantive inequalities of political input in the interest of increasing input overall. Mainly, I hope to refute political egalitarianism, the view that justice or legitimacy requires substantive political equality, specifically equal availability of power or influence over collective choices that have legal force. I hope to show that political egalitarianism exaggerates individual rights in the conduct of political procedures, and neglects the substantive justice of the decisions made through those procedures. Some unequal distributions of influence may better promote just decisions, and without reliance on any invidious comparisons such as the relative wisdom of the wealthy or the educated

Gerald MacCallum taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin from 1961 until 1977. The stroke he suffered in that year prevented him from further teaching. He continued to write, even through the crippling effects of a second stroke, until his death in 1987. His final project was the Prentice Hall Foundations in Philosophy book, Political Philosophy. The present collection brings together papers, published and unpublished, spanning his writing career. I hope in this short space to convey some bigger, largely tacit themes underlying MacCallum’s penetrating but humble attention to detail and distinctions.

Democracy is not naturally plausible. Why turn such important matters over to masses of people who have no expertise? Many theories of democracy answer by appealing to the intrinsic value of democratic procedure, leaving aside whether it makes good decisions. In Democratic Authority, David Estlund offers a groundbreaking alternative based on the idea that democratic authority and legitimacy must depend partly on democracy's tendency to make good decisions.Just as with verdicts in jury trials, Estlund argues, the authority and legitimacy of a political decision does not depend on the particular decision being good or correct. But the "epistemic value" of the procedure--the degree to which it can generally be accepted as tending toward a good decision--is nevertheless crucial. Yet if good decisions were all that mattered, one might wonder why those who know best shouldn't simply rule.Estlund's theory--which he calls "epistemic proceduralism"--avoids epistocracy, or the rule of those who know. He argues that while some few people probably do know best, this can be used in political justification only if their expertise is acceptable from all reasonable points of view. If we seek the best epistemic arrangement in this respect, it will be recognizably democratic--with laws and policies actually authorized by the people subject to them

Suppose justice depends on some very unlikely good behavior. In that case the true (or correct, or best) theory of justice might have no practical value. But then, what good would it be? I consider analogies with science and mathematics in order to test various ways of tying their the value of intellectual work to practice, though I argue that these fail. If their value, or that of some political theory, is not practical then what is good about them? As for political theory, I consider the question of what would even count as an answer to this question, and I conclude with the tentative proposal that it is valuable to come to understand something that is, itself, important.

Condorcet's Jury Theorem shows that on a dichotomous choice, individuals who all have the same competence above 0.5, can make collective decisions under majority rule with a competence that approaches 1 as either the size of the group or the individual competence goes up. The theorem assumes that the probability of each voter's being correct is independent of the probability of any other voter being correct. Contrary to several authors, the presence of mutual or common influences such as opinion leaders does not easily rule independence either in or out. Indeed, and this ought to be surprising,under certain conditions deference to opinion leaders can improve individual competence without violating independence, and so can raise group competence as well.

This piece is a response to four essays that critically discuss my book Democratic Authority. In addition to responding to their specific criticisms, it takes up several methodological issues that put some of the critiques in a broader context. Among the issues discussed are “normative consent,” which I offer as a new theory of authority; the “general acceptability requirement,” which advances a broadly Rawlsian approach to political justification; and methodological questions about theory building, including a device I dub the “method of provisional leap.”