David Estlund

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

Sunstein argues that democratic theory has recently rested its normative claims on a vast but empirically uninformed optimism about the ability of collective deliberation to lead to morally and rationally better decisions. Once that question is considered empirically, he argues, deliberation turns out to be mixed at best, and a disaster at worst. I want to suggest that Sunstein exaggerates the claims of the deliberative democrats, and interprets the empirical literature against deliberation in a way that appears, even based on his own descriptions of the studies, to be unfairly biased against the value of deliberation

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 The present collection brings together papers, published and unpublished, spanning his writing career.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.

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.

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

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.”

Sunstein argues that democratic theory has recently rested its normative claims on a vast but empirically uninformed optimism about the ability of collective deliberation to lead to morally and rationally better decisions. Once that question is considered empirically, he argues, deliberation turns out to be mixed at best, and a disaster at worst. I want to suggest that Sunstein exaggerates the claims of the deliberative democrats, and interprets the empirical literature against deliberation in a way that appears, even based on his own descriptions of the studies, to be unfairly biased against the value of deliberation.

The papers published in this special issue can fairly be unified under the heading “Epistemic Democracy,” but there is more variety among them than this might indicate. They exhibit the broad range of ways in which epistemological considerations are figuring in contemporary philosophical discussions of democracy. The authors range from young and promising to established and distinguished. I'd like to introduce a few of the issues that run through the papers, sprinkling references to the actual papers along the way. From the beginning, democratic forms of government have included discussion and debate. In real life the value of democracy can hardly be separated from the value of free public discussion, prior to voting, about the issues and candidates. This is not to say that either the discussion or the vote have always been inspiring, but whatever value democracy is thought to have, it seems inseparable from public political discussion. One way of accounting for the value of the discussion is to suppose that voters exchange reasons (not always cooperatively) about what to do. Even a quick look at the content of political debate seems to confirm that it is mostly about which decision would be best for the country or city whose laws or leaders are in question

There is a growing literature under the banner of "deliberative democracy," and Paul Weithman suggests that much of it is based on, or at least implies, a critique of the kind of theory of justice pioneered by Rawls 1. The issue at stake is whether a democratic political theory can admit independent normative standards that apply to and constrain democratic decisions. A certain kind of critic thinks independent standards are anti-democratic. Weithman's defense of Rawlsian theory against this charge is, I believe, instructively mistaken. Rawlsian theory escapes the charge but not for Weithman's reasons. This dispute might reasonably hope to shed light on the interrelations not only between democracy and justice, but also between these and political legitimacy.

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.”