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2997Debate: Liberalism, equality, and fraternity in Cohen's critique of RawlsJournal of Political Philosophy 6 (1). 1998.
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1873Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political PhilosophyPhilosophy and Public Affairs 39 (3): 207-237. 2011.
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1600The survival of egalitarian justice in John Rawls's political liberalismJournal of Political Philosophy 4 (1). 1996.
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1207Opinion leaders, independence, and Condorcet's Jury TheoremTheory and Decision 36 (2): 131-162. 1994.
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1202Political QualitySocial Philosophy and Policy 17 (1): 127. 2000.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 collecti…Read more
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1162The insularity of the reasonable: Why political liberalism must admit the truthEthics 108 (2): 252-275. 1998.
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954Introduction: Epistemic approaches to democracyEpisteme 5 (1). 2008.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 p…Read more
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948Debate: On Christiano's the constitution of equalityJournal of Political Philosophy 17 (2): 241-252. 2009.No Abstract
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628Jeremy Waldron on law and disagreementPhilosophical Studies 99 (1): 111-128. 2000.Waldron argues that recent treatments of justice have neglected reasonable disagreement about justice itself. So Waldron offers a procedural account of democratic legitimacy, in which contending views of justice can be brought together to arrive at a decision without deciding which one is correct. However, if there is reasonable disagreement about everything, then this includes his preferred account of legitimacy. On the other hand, it is not clear that Waldron is right to count so much disagree…Read more
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612Justificatory Liberalism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3): 821-825. 1999.
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598Democratic theoryIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 208--30. 2005.
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542Democracy & Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, Geoffery Brennan and Loren Lomasky. Cambridge University Press, 1993, 225 + x pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 12 (1): 113. 1996.
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439Liberal associationism and the rights of statesSocial Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2): 425-449. 2013.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…Read more
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430The place of self-interest and the role of power in deliberative democracyJournal of Political Philosophy 18 (1): 64-100. 2009.No Abstract
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407Reply to Copp, Gaus, Richardson, and EdmundsonEthics 121 (2): 354-389. 2011.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 build…Read more
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339The Epistemic Value of Democratic DeliberationIn Jane Mansbridge, Andre Baechtiger, John Dryzek & Mark Warren (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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300Why Not Epistocracy?In Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Desire, Identity and Existence: Essays in honor of T. M. Penner, Academic Printing and Publishing. pp. 53-69. 2003.
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295On Sunstein's InfotopiaTheoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 56 (119): 14-29. 2009.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…Read more
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280Methodological moralism in political philosophyCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3): 385-402. 2017.
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278Democratic Authority: A Philosophical FrameworkPrinceton University Press. 2008.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, Es…Read more
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254The persuasiveness of democratic majoritiesPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 3 (2): 131-142. 2004.Under the assumptions of the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, majority verdicts are virtually certain to be correct if the competence of voters is greater than one-half, and virtually certain to be incorrect if voter competence is less than one-half. But which is the case? Here we turn the Jury Theorem on its head, to provide one way of addressing that question. The same logic implies that, if the outcome saw 60 percent of voters supporting one proposition and 40 percent the other, then average …Read more
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247One Person, At Least One Vote? Rawls on Political Equality…Within LimitsIn Paul J. Weithman (ed.), Rawls's 'A theory of justice' at 50, Cambridge University Press. 2023.
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210Democratic Theory and the Public Interest: Condorcet and Rousseau RevisitedAmerican Political Science Review 83 (4): 1217-1322. 1989.