Jason Brennan

Many proposals for democratic reform promise both to make democracy more representative and to make it wiser. But there is often a tension between these two goals. To make a system wiser often just is to make it less representative. This paper argues lottocracy in particular falls prey to this general dilemma. Two of the main arguments for lottocracy, that it is both more representative of the people than electoral democracy and wiser, are inconsistent. The very mechanisms that make lottery-winners wiser also make them no longer representative of the people, and, unlike elected officials, they do not even enjoy democratic authorization by the people they stand in for.

Jonathan Benson’s Intelligent Democracy defends democracy against recent democratic skeptics by arguing that democracy should be evaluated as a complex epistemic system rather than merely as a mechanism of electoral decision-making. I argue this defense does not adequately answer the skeptical challenge. First, Benson’s systems-level defense attributes epistemic successes to democracy that alternative institutional arrangements can also incorporate, while his claim that democracy is especially well suited to select among and regulate these institutions remains largely undefended. Second, his treatment of voter competence focuses primarily on ignorance and motivation while largely bypassing the deeper challenge posed by democratic realism: the evidence that political identities often determine citizens’ policy preferences rather than the reverse. Third, Benson’s principal objection to epistocracy targets restricted suffrage and invokes the demographic objection, but does not engage stronger epistocratic alternatives or my earlier argument that demographic inequalities afflict electoral democracy as well. Indeed, some forms of epistocracy may perform better than ordinary democracy by the demographic objection’s own standards. These omissions matter because answering democratic skepticism requires comparative institutional analysis. It is not enough to show that democratic systems can perform well; defenders of democracy must show either that democracy has independent moral value or that it performs better than feasible alternatives. Benson establishes neither.

Many democratic theorists want to replace electoral democracy with sortition or lottery‐based political systems, in which at most a small number of lottery‐selected citizens will be appointed to exercise political power. They claim one virtue of these systems is that they tend to ensure demographic proportionality, while electoral democracy, they claim, has uneven demographic turnout in voting and even more uneven demographic results in elections. Lottocrat propose to disenfranchise nearly all citizens, but claim, no matter, citizens can be assured that someone demographically like them will hold power. This paper argues that there is something morally problematic about treating individual citizens as tokens of their demographic groups, even if, empirically speaking, demographics have great predictive power about how people vote or what political outcomes they prefer.

Most of us believe we should judge others less. Few of us manage it. Jason Brennan thinks he knows why: The problem isn’t that we lack willpower or kindness. It’s that we are genuinely bad at moral judgment—biased, self-deceived, tribal, and far more interested in promoting our own status than in discovering the truth. We exaggerate our virtue and inflate the faults of others. We mistake outrage for righteousness. We are not impartial referees of the moral life; we are players calling fouls on the other team. In Glass Houses, Brennan defends the neglected virtue of human grace: not merely forgiving after the fact, but declining to appraise others’ character in the first place. Grace means extending goodwill as a default—treating people well without first auditing whether they deserve it. It resists the urge to publicize every fault or turn disagreement into condemnation. Grace is not indifference or navet. It recognizes something deeper: Flawed people judging other flawed people should proceed with humility. Given our cognitive limits and our incentives to posture and punish, restraint is often wiser than righteousness. Drawing on moral psychology and political philosophy, Glass Houses argues that grace is not weakness but strength—a disciplined refusal to weaponize moral certainty. In a world eager to throw stones, Brennan urges us to remember the fragility of our own glass houses—and to set the stones down.

Which kind of capitalism is best? In this provocative and accessible book, two leading philosophers take up the question from opposing but overlapping perspectives. Jason Brennan defends a more laissez-faire, classically liberal vision of capitalism—one that prizes economic rights and cautions against the failures of government intervention. Richard Arneson argues for a more interventionist, social democratic approach—one that sees robust redistribution and regulation as essential to justice and human flourishing. Rather than a tired “for and against” exchange, Brennan and Arneson begin from shared values—reducing poverty and advancing human welfare—and then press their disagreements about how best to get there. Along the way, they wrestle with questions of market and government failure, the role of rights, the weight of equality, and the trade-offs between growth, justice, inclusion, and sustainability. The result is a genuine debate: two powerful and plausible visions of capitalism, each admitting uncertainty, acknowledging critics, and refusing to caricature the other side. Debating Capitalism is an invitation to think more clearly, argue more honestly, and imagine more carefully what kind of economic order we should build together.

The “particularity problem” challenges arguments for a duty to vote by showing that the reasons usually offered—promoting the common good, avoiding free-riding, doing one’s part—can be satisfied by many alternative actions. We argue that this response does not always dissolve duties. Some actions remain obligatory even when substitutable, because cultural practices single them out as canonical expressions of underlying reasons. Celebrating birthdays is one example. Our culture fixes birthdays as the focal way of showing love and recognition, and parents who ignore them fail in their role, even if they meet the same ends in other ways. We argue that voting functions similarly.

Despite the avalanche of facts that Jason Brennan brings against the average voter and his skepticism of deliberation among ordinary citizens, the resulting attack on democracy turns out to be surprisingly limited. In the end, Brennan concedes, democracy is still the best regime around, no matter how flawed, and we have a duty to fix it. He also concedes that deliberation among randomly selected citizens is going to be part of the solution. Landemore argues that Brennan’s solution, however—a combination of randomly selected mini-publics designing questionnaires and a weighted vote system based on these questionnaires—is still too elitist, empirically inattentive to existing experiments in deliberative democracy, and unlikely to work.

This chapter returns to the ideal of people’s power and argues that democracies as we know them are dubiously democratic. Most ordinary citizens, in the United States certainly but in other advanced democracies as well, have little deliberative input into the laws and policies that rule their lives. The chapter traces the problem to fundamental design mistakes made in the eighteenth century when elections, an oligarchic selection mechanism, rather than the traditional lot of Classical Athens, were privileged as the method for choosing representatives. This original design mistake explains in part why contemporary democracies are, and indeed have always been, dysfunctional. This chapter also makes the case for open democracy, a new paradigm of democracy that takes more seriously the core ideal of people’s power and in which elections are no longer a central institutional principle.

Jason Brennan responds to Landemore’s main argument in _Debating Democracy_. He argues that the proof the Hong–Page Theorem is largely question-begging, and that the concept of “diversity” in the proof does not correspond to the concept as used by democratic theorists. He argues that Landemore must accept that voter knowledge matters, but doing so prevents her from being able to say democracy always outperforms democracy. He also argues that democracy performs as well as it does because it tends to come together with liberalism. He finally offers additional criticisms of open democracy.

This chapter addresses theoretical and empirical objections that critics have presented against the epistemic argument for democracy presented in the previous chapter (the argument from collective wisdom). The objections this chapter addresses include those based on the average voter’s alleged incompetence and systematic biases, as well as those that challenge the relevance of deductive arguments for democracy. The metrics by which political scientists and economists claim to measure voters’ incompetence are elitist and the argument “garbage in, garbage out” on which people like Brennan rely to criticize democracy fail to take into account the fact that collective intelligence is not a linear function of individual competence but an emergent property that crucially depends on group properties, including cognitive diversity, and thus not captured by Brennan’s purely individualistic framework. Inferring from individual input to collective outcomes is thus neither empirical nor demonstrative. Systematic biases would be, and often are, a problem for democracy but not more than for oligarchies of knowers. In a free and diverse public sphere the public and its democratic representatives have more opportunities to debias themselves, at least over time, than small groups of homogenously thinking elites.

This chapter argues against both oligarchic and majoritarian rule by knowers, or epistocracies. Such regimes are necessarily blind to certain interests and perspectives, rendering them epistemically inferior to fully inclusive democracies over the long term. The chapter first consider the classic defense of Chinese-style epistocracy by Daniel Bell and then turns to the more puzzling rule by the knowledgeable 95% defended by Jason Brennan. While Bell’s Chinese model is much more vulnerable to epistemic failure due to the blindspots it structurally builds in its decision-process, even Brennan’s majoritarian epistocracy takes the unjustifiable epistemic risk of silencing what could be the most relevant voices on crucial issues.

This chapter defends an epistemic argument for democracy, namely the argument that the rule of the many is better at aggregating knowledge and, in the version presented here, at producing better decisions than the rule of the few. This argument builds on the formal properties of two key democratic decision-making mechanisms of democracy, namely inclusive deliberation on equal grounds and majority rule with universal suffrage. Properly used in sequence and under the right conditions, these two mechanisms ensure that no information and viewpoint is ignored and maximize the cognitive diversity brought to bear on collective political problems and predictions. Building on existing formal results by Lu Hong and Scott Page, the chapter introduces the “Number Trumps Ability” theorem, which formalizes the intuition that many minds are smarter than just a few. Under the right conditions systems governed by democratic decision-procedures can be expected to deliver greater epistemic performance than less inclusive and egalitarian systems.

This chapter lays out a general theoretical case for democracy, specifically the kind of democracy that democratic theorists call “deliberative democracy,” which traces the legitimacy of laws and policies to the reasoned exchange of arguments among free and equal citizens. The chapter shows the benefits of distributing political decision-power in an inclusive and egalitarian manner, especially in the deliberative phase of the legislative process. The core idea is that many minds deliberating together are better than few when it comes to dealing with the uncertainty and complexity of the world and figuring out solutions that work for all within it.

This chapter argues that enlightened preference voting is likely to be superior to our current system. In enlightened preference voting, all citizens may vote. When they vote, they (1) register their preferences, (2) indicate their demographic categories, and (3) take a short test of basic, easily verifiable political knowledge. Afterward, all three sets of “data” are anonymized and made public. The government—and any decent political scientist or newspaper—can then calculate what a demographically identical public _would_ have supported if only everyone got a perfect score on the test.

In any functional democratic system, some decisions are left to experts (who may be overseen indirectly by the people), while others are directly in the hands of the people. How to allocate these decision rights is a persistent problem in democratic theory. This chapter argues that competence is a crucial criterion in deciding the question of who decides. Further, part of the solution to the persistent pathologies of democracy is to reduce the sphere of politics and also the sphere of political control. Certain issues, such as trade policy, immigration policy, central banking interest rates, who serves as district attorney or judge, and various kinds of regulation, should be kept out of democracy’s hands—for everybody’s own good.

Most people’s models of democracy do not match how democracies in fact perform or could be made to perform under realistic circumstances. They think citizens form their political affiliations on the basis of their beliefs and values. When citizens vote, they support politicians who will advance their favored ideas. In the end, democracies deliver, if not the will of the people, at least a compromise position among their separate wills. In contrast, Brennan will argue, the empirical work shows that most citizens lack any stable ideology or political beliefs, and their political affiliations are largely arbitrary. Their votes do not communicate their genuine support for different policies or values. Citizens are ignorant, misinformed, and tribalistic despite lacking firm beliefs. As a result, the more power we give them, the more we suffer the consequences. Whatever we say about democracy, we need to be realistic about how people behave.

Philosophers often try to “solve” democracy’s problems by arguing we need more and better democracy. They tend to think certain kinds of democratic systems could unleash the hidden “wisdom of the crowds.” Some defenders of democracy propose deliberative democracy and some extol the reliability of large groups. However, both ideas have limitations in the real world. This chapter objects to such arguments as they rely upon mistaken applications of certain mathematical theorems, or they end up retreating toward unrealistic ideals of how people _ought_ to behave. In effect, they say that democracy _would_ be wonderful if only people behaved the right way.

This chapter introduces the main topics of _Debating Democracy_. Brennan and Landemore agree that democracy should largely be judged by its results. However, they dispute whether the problems contemporary democracies face can be solved by increasing citizens’ involvement in politics or, instead, by limiting the scope of politics and experimenting with less democratic forms of governments. Brennan argues that voters in democracies are often ignorant, misinformed, or vote for their parties for tribalistic reasons rather than to advance their interests. He believes experts should make certain decisions and suggests experimenting with less democratic government. Landemore, on the other hand, believes the best decisions are made when everyone is involved. She promotes “open democracy” where all citizens have equal and far more substantive deliberative input than they do in contemporary democracies, in which citizens’ involvement is heavily constrained.

Public reason liberalism is a normative theory meant to adjudicate citizens’ conflicting beliefs about the right and the good. However, it rests upon controversial and likely mistaken empirical claims about voter psychology and voter knowledge. In political science, there are two major paradigms—populism and realism—about the relationship between voters’ beliefs and political outcomes. Realism holds that most citizens lack the kinds of beliefs and attitudes which public reason liberals believe are normatively significant. If so, then most citizens lack the kinds of ideological disputes which public reason liberalism is supposed to adjudicate. Worse, most citizens lack the kinds of normatively significantly beliefs upon which public justification must rest.

Semiotic objections to markets hold that buying and selling certain things – for example, sex, body parts, votes, surrogacy services – expresses that those things are fungible with money, which has only profane value. This article offers a more fundamental challenge to semiotic critiques of market. We will argue that market exchanges do not have the univocal negative social meaning that friends and foes of markets claim they have. Instead, we argue that money also has a positive public or social meaning because it is a mechanism to achieve a profound value, namely, positive liberty.

The humane and workable solution to global poverty is freedom. We can help the poor—and help ourselves at the same time—by tearing down our walls and trade barriers. Both justice and good economic sense require that we open borders, free up international trade, and respect the economic liberties of people around the world. What global justice requires is an open world. Most books on global justice see the world’s poor as little more than mouths to be fed. Their authors see justice as a zero-sum game: some must lose so that others may win. They rely on controversial moral intuitions and outdated or mistaken economic beliefs about economic growth. Van der Vossen and Brennan present global justice as a positive-sum game: the methods that can best help the world’s poor also help everyone else. Using mainstream development economics and common-sense moral intuitions, they argue that instead of treating the world’s poor as helpless victims who must be rescued by the rich, we should remove the coercive limits that keep people poor in the first place. We should offer people the freedom to work, produce, trade, and migrate, in ways that help better themselves and others who are willing to cooperate with them. In Defense of Openness offers a new approach to global justice: we don’t need to “save” the poor. The poor will save themselves, if only we would get out of their way and let them.

A bracingly provocative challenge to one of our most cherished ideas and institutions Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us—it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy. But Jason Brennan says they are all wrong. In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short. Furthermore, no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and exercising political power does most of us little good. On the contrary, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse—more irrational, biased, and mean. Given this grim picture, Brennan argues that a new system of government—epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable—may be better than democracy, and that it's time to experiment and find out. A challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable, Against Democracy is essential reading for scholars and students of politics across the disciplines. Featuring a new preface that situates the book within the current political climate and discusses other alternatives beyond epistocracy, Against Democracy is a challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable.