The Role of ‘Epistemic’ Considerations in Democratic Theory. Truth, Freedom and Equality as Grounds for Political Legitimacy.

This paper proposes a critical analysis of an increasingly influential strand of contemporary democratic theory, whose distinctive feature is the claim that democratic institutions are the most adequate means for approximating an ‘epistemic’ standard of normative truth (Cf. Estlund 2008, Landemore and Elster 2012). Originally intended as a way of responding to the classical ‘technocratic’ critique of democracy, according to which ordinary people are not competent enough to make good political decisions, my contention is that this strand of thought ends up reintroducing a ‘technocratic’ conception of politics at the heart of democratic theory itself. The reason is that it implicitly assumes that the standards by which political outcomes are to be judged are not themselves open to question, from which it follows that politics is essentially a matter of ‘problem-solving’ and administration. As a consequence, ‘epistemic’ theories of democracy pervert the meaning of the core values on which democracy is based: freedom is reduced to the idea of a “normative consent” citizens are morally required to grant to what is objectively right, while equality is treated as an instrumental value detached from the idea of an equal intrinsic worth of human beings. In the light of this analysis, I suggest that a more appropriate way for responding to the ‘technocratic’ critique of democracy is to challenge the underlying conception of politics on which it is based. Rather than being a matter of approximating an independent standard of normative truth, democracy only really makes sense if the definition of the ultimate ends of political action is part of what politics is about. This lays the ground for a purely procedural defense of democratic institutions, as a means for enabling citizens to govern themselves equally and freely within a context of normative indeterminacy.