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Estlund on epistocracy - a critique.md

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---
bibtex: @article{lippert2012estlund,
  title={Estlund on epistocracy: a critique},
  author={Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper},
  journal={Res Publica},
  volume={18},
  number={3},
  pages={241--258},
  year={2012},
  publisher={Springer}
}
---

Estlund on epistocracy: a critique

http://www.uio.no/english/research/interfaculty-research-areas/democracy/news-and-events/events/seminars/2011/papers-yale-2011/Yale-LippertRasmussen.pdf

TLDR: Estlund is right about epistemic democracy for the wrong reasons

A crucial ambition in David Estlund’s important book Democratic Authority is to defeat epistocracy and defend democratic authority, while conceding to Plato and Mill the proposition that knowledge of political issues is possible and that, in all likelihood, it is unequally distributed .... I offer a different argument for why greater expertise does not warrant greater political authority ... among the things epistocrats know might be the following fact: a situation in which political authority is equally distributed and non-optimal decisions, epistemically speaking, among those available are made is better than a situation in which epistocrats have greater political authority and make optimal selections from the worse set of feasible, political decisions given the epistocratic constitution ... My quarrel is with the direct inference from expertise to authority. (p1-2)

The Epistocratic argument:

  1. There are true, procedure-independent normative standards by which political decisions ought to be judged. (The truth claim)

  2. For any demos, it is true that there is a small group of people – the epistocrats – who know those normative standards better than others and, thus, know better what the decisions that conform to those standards are. (The privileged knowledge status claim)

  3. For any demos, if it is true that the epistocrats know those standards better than others etc., then these people should have political authority over others. (The authority claim)

  4. Thus, for any given demos, epistocrats should have political authority over others. (The epistocratic conclusion)

Estlund rejects premise 3 as an example of the expert/boss fallacy

The general acceptability criterion: “(N)o one has authority or legitimate coercive power over another without a justification that could be accepted by all qualified points of view” (Estlund 2008, p. 33).

appeals to the general acceptability criterion are not as effective in blocking the epistocratic argument as Estlund wants them to be. p17