Politics Must Get it Right Sometimes: Reply to Muirhead

ABSTRACT

In “The Politics of Getting It Right,” Russell Muirhead has contended in this journal that democracy is valuable because of its procedural legitimacy rather than because of the epistemic values of “getting things right.” However, pure procedural theories of legitimacy fail. Thus, if democracy is legitimate, it will have to be due partly to its (potential) epistemic advantages. There are two ways of thinking about these advantages. One approach, associated most prominently with David Estlund and Hélène Landemore, equates the epistemic advantages of democracy with its ability to approximate a procedure-independent standard of correctness. The other, associated with Fabienne Peter, explicitly rejects that standard. Peter’s view, however, is incapable of answering challenges against pure procedural theories of legitimacy.

Keywords:

• democratic legitimacy
• epistemic democracy
• epistemic proceduralism
• procedure-independent standard of correctness

Notes

1. I will also set aside Muirhead’s interesting discussion of the epistemic function of partisanship. I will just mention in passing that the epistemic function of partisanship can be a valuable contribution to the literature in epistemic democracy as it explores the epistemic functions of actual democracies.

2. There is an interpretative question of whether Longino thinks there is a procedure-independent standard of what counts as good science.