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ABSTRACT
Jason Brennan’s recent epistemic argument for epistocracy relies on the assumption that voter competence requires knowledge of economics and political science. He conjectures that people who would qualify as competent are mostly white, upper-middle- to upper-class, educated, employed men, who know better how to promote the interests of the disadvantaged than the disadvantaged themselves. My paper, first, shows that this account of voter competence is too narrow and, second, proposes a modified account of this concept. Brennan mistakenly reasons as though it is obvious that socially disadvantaged and oppressed people, by virtue of lacking sufficient knowledge of political science and economics, do not belong on an epistocratic council. This is because there is another way of being competent: possessing first-personal experience and knowledge unique to (and acquired through) disadvantaged or oppressed situatedness. Once voter competence is characterized accurately and more holistically, epistocracy’s problematic implications of privileging already dominant genders, races, and classes, which characterize Brennan’s account, no longer arise.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to David Estlund, whose mentorship and guest seminar at Stanford gave me the idea to write on this topic and allowed me to develop the best version of this paper. I am also grateful to Juliana Bidadanure, Mikayla Kelley, Taylor Madigan, Barry Maguire, Milan Mossé, Wendy Salkin, Cesar Valenzuela-Marquez, and Adam Zweber for their kind and helpful comments on various drafts of the paper. In addition, I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Manchester Centre for Political Theory conference in 2020, the Brighton Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics conference in 2021, and the 2021 Workshop on Testimonial Injustice and Trust hosted by University College Dublin, where I received invaluable feedback on my work on epistocracy and standpoint theory.
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Notes
1. Plato [c. 375 BC] (Citation1997, V.473c11–d6) famously writes in the Republic: ‘Unless (…) philosophers become kings in the cities or those whom we now call kings and rulers philosophize truly and adequately and there is a conjunction of political power and philosophy (…) there can be no cessation of evils (…) for cities nor, I think, for the human race.’
2. Brennan (Citation2016, 14) himself defines ‘epistocracy’ as ‘a political regime (…) [where] political power is formally distributed according to competence, skill, and the good faith to act on that skill.’ This definition is deliberately vague so as to encompass several possible forms of epistocracy Brennan (Citation2016, 204–222) discusses: values-only voting, restricted suffrage, plural voting, enfranchisement lottery, universal suffrage with epistocratic veto, government by simulated oracle. Some, but not all of these forms, involve deliberation.
3. See also Brennan (Citation2011, 703–10).
4. This list of things one would have to know or be aware of in order to count as ‘politically competent’ is not exhaustive, Brennan might say, but it’s the kind of heuristic the reader needs in order to understand what he means by this term.
5. I do not want to contest the claim that belonging to a systematically oppressed group is positively correlated with poor knowledge of political science and economics. This claim has been supported by work in sociology, psychology, and education (see, e.g. Verba et al. Citation1993; Delli Carpini & Keeter 1996; Prior and Lupia Citation2008; Abrajano 2010). Rather, I want to show that knowledge of political science, economics, and related fields is not all that the notion of political competence should track and that such an account of political competence misses other kinds of knowledges relevant to political decision-making.
6. Epistocracy has been critiqued in an epistemic way, through the claim that suffrage restricted to the experts would not yield better or more correct results than universal suffrage (Estlund Citation2003, Citation2008). Epistocracy has also been critiqued on non-epistemic grounds of anti-paternalism or procedural fairness, claiming that epistocracy seems incompatible with a liberal and egalitarian society
7. For the purposes of this paper, I define ‘socio-economic disadvantage’ as disadvantage related to family wealth, income, education, and geographic location, relative to other members of one’s society. Next, I define ‘oppression’ after CitationYoung, [1990] 2011, 5–6) as ‘the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms (…) [that are] systematically reproduced in major economic, political, and cultural institutions.’
8. There might be still other ways of being politically competent. I do not claim that the two ways of being politically competent I identify are jointly sufficient, but only that they are both necessary.
9. An epistocratic council, which can take various shapes under various forms of epistocracy, is the collective of people who partake in political decision-making.
10. As Myers and Mendelberg (Citation2013, 701) note, the content of a political deliberation ‘can take many forms, such as evidence, reasons, or questions, and more controversially, personal testimony, storytelling, or expressions of emotion.’ Most theorists of political deliberation agree that the deliberation has to end at some point with an individually cast vote (Cohen Citation1989, 348). The ideal outcomes of a deliberation from the perspective of individual votes are: knowledge gain, change in attitude, satisfaction with the procedure and its products, increased tolerance for opposing views, and a feeling of political efficacy (Myers and Mendelberg Citation2013, 704–9).
11. This is not to say that my argument cannot be extended to non-deliberative forms of epistocratic political decision-making. I simply will not attempt to do this here.
12. The claim that one’s socio-economic location is relevant to what one is in a position to know can arguably be first found in the historical-materialist writings of Karl Marx (1867), Fredrich Engels (1932), and Georg Lukács (1923) in the context of the analysis of the influence of material labor on one’s broader existential condition (Toole Citation2019, 601). It can also be found in the writings of CitationDu Bois ([1903] 2016).
13. It is worth noting that empirical findings concerning the ‘racial gap’ in political knowledge, however, have been widely challenged. Some have argued that surveys about political knowledge tend to be perceptually biased and poorly designed in ways that tend to favor the experiences of white Americans (Aldrich and McKelvey (Citation1977); King and Wand (Citation2007); Abrajano Citation2015). Without evaluating either the merits of research affirming the racial gap in political knowledge or the merits of research denying that such a gap exists, the sheer plausibility of this racial gap, and hence the plausibility of epistemic disadvantages of the socially and economically disadvantaged, poses a challenge to the claim that these subjects are epistemically privileged in ways relevant to political decision-making.
14. In §6 I will return to the challenge of weighing the epistemic privileges and disadvantages against one another.
15. This is not to say, of course, that all oppressed subjects automatically have these epistemic advantages. In addition to being in a disadvantaged or oppressed socio-economic location, obtaining these epistemic advantages requires individual reflection and collective consciousness raising (Hartsock Citation1983; Jaggar Citation2004; Anderson Citation2015).
16. For a discussion of combining epistocratic authority with the ability of citizens to act according to values that are in the minority or not understood by the majority, see Jeffrey (Citation2018, 412–432).
17. Relatedly, there is the question of how to come up with a reliable and ethical way of identifying such citizens for the purpose of including some of them in an epistocratic council.
18. This claim is related to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, according to which (in its simplified version), so long as each voter is at least 51% likely to vote correctly, adding more voters increases the probability that the majority decision is correct.
19. There are multiple forms of epistocracy which could in principle have a deliberative component to it: restricted suffrage, enfranchisement lottery, and (arguably) weighted voting (also known as government by simulated oracle). Brennan himself makes the contentious statement about the probable demographic discrepancies of passing a political competence (voter qualification) test in the context of restricted suffrage epistocracy or what I have been calling an epistocratic council. I will therefore confine the discussion in this section to this form of epistocracy.
20. For simplicity, I will assume that whoever deliberates (whether the entire population or its small fraction) is also allowed to vote, and I will put aside the issue of deciding between this scenario and one in which the entire population deliberates, but only a fraction of the population votes.