Sustaining democracy: folk epistemology and social conflict

Abstract

When political philosophers ask whether there is a philosophical justification for democracy, they are most frequently concerned with one of two queries. The first has to do with the relative merits of democracy as compared with other regimes. The second query has to do with the moral bindingness of democratic outcomes. But there is a third query we may be engaging when we are looking for a philosophical justification of democracy: what reason can be given to democratic citizens to pursue democratic means of social change when they are confronted with a democratic result that seems to them seriously objectionable or morally intolerable? In this paper I develop an epistemological response to the third query. The thesis is that we have sufficient epistemological reasons to be democrats. The epistemological norms that we take ourselves to be governed by can be satisfied only under certain social conditions, and these social conditions are best secured under democracy.

Keywords:

• democracy
• epistemology
• folk epistemology
• political justification

Notes

1. For a recent and sustained example of this line of investigation, see Estlund (2008).

2. This thought, I take it, is what lies behind much of the more radical pro-life rhetoric in the United States, where not only is legalized abortion regularly referred to as a holocaust, and women’s health clinics called ‘death camps,’ but also citizens are asked what they would have done were they citizens in Nazi Germany. One Focus on the Family tract embraces illegal ‘rescue’ action at abortion clinics, asking ‘What would you have done as a citizen of Germany in World War II? The Nazi extermination camps were legal. Would you have broken your country’s unjust laws in order to protect millions of people marked for death?’ The idea is that laws permitting abortion are so plainly unjust that any government that enacts such laws is ipso facto not authoritative, and so there are no moral reasons to obey.

3. It is worth noting that when Rawls confronts this difficulty, he simply declares that ‘under reasonably favorable conditions,’ the values associated with democracy will ‘normally outweigh’ the other values that may conflict (Rawls 2005, pp. 146, 155, 209).

4. For coverage of the debates concerning evidentialism, see Conee and Feldman (2004), Dougherty (2011), Aikin (2011), and the essays collected in Feldman and Warfield (2010).

5. Compare Goldberg’s illuminating analysis of thoughts of the kind ‘if that were true, I would have heard about it by now’ (Goldberg 2010, ch. 6).

6. See also Dworkin (2006) for similar proposals.