Most academics know some version of the critique of elite rule, administrative power, and centralized regulation by experts. Hannah Arendt called bureaucracy the “rule of No Man;” Michel Foucault described the overlap of legislative power, knowledge-production, and the apparatus of discipline and control; Iris Marion Young defended simple street activism against the demand that political participation meet elaborate standards of reasonableness in the name of pluralism and in so doing laid the groundwork for current theories of agonistic democracy like Chantal Mouffe; Roberto Unger suggested that we ought to embrace democratic destabilization, experimentalism, and a radical institutional creativity belied by the supposed necessity of expert judgments; Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have diagnosed the relationship between risk-aversion and governmental responsibility for emergency management as a modern form of legitimacy that both generates hazards and takes responsibility for managing them. Other criticisms came from conservative circles: Friedrich Hayek, Michael Oakeshott, and even Antonin Scalia.
Phillip Tetlock’s work on expertise is very illuminating here: in some fields, the avowed experts’ predictions actually are no better (and sometimes worse!) than a coin flip. That’s why David Estlund criticized the epistocratic tendency to ignore the systematic biases that underwrite invidious comparisons between evaluations of competence and incompetence in his book Democratic Authority.
And yet, some matters of expertise are unavoidable. David Estlund called these “primary bads”: war, famine, economic collapse, political collapse, epidemic, and genocide. In some cases, increased participation decreases the risk of such catastrophes: literacy and universal suffrage decrease the risk of famine, for instance. ”No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” Amartya Sen wrote in Development as Freedom, because democratic governments ”have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes.” Yet democracies still go to war and face economic crises (if not yet collapse) and the temptation is always there to imagine a system that will decrease the likelhood of such events.
The standard line is that democracies must keep experts “on tap, but not on top.” But consider a common example that Steven Maloney and I articulated in our paper “Foresight, Epistemic Reliability and the Systematic Underestimation of Risk:”
all citizens are affected by the Federal Reserve funds target rate (the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans to cover capital reserve requirements) as it ultimately determines the availability of credit and thus the balance between economic growth, inflation, and unemployment. Most experts agree that the range of viable options for this rate is limited. Further, they agree that direct or representative democratic control of the rate would encourage non-optimal outcomes, including price bubbles that could lead to economic collapse. As a result, decisions on the target rate, which affect every citizen, are nonetheless denied to the public. Some citizens thus argue that the Federal Reserve ought then to be abolished as illegitimate. [These] citizens charge that members of the Federal Reserve Board, who are drawn from the management of a few investment banks, allow systematic biases for their home institutions to color their decisions… [I]t makes (1) findings of fact (2) in an exclusive and closed manner that (3) have coercive effects on citizens because (4) democratic decision-making would lead to cataclysmic primary bads….
Now, it is amusing to point to the financial crisis of 2008 and argue that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent economic collapse. But though the crisis was and remains severe, the Federal Reserve actually played a major and undemocratic role in preventing a true collapse. David Runciman’s recent piece in the London Review of Books makes a similar point:
When democracies are in serious trouble, elections always come at the wrong time. Maynard Keynes, the posthumous guru of the current crisis, made this point in the aftermath of the First World War, and again in the early 1930s. When something really momentous is at stake, the last thing you need is democratic politicians trawling for votes. Keynes readily accepted that democracies were far better at renewing themselves than the supposedly more efficient dictatorships. He just wished they wouldn’t try to do it when they were struggling to stop the world descending into chaos.
Matthew Yglesias discussed the implications of the Federal Reserve for Progressives early last year:
No public institution can or should be truly independent of the political process. The Supreme Court is an independent branch of government, and rightly so. But its decisions are subject to hot political debate, and the nomination of judges to sit on the high court is considered an important presidential power. This, too, is as it should be. The assumption that monetary policy is too important to hold central bankers accountable through the political process should have come to an end along with the illusory great moderation.
Perhaps he is right; but perhaps politicizing the Fed will have the same de-legitimizing impact that politicizing the Court has had, which could be dangerous for an institution whose only power is its capacity to make credible counter-cyclical commitments.
Too often, we have the tendency to reduce these questions into a battle between “democrats” and “elitists.” But there are few serious radical democrats who advocate the dissolution of the administrative state, let alone the liberal rights that restrict majoritarian rule.
Objections to elite status and epistemic privilege more often reflect a kind of partianship about which experts to respect, as a proxy for in-group solidarity. It is difficult not to reduce matters of scientific expertise and superstition to in-group/out-group tribalism: after all, as much as I respect the opposition to intelligent design in public schooling, there is little reason to believe it has important implications for biology curricula, and it also has massive public support in many school districts. A pure democracy would allow the people to set their own standards.
We all fear some out-group, whether it be the white supremacists’ fear of non-white incursions, or the secularists’ fear of theological domination. Many people without a college degree resent the wage premium and social status associated with it; many people with a college degree resent the democratic power of the uneducated and the pandering they receive by politicians and media. Regardless of education, there is the sense of irreconcilable differences. Many people believe that we do not inhabit the same world, even as our disputes over how to constitute our shared world erupt over a very narrow band of possible policies.
Who among us is not an elitist or a vanguardist in some sense? We all think we’re right and that we could run things better than the status quo. Even my fellow fallibilists think we’ve got a recipe for institutional humility that would enhance outcomes!
While there is much more to be said about the risks associated with advocating “experimental disenfranchisement,” I stand by the claim that we cannot ignore the widespread temptation towards disenfranchising ignorant citizens. We must at least acknowledge that the challenge is not simply coming from nowhere: Jason Brennan reflects a widespread, even common-sensical, fear of democracy: electorates too often seem to be ill-equipped to make good decisions.
My initial defense of Brennan was partly rooted in a respect for a fellow philosopher interested in epistemic problems in democracy, and partly rooted in a desire to defend norms of scholarly civility. After all, there’s a lot in The Ethics of Voting and “Polluting the Polls,” that I find challenging and useful. These are, to my mind, really hard and interesting problems: *should* the white supremacist vote if he recognizes that his motivations are based in racism? I honestly don’t think so, but I’d never deny him the right to do so. Certainly, the basic insight that the obligation to vote well may sometimes lead one to abstain seems indisputable. We can all ask ourselves: “Should I vote if I haven’t researched the candidates’ positions?”
Even this new paper of Brennan’s fits within the broad research agenda of epistemic institutional design. Apropos of the question about professional ethics, I’m kind of glad he wrote it, so that now we can criticize the argument itself rather than the crypto-disenfranchisement that Schliesser and others had accurately ascertained from the book (especially his use of the “pollution” metaphor for incompetent voters) while I was blinded by his explicit denial and purported libertarian credentials. Certainly, the real risks of disenfranchisement are already being realized without Brennan’s participation, and while they are more strictly partisan, they might someday find resources for rhetorical defense in Brennan’s research.
Brennan is hardly the first one to raise these questions, nor is he the first to suggest disenfranchising solutions. The most important kind of disenfranchisement is the liberal system of rights, after all: by restricting those issues which are proper matters of government intervention, liberal rights selectively disenfranchise voters on various important questions. Deliberative democrats have also tended to try to foreclose certain kinds of speech, whether it be theological speech or hate speech, in order to preserve a space where citizens can gather and reach reasonable agreements. The procedural democrats, in contrast, merely circumscribed what voters actually choose by turning important matters over to a purportedly-competent bureaucracy and reducing electoral partisanship to a few perpetually-unresolved cultural disagreements.
Following the Frankfurt School and especially the work of Max Weber, Claude Lefort, and Louis Althusser, there has been increasing attention to the ways in which these various strategies of disenfranchisement preserve elite rule. Notably, these critiques have tended to come from sociologically-oriented philosophers: scholars who noticed that attention to institutions and personalities might sometimes be needed to supplement arguments and ideas, and who returned to simple questions like “Who is speaking?” and “Who is being dominated?” It helps, also, to have strongly egalitarian moral intuitions, or to lack deference for expertise.
Starting with my dissertation, I have been interested in contemporary democratic theories of deliberation and public reason, focusing on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the growing power of the administrative state as a response to public ignorance. Arendt held that communities of like-minded individuals supply the foundations of political action, and that the increasing interconnection of governance and economic management is detrimental to this civic springboard. In addition to devoting their attention to the distribution of public goods, state institutions are obligated to supply a space and an opportunity for action and mutual engagement. A thick conception of democracy as isonomy requires that we have the opportunity to act consequentially with respect to the constitution of our shared world. In my view, institutions cannot duck substantive citizen participation in matters that concern our shared world, because one of the fundamental public goods that state institutions must “distribute” is the opportunity for civic engagement itself.
If Hannah Arendt is right, the history of political philosophy has been a long history of anti-isonomic disenfranchisement, ultimately grounded in the desire to defend elite thinkers like Socrates against the dangers of demagogues and their crowds. In this sense, fear of democracy is certainly rational, and all the more so when we see polls that demonstrate the indifference of the electorate to matters like environmental degradation, global warming, and economic inequality that threaten not just elites but the least advantaged. But it is not just.
By the way, I think Brennan is on to something when he argues that ”Restricted suffrage is about as unjust as voting age laws.” Perhaps the approximation of the two is off by several orders of magnitude, since most who are restricted by voting age laws will eventually be old enough to vote, but perhaps too we ought to experiment with lowering the voting age.
In my last post, I noted that Jason Brennan’s published work strongly opposed disenfranchisement in the ordinary sense, and I claimed that Eric Schiesser had misrepresented his words in order to derive that conclusion. Today, Eric Schliesser supplied an unpublished paper in which Brennan offers an argument for experimentation with competency tests to disenfranchise incompetent voters.
Eric, please accept my apology.
Here are some telling highlights from Brennan’s paper:
- In this paper, I argue that the practice of unrestricted, universal suffrage is unjust. Citizens have a right that any political power held over them should be exercised by competent people in a competent way. In realistic circumstances, universal suffrage violates this right. Since nearly all current democracies have universal suffrage, all current democracies are to that extent unjust.
- Restricted suffrage is about as unjust as voting age laws. It creates a ruling relationship between different classes of citizens based on a distinction that all reasonable people can accept in the abstract, but about which in practice there will be reasonable disagreement. In contrast, universal suffrage is about as unjust as a policy of enforcing jury decisions not matter what, even when we have conclusive grounds for thinking the jurors were incompetent or made their decisions incompetently. Thus, universal suffrage appears to be more intrinsically unjust than restricted suffrage.
- We do not know for sure whether voter examination systems would produce better or worse results than democracy universal suffrage. However, as I have argued, such systems are less intrinsically unjust than democracies with universal suffrage. And there are good reasons to think they will produce better results than democracy with universal suffrage, though there are reasons to worry they will not. Since we are unsure of the consequences, but have reason to expect them to be positive, we might experiment with voter examination systems on a relatively small scale at first. For instance, perhaps it would be best if one state in the U.S. tried the system first. (We would want to start with a relatively non-corrupt state, such as New Hampshire, rather than a corrupt state, such as Rhode Island.) If the experiment succeeds, then the rules could be scaled up. Similarly, consider that a few hundred years ago, we have little experience with democracy. Some advocated democracy in part because they believed it would tend to produce better and more just outcomes than monarchy. Others worried that democracies would be even more corrupt, or would collapse into chaos. In light of their lack of experience, a democrat might reasonably have argued in favor of experimenting with democracy on a relatively small scale, and then scaling up if the experiment succeeds.
Unlike a call for abstention from voting, a call for restricted suffrage is certainly support for disenfranchisement. I intend to respond to this paper in depth when it is published, but for now I will say that Brennan ought not to look to Burkean conservatism for practical objections to such experiments, but rather to Hayekian liberalism or Arendtian republicanism (cf. Brennan’s comments on civic virtue.) As always, the difference between micro and macro, small experiments and institutional redesigns, should not be overlooked. (No doubt Brennan is exploring territory similar to the prediction markets I discussed with Robin Hanson last year here and here.)
Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, 2011, page 5:
“The right to vote and the rightness of voting are different things. I do not argue that we should disenfranchise anyone. Though I think many voters are wrong to vote, I will not argue that anyone should prevent them from voting.” (Emphasis mine)
Eric Schliesser, New APPS, 1/3/12:
“The following tentative remarks were caused by reflection on the recent publication of books that (with qualification, of course) condone… disenfranchisement of ignorant voters.”
Jason Brennan, interviewed for a web article posted to The Daily Need, 4/15/2011:
“Since writing ‘The Ethics of Voting,’ I’ve actually become more sympathetic to the idea that maybe people should be formally excluded from voting,” Brennan said.
Of course, there are obvious dangers implicit in this view, as Brennan admits. Special interests, for example, might co-opt the voting process to exclude those who won’t support their agenda. Incumbents might bar voters who are likely to oust them from office. And literacy and comprehension tests have an ugly history dating back to the Jim Crow era, when they were used to disenfranchise African-Americans. That led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (Emphasis mine; the second paragraph is from The Daily Need article, but it is partly a gloss of Brennan’s book, page 108)
Eric Schliesser, New APPS, 1/4/12:
“When I wrote my original post, I had no idea that Brennan had already slipped down the slope of my not so ‘idle concern.’ As a community, we are politely witnessing (refereeing, reviewing, etc) the philosophic ground-clearing being done for –and the accompanying public marketing of — ideas that will justify a certain kind of elite rule. [...] (In the book he argues for a sub-set [of disenfranchisement], self-disenfranchisement.)” (Emphasis mine)
In his post, Schliesser argues that we ought to consider a professional code of conduct that bars sympathetic consideration of topics like not-voting or torture when that research threatens to supply “a rhetorical fig-leaf to let politicians and generals morally off-the-hook for atrocious deeds,” or research that assists the state in “annihilat[ing] enormous number[s] of innocent people deemed enemy by the government.”
Unfortunately, as stated, the proposition is self-refuting. Here’s why: Schliesser suggests we ought to consider restrictions on easily misunderstood work on moral taboos. His own post could easily be interpreted as a call for a ban on politically unpopular research. In fact, my friend Leigh Johnson interprets his question in this way: as an encouragement to ban “Forbidden Knowledge.” In the comments, Schliesser claims that this is a misreading, but Johnson is both a charitable and smart reader: if it’s possible for her to derive this interpretation of his words, it’s quite easy for them to be misused in this way by “politicians and generals” in search of a “rhetorical fig-leaf.” If Brennan’s book with its clear warning against disenfranchisement can be read as a call for disenfranchisement, then certainly Schliesser’s post can be read as a call for a ban!
In this sense, Schliesser’s post is precisely the sort of thing that would violate a code of professional ethics like the one he’s describing! The counterfactual is not: “What would the world look like if Brennan had not written his book and articles?” The relevant counterfactual is: “What would the world look like if there was a code of ethics that restricted research on moral taboos?” Such a world is more likely to involve illiberal restrictions than the ones that Schliesser seems to favor.
But I want to focus on the justifications he gives between two different kinds of restrictions: informal norms and codes of conduct. As he points out, there already are norms of collegiality, politeness, and prudence that govern our professional interactions, norms that Schliesser violates by reviewing and now attacking a book he has not read and using a likely-sensationalized web interview to justify his position after the fact.
What is added when these informal norms are codified? The clarity and transparency of codified norms at first seems promising, but wherever there is a code of conduct, there must also be a process for amending it. Since Schliesser advocates against elite rule, I assume he would want this process to be open to all members of the profession, as would I. The alternative is elite rule by the professional ethicists!
But what makes Schliesser think that our profession would adopt rules that outlawed research on torture or epistemic problems with democracy, given the fact that such research is popular and widely believed to be central to the profession’s mission? Here it’s important to note that while many professions have codes of conduct, there is little evidence that they actually bind members of the profession meaningfully because they are a isonomic: the professionals themselves make the rules. Finance professionals, lawyers, engineers, and research scientists are all bound by rules of conduct that are so laughably generic that these same groups are regularly caricatured as unprincipled and even evil, both by the public and by disillusioned members of the same professions.
Another reason to codify norms is because codification supplies an opportunity for an intervention: though informal norms will govern what sorts of rules are considered legitimate, it’s also possible that new rules will eventually be internalized as informal norms. This is obviously what Schliesser hopes: that by sneaking a politically radical provision into the rules banning research on moral taboos, we will finally internalize the informal norms that actually prevent such work. But this is certainly not a democratic hope: it is governance through trickery by a different set of elites.
Now, Schliesser is certainly right that the philosophy profession is driven by the demand to scrutinize all assumptions and follow arguments where they lead, and that some professional philosophers are so enamored of this ethos that they will adopt contrary positions and embrace iconoclasm over prudence.
However, these drives seem less dangerous than Schliesser supposes, especially because these drives are already limited by the existence of informal norms governing the profession, which dictate who is considered fit for jobs, tenure, and grants. I think it is likely that efforts to codify and enact punishments to fit these informal norms are more likely to harm than help, more likely to transform into a broad and toothless set of guidelines or into Johnson’s feared ban on “forbidden knowledge” than to successfully institute new moral taboos.
Perhaps, in part, research like that of Brennan and Alhoff is not justificatory but rather inspired by the fact that we already inhabit a world governed by “a certain kind of elite rule” and one where torture is condoned by the highest political authorities. Jason Brennan’s voting ethics is looking pretty good the day after the 2012 Iowa caucuses with democracy reduced to an adolescent joke: “Obama, Romney win Iowa caucuses; Santorum slips into #2 spot.” Someone has to formulate that argument, if only so that we can discover a winning refutation or design institutions that do not so easily suggest the argument’s conclusion to onlookers.
If we want to do research that combats the status quo of elite rule and torture, we must understand the arguments that currently justify it, or else fall victim to overuse of “Weak Man” argumentation and research that is irrelevant to contemporary needs. To ban discussion of the facts of our common existence is an absurd self-destruction of the profession, especially its most emancipatory traditions, in an attempt to save it.
