Review Article: Between Expertise and Fairness
| Author | Will Colish |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885109338005 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
review article
Between Expertise and Fairness
EJPT
Considering Epistemic Proceduralism
European Journal of Political Theory
9(1) 103–111
© The Author(s), 2010
Will Colish Centre de recherche en éthique de
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
l’Université de Montréal
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885109338005]
http://ejpt.sagepub.com
David Estlund Democratic Authority. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN:
978–0-691–12417–9 (hbk), 324 pp., $29.95
If we have to make a decision on something about which you know more than I, it would
be hard to resist your authority. After all, what do I know? Yet, I may (reasonably) object
to your superior knowledge and convince you that what matters is fairness, thinking we
will hold a vote. ‘Fine,’ you say, ‘let’s flip a coin.’ Having rejected the authority of your
knowledge, though resting my case on mere fairness, my efforts at democracy have been
foiled, and we still don’t have any authority to make a decision.
Such is a caricature of the theoretical exchange from which the thesis of Democratic
Authority emerges. In this impasse between rule-by-knowledge (epistocracy) and rule-by-
fairness (proceduralism), Estlund works his way through the efforts that keep this division
intact in their unjustified appeals to expertise or disingenuous claims of pure procedural-
ism. He exposes the impasse as a misleading fork in the road in order to reclaim democ-
racy’s epistemic value, and ultimately political authority. To this end, Estlund advances a
number of theoretical tools – some familiar, some novel – to ground his claim to the politi-
cal authority of democracy. This book stakes its ground in their creative (re)deployment
that embodies Estlund’s version of democratic authority, epistemic proceduralism (EP).
The import of this text is somewhat concealed behind the analytical bush-clearing that
occupies a good portion of book. For all its technical splendour, the text nevertheless
speaks to some very real and thus far unanswered intuitions about everyday politics, such as
why observance of poor democratic decisions is morally supported or why experts cannot
always lay claim to authority. Political authority is and has been confronted and challenged
in various contexts and no examples need be rehearsed here. It is a concept that is about as
perennial as it gets, not only for democratic theorists but for citizens, communities or any
other kind of political entity; it does us well then to understand the moral arguments that
may be mobilized in its favour and which circumscribe its bounds.
Although Estlund’s objective is far from original in political philosophy, it is seated
at a table with other approaches that tend to paint the image of democracy as politically
dynamic and multilevelled, expressed in a broad spectrum of processes and strategies,
rather than in a barefaced system of government – it is this global perspective of demo-
Contact address: Will Colish, Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de
Montréal (CRÉUM), Montréal, Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada.
Email: willcolish@gmail.com
103
European Journal of Political Theory 9(1)
cratic authority that is a noteworthy nuance. Under these lights, Estlund is able to make
space for and give a defence of ‘sharp, disruptive, and even informally suppressive political
activity [folded] into a broadly deliberative approach to democratic politics, recovering a
crucial part of democracy’s moral promise’ (pp. 204–5). Yet, against this Millian rendering
of the internal dynamics that nourish and structure the self-government of the people, the
rhetorical question still nags, for what good is all of this if democracy simply does it wrong?
Democracy characterized by epistemic proceduralism is intended to put this worry to rest
by representing the people’s political aptitude to get it right, and via the ingredients of this
particular arrangement democratic authority is captured.
Authority
The authority that Estlund hangs on democracy’s epistemic tendencies is of a distinct,
moral nature. It is moral in the plain sense that it is a justificatory account of a govern-
ment’s ability to require or forbid actions of its citizens (p. 2). It is distinct – and this
appears to be the real ingenuity of the book – in that it renders democracy’s authority
through a hybridization of two forms of authority common in moral philosophy. Although
Estlund does not use these terms, he nonetheless seems to appeal to the following claim.
Democracy bears 1) a certain element of instrumental authority, which is granted justified
on its achieving desirable political ends, and 2) a form of consent authority, which is granted
justified on its receiving the consent of those subject to authority (although, this latter is
delivered through a unique rendition of nullified consent, which I will treat below).
These two species of authority represent the poles of political theory that Estlund is
working through more generally, epistocracy and pure proceduralism. Epistocracy en-
shrines the pursuit of truth in political matters, and is thus given accord on its ability to
attain it. As such, it operates as an instrument to the realization of preordained political
goods. What matters is getting things right. Proceduralism, as captured by Estlund, rejects
teleological structuration of political activity. Truth is perceived as halting politics rather
than being offered as a desirable objective for it. The grounds on which proceduralism rests
its authority are fair processes of participation that give expression to the Rousseauian ideal
of making participants both subjects and authors of the law, and to which an ephemeral
notion of consent is attached (and continually reproduced). By contrast, the concern here
is to make politics a fair game. Estlund’s result from negotiating between these two poles
is a kind of Goldilocks version of democracy as a middle ground. The first step toward this
end is to overcome the initial plausibility that each version of authority offers.
Epistocracy
The engine that drives intuitions about epistocracy is the pursuit of truth. Medical care,
aircraft design, cinematography, etc. – these...
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