Reconsidering Rawls: Is Public Reason Truly Deliberative? — Epoche B2
The Epistocracy Charge Misses; Gaus's Does Not The complaint and where it is aimed A recurring complaint against Rawls's public reason is that it privileges some citizens epistemically [1] . Public reason, the complaint runs, requires arguments cast in a particular register and resting on a particular body of accepted fact; citizens at home in that register are advantaged; the ideal of deliberation among free and equal persons is therefore compromised by an unacknowledged hierarchy of knowers. Put strongly, the charge is that Political Liberalism (1993) contains a strain of epistocracy — rule by those who know. This essay argues that the charge, so aimed, misses, and that the two books usually cited alongside Rawls in these discussions show why. David Estlund's Democratic Authority (2008 [2] ) supplies the definition of epistocracy that makes the charge assessable, and on that definition public reason is not a candidate. Gerald Gaus's Justificatory Liberalism (1996 [3] ) contains an objection in the same neighbourhood which does land, and which is not about epistemic content at all. The question this essay answers is therefore not whether public reason is too restrictive — a question worked over at length elsewhere — but whether the specific worry about epistemic privilege identifies a genuine defect, and if so, where the defect sits. What Rawls's requirement is a requirement on Public reason, in Political Liberalism , governs how citizens and officials argue about constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. The duty of civility asks that positions on such questions be supportable by political values that others, holding different comprehensive doctrines, could reasonably be expected to accept. Rawls does say something about evidence, and it is worth stating accurately because the complaint usually rests on a misdescription of it. Public reason, on his account, draws on presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense, and on the methods and conclusions of science when these are not controversial . The qualification is the opposite of what the complaint attributes to him. It does not install a scientific consensus as authoritative over dissenters; it withholds contested science from the public forum precisely so that the forum need not adjudicate it. A citizen who disputes a contested finding is not thereby placed outside public reason, because the contested finding was never inside it. The requirement is also a requirement on justifications , not on persons. It can be applied to an argument by anyone, and passing or failing it confers no standing. This will matter in a moment. Estlund's definition, and the test it yields Estlund's Democratic Authority is the book to consult here because it takes epistocracy seriously enough to define it and then to reject it. Epistocracy is the doctrine that political authority should be allocated on the basis of superior knowledge: those who know better should rule, or should have weightier votes. Estlund's own project is to defend a view on which democratic procedures do have epistemic value, so he needs a principled reason for stopping short of epistocracy, and he supplies one. His device is a requirement of qualified acceptability: the justification of political authority must be acceptable from every qualified point of view. Applied to epistocracy, this yields what he calls the demographic objection. Any workable criterion for identifying the knowers will pick out a group with a particular social and demographic profile, and reasonable citizens can object to that criterion without being unreasonable. So even if some people do know better, no acceptable procedure exists for handing them authority on that basis. Now apply the definition to public reason. Does it allocate authority by knowledge? It gives no one a vote, an office, or a veto. It does not rank citizens. It says that when political power is exercised over fundamental matters, the exercise must be defensible in certain terms — and the same terms bind everyone, including the most expert. An epistemic ranking that confers no authority is not epistocracy; it is not even a ranking, since the requirement attaches to arguments and arguments are not citizens. The residual thought is that a requirement of this kind will be easier for some citizens to meet, so that its effect is a de facto hierarchy. That is true and it is true of every argumentative standard, including the ones the complaint would put in public reason's place. It is a claim about unequal capacity to participate, which is a serious matter, and it is a different claim from the one the charge makes. Estlund's own framework marks the difference cleanly: his objection to epistocracy is that no criterion for identifying knowers can be acceptable to all, and public reason offers no such criterion because it is not trying to identify anyone. Where the real objection lies Gaus's Justificatory Liberalism reaches the same neighbourhood from a different direction and arrives somewhere Rawls has not answered. Gaus's underlying epistemology is that whether a belief is justified for a person depends on that person's own system of beliefs and inferential commitments — on what would survive their reflection, not on what would survive an idealised reflector's. Carried into political theory, this produces a demanding test: a coercive law is publicly justified only if each person subject to it has, within their own epistemic and evaluative system, sufficient reason to accept it. The important consequence is structural, and it concerns what kind of agreement public justification requires. Rawls's model is consensus: there is one political conception of justice, and reasonable citizens affirm it, each from within their own comprehensive doctrine but all affirming the same conception, expressed in shared political values. Gaus's model is convergence: different citizens may support the same law for entirely diff