Abstract
Recently Robert B. Talisse has put forth a socio-epistemic justification of liberal democracy that he believes qualifies as a public justification in that it purportedly can be endorsed by all reasonable individuals. In avoiding narrow restraints on reasonableness, Talisse argues that he has in fact proposed a justification that crosses the boundaries of a wide range of religious, philosophical and moral worldviews and in this way the justification is sufficiently pluralistic to overcome the challenges of reasonable pluralism familiar from Rawls. The fascinating argument that Talisse furthers is that when cognitively functional individuals reflect on some of their most basic epistemic commitments they will come to see that, in virtue of these commitments, they are also committed to endorsing key liberal democratic institutions. We argue that the socio-epistemic justification can be reasonably rejected on its own terms and thus fails as a public justification approach. This point is made by illustrating the significance of deep epistemic disagreements in liberal democracies.
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Notes
Michael Lynch uses this term and offers a thoroughgoing analysis of the concept of deep epistemic disagreements (see Michael Lynch 2010) Our definition is more crude than the one employed by Michael Lynch and does not rely on the specifics of this interesting discussion.
In his illuminating discussion of pragmatist justifications for political liberalism, Festenstein notes the following worry about Talisse’s argument: ‘there is immense scope for reasonable disagreement about what counts as epistemic vice and about what measures should be taken to curtail it.’ (Festenstein 2010, p. 37). So, reasonable individuals may disagree about which institutions or practices, democratic or not, best further epistemic aims. This is similar to the objection we present, though the context in which it appears in Festenstein’s paper appears to be different. Moreover, Festenstein does not really explain why, when everyone is assumed to be reasonable, there can be such reasonable disagreement nonetheless.
We borrow this term from Alvin Plantinga (1981)
Michael Lynch(2010;2013) discusses a related distinction between basic and non-basic epistemic methods, or fundamental and derivative epistemic principles. A method is basic when it cannot be ‘justified solely by appeal to any other method’, otherwise it is non-basic, and ‘a principle is fundamental when it is about such a [basic] method and derivative when it is not’ (Lynch 2010, p. 264). The two sets of distinctions are cross-cutting. Formal epistemic norms can be either basic or non-basic and the same goes for substantive epistemic norms. For further discussion on the distinction between fundamental and derivative epistemic principles see also Boghossian (2006).
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Jønch-Clausen, K., Kappel, K. Social Epistemic Liberalism and the Problem of Deep Epistemic Disagreements. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 371–384 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9523-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9523-y