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Epistemic Responsibility and Democratic Justification

Robert B. Talisse: Democracy and Moral Conflict. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, 216 pp

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Notes

  1. To offer several emblematic examples, John Rawls appeals to a shared fund of public political values—citizens ought to be regarded free and equal, society should constitute a fair scheme of mutual cooperation, all citizens must enjoy constitutionally enshrined rights and liberties—that are ‘not easily overridden' (2001, 189) even by compelling comprehensive considerations. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson offer three basic principles that should regulate political processes (reciprocity, publicity, and accountability) and three comparable principles that should govern the content of policies (basic liberty, basic opportunity, and fair opportunity) (1996, 12). And Ronald Dworkin asserts that two principles, which embody the idea ‘that every human life is of intrinsic potential value and that everyone has a responsibility for realizing that value in his own life' (2006, 10), define the basis of human dignity that democracy is intended to enshrine.

  2. In charting his return to politics, Christian conservative Ralph Reed notes that earlier failures forced him ‘to turn inward for some self-cleansing and—at the risk of sounding like a Maoist—self-criticism' (2010, 42). This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the latter practice.

  3. Talisse’s claim is not that people do not embrace anti-democratic political positions; ‘rather, the view is that anti-democrats are not—and cannot be—proper believers.' (2009, 132). They are self-deluded epistemic agents to the extent that they maintain beliefs that run up against their epistemic self-understanding: their sense of themselves as committed to the truth of their beliefs, or to the desire for access to accurate information and good evidence.

  4. These core principles represent a refinement and generalisation of earlier epistemic justifications of democracy that Talisse has offered. Here, he more thoroughly defends these principles while also broadening the epistemic justification beyond past Peircean roots that, it would seem, Talisse now regards as unnecessarily controversial.

References

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  1. Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Andrew F. Smith

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  1. Andrew F. Smith
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Correspondence to Andrew F. Smith.

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Smith, A.F. Epistemic Responsibility and Democratic Justification. Res Publica 17, 297–302 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9147-1

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