Abstract
In this paper, I develop an epistemological argument for freedom from poverty, building on Gerald Gaus’ work on political and moral disagreement in New Diversity Theory (NDT). NDT argues that diversity and disagreement are fundamental to political and moral learning. In this paper, I address Gaus’ central arguments in NDT, and focus on what I argue to be the key epistemological distinction of his account—namely, the argument that the relevant diversity, which is conducive to political and moral learning and should therefore be protected by an institutional order, should not be defended or defined by reference to its performance with regards to discovery of true beliefs, but by reference to the independent epistemic value of protection of disagreeing, redundant and distant investigators. I develop a restatement of this argument from the perspective of institutional epistemology, and show that (along with constitutional liberties, polycentric self-governance and markets) freedom from poverty must be considered an institutional “device” conducive to such a conception of diversity. While Gaus rejects redistributive policies at the level of an institutional order, it is precisely his account of the epistemic powers of diversity and disagreement which provides the strongest defense of minimal redistribution.
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Notes
Gaus does model his “search for justice” landscapes as moderately rugged, and thus allows for certain varieties of “shallow consensus” (D’Agostino 2009) which might even involve certain minimal sharing of varieties of positive rules among communities. However, such discoveries do not amount to positive reliability.
There is a possibility that some polities in a polycentric system might decide upon some redistributive policies, as well as a possibility that the people will be very charitable. However, these are mere good fortunes, and not systemic protections against the systemic violations of OFD which are my focus here.
A case could, however, be made that a certain level of wealth accumulation makes one too powerful in the sense of having significantly more influence on the political process to the point of depriving others of the possibility of meaningful participation in self-governance. I will not address this here.
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Zubčić, ML. Disagreement without discovery and the epistemological argument for freedom from poverty. Synthese 200, 62 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03490-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03490-8