Firstly, I forget whether I said this before, but it seems the claim that there’s less authority depends on a certain unpredictability about who’s going to win. If we knew society consisted of a permanent majority and a permanent minority, who would split along some pre-determined cleavage (race, religion, etc), then it seems majority rule with equal votes would be as bad as - or probably worse than - majority rule with some select group (e.g. the educated) getting more votes. At least in the latter case, how the educated will vote isn’t as predictable in advance and others may expect to sometimes share interests with them. Thus, it seems while fairness per se doesn’t play a role in your account, this qualified acceptability stuff achieves something similar (I’m assuming the permanent minority would have grounds for a qualified objection).

I’m not quite clear on the justification of weighted voting, though. It seems possible that members of a society could unanimously accept a constitutional voting rule that, let’s say, gave university graduates two votes and everyone else one. If everyone thinks this will promote epistemic goals, and they accept the inequality for that sake, then that doesn’t really seem objectionable to me. Is what you’re saying that this would be illegitimate because the people who accepted it could have qualifiedly rejected it? (As Scanlon says, the fact that certain people may actually accept less isn’t justification for victimizing them, if they could have reasonably rejected the proposal). Or are you only saying equal voting is something like the ‘minimax qualified objection’ solution? I can probably clear this up myself, if I go away and re-read the bit on qualified acceptability and give it some thought, but I wondered what others think.

While it’s a perfectly fair challenge, it’s important to be clear about what I am and am not trying to establish, and this relates to my longer remarks on the comments on Chapter 11. I despair of providing a general account that would allow us to identify which points of view are qualified and which not. At some points in the argument I’m comfortable asserting a few claims of that kind. In other places it’s best to see the argument as conditional: if we draw the line in a certain and not implausible place the theory would be permitted to say certain interesting things. My claim that the latent and conjectural objections to epistocracy of the educated are qualified is, I suppose, a mix of these. Obviously, I demonstrate what this would allow theoretically. I also try to cast some doubt on the prospect of treating those objections as disqualified, though nothing close to conclusive.

That said, it would be serious trouble for my argument if there were no way to distinguish those objections from possible doubts about democracy’s above-random epistemic value—doubts stemming from worries about, say, voter irrationality or bias. So I would need to provide some reason to think that objections of the latter kind are less likely to be qualified. But I don’t attempt to show more than that.

As you anticipate, the consideration that provides this distinction concerns the different ways in which epistocracy and majority rule subject individuals to external rule. As I discuss in the remarks on comments on Chapter 2, epistocracy is a greater magnitude of subjection of some to others than majority rule is. Both would be subject to the general acceptability requirement, but epistocracy to a greater extent. That is, owing to a presumption against greater magnitudes of authority, it is harder to justify. The measure of that greater difficulty is that more objections to epistocracy count as qualified. Some objections that would be qualified objections to epistocracy would not be qualified objections to majority rule. The reason, again, is that majority rule involves a lesser (but still significant) magnitude of subjection of some to the authority of others. The subjection of specific people to specific others, which is what epistocracy involves, is a greater magnitude of subjection than the subjection of those who lose the vote to those who win, whoever they might turn out to be. The reason for saying this is that prior to the vote, the authority situation among individuals is perfectly symmetrical. That is not so in the case of epistocracy, where the educated are formally in a superior position. This doesn’t, as I say, show that the line between qualified and disqualified objections falls just in the right place. But it shows, I think, that what I say about qualified objections to the epistemic value of epistocracy does not forced me to say there are bound to be qualified objections to the epistemic value of majority rule.

I do not rule out the possibility that there are qualified objections to democracy’s epistemic value. But I believe the most relevant question of this kind would be about some specific institutional arrangement in a particular historical context. What my theory needs is for there to be some possible arrangement which if generally complied with would yield a democratic process with above random epistemic value. So the troubling objection would be one that suggested that for any democratic arrangement, there would be possible qualified objections on the basis of possible bias and irrationality, leading to doubt that it would make decisions better than random. (As I make clear in the chapter on “utopophobia,” I am not limiting myself to arrangements that are at all likely.) So, the objector needs to make a stronger claim than might, at first, have appeared. Still, I don’t purport to demonstrate that the objector’s claim is false. It strikes me as a very difficult claim to evaluate. This is partly because of the indeterminacy, so far, of the standard for qualified points of view. But it is also because of the great range of possibilities the objection covers. I won’t try to determine whether such an objection based on bias or irrationality is qualified as against actual existing democratic arrangements in one place or another, but I’m not committed to insisting that it is disqualified.

I understand there cannot be selection effects with regard to universal suffrage, but a structurally similar objection to the one you raise against epistocracy can still be pressed against universal suffrage, and this is what I was trying to highlight. In my second comment on Blain’s post I formulated the objection this way:

‘There is reason to believe (or to worry) that people, in general, are vulnerable to certain biases (like racism) and cognitive errors (like regret-aversion or confirmatory bias). We thus have reason to believe that even though there are epistemic benefits to the practice of democracy (e.g. deliberation etc…), those benefits are outweighed by the probability of biases and cognitive errors that people generally make. This is a qualified reason to believe that randomized decision procedures (or an epistocracy of people who have been selected by virtue of being less prone to such biases) will do better in epistemic terms than univeral suffrage’.

Do you think this sort of objection to democracy is not a qualified objection? If so, what distinguishes it from the latent/conjectural features objection to epistocracy of the educated? That’s the question I was really wondering about.