If I were a choice theorist (I’m not), I’d probably model this as nonuniform fundamental preferences. An easy CJT case has a unanimously desired outcome, but uncertainty about the best of two available means to that end. Yet there might well be several plausible ways to arrive at several available outcomes, and disagreement not only over means, but also about which outcome is indeed best. Pcorrect1 = Pcorrect2 = 0.3 and Pwrong = 0.4 would then be equivalent to disagreement about which of two correct means we should pursue. For US Democrats I suppose this is Clinton vs Obama (vs McCain. For Republicans, Pcorrect = 0.4, although perhaps only grudgingly, with some holding their noses as they vote, as his mother predicts). As you say, plurality voting runs into problems here, and while there are ways around this, they come with costs (domain restrictions, etc). I agree that this doesn’t get at the deeper concerns about the Jury Theorem.

Vaguely relevant: in the American version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” the audience, when polled by a stumped contestant, tended to do a lot better than I’d have thought likely with plurality voting in a CJT setting. My sense is that the questions typically had a correct answer, a plausible answer, and two silly options. Thus for most participants much of the time, these were essentially binary choices. But I remember a dramatic failure of group competence on a question about the capital of Australia: the options were Syndey, Melbourne, Canberra, and maybe Adelaide or Geelong? (I don’t remember). A strong plurality chose Sydney, followed by a solid chunk of votes for Melbourne, with a smattering of votes for the correct answer, and a few for the fourth option. Optimistic competence assumptions indeed come at a price.

On the hippies, I guess I’m not worried that the focus on primary bads will allow threats to civil liberties per se, but I think you’re correct that my closing comments try to find a tension between liberal commitments and democratic authority, and then to invite speculation about whether or not epistemic proceduralism gives us sufficient resources to speak to that tension.

My example suggests that there can be deep and enduring, yet qualified, disagreement over the relative epistemic merits of democratic procedures beyond the (obviously vital) downside insurance of avoiding primary bads, and I further wonder if this will have implications for stability. I think an account of democratic authority should have something to say about the question of stability (although that’s a problem somewhere between philosophical and social-theoretic concerns, perhaps drifting closer to the latter). Given the sort of reasonable diversity that an inclusive qualification standard permits, I wonder if the modest epistemic virtue of democratic procedures accounts for why persistent reasonable minorities accept (or ought to accept) the legitimacy of those procedures across a wide range of issues and concerns, over the course of entire lives and several generations?

Here is a more pointed version of my worry that anticipates some of David’s final chapter: the experience of democracy seems to have turned my hypothetical hippies into hopeless realists! (pp. 264-267)

The hippies, after all, hold both their institutions and their fellow citizens to standards several of which could actually be met (so they aren’t merely utopian); yet after decades, even generations of persistent argument followed by fruitless voting, they have good reason to believe that their (morally correct and actually attainable) standards will never, ever be met by these institutions (the legitimacy of which they nonetheless are expected to affirm).

Many of the hippies may have started out in young adulthood viewing their favoured principles and policies in a hopeful way — as “appropriate standards which are not only possible for people and institutions to meet, but which there is no strong reason to think they will not meet” (267). The experience of putatively legitimate democratic institutions has (or should have) convinced them otherwise.

Now that might actually be a good thing, if the hopeless view is morally better than a more hopeful alternative. David will make a case in the final chapter that we shouldn’t have a kneejerk preference for nonhopeless theories in philosophy; so why in our moral and political perspectives? But I cannot help but wonder if this might have some potentially perverse implications for longterm stability.

One problem I’ve always had with the CJT is that it seems to assume not only binary options but one correct answer. The example you gave above Loren (from Goodin and List) was Pcorrect= 0.4 versus Pwrong1 = Pwrong2 = 0.3. My worry is about cases like Pcorrect1 = Pcorrect2 = 0.3 versus Pwrong = 0.4. Here it seems that, even though individuals have a greater than 50% chance of getting a right answer, if they’re split between the two equally right answers then the wrong outcome may win a plurality. Of course, this can be avoided by different electoral rules, e.g. STV, and in any case we’ve already seen plenty of reasons to reject CJT, but that’s just one that’s always bothered me.

As for your own hobby-horse, these hippie vegans, it’s true that they’ll lose out on matters decided collectively through voting (or, possibly, the market). I guess what this really raises, however, is questions about liberalism, rather than democracy, insofar as the two are distinct. While they’re often portrayed as potentially conflicting (e.g. Berlin, Sen), democracy has been praised as allowing individual liberty since at least Pericles’ funeral oration. It may well be, therefore, that these people will be left to live their lives as they choose.

Of course, as you point out (and this is the real crux of your argument, I take it), that doesn’t follow if we focus only on primary bads. If we simply pick the government that does the best job of avoiding war and famine, there’s no guarantee it won’t trample on civil liberties. I suppose one thing we could do is add major infringements of such to our list of primary bads (I can’t remember the list exactly, but I think it wasn’t intended to be exhaustive). Beyond that, however, we may simply have to say the hippies should be more concerned about avoiding war and famine than having the marriage laws they want*, and willing to recognize that, since they must live with a majority not sharing their lifestyle, they have no qualified objection to the arrangements David describes.

*One problem with this being that primary bads are I take it defined in terms of being universally recognized as bad, which need not be the same as them being the most important bads. Lack of food is a primary bad, whereas lack of place-of-worship-for-religion-X isn’t.