David M. Estlund

Opinion leaders, independence, and Condorcet's Jury Theorem

Condorcets Jury Theorem shows that on a dichotomous choice, individuals who all have the same competence above 0.5, can make collective decisions under majority rule with a competence that approaches 1 as either the size of the group or the individual competence goes up. The theorem assumes that the probability of each voters being correct is independent of the probability of any other voter being correct. Contrary to several authors, the presence of mutual or common influences such as opinion leaders does not easily rule independence either in or out. Indeed, and this ought to be surprising,under certain conditions deference to opinion leaders can improve individual competence without violating independence, and so can raise group competence as well.

The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth*

Not everything, then, is constructed; we must have some material, as it were, from which to begin.(John Rawls, Political Liberalism) 1

Democracy Without Preference

Is democracy fundamentally a competitive or a cooperative endeavor?1 Some voters, both elected representatives and private citizens, base their votes on parochial interests or desires, while the votes of others are shaped by the apparent best interests of the whole political community. Which of these, if either, is the proper task of the democratic voter? It is a separate question how one morally ought to vote, since it is a separate question whether and how democracy imposes any moral requirements or bestows any moral legitimacy. I do not address the moral question directly in this paper. Instead, I want to ask which of these tasks, if either, is given by the idea of democracy. The idea of democracy is a contested matter, but I shall take its core to be rule by the people by way of voting. This is not to say that voting is the most important democratic political activity practically, but only conceptually. Other features of democratic life, such as free expression, political participation, and equal consideration get their democratic credentials (though these are not their only moral ground) from an association with popular rule through voting. Is the Wisconsin senators task to promote, say, the dairy in-

The Persuasiveness of Democratic Majorities

Under the assumptions of the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, majority verdicts are virtually certain to be correct if the competence of voters is greater than one-half, and virtually certain to be incorrect if voter competence is less than one-half. But which is the case? Here we turn the Jury Theorem on its head, to provide one way of addressing that question. The same logic implies that, if the outcome saw 60 percent of voters supporting one proposition and 40 percent the other, then average voter competence must either be 0.60 or 0.40. We still have to decide which, but limiting the choice to those two values is a considerable aid in that.

Reply to Copp, Gaus, Richardson, and Edmundson

This piece is a response to four essays that critically discuss my book Democratic Authority. In addition to responding to their specific criticisms, it takes up several methodological issues that put some of the critiques in a broader context. Among the issues discussed are “normative consent,” which I offer as a new theory of authority; the “general acceptability requirement,” which advances a broadly Rawlsian approach to political justification; and methodological questions about theory building, including a device I dub the “method of provisional leap.”

Methodological moralism in political philosophy

Abstract An important strand in the school of thought known as ‘political realism’ is a distancing from, if not a rejection of ‘political moralism,’ the application of moral standards to political phenomena. This initial formulation of realism’s opposition to moralism suggests several distinct theses. One is that moral thinking, as a social phenomenon, is causally subsidiary to political structure. Another is that moral convictions are mere rationalizations of preferences and interests. A third is that proper political thought takes the moral defects of humans as given. Another thesis yet would be that political standards are not ‘applied ethics,’ applications of moral principles applicable to individual behavior. I argue that none of these positions, even if they were correct, would raise any difficulty for the thesis that political arrangements are subject to moral standards of what is right or just.

The Ideal, the Neighborhood, and the Status Quo: Gaus on the Uses of Justice*

Many political philosophers and theorists have been reflecting recently on methodological questions about realistic-ness, “realism,” idealization, and idealism in normative theoretical work about social justice. A book called The Tyranny of the Ideal seems clearly to signal sympathy with opponents of “ideal theory” (which notoriously means multiple things, but still). While there is some truth to that, one can also say that, like much in the book, it’s complicated. It is a nuanced engagement with the role of the ideal in political philosophy. A central problem that Gaus sets himself (call this the first question) is this: can there be a conception of normative theorizing about justice that (a) is practically relevant in making social decisions and (b) makes ineliminable use of the idea of full or ideal justice, (c) even when that ideal is unattainable? The problem is posed by Amartya Sen, who argues that this is harder than it might seem. Social decisions depend on rankings of available alternatives, and that’s all. What practical use, Sen asks, would an ideal of justice have beyond those rank-

WHAT IS CIRCUMSTANTIAL ABOUT JUSTICE

Does social justice lose all application in the (imaginary, of course) condition in which people are morally flawless? The answer, I will argue, is that it does not — justice might still have application. This is one lesson of my broader thesis in this paper, that there is a variety of conditions we would all regard as highly idealistic and unrealistic which are, nevertheless, not beyond justice. The idea of “circumstances of justice” developed especially by Hume and Rawls may seem to point in a more realistic direction, but we can see that this is not so once we distinguish between conditions of need for norms of justice, conditions of their emergence, and conditions of applicability of the standard of justice. Justice, I argue, can have application even in conditions where no mechanism of justice is present or needed, such as the case of internalized motives of justice.

Reply to Wiens

In Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy, I argued that justice might require things of people that they cannot bring themselves to do. A central step was to argue that this does not entail an inability to ‘do’ the putatively required thing. David Wiens challenges that argument of mine, and this piece is my reply.

Liberal Associationism and the Rights of States

In political philosophy’s recent turn toward moral questions about the global order, one central controversy is about whether, and to what extent, states (or nations, or peoples) have the right to make their own decisions free from outside interference. Such a right would, according to almost anyone, be defeasible, but there are some reasons for wondering whether there is any such right at all. There might be practical reasons for staying out of states’ business in many cases, but not, on some views, because states have any right of noninterference. Furthermore, to think that states, as such, might hold such a right suggests a kind of collectivism that comes at the expense of the rights of individuals — individuals who may be unjustly treated by their communities with no recourse to aid from the larger world. It is often argued that if you hold a liberal political philosophy about individual rights against the state and the community then you cannot consistently say that a state that violates those principles is owed the right of noninterference. How could the rights of the collective trump the rights of individuals in a liberal view? I believe that this debate calls for more reflection on the relation between liberalism and individualism. I will sketch a conception of liberalism (“liberal associationism”) in which there is nothing awkward about saying that associations, as such, have some moral (not just, say, legal) rights to noninterference. If liberal associationism is compelling in general terms then, if states (or some of them) can be shown to be associations in the relevant respects, then liberalism itself will supply the moral basis for a right, held by a state or people as such, to non-intervention.