This post is a part of the Blog's 2023 APA Conference coverage, showcasing the research of APA members across the country. The APA Eastern Conference session covered in this post was organized by the Political Epistemology Network.
The political world is what William James called “a blooming, buzzing confusion.” The size and complexity of modern government make it virtually impossible for most ordinary citizens to have informed opinions about what the government does. This raises a challenge. How can citizens form reliable political beliefs? And when we do have political opinions, should we have much confidence in them? These questions were at the center of the Political Epistemology Network session at the Eastern APA in Montreal.
In the first talk, titled “What’s Wrong with Political Deference?,” Elise Woodard (MIT) critically scrutinized the value of deference in politics. Woodard began by acknowledging that deference in politics is often necessary; most political issues are too complicated for citizens to figure out on their own. To answer questions like, “Should the government increase the federal minimum wage?” or “Should the state introduce a mask mandate?”, one needs to know relevant scientific and economic facts, make complex value judgments, and answer questions about incentives and implementation. However, lay citizens typically lack the time, resources, and competence to answer these questions on their own. Hence, they must defer to others. But to whom should they defer?
A common answer is that they should defer to co-partisans. This view has been defended on both normative and empirical grounds. Normatively, deference to co-partisans seems unproblematic because we are using their judgment as a proxy for our own, given our shared values. This is important, because answering political questions often requires making normative judgments, but purely normative deference seems problematic. Empirically, it is often easy to identify co-partisans, and hence norms on deferring to co-partisans are appropriately action-guiding.
Despite recent defenses of the value of political deference, Woodard argued that deference to co-partisans has overlooked moral and epistemic problems. First, we do not fully avoid the need for normative deference. Even if co-partisans share our values, they may not share our risk-assessments or what trade-offs we’re willing to make. Thus, we may end up deferring on normative issues even to those who share our values. Avoiding normative deference would require a great deal of knowledge, but then co-partisanship is too coarse-grained a heuristic to be action-guiding. Second, there are epistemic worries about relying on co-partisans. For example, it may lead to opinion clustering on orthogonal political issues, which we may have reason to think is irrational. Finally, Woodard argued that even if deference is permissible, it is often suboptimal. In light of these problems, she proposed several new ways to restructure our expectations of citizens in a democracy both interpersonally and institutionally. These proposals included adjusting our expectations of what citizens should know, as well as radical institutional changes such as ‘lottocratic’ political arrangements.
In the second talk of the session, Endre Begby (Simon Fraser University) argued that political beliefs are often formed in “antagonistic information environments.” He started by reflecting on the institution of democracy as a procedure for collective deliberation and decision-making. He then asked: what makes democracy a good procedure of this kind?
Begby’s talk highlighted that philosophical work on this topic is often too idealized to have real-world implications. When philosophers attempt to evaluate democracy strictly on its epistemic merits, they too often rely on idealizations: e.g., democracy outperforms its competitors when citizens adopt a stance of maximal inclusivity and tolerance for diversity, jointly seeing themselves as involved in a collaborative project of information exchange-towards a shared end, guided by shared values. While Begby acknowledged that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such idealizations, he underscored that such idealizations are unlikely to be realized on the institutional scale of democratic polities. Thus, he argues that political discourse, in any large institutional setting, will constitute, at least in part, an antagonistic information environment: even in democracies, we should expect to encounter agents who aren’t simply failing to cooperate fully, but might also be actively trying to undermine our political agency by engaging in strategic disinformation.
In such information environments, Begby claimed we have reason to be cautious and selective in how we form peer groups for the purpose of collective political deliberation. The result is a recipe for what Cass Sunstein has called “enclave deliberation,” perhaps leading to “echo chamber” formation and increased political polarization. Nonetheless, this is not an aberration but precisely a result of the attempt to implement the norms of deliberative democracy to the best of our ability in the decidedly non-ideal information environments that we find ourselves in.
In the final talk, titled “The Skeptical Upshot of Social Cognition,” Hrishikesh Joshi (Bowling Green State University) investigated a novel skeptical challenge for our political beliefs. This challenge is nicely illustrated by a quote from J. S. Mill. In On Liberty, Mill writes: “the same causes which make [someone] a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or Confucian in Pekin.” Mill intends this to be epistemically troubling—perhaps it behooves such people to tone down their convictions, given how easily they could have believed differently had they been born in different circumstances.
Joshi explored one way of developing this skeptical challenge, by incorporating recent work on motivated reasoning. The basic idea is that our belief-forming processes can be sensitive to social rewards and punishments. By holding certain beliefs, we convince others that we’re part of the same team. Political, sectarian, religious, or ideological beliefs are especially likely to play these roles.
It might be thought that genuine belief is not necessary to reap social rewards and avoid punishments—what matters is what we say, not what we think. However, Joshi claimed that this underestimates two main things—the ability of others to detect deception, and the psychic and cognitive costs involved in thinking one thing but saying another.
At the same time, we want to be able to persuade others that we have good reasons for our beliefs. Furthermore, there are typically costs to holding false beliefs. However, when it comes to political or ideological beliefs, these costs are largely externalized. Joshi combined these observations to produce a heuristic that non-ideal agents can use to achieve greater intellectual humility and doxastic openness regarding this class of beliefs.
When we think about how citizens ought to form their political beliefs, it is easy to propose norms that abstract away from the realities of political life. Against this, Woodard, Begby, and Joshi offer accounts of how citizens should think about political issues from the perspective of a non-ideal political epistemology.
Michael Hannon
Michael Hannon is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He is also the founding director of the Political Epistemology Network.
