Pick any recent op-ed lamenting the demise of contemporary democracy and you will most likely read claims about how a toxic combination of widespread misinformation, pernicious algorithms, and the biased media is to blame. The idea here is that cleaning up the media sphere and improving how people consume information would amount to a crucial step towards safeguarding our cherished democratic institutions. In other words, the path to democratic integrity is paved by a reliable information environment and responsible epistemic agency.
To a first approximation, this sounds absolutely right: as we see our neighbors, family members, and friends become increasingly consumed by ideas that have markedly little to no connection to the facts—and which appear to (surprisingly!) serve only the interests of a select group of clever political actors—we could be forgiven for assuming that this story is correct. If only citizens were adequately responsive to the information they receive from unbiased media sources, then we would be heading in the right direction. But what if responsible epistemic agency—for example, adequately responding to the evidence and practicing intellectual virtues of open-mindedness—actually worked to further damage democracy?
This question has started to gain traction in light of recent work in political epistemology. For instance, Alex Worsnip has persuasively argued that being a responsible epistemic agent can unfairly shift political power to one’s political opponents. In addition, Michael Hannon has argued that more knowledgeable citizens are more likely to hold biased and dogmatic political beliefs, and in joint work with Ian Kidd, they argue that exercising intellectual humility can lead to political apathy. And in my own work, I have argued that being a good epistemic agent might require suspension of political beliefs, which may in turn require refraining from political life—thereby undermining self-government. These theoretical developments not only put pressure on the idea that good epistemic agency is a one-stop solution for solving our current democratic ills; they also seem to suggest there is a choice to be made between being a good epistemic agent and being a good democratic citizen.
One might be tempted to think the solution is obvious here: defending democracy just is the right thing to do. Lofty intellectual goals of good epistemic agency—as important as they may sound—can never take priority over core democratic principles. However, this response is too quick. Even if recent work in political epistemology is right that good epistemic agency can be out of step with democracy, it is also clear we cannot do away with epistemology entirely. Flipping coins and random lotteries can hardly be regarded as adequate methods for choosing public policies. The reason, of course, is that we expect our political decision-making procedures to have some truth-tracking mechanisms; we should want them to have a tendency of yielding correct decisions—not just fair ones. In a similar vein, it seems reasonable to expect that if citizens collectively decide to give up on being good epistemic agents, then we should reduce our confidence that their collective democratic procedures will tend to yield good decisions. In a simple motto: good democracy depends on good epistemic agency.
Taken together, these considerations seem to uncover a serious dilemma. On one side, recent work in political epistemology demonstrates that being a good epistemic agent can undermine democratic principles; on the other, being a bad epistemic agent also poses serious dangers for democracy. So, we are damned if we do (act as a responsible epistemic agent), and damned if we don’t.
Defenders of democracy might regard this dilemma as genuine reason for despair. That is because it raises a more serious challenge than familiar critiques of democracy which focus on its epistemic failures. Prominent examples are Jason Brennan’s argument that the epistemic incompetence of the electorate justifies the adoption of epistocratic systems of government, or Alexander Guerrero’s contention that failures of electoral democracy warrant adopting lottocratic governance. For all their pessimism about democracy, these arguments remain compatible with the idea that responsible epistemic agency may ultimately serve democratic goals. For instance, Brennan’s arguments for epistocracy collapse if the electorate proves itself to be very knowledgeable and unbiased; likewise, for Guerrero’s advocacy of lottocracy. By contrast, the considerations above are bleaker, precisely because they suggest that democratic and epistemic goals may be fundamentally in tension with each other.
Rather than despairing, I propose we use this dilemma as an opportunity to rethink what it means to be a good democratic citizen. The expectation is that by taking a closer look at what we should expect from democratic actors, we will gain resources to better understand how to manage cases where democratic and epistemic norms conflict. My particular angle on this matter is guided by the idea that democratic decision-making is best understood as a kind of joint inquiry; a view I have called (in line with the recent literature) the “zetetic conception of democracy.”
The core of the zetetic account of democracy is that when we come together to make democratic decisions, we should take ourselves as participants in a joint investigation. Specifically, we should take ourselves as inquiring into a question of the form “what should we do about this problem of common concern?” So, when making a democratic decision about what should be the right level of income taxation, we should see ourselves as jointly investigating the question “what should we do about the issue of income taxation?”
This connection between democracy and inquiry is not novel. It finds echo in core normative theories of deliberative democracy—from Dewey to Habermas (and even Rawls), as well as in some views about democratic voting, and especially those that take voting as a mechanism to find out what is the right approach to solving common problems. But despite its influence, it remains a relatively underdeveloped view. Its proponents rarely explicitly frame their views in those terms, and neither do they make great efforts to flesh out this democracy-as-inquiry view in great detail. This is unfortunate as it obscures the potential theoretical fruitfulness of this approach. My hope is that fleshing out this approach will help us solve the contradiction above.
To do so, I take inspiration from philosophers of science, who have long dwelled on the nature of joint inquiry and on the rules its participants should follow. And although recent research in epistemology has also made great strides in this direction, I maintain that philosophy of science offers the more informative perspective for fleshing out the zetetic conception of democracy. Of particular help is the key insight that the collective endeavor of scientific inquiry requires an ongoing evaluation of how to balance epistemic considerations against moral, prudential, and pragmatic considerations (among others).
To illustrate, consider how scientific inquiry clearly has epistemic ambitions, insofar as it aims to at least improve our epistemic standing with respect to scientific matters. But we all agree that these epistemic goals are limited by moral rules. For instance, we all agree that even if scientists want to uncover the truth, they cannot torture people to do so. Likewise, most of us will likely agree that pragmatic considerations may constrain epistemic standards too—and so that considerations about the urgency of climate change may help determine what counts as sufficient evidence for accepting theories in climate science. And note that these trade-offs are not permanently fixed once they have been settled for a particular case. The COVID-19 pandemic offers an excellent illustration. During the crisis, most scientists agreed that epistemic goals were more important and that ethical standards for research should be adapted to more quickly arrive at discoveries for solving it; however, most also agreed that those standards should be re-implemented once the crisis had passed.
These commonplace observations may seem obvious, but they’ve proven crucial for understanding how scientific inquiry actually works and what we should expect from scientists. In my current work, I’m exploring how these same lessons extend to the political case. My proposal is that we should think of citizens as participants in a collective investigation—one where they’re constantly weighing truth-seeking against moral, practical, and pragmatic concerns—and that this can fundamentally change what we mean by “good democratic citizenship.” And while I can’t fully develop this idea here, my main claim is that framing democratic citizenship this way shows it can actually be compatible with responsible epistemic agency. The supposed conflict dissolves, and democracy lives to see another day.
Miguel Egler
Miguel Egler is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University and also a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Cologne. His current work focuses on topics at the intersection of epistemology and political philosophy, but he also has interests in philosophy of mind. He has also worked extensively on the norms of philosophical inquiry.
