Failures of Epistemic Duty and Democratic Equality: Lippmann, Orwell, and Rawls

• In Event: Democracy--Crisis, Practice and Paradox

Abstract

The election of 2016 has led to a great deal of voter shaming. Journalists, commentators, and political scientists have claimed that many Trump voters are racist, ignorant, and driven by resentments and fears. This sits uneasily with the idea that it is the possession of a minimal degree of instrumental and moral rationality that entitles and enables people to live in democracies. The conflict between voter shaming and the values underlying democratic governance occur because the shaming often takes the form of implying that people either lack or do not exercise their moral capacities. If people are racist or sexist, they are morally irrational. If people are so inattentive to the news and policy detail or are so epistemically slipshod that they end up supporting politicians and policies that harm themselves (and their fellow citizens), then they have failed to be instrumentally rational. To shame such voters for these failures is to imply that they are bad citizens. One of the questions this raises is whether imputing these failures to fellow citizens is consistent with according them the respect called for by their democratic and moral equality.

In section 1, I cite evidence, predominantly from the United States, suggesting that many people are bad citizens. Large numbers are ethnocentric in various ways, and this informs a wide range of their policy positions, their voting, and extra-political behavior. Large numbers are inattentive to politics or so epistemically careless that their political behavior harms their fellow citizens.

In section 2, I consider the standard criticisms of judging fellow citizens in these ways. Holding that some groups of people regularly fail to exercise moral and rational agency in politics comes perilously close to holding that they lack these capacities are unfit for inclusion in the polity. Moreover, casting aspersions on the political agency of others is unlikely to encourage them to develop and exercise their agency in better ways. I conclude in this section that these are reasons to be careful as a matter of strategy and political rhetoric about shaming voters, but they are not reasons for avoiding the conclusion that there are shameful voters.

In section three, I argue that some of the standard ways of negotiating the conflict between regarding some citizens as failing in their democratic (and moral) duties and regarding them as equals fail. One prominent strategy is to distinguish between people’s capacities for moral and rational agency and their exercise of them. The thought is that we can criticize people for failing to exercise their capacities while still respecting them for possessing those capacities. The problem with this strategy is that immoral attitudes, such as racism or sexism, poor political judgments, such as climate-change denial, and poor behavior, such as lying or on-line trolling, can be evidence for lack of moral capacities as well as evidence for simple failure to exercise them. A related view is to think that even if people systematically fail in their democratic duties, they could, hypothetically be brought, through argument or persuasion to think and act better. We ought to respect them as potential good democratic citizens. I agree that if someone in the short or medium term, under not terribly ideal conditions, could be brought to change their ways, this shows that they are corrigible and thus have basic moral capacities. But if the claim is simply that in some ideal situation, e.g. with many resources, a non-toxic social and political environment, and a very long period of time, people could be brought to mend their ways, then the difference between being a hypothetically good agent and an actually bad one vanishes.

In the concluding section, I argue that there are reasons to accord people basic moral respect while denying them respect as democratic equals. The main reason is that acting in political life in a way that is respectful of others and instrumentally rational is harder than acting in these ways in every day life. The political realm is more distant and infinitely more complex than everyday life. Understanding what the goals of the political community ought to be and how to achieve them are, correspondingly more difficult than understanding and pursuing the goals of oneself, one’s family and friends, and one’s local community. One possible conclusion from this claim is that a democratic polity in which people relate to others as moral equals is an aspiration, but that in the short to medium term, the justification for democratic procedures must be instrumentalist.

Author

• Alexander Moon, Ithaca College