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Title: Expertise and Democratic Equality
Abstract: Democratic citizens are limited in what political information they have access to. As a result, they rely heavily on expert testimony – the testimony of journalists, academics, and others they trust to be informed – in order to decide how to vote. These commonplace facts raise a difficult question for egalitarian justifications of democracy, which hold that it is non-instrumentally valuable for political influence to be distributed equally. Is reliance on expert testimony incompatible with democratic equality? I argue that it is; furthermore, I argue that this is reason to reject egalitarian views of democracy's non-instrumental value. In their place, I offer a framework for a democratic ethics of testimony which treats the role-based duties of experts as fundamental.
As usual, we'll meet in the Maloney Seminar Room, Social Science Building 224, 3-5p. Those unable to attend in person can spectate virtually via this Zoom link.