Democratic reason

Sinopse

Hélène Landemore's dissertation "Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many" uses the idea of collective intelligence as an argument for democracy. The dissertation first defends a normative claim about the necessary component of any sensible justification for democracy. According to that argument, no justification for democracy is complete that does not establish the epistemic credentials of democracy, i.e. its ability to make the "right" decisions more often than not, where "rightness" is defined by a context and a set of fundamental values. In other words, democracy would have no normative authority--the moral right to claim obedience to its laws--if we did not assume that it is at least as intelligent a way to make choices as a random decision-procedure. The dissertation then makes a second, positive theoretical claim about the likely epistemic properties of democracy, generalizing Aristotle's famous claim that "many heads are better than one" into a strong epistemic argument for democracy. According to that argument, under conditions of sufficient cognitive diversity, democracy is at least as good as and occasionally better than, other non democratic regimes at producing smart decisions, because democratic procedures such as deliberation and majority rule channel the collective distributed intelligence of the people, or what this dissertation proposes to conceptualize as "democratic reason."