Democratic Reason: the Mechanisms of Collective Intelligence in Politics

This paper argues that democracy can be seen as a way to channel “democratic reason,” or the collective intelligence of the many. The paper hypothesizes that two main democratic mechanisms—the practice of inclusive deliberation (in its direct and indirect versions) and the institution of majority rule with universal suffrage— combine their epistemic properties to maximize the chances that the group pick the “better” political answer within a given a context and a set of values. The paper further argues that under the conditions of a liberal society, characterized among other things by sufficient cognitive diversity, these two mechanisms give the rule of the many an epistemic edge over versions of the rule of the few. Introduction In this paper I propose that democracy is valuable in part because it is a collective decision-method that channels citizens’ collective wisdom or, as I call it, “democratic reason.” Traditional justifications for democracy emphasize non-instrumental arguments, such as those based on the ideas of freedom, equality, justice and fairness. Here I take seriously the old Aristotelian idea that “many heads are better than one” as an argument for democracy. I explore theoretical reasons supporting the possibility that the rule of the many epistemically dominates dictatorship and any known variant of the rule of the few (where the few are either self-selected or elected once and for all). The boldness of the hypothesis presented here comes in part from the fact that I interpret both dictatorsh and oligarchy in the best possible light, granting that the oligarchs and the dictator pursue the good of the greatest number as opposed to their narrow interests. ip While the results of a comparison between the rule of many and the rule of one should be fairly intuitive (if, indeed, many heads are better than one), the second part of 1 David Estlund is one of the first contemporary political theorists to have shifted the emphasis from the intrinsic value of the democratic decision-process to its instrumental value, arguing that the normative authority of democracy is also in part “epistemic,” that is determined by the tendency of democratic procedures to deliver “correct” or “right” results overall (Estlund 1997, 2007).