Politics Must Get it Right Sometimes: Reply to Muirhead

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn “The Politics of Getting It Right,” Russell Muirhead has contended in this journal that democracy is valuable because of its procedural legitimacy rather than because of the epistemic values of “getting things right.” However, pure procedural theories of legitimacy fail. Thus, if democracy is legitimate, it will have to be due partly to its (potential) epistemic advantages. There are two ways of thinking about these advantages. One approach, associated most prominently with David Estlund and Hélène Landemore, equates the epistemic advantages of democracy with its ability to approximate a procedure-independent standard of correctness. The other, associated with Fabienne Peter, explicitly rejects that standard. Peter’s view, however, is incapable of answering challenges against pure procedural theories of legitimacy.