The public will not deliberate in accordance with truth-sensitive principles; on the contrary, the public will err in accordance with definite patterns. The idea is that acquiring reliable knowledge about social theory (economics, pol sci, etc) is very costly to the average citizen, so he will rely on theories by default that are mostly false (for example: "we need to protect our industry against foreign competition", "higher crime results from lenient courts", etc, etc). The public, in short, is rationally ignorant. Reliable social science is hard because it is opaque and complex. Folk knowledge is easy to apprehend because it is vivid. Knowing this, politicians and others use, for electoral purposes, a rhetoric that feeds into these false theories. As a result, public deliberation does not bring us closer to the truth. On the contrary, deliberation increases error. We call this phenomenon discourse failure.
In comments, PrawfsBlawg's "resident deliberativist", Ethan Leib, argues that this is a rehash of the old "the people are too incompetent to govern" argument. I think that he's right that this problem may be partially rectifiable at an institutional level (or at least that we have to try), but in general I'm not optimistic.
I've hit on these themes before, most notably in my post attacking the concept of "persuasiveness" equaling "strong rhetoric" in debate, or my post of no-confidence in democracy. In general, I like the idea of "deliberative democracy," as long as "deliberative" has some depth to it--where "rational ignorance" no longer counts as deliberation. Engagement is the key. Unfortunately, I don't see much hope for salvation, and Professor Teson's argument about "rational ignorance" helps explain why.
2 comments:
I know an economist that says that people's "distributed wisdom" is actually quite good and that, while most people are far from the mark when evaluating the true costs of, say, pollution, if you aggregate their answers, they're actually quite accurate. It's possible that there would be too many systemic biases, but he says that for many of the issues that have been studied, there actually weren't.
It's possible that voting could accomplish the same kind of averaging that the economic polls did, but it's less likely since 1) the "output" is discrete (you either vote for it or against it) instead of continuous and 2) the issues are much more complicated and involve ethical questions. Even if everyone agreed that Social Security privitization would increase the deficit by a certain amount, people wouldn't agree on whether that was worth the benefits of increased ownership of one's retirement funds.
The general public can't be counted on to deliberate according to truth-sensitive principles -- but neither can any elite.
I don't think discussing deliberation vs aggregation (voting or markets) vs expertise/authority in the abstract is necessarily very helpful. Our challenge is to design a social system that applies each different form of decision-making at the points where it's most useful and where its strengths will compensate best for the weaknesses of the others.
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