Epistemic democracy and political legitimacy
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My dissertation aims to answer two questions: (1) Is democracy epistemically valuable? (2) Is the epistemic value of democracy, if it has any, necessary for justifying its legitimacy? I argue that democracy in certain form can be epistemically valuable. However, I also argue that the epistemic value of democracy is not necessary for justifying its legitimacy. To defend the epistemic value of democracy, I propose a postdeliberation version of Condorcet's jury theorem. I argue that this version of the jury theorem can avoid the common challenges against the classic version. To reject the necessity of epistemic value for democratic legitimacy, I argue that, given that the epistemic value of democracy is subject to disagreement, it cannot be used to justify legitimacy. In addition, I provide a purely proceduralist argument for democratic legitimacy, which appeals to the egalitarian principle that every citizens ought to be equally respected by the state. This argument, if succeeds, shows that the epistemic value of democracy is not necessary for justifying democratic legitimacy.
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Ph. D.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.