Disagreement, Expertise, and Democratic Intelligence

Epistemic arguments for democracy take on new urgency as democracy faces sceptics favoring market-based or elitist alternatives such as meritocracy and epistocracy. Jonathan Benson's Intelligent Democracy locates democracy's advantage not in first-order decision-making but in its capacity, at the system level, to aggregate the intelligence dispersed across a society's public sphere and expert bodies. This systemic approach has two vulnerabilities. First, because political actors persistently disagree about what counts as a good outcome, Benson evaluates institutions as a “toolbox” that must remain compatible with a wide range of conceptions of the good. But this criterion already presupposes a commitment to pluralism that is distinctively democratic, disadvantaging market advocates and elitists who hold a single conception of good outcomes. Second, although Benson claims democracies handle expertise as well as or better than rival regimes, his account treats expertise as a neutral input whose only problem is distinguishing competent from incompetent experts. This underestimates the difficulty: expertise is itself value-laden, so using it well requires resolving how experts are kept accountable to democratic authority, and how democracies compare to regimes where elites and aligned experts share a single ideology.