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    Democratic procedures have legitimate authority — Carmelics
    Home/Democracy & Governance
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Democratic procedures have legitimate authority

    Democracy & Governance
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Democratic procedures are better than random chance at producing good decisions
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    • 2.Democratic procedures are epistemically the best of the political systems acceptable to all reasonable citizens
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    • 3.The justification of democratic procedures is acceptable to all reasonable citizens, thereby respecting their freedom and equality
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Legitimate authority requires that decisions track justice or correct outcomes, not merely procedural agreement (Estlund's epistemic proceduralism inverted).
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    • 2.Majority rule systematically produces outcomes that violate the rights of minorities, as Tocqueville's tyranny of the majority demonstrates historically.
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    • 3.A procedure that reliably produces unjust outcomes forfeits its claim to legitimate authority regardless of its formal fairness.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Rousseau's distinction between the will of all and the general will shows that aggregating individual preferences does not yield a genuinely authoritative collective will.
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    • 2.Democratic procedures in pluralist societies aggregate preferences shaped by structural inequality, advertising, and epistemic distortion rather than informed deliberation.
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    • 3.Authority grounded in epistemically corrupted preference aggregation is not legitimate authority but the laundering of existing power structures.
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    Topics

    Democracy & Governance

    Related

    A procedure that reliably produces unjust outcomes forfeits its claim to legitim...Authority grounded in epistemically corrupted preference aggregation is not legi...Democratic procedures are better than random chance at producing good decisionsDemocratic procedures are epistemically the best of the political systems accept...
    +5 moreShow less
    Democratic procedures in pluralist societies aggregate preferences shaped by str...Legitimate authority requires that decisions track justice or correct outcomes, ...Majority rule systematically produces outcomes that violate the rights of minori...Rousseau's distinction between the will of all and the general will shows that a...The justification of democratic procedures is acceptable to all reasonable citiz...

    Similar

    Law necessarily claims to be a legitimate authority81%Legitimate authority requires that those subject to it have consented ...77%Democratic procedures are epistemically the best of the political syst...77%Kant distinguishes between legitimate authority and effective authorit...76%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: democracy
    View source passageHide passage
    Some theories of democratic authority combine instrumental and non-instrumental considerations. David Estlund argues that democratic procedures have legitimate authority because they are better than random and epistemically the best of the political systems that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens (Estlund 2008). They must be better than random because, otherwise, why wouldn’t we use a fair random procedure like a lottery or coin flip? Democratic authority must have an epistemic element. A
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit