UC Irvine

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Democracy, Epistocracy, and the Epistemic Problems of Politics: How Centralized Decision Making Undermines Three Fundamental Democratic Values

by

Brandon Samuel Richardson

Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy

University of California, Irvine, 2020

Professor Annalisa Coliva, Chair

The empirical evidence of widespread ignorance of voters in modern democracies has led some philosophers to question traditional justifications for democracy. These philosophers attempt to resolve this problem by arguing for limits on who can vote with the goal of increasing the competence of the average voter. Epistemic democrats attempt to assuage these worries by looking to a priori theorems that purport to show that democracy can be competent despite the widespread ignorance of voters. In this dissertation I argue for a fuller account of what it means to be competent in making political decisions, without which we face a problem I call the graveyard spiral. I then use this account of competence to show that epistemic democrats and epistocrats fail to give us a reason to expect competence in government, which leaves us open to the graveyard spiral problem. Because of this, I argue that these views face a trilemma of democratic values. I argue that in order for competence to be satisfied, public problems should be addressed at the lowest levels of complexity to reduce the problems with tracking the effects of decisions, but also to increase the variety of solutions to public problems. Through a process of encapsulating public problems and decentralizing the decision making process, we can expect meta-competence to be satisfied and to avoid the trilemma.