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Finding the Epistocrats

Episteme 20 (2):497-512 (2023)

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  1. Bad Language Makes Good Politics.Adam F. Gibbons - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Politics abounds with bad language: lying and bullshitting, grandstanding and virtue signaling, code words and dogwhistles, and more. But why is there so much bad language in politics? And what, if anything, can we do about it? In this paper I show how these two questions are connected. Politics is full of bad language because existing social and political institutions are structured in such a way that the production of bad language becomes rational. In principle, by modifying these institutions we (...)
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  • On Epistocracy's Epistemic Problem: Reply to Méndez.Adam F. Gibbons - 2022 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11 (8):1-7.
    In a recent paper, María Pía Méndez (2022) offers an epistemic critique of epistocracy according to which the sort of politically well-informed but homogenous groups of citizens that would be empowered under epistocracy would lack reliable access to information about the preferences of less informed citizens. Specifically, they would lack access to such citizens’ preferences regarding the form that policies ought to take—that is, how these policies ought to be implemented. Arguing that this so-called Information Gap Problem militates against epistocracy, (...)
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  • There is no right to a competent electorate.Brian Kogelmann & Jeffrey Carroll - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper addresses the debate surrounding epistocracy. While many discussions of epistocracy focus on its instrumental defenses, this paper aims to critically examine the non-instrumental jury argument offered by Jason Brennan. Brennan’s argument equates the rights of individuals in political decisions to their rights in jury decisions, asserting that just as individuals have a right to a competent jury, they likewise have a right to a competent electorate. We disagree. By juxtaposing the costs of enforcing such rights and the severity (...)
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  • Epistocracy and the Problem of Political Capture.Adam F. Gibbons - 2025 - Public Affairs Quarterly 39 (1):19-42.
    Concerned about the harmful effects of pervasive political ignorance, epistocrats argue that we should amplify the political power of politically knowledgeable citizens. But their proposals have been widely criticized on the grounds that they are susceptible to manipulation and abuse. Instead of empowering the knowledgeable, incumbents who control epistocratic institutions are likely to selectively empower their supporters, thereby increasing their share of power. Call this the problem of political capture. In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, I claim (...)
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  • Meritocracy and the Tests of Virtue in Greek and Confucian Political Thought.Justin Tiwald & Jeremy Reid - 2024 - Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 41:111–147.
    A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, we (...)
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  • On the coherence of the Rawlsian non-minimalist methodological approach.Jeffrey Carroll - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
    This essay examines the coherence of a Rawlsian non-minimalist approach to pursuing justice. Kim Angell argues that Rawlsian non-minimalism suffers from two ‘incoherence defects’. This paper argues, pace Angell, that non-minimalist principles can be both realizable and stable. First, Angell’s argument that political normalization necessarily leads to changes in the feasibility set, rendering principles unrealizable, begs the question. Second, the paper argues against Angell’s claim that habituation of principles necessarily leads to changes in the feasibility set. Whether habituation induces a (...)
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  • Social equality and the conditional justifiability of political inequality.Takuto Kobayashi - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (3):252-272.
    Social or relational egalitarians try to defend democracy non-instrumentally as a constitutive element of a society where no one stands as inferior or superior to anyone else. However, they face an instrumentalist challenge from within: Why not uphold a non-democratic regime if it outperforms democracy in protecting or promoting egalitarian social relations, for example, by stably producing substantive political decisions that guard against social hierarchies? This article explores the best response to this challenge from the social egalitarian non-instrumentalist standpoint. It (...)
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  • AI rule and a fundamental objection to epistocracy.Sean Donahue - forthcoming - AI and Society:1-13.
    Epistocracy is rule by whoever is more likely to make correct decisions. AI epistocracy is rule by an artificial intelligence that is more likely to make correct decisions than any humans, individually or collectively. I argue that although various objections have been raised against epistocracy, the most popular do not apply to epistocracy organized around AI rule. I use this result to show that epistocracy is fundamentally flawed because none of its forms provide adequate opportunity for people (as opposed to (...)
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  • The Epistemic Value of Democratic Meritocracy.Zhichao Tong - 2024 - Social Epistemology 38 (5):577-592.
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