Open Collections

Gillette, Kinley

University of British Columbia

This dissertation addresses the question of the proper role of expert authority in democracy. It is a challenging and perennial question. On the one hand, advice from experts, especially scientists, is useful, if not essential, for addressing complex problems in society, from climate change to pandemics. On the other hand, handing over any degree of decision-making power to authorities whose domain of knowledge is beyond most of our capacities to understand appears to threaten the democratic requirement that the people rule. The question is not, to be clear, whether to have expert authorities at all in a democracy. Any democratic system requires authority to distribute decision-making efficiently. The question is, rather, whether to open expert authority to nonexpert authorization. The obvious worry is that doing so will undermine the quality of expert knowledge production, as well as the role of expert advice in decision-making. My argument in this dissertation is that nonexperts have already inserted themselves into the expert authorization process, and that it is infeasible to stop them from doing so. Normative theorizing about expertise and publics’ relationship to it must therefore take into account political feasibility constraints, which reference the possibility, and even likelihood, of publics’ political contestation of social-epistemic ideals. To the extent that we fail to take such political feasibility constraints into account, our theories run the risk of being unimplementable, much like overly ambitious efforts at social engineering that assume an unrealistic degree of public compliance with reformers’ plans. By applying political philosophy and democratic theory to questions of social epistemology, this dissertation’s analysis of the problem of expert authority generates new ways of thinking about public distrust in science, the politicization of science, and specific public engagements with science, such as patient activism and vaccine hesitancy and refusal. It also advances recent efforts to adapt nonideal theory from political philosophy to epistemology, though with a different methodological twist – namely, political realism’s emphasis on what makes politics distinct from ethics – and also, I argue, from epistemology.

Text

2025-04-17

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90679

Philosophy

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/