Should Antivaxxers have the Right to Vote?
The Covid 19 pandemic has triggered debates over the proper role of scientific expertise in political governance and decision-making. These debates are not new, but the pandemic has contributed to making more acute and visible the tension between the nature of knowledge that science produce and the mechanisms that govern – or ought to govern – social choices made by political authorities. Among the various aspects of the relationship between expertise and politics, one that is particularly relevant given recent discussions in political philosophy and economy is whether epistocratic political institutions can be justified and legitimate, as an alternative to democracy.
In the literal sense, epistocracy is the rule by knowledgeable citizens. The idea is fairly old (Plato and John Stuart Mill are among its precursors), but the concept in itself is fairly recent – it is generally attributed to the philosopher David Estlund who coined it in a 2004 paper. Because it makes obvious that political decisions cannot ignore scientific evidence, but that in the meantime that the latter does not fully determine the former, the pandemic provides an interesting test to epistocratic ideas. Behind the provocative title of this post, the issue is whether citizens who entertain false or at least very controversial claims over issues that are partially settled by scientific knowledge have a say in political decision-making, either directly or through the democratic one-person-one-vote principle. Let start with some conceptual terminology. It is useful to start with a familiar distinction between two kinds of judgments, which I shall call respectively technical judgments and political judgments. A technical judgment asserts the truth or the probability of the truth of some propositions about facts. A technical judgment can take at least two forms, factual and means-ends:
Factual – It is true that X, where e.g., X = everything else equals, vaccination reduces by 10 the probability of being hospitalized due to Covid 19.
Means-Ends – It is true that if X, then Y, where e.g., X = if a lockdown is enforced and Y = x lives will be saved everything else equals.
As it appears, it is fairly easy to translate a factual technical judgment into a means-ends one, and the reverse. Still, as it will appear below, the distinction is useful when we will have to deal with the relationship between technical judgments and political judgments. A political judgment asserts either the truth or the reasonableness[1] about what is best and/or what ought to be done about a social decision problem which, by agreed-upon standards, is at least partially “public”. It can be categorical or comparative:
Categorical – X is best/X ought to be done.
Comparative – X is better than Y/X rather than Y ought to be done.
Among the classical arguments against epistocracy figure what I have called in a recent paper the “epistemic critique”. Julian Reiss argues for instance that epistocratic institutions would be illegitimate since they presuppose that (i) we can find out which political judgments are superior and (ii) (social) scientific knowledge is not controversial, or part of it at least. Reiss denies both (i) and (ii). I will ignore here Reiss’s denial of (ii)[2] and focus instead on the denial of (i). This denial consists in two propositions:
1. We can distinguish between technical and political judgments.
2. Political judgments cannot be reduced to technical judgments.
I think we can accept proposition 1, though we should keep in mind Hilary Putnam’s point that a distinction is not a dichotomy, and that they are judgments that can be both descriptive and evaluative at the same time. At first sight, proposition 2 looks plausible, but the notion of reduction it contains should be clarified. If it consists in claiming that it is not possible to reformulate all political judgments in terms of technical judgments, this is obviously true. It is just a restatement of Hume’s law and the Weberian facts/value distinction (in its weak interpretation). But this weak reading of proposition 2 is insufficient to disqualify by itself epistocracy. What is needed is the stronger claim that the evaluation of political judgments cannot rest, even partially, on the truth of technical judgments. I think this claim is plainly false. I’ve elsewhere proposed what I call the Partial Ordering of Political Judgments (POPJ) principle:
POPJ: Among two political judgments JP and JP’ over a specific issue I, JP is better than JP’ if, everything else equals, JP but not JP’ is consistent with a technical judgment JT which is regarded as true according to the relevant piece of scientific knowledge KD.
The plausibility of POPJ rests on the fact that many political judgments have an implicit conditional form and have as one of their conditionals, a technical judgment.
Let’s take a concrete example. Suppose a government is faced with the decision of enforcing or not a strict lockdown, in the context of an explosion of cases of Covid. For simplicity, consider only two possible political judgments:
PJ1 = It is better to enforce a strict lockdown than keep the status quo (e.g., weak rules of social distancing and mask-wearing mandatory in closed spaces).
PJ2 = It is better to keep the status than to enforce a strict lockdown.
It is obvious that determining which political judgment is superior rests on a large range of considerations. As such, means-ends technical judgments about the likeliness of various outcomes depending on the political decision taken (building for instance on epidemiological models) are insufficient to order PJ1 and PJ2, even if we are highly confident regarding their truth-value. However, suppose that someone holds that PJ1 is superior to PJ2 because either she ignores or intentionally rejects the most solid technical judgments. Then, I argue, this person’s assessment would be rightfully ignored by the political authorities when making their decision.
Of course, this conclusion is far from providing support to epistocracy against all forms of democracy. But it points to an interesting rationale for epistocratic institutions that has until now hardly surfaced in the literature, even from proponents of epistocracy. In the domain of political decision-making, reasons for decision-making have an independent relevance, besides (expected) outcomes. I think there are good philosophical arguments, in line with liberal principles of respect for persons and public justifications, for requiring that political decisions be made based on acceptable reasons. Among those reasons figure the fact of grounding one’s judgment on the best scientific evidence. As casting a ballot is an indirect way to contribute to political decisions, I think there are pro tanto reasons to extend this requirement to the allocation of the right to vote.
Now, to come back to the beginning, should we deny antivaxxers the right to vote. As far as it could be established that being an antivaxxer signals a tendency to disregard scientific knowledge on a range of diverse politically relevant issues, I would answer positively. This is subject to an important caveat however: we should figure out a way to establish that signal with a high level of confidence. Moreover, we should clearly distinguish the case of the antivaxxers from the more general case of people who oppose political measures restricting the rights of the non-vaccinated population (health pass, vaccine pass, or even lockdown for the non-vaccinated persons). This opposition is perfectly consistent with the fact of being aware and of endorsing the best relevant scientific knowledge. Here, the disagreement rather reflects the impossibility to rationally solve a conflict between competing and partially incommensurable values. A liberal epistocracy should not ignore the existence of such “radical choices”.
[1] So that I leave open the debate regarding whether claims of truth are acceptable within the political public sphere. See for instance Joseph Raz’s “Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence”.
[2] In the paper I’ve linked to, I argue that denying (ii) implies endorsing epistemological anarchistic conclusions à la Feyerabend, including the political implications about the status of science in secular societies. Interestingly, few if any scholars who deny claim (ii) explicitly endorse these implications.