The Limits of Expertism

Snježana Prijić-Samaržija’s book discusses the epistemic grounding of democracy, stressing the epistemic role of experts in her political-epistemological favorite, the project of “reliability democracy”. Her proposal, inspired by Christiano, lets citizens play an important role in setting the aims, whereas experts deliberate about means of reaching them. I argue that it is not easy to reach a consensus about goals and values. What is needed is democratic deliberation in deciding, encompassing both experts and laypersons. We should retain the duality of less ideal deliberation in real-world and of hypothetical contractualist deliberation, within moral-political thought-experiments, in the tradition of Habermas and Scanlon in the ideal theory. I leave it open whether our author might ultimately agree with this picture of reliability democracy