PO301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Well-Founded Relation
Po301 lesson 18
- People don’t need to be ‘wise’, or a competent knower, in order to make
decisions about their life - they just need to be able to make judgements on how
their own lived experience has and will interact with policy. Therefore this
potentially constitutes a defence of
one person one vote on epistocratic grounds - the core principle here is that
people in some way ‘know’ enough to vote in a given way, but just sets this
knowing in a different way which is exclusive to the one person one vote model.
Given that the rich and the poor often have mutually exclusive interests, and
making the wise in charge suggests that the rich would have more power by dint
of their greater access to educational opportunity and so on, epistocracy would
therefore have a greater proclivity to disadvantaging those already worst off in
society, which our moral intuitions would jar with.
It seems plausible that people should be able to vote on whichever metric they so
choose - if this conflicts with what has been determined to be the criteria which
the ‘wise’ vote on, then even the mildest form of epistocracy of giving the wise
more votes, the epistemological prioritisation of what seems a relatively
arbitrary set of criteria artificially disadvantages those who have a preference
for a different set of metrics by which to vote (local, single-issue voters).
Epistocracy would also entrench the hierarchies of knowledge which we are
subject to right now - the prioritisation of academic knowledge as opposed to
practical knowledge. Isn’t clear why one is more valuable than the other.
Immigration
There are widely accepted limits on the rights of states to exclude people from
living within their territory - though most people think that states should be able
to exclude to some degree, it’s generally not seen as permissible to exclude on the
basis of race or gender or other identity characteristics, and we generally permit
people to bring their close family in, as well as taking refugees (with exceptions
in situations where states are seen to have taken their 'fair share’ of refugees.
Refugees: UN Geneva Convention defines refugees as people who ‘owing to a
well-founded’ fear of persecution on grounds of ‘race, religion, nationality,
membership in a particular social group or political opinion’ is outside their own
country and unable, because of persecution, to go back there.
