Jason Brennan

Last updated

Jason Brennan
Jason Brennan portrait.jpg
Born
Jason F. Brennan

1979 (age 4445)
Alma mater University of Arizona
Era 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Libertarianism
Arizona School liberalism
Institutions Georgetown University
Main interests
Political philosophy  · Applied ethics  · Democratic theory Libertarianism
Notable ideas
Ethics of voting
Website jasonfbrennan.com

Jason F. Brennan (born 1979) is an American philosopher and business professor. He is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. [1]

Contents

Brennan writes about democratic theory, the ethics of voting, competence and power, freedom, and the moral foundations of commercial society. [2] His work focuses on the intersection of normative political philosophy and the empirical social sciences, especially on questions about voter behavior, pathologies of democracy, and the consequences of freedom. He argues that most citizens have a moral obligation not to vote. [3]

Early life

Brennan grew up in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and Hudson, New Hampshire. He attended Case Western Reserve University and the University of New Hampshire as an undergraduate. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Arizona under the direction of David Schmidtz.

From 2006 to 2011, he was a research fellow at the Political Theory Project, and later assistant professor of philosophy at Brown University. [2]

His case against democracy

Irrationality of voters

Proponents of noocratic theory cite evidence that suggests voters in modern democracies are largely ignorant, misinformed and irrational. [4] Therefore, one person one vote mechanism proposed by democracy cannot be used to produce efficient policy outcomes, for which the transfer of power to a smaller, informed and rational group would be more appropriate. The irrationality of voters inherent in democracies can be explained by two major behavioral and cognitive patterns. Firstly, most of the voters think that the marginal contribution of their vote will not make a difference on election outcomes; therefore, they do not find it useful to inform themselves on political matters. [4] In other terms, due to the required time and effort of acquiring new information, voters rationally prefer to remain ignorant. Moreover, it has been shown that most citizens process political information in deeply biased, partisan, motivated ways rather than in dispassionate, rational ways. [4] This psychological phenomenon causes voters to strongly identify themselves with a certain political group, specifically find evidence to support arguments aligning with their preferred ideological inclinations, and eventually vote with a high level of bias.

Democracy's susceptibility to bad policies

Irrational political behaviors of voters prevent them from making calculated choices and opting for the right policy proposals. On the other hand, many political experiments have shown that as voters get more informed, they tend to support better policies, demonstrating that acquisition of information has a direct impact on rational voting. [4] Moreover, supporters of noocracy see a greater danger in the fact that politicians will actually prefer to implement the policy decisions of citizens to win elections and stabilize their power, without paying particular attention to the content and further outcomes of these policies. In democracies, the problem is that voters are prone to make bad policy decisions and therefore that politicians are incentivized to implement these policies due to personal benefits. Therefore, noocrats argue that it makes sense to limit the voting power of citizens in order to prevent bad policy outcomes. Noocracy has a code of conduct to pursue philanthropic initiatives.[ citation needed ]

Use of expertise for efficient outcomes

According to noocrats, given the complex nature of political decisions, it is not reasonable to assume that a citizen would have the necessary knowledge to decide on means to achieve their political aims. In general, political actions require a lot of social scientific knowledge from various fields, such as economics, sociology, international relations, and public policy; however, an ordinary voter is hardly specialized enough in any of those fields to make the optimal decision. To address this issue, Christiano proposes a ruling system based on division of political labor, in which citizens set the agenda for political discussions and determine the aims of the society, whereas legislators are in charge of deciding on the means to achieve these aims. [5] For noocrats, transferring the decision-making mechanism to a body of specifically trained, specialized and experienced body is expected to result in superior and more efficient policy outcomes. Recent economic success of some countries that have a sort of noocratic ruling element provides basis for this particular argument in favor of noocracy.

For instance, Singapore has a political system that favors meritocracy; the path to government in Singapore is structured in such a way that only those with above-average skills are identified with strict university-entrance exams, recruiting processes, etc., and then rigorously trained to be able to devise best the solutions that benefit the entire society. In the words of the country's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore is a society based on effort and merit, not wealth or privilege depending on birth. [6] This system primarily works due to citizens’ belief that political leaders tend to have a better understanding of country's long-term plans than themselves; therefore, as they see positive policy outcomes, they tend to go along with the system, rather than complain about the meritocratic dimensions. For example, most citizens praise their government in Singapore, stating that it managed to transform Singapore from a third world country to a developed economy, and that it successfully fostered loyalty in its citizens towards the country and gave birth to a unique concept of Singaporean citizenship despite a great level of ethnic diversity.[ citation needed ] In order to develop further Singapore's technocratic system, some thinkers, like Parag Khanna, have proposed for the country to adapt a model of direct technocracy, demanding citizen input in essential matters through online polls, referendums, etc., and asking for a committee of experts to analyze this data to determine the best course of action. [7]

Differing modalities of elite governance

Adhering to Jason F. Brennan's taxonomy of the roughly equivalent concept he himself instead designates "epistocracy", [8] one may already discern some basic ways of rendering governance more wise a process:

• “Restricted suffrage”: Give voting rights only to those who prove themselves sufficiently well informed to earn the right to cast a ballot. Test to determine the right to vote. Everyone would be eligible to take the exam, but only those who show mastery of the basic concepts of political science, economics, and sociology would earn permission to vote. To make the test fair, focus the questions on objective topics. To create an incentive, voters who pass the test could receive a $1,000 bonus. A citizen who failed the test but wanted to vote could pay a penalty of $2,000, similar to a gas-guzzler tax.

• “Plural voting”: Everyone gets a vote, but the better-educated and more-informed get more votes. This system, espoused by the philosopher John Stuart Mill, holds that political participation helps voters feel empowered. It also acknowledges that stupid voters make bad decisions. It favors those who can prove their competence.

• “Enfranchisement lottery” [also known as Sortition]: Before each election, hold a random drawing to grant voting rights. Winners would have to earn the right to vote, perhaps by participating in forums with other voters. The random nature of the lottery would ensure the electorate reflects the demographics of the larger population.

• “Epistocratic veto”: Every citizen retains the right to vote, but an epistocratic branch of government could overrule democratic deliberations. Membership in this deliberative body would be open to any member of society, but qualifying would require passing difficult tests and undergoing criminal background checks. People with conflicts of interest would be disqualified. This council of expert overseers couldn’t create new legislation or regulation but could overrule decisions it deems misguided. The council could block the candidacies of unqualified candidates; this might create gridlock but would force voters to consider candidates carefully.

“Simulated oracle”: In this model, all citizens are asked simultaneously to vote on policies or candidates, to take a test of basic political knowledge, and to indicate their demographics. With these three sets of data, the government can estimate the public’s “enlightened preferences,” for example, what a fully-informed but demographically-identical voting public would want. It implements these enlightened preferences. [9]

Books

See also

Related Research Articles

Rational choice theory refers to a set of guidelines that help understand economic and social behaviour. The theory originated in the eighteenth century and can be traced back to the political economist and philosopher Adam Smith. The theory postulates that an individual will perform a cost–benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them. Rational choice theory looks at three concepts: rational actors, self interest and the invisible hand.

Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science." Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways—using standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.

Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), also known as binary independence, the independence axiom, is an axiom of decision theory and economics describing a necessary condition for rational behavior. The axiom says that a choice between and should not depend on the quality of a third, unrelated outcome .

Participatory democracy, participant democracy, participative democracy, or semi-direct democracy is a form of government in which citizens participate individually and directly in political decisions and policies that affect their lives, rather than through elected representatives. Elements of direct and representative democracy are combined in this model.

Rational ignorance is refraining from acquiring knowledge when the supposed cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the expected potential benefit that the knowledge would provide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Applied philosophy</span> Branch of philosophy

Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.

Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Technocracy follows largely in the tradition of other meritocracy theories and assumes full state control over political and economic issues.

Noocracy is an ideal type of government where decisions are delegated to those deemed wisest. The idea is classically advanced, among others, by Plato, al-Farabi and Confucius.

David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Previously, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While at Arizona, he founded and served as inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.

Allan Fletcher Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gibbard has made major contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics, where he has developed a contemporary version of non-cognitivism. He has also published articles in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and social choice theory: in social choice, he first proved the result known today as Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, which had been previously conjectured by Michael Dummett and Robin Farquharson.

An Economic Theory of Democracy is a treatise of economics written by Anthony Downs, published in 1957. The book set forth a model with precise conditions under which economic theory could be applied to non-market political decision-making. It also suggested areas of empirical research that could be tested to confirm the validity of his conclusions in the model. Much of this offshoot research eventually became integrated into public choice theory. Downs' theory abstains from making normative statements about public policy choices and instead focuses on what is rational, given the relevant incentives, for government to do.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paradox of voting</span> Aspect of politics

The paradox of voting, also called Downs' paradox, is that for a rational, self-interested voter, the costs of voting will normally exceed the expected benefits. Because the chance of exercising the pivotal vote is minuscule compared to any realistic estimate of the private individual benefits of the different possible outcomes, the expected benefits of voting are less than the costs.

<i>The Myth of the Rational Voter</i> 2007 book by Bryan Caplan

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is a 2007 book by the economist Bryan Caplan, in which the author challenges the idea that voters are reasonable people whom society can trust to make laws. Rather, Caplan contends that voters are irrational in the political sphere and have systematically biased ideas concerning economics.

Criticism of democracy, or debate on democracy and the different aspects of how to implement democracy best have been widely discussed. There are both internal critics and external ones who reject the values promoted by constitutional democracy.

The concept known as rational irrationality was popularized by economist Bryan Caplan in 2001 to reconcile the widespread existence of irrational behavior with the assumption of rationality made by mainstream economics and game theory. The theory, along with its implications for democracy, was expanded upon by Caplan in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter.

The altruism theory of voting is a model of voter behavior which states that if citizens in a democracy have "social" preferences for the welfare of others, the extremely low probability of a single vote determining an election will be outweighed by the large cumulative benefits society will receive from the voter's preferred policy being enacted, such that it is rational for an “altruistic” citizen, who receives utility from helping others, to vote. Altruistic voting has been compared to purchasing a lottery ticket, in which the probability of winning is extremely low but the payoff is large enough that the expected benefit outweighs the cost.

Neoclassical liberalism is a tradition of the liberal thought that, with the premises of John Locke's classical liberalism applied to industrialized societies, stands in opposition to the welfare state and social liberalism. In the United States, the Arizona School of liberalism, also referred to as "bleeding-heart libertarianism", adopted the term neoclassical liberal to advance certain ideas of Chicago School economist Milton Friedman within the American libertarian movement, including the school voucher system and the negative income tax.

Epistemic democracy refers to a range of views in political science and philosophy which see the value of democracy as based, at least in part, on its ability to make good or correct decisions. Epistemic democrats believe that the legitimacy or justification of democratic government should not be exclusively based on the intrinsic value of its procedures and how they embody or express values such as fairness, equality, or freedom. Instead, they claim that a political system based on political equality can be expected to make good political decisions, and possibly decisions better than any alternative form of government .   

<i>The Ethics of Voting</i> 2011 book by Jason Brennan

The Ethics of Voting by Jason Brennan is a book which outlines a contrasting argument to the idea that it is the civic duty of individuals within a democracy to vote. The core tenet upon which his argument resides is that the individuals who do not know what they are voting for should not feel the moral obligation to vote on issues about which they are uninformed, and that democracies would benefit as a whole from their abstaining from the polls.

<i>Against Democracy</i> 2016 book by Jason Brennan

Against Democracy is a book by American political philosopher Jason Brennan. It contains the writer’s critical perspectives of democracy, a form of government by which the rights to rule are evenly given to every citizen, and argues for its replacement by the more limiting epistocracy, where such rights are achieved by the knowledgeable. The book was published on 6 September 2016 by Princeton University Press, and has been translated into other languages. The German translation, Gegen Demokratie, published the next year, became a Der Spiegel bestseller.

References

  1. "Faculty". gufaculty360.georgetown.edu. Retrieved June 16, 2019.
  2. 1 2 "Jason Brennan". explore.georgetown.edu. Retrieved July 16, 2016.
  3. Brennan, Jason (2012). The Ethics of Voting. ISBN   978-0-691-15444-2.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Brennan, Jason (2016). Against democracy. Princeton. ISBN   9780691162607. OCLC   942707357.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  5. Christiano, Thomas (1996). The Rule of the Many. CO: Westview.
  6. Bell, D.A. (2016). The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy. Princeton University Press.
  7. Khanna, Parag (July 1, 2017). "Swiss Direct Democracy + Singapore's Smart Rulers = Direct Technocracy". New Perspectives Quarterly. 34 (3): 40–42. doi:10.1111/npqu.12093. ISSN   1540-5842.
  8. Brennan, Jason F. (2016). Against Democracy. Princeton University Press.
  9. Norman, Nina (October 27, 2023). "Summary: Against Democracy by Jason Brennan" . Retrieved March 15, 2024.