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Epistemic Political Egalitarianism and Conciliatory Democracy

First and foremost, I would like to thank Thomas Mulligan for his comment on my article. Furthermore, I would like to thank the editors of this journal for granting me the opportunity to reply to his objections voiced therein. Mulligan sees fault both with the way I construe peerhood relations between members of an electorate and with the conclusions I draw based on these allegedly misconstrued relations. His objections force me to offer a more complete account of the conciliatory conception of democracy, an enterprise which I shall happily pursue. My response seeks to clarify some important assumptions which underlie my project of defending an epistemic political egalitarianism in the form of conciliatory democracy. This will speak mainly to Mulligan’s first concern, the misconstruction of peerhood relations in modern democracies. Regarding his points on the implications of peerhood relations in politics, I shall subsequently defend my view of these matters and explain why I believe that the Equal Weight View applies to the kind of political disagreements the conciliatory conception of democracy addresses. Before getting started, it is important to clarify the wider background assumptions of my argument. The epistemic argument I offer for egalitarianism in politics is embedded in a normative framework. The goal is to describe the epistemological dialectic that unfolds in a democracy which meets certain normative criteria. Among these criteria are citizens who are suitably motivated and sufficiently informed about the matters at stake in political decision making. In this sense, it is a “civic” conception along the lines of deliberative conceptions of democracy, in other words a theory of how citizens and parties should act in well-functioning democracies.1