Publications

This book examines the Condorcet Jury Theorem and how its assumptions can be applicable to the real world. It will use the theorem to assess various familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, revealing how best to take advantage of the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy.

This book examines the Condorcet Jury Theorem and how its assumptions can be applicable to the real world. It will use the theorem to assess various familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, revealing how best to take advantage of the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy.

Many theorists tie social norms to attitudes, such as expectations on others, perhaps along with conforming practices. Challenging this view, we instead ground social norms in a social norming process, an often non-verbal social communication process that ‘makes’ the norm through mutual expressions of support. We present the process-based account of social norms and social normativity, and distinguish social norms from social pressures, social practices, and Lewisian conventions. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, by tying them to ‘expressive acts’, just as laws and contracts arise through acts of voting or signing, not through mere attitudes.

Does pre-voting group deliberation improve majority outcomes? To address this question, we develop a probabilistic model of opinion formation and deliberation. Two new jury theorems, one pre-deliberation and one post-deliberation, suggest that deliberation is beneficial. Successful deliberation mitigates three voting failures: overcounting widespread evidence, neglecting evidential inequality, and neglecting evidential complementarity.

A roundtable discussion on the diversity trumps ability (DTA) theorem by economists Lu Hong and Scott E. Page. Examines whether cognitively more diverse groups are better at solving problems than less diverse groups, with debate on the combining of diverse heuristics in cooperative search processes and whether deliberation is always beneficial.

Many goods are distributed by processes that involve randomness. In lotteries, randomness is used to promote fairness. When taking social risks, randomness is a feature of the process. The losers of such decisions ought to be given a reason why they should accept the outcome. Surprisingly, good reasons demand more than merely equal ex ante chances.

A link between populism and social media is often suspected. This paper spells out a set of possible mechanisms underpinning this link: that social media changes the communication structure of the pub...

Epistemic Network Injustice arises when a subset of citizens is systematically deprived of connections to helpful epistemic peers, leading to their reduced political influence. This paper examines how to identify epistemic peers in a stylized political setting of electoral competition between Masses and Elites.

Abstract In this paper we develop a new methodology for normative theorising, which we call Directed Reflective Equilibrium. Directed Reflective Equilibrium is based on a taxonomy that distinguishes b...

Solidarity is supposed to facilitate collective action. We argue that it can also help overcome false consciousness. Groups practice epistemic solidarity if they pool information about what is in their true interest and how to vote accordingly. The more numerous Masses can in this way overcome the Elites, but only if they are minimally confident with whom they share the same interests.

The problem of imperceptible effects arises because very small changes are not perceived, even if many of these small changes together are. If the normatively relevant consequences of an action, holding all other actions fixed, cannot be perceived, we are challenged to explain what makes the action wrong. I argue that an action can be wrong because it can cause an effect together with other actions.

Many companies offer their customers voluntary carbon "offset" certificates to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions. Voluntary offset certificates are cheap because the demand for them is low, allowing consumers to compensate for their emissions without significant sacrifices. Regarding the distribution of emission reduction responsibilities I argue that excess emissions are permissible if they are offset properly. However, if individuals buy offsets only because they are cheap, they fail to be robustly motivated to choose a permissible course of action.

This paper addresses the claim that opinions are more likely to be correct if they are held independently by many individuals, often used as an argument in social epistemology to defend democratic decision-making on grounds of the wisdom of crowds. The authors distinguish four probabilistic notions of opinion independence and identify causal conditions guaranteeing each kind.

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the "wisdom of crowds". But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises -- voter independence -- is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that "large crowds are infallible". We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, "large crowds are fallible but better than small groups". This theorem rehabilitates the importance of deliberation and education, which appear inessential in the classical jury framework.

The Federalist, justifying the Electoral College to elect the president, claimed that a small group of more informed individuals would make a better decision than the general mass. But the Condorcet Jury Theorem tells us that the more independent, better-than-random voters there are, the more likely it will be that the majority among them will be correct. The question thus arises as to how much better, on average, members of the smaller group would have to be to compensate for the epistemic costs of making decisions on that many fewer votes. This question is explored in the contexts of referendum democracy, delegate-style representative democracy, and trustee-style representative democracy.

In A Constitution of Many Minds Cass Sunstein argues that the three major approaches to constitutional interpretation - Traditionalism, Populism and Cosmopolitanism - all rely on some variation of a \...

In recent years, judgement aggregation has emerged as an important area of social choice theory. Judgement aggregation is concerned with aggregating sets of individual judgements over logically connected propositions into a set of collective judgements. It has been shown that even seemingly weak conditions on the aggregation function make it impossible to find functions that produce rational collective judgements from all possible rational individual judgements. This implies that the step from individual judgements to collective judgements requires trade-offs between different desiderata, such as universal domain, rationality, epistemological quality, and unbiasedness.

Replying to my earlier article "Translucency, Assortation, and Information Pooling: How Groups Solve Social Dilemmas", Robert Goodin examines the normative implications of the rule "cooperate with those whose inclusion benefits the larger scheme of cooperation", and gives several reasons for why the conversion of justice into a club good is normatively unappealing. This reply to Goodin discusses whether the rule leads to an exclusion of poor agents, whether a group should hire agents to detect free-riders, and how a group should deal with naive cooperators. The rule can be defended as an enforcement mechanism in some cases, but it is normatively unappealing as a theory of justice.

In one-shot public goods dilemmas, defection is the strictly dominant strategy. However, agents with cooperative strategies can do well if agents are "translucent" (that is, if agents can fallibly recognize the strategy other agents play ex ante) and an institutional structure allows "assortation" such that cooperative agents can increase the likelihood of playing with their own kind. The model developed in this article shows that even weak levels of translucency suffice if cooperators are able to pool their information to exclude defectors.

The philosopher John Rawls once said that "the question of justice between generations...subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests." This volume aims to illuminate those tests, ind...

This handbook provides a wide-ranging and authoritative overview of the main philosophical currents and traditions at work in the social sciences today. It explores fundamental issues like ontology, epistemology, methodology, and key concepts such as paradigm, empiricism, agency, power, and causality. The chapter on Rules, Norms, and Commitment examines what is the relationship between the social sciences and the natural sciences and where today's dominant approaches to doing social science come from.

Jury theorems are mathematical theorems about the ability ofcollectives to make correct decisions. Several jury theorems carry the optimistic message that, in suitable circumstances, “crowds arewise”: ...