ProfMittenz t1_j4job1e wrote
I think you should read Fabienne Peters work. Her book Democratic Legitimacy is a good place to start. She also wrote the sep article on political legitimacy. This will help you categorize these various views you want to engage (normative v descriptive legitimacy, procedural v. Instrumental legitimacy, moral v epistemic approaches).
One challenge you're going to have is that if democracy is entirely instrumental then who is deciding these outcomes the democracy is meant to achieve? The point of democracy is that we all get together and debate what the good life or good society is without one person or group imposing their view on another without sufficient justification.
A second area to work on is defining what you mean by reason. One of the big debates within this field is what counts as a public reason and what limitations can be placed on reasoning. Kevin Vallier and G Gaus have written extensively on this. You argue that reason has legitimacy but not democracy, yet democracy is the arena where we share and debate reasons. If we had a God's eye view or AI computer that knew all the correct answers then we wouldn't need to share reasons but since we don't have that, democracy is the opportunity for us to deliberate as equals without imposing our own conception of whats easonable on others.
contractualist OP t1_j4nm3wv wrote
Thank you for the review and I'll check out the literature you cited!
I argue in the piece that democracy lacks inherent moral and epistemic value. I'll argue for its instrumental value in a later piece though. It lacks moral value since democratic decisions may stray from ethical principles of the social contract (tyranny of the majority) and it lacks epistemic authority since there are certain systemic biases of the electorate (anti-market, identitarian biases, etc.) that inhibit any resulting wisdom of crowds. Especially as laws require more complexity to deal with modern issues.
On the first point, I argue that certain decisions would be better handled through expert-led agencies and courts. They already perform this role in some regard. For example, courts have been enforcing social rights in the face of democratic legislation, but not economic rights.
On the second point, I mean reason as publicly recognized justifications. The SEP on Public Reason captures my view fairly well.
If you have any more reading recommendations, I'd be happy to review them and address their arguments in later posts.
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