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C H A P T E R 6 Democracy’s Ethics of Belief The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce strongly believed in free trade, and he wanted his conviction to stay that way. Fearing that Peirce may give up this conviction, a friend implored him to stop reading the newspaper. “You are not a special student of political economy,” he said; “you might, therefore, easily be deceived by fallacious arguments upon the subject.”1 His friend’s insistence was not subtle. Exposed to counterarguments, Peirce may change his mind: “You would be led to believe in protection. But you admit that free-trade is the true doctrine ; and you do not wish to believe what is not true.”2 Neither Peirce nor his friend seemed to appreciate the irony of adopting a protectionist posture toward this particular belief. Our beliefs about politics, like any other, are not like furniture. We cannot rearrange them at will. There is something implausible about Peirce’s later life claim that he had “deliberately adopted” his views about free trade. This description doesn’t comport with our own experience of the status of our political convictions. If you were offered a hundred dollars to alter a core belief, what could you possibly do? This isn’t to say that citizens wholly lack control over their principles. We are equipped with powerful indirect mechanisms of influencing beliefs. Wishful thinking and Peirce’s ostrich strategy are not unfamiliar parts of democratic life. When used by citizens, they are potentially hazardous. The salient liability of citizenship, I have argued, is participation in mediated injustice. We have seen how ordinary citizens stand in a distinctive relation to each other—one mediated by state coercion. The focus was our actions and omissions in political processes: the levers we pull in the voting booth, the political causes we champion, the letters to the editor that we send off to the local newspaper. But our potential role as accessories to injustice begins in the most elemental activity of citizenship. We reason about political decisions well, or poorly, or sometimes not at all. For the purposes of my argument, we can treat deliberation as including processes of internal reasoning and external reasoning—talking, arguing, publicly debating.3 The easiest way for citizens to be complicit in political systems is to fail to perceive the injustice that they nonetheless sustain. Sometimes this ignorance is culpable. Democracy’sEthicsofBelief • 143 This version of the philosophical problem of responsibility is more perplexing than the first-order version. A theory of citizenship must offer more than an account of participatory complicity. It is relatively easy to explain the wrongness of my decision to deliberately throw my support behind a political party that I believe to be unjust or how I can be implicated in my state’s injustice by failing to press for reform of institutions that I perceive as unjust. What remains is an explanation of how citizens can avoid epistemic complicity. I can be a cognitive bystander without knowing it. I can find myself campaigning for party lines, or voting for complicated initiatives, that do not pass moral muster. In actual democratic practice, these are much more familiar specimens, because our powers of rationalization are surprisingly refined. While the epistemic properties of democracy writ large are at the center of democratic theory, there is little systematic reflection on the epistemic obligations of the ordinary citizen. The attention paid to citizenship occupies a narrow bandwidth. We tend to focus on citizens’ physical activity—their trips to the polls, canvassing, donating, speaking at a town meeting. This can come at the expense of attending to their mental activity . We can reject voluntarism about belief while acknowledging that reasoning is just as much an action that we undertake.4 It can be done carelessly , even dangerously. It can also be intentionally omitted. John Locke held that we have moral reason qua citizens to be “studiers.”5 We must be students of the natural law, on his view, no less than we are required to have a working knowledge of the demands of the common law. Our participation in politics rests on the assumption that we must reason in a certain kind of way, at least about certain collective decisions. I begin outside the domain of public affairs, where ordinary moral thought acknowledges virtues of reasoning. The next section proceeds in an indirect manner, presenting a collection of counternormative cases— designed to tease out our intuitions about...

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