Why There are No Moral Experts, and What it Means for Democracy

Discussions of epistemic democracy generally revolve around the generic notion of “competence,” which, roughly speaking, concerns the probability of choosing the correct or best answer to questions in the political domain. But this idea has received little scrutiny. “Competence” is a relatively well-defined notion in domains with clear epistemic hierarchies, such as the natural sciences. By contrast – considering a few examples from social history – I argue that there is no such thing as moral competence and, relatedly, that there are no plausible moral credentials, that is, reliable general measures of moral skill or insight. Even worse, conceptions of moral credibility tend themselves to be linked to the perspective of the socially dominant class. This implies a novel epistemic defense of democracy: any merit-based criterion for power would tend to structurally exclude the greatest potential sources of moral insight, thereby running unacceptable moral risks.