Reply to comment

I'm not sure the analogy works. When it comes to brain surgery, presumably everyone has more or less the same goal--save the patient's life with a minimum of damage. Now, an election is partly about rating performance--if someone's massively incompetent, people vote to throw him out. And if a person is not informed enough to know whether or not someone is competent--surely true in many areas--then they should abstain.

But voting is also about expressing what values you think should be followed, so that the country can represent those. One needn't any elite knowledge to know one's own values. So this aspect of voting remains vital to the practice (consider Hanson's decoupling of the values and methods in his imagined futurarchy).

Two responses: if, you're a moral realist, like Caplan, and believe that there are some sort of true values out there, it's reasonable to think that a moral philosopher is more likely to find them. So he or she should be the one voting. The rest of us, even for value purposes, should not. That's controversial.

More powerfully, one might say that even if we know our own values, we're still too ill-informed to know which candidate best represents those values. But I find this quite dubious.

I believe Caplan is, as per his book, assuming that democracy should be geared towards economic efficiency (I haven't read his book, and am going secondhand--I may be far off)--that is to say, he assumes one value everyone should agree on, the way everyone agrees on the goal of brain surgery. Which is unlikely to persuade many who are skeptical of economic efficiency, or believe a democracy should pander to other values as well.