¹ For references, see the next section.

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⁸ Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue. Dworkin's theory is complex, and includes a hypothetical insurance scheme whereby each pays to insure against natural disadvantages. The sum raised is then allocated to the naturally disadvantaged (e.g., the untalented and the disabled) to compensate for their plight.

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¹⁷ Some may find the idea of a right to subsistence too controversial, if by a right to subsistence we mean an unconditional right to basic income. But this right can also be understood, less controversially, as one to meaningful opportunities for subsistence.

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²⁵ This is not counter-intuitive at the level of some decisions. For example, whether a municipality should build a football pitch or a tennis court may entirely depend on the majority's preferences. But on more fundamental political questions we do tend to think that there is a procedure-independent truth of the matter.

²⁶ David Estlund also considers doctors to be paradigmatic examples of experts. See his Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 1.

²⁷ As a reviewer has pointed out to me, people may disagree about the truth conditions of statements about justice, and yet agree about which policies are just (or unjust). For example, both atheists and Catholics typically believe that it is unjust to torture convicted offenders, the former in virtue of certain interests sentient beings have, the latter in virtue of human beings’ status as creatures made in the image of God. I am not explicitly considering cases of agreement about policy and disagreement about truth conditions, because, absent any actual or prospective disagreement about how a just society ought to be organized, there is little reason to resort to democratic procedures. Moreover, it is plausible to suppose that complete and full agreement about justice can hardly obtain when there is disagreement about the truth conditions of justice claims. This is logically possible, but empirically unlikely.

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³⁸ I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this challenge.

³⁹ I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising these points.

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⁴⁸ Estlund makes this point in his Democratic Authority, chaps 11–12. Despite this, he still believes that the authority of democracy is largely grounded in its tendency to deliver right answers (though he expresses scepticism about the Jury Theorem in particular).

⁴⁹ Estlund, Democratic Authority.

⁵⁰ Notice that a similar problem would not occur if the disagreement were only about whether policy X or Y is just. For we do not need to know what the substantive right answer is in order to decide whether a particular procedure is good at tracking the truth. (On this see Estlund's critique of Waldron in ‘Jeremy Waldron on Law and Disagreement’, p. 122.) What makes resort to epistemic procedures problematic is the fact that we lack an account of the truth conditions of statements about justice.

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⁵³ For a somewhat similar view, which also emphasizes mutual justifiability but with a much greater focus on epistemic considerations, see Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, part III. Unlike Christiano and me (more on which later), Gaus does not consider democracy – i.e., the roughly equal distribution of political power – as a demand of distributive justice, but analyses it in connection with the problem of political authority (pp. 249–51). Moreover, Gaus defines his defence of democracy as ‘essentially epistemic’, rather than as primarily intrinsic (p. 258). He first endorses the general category of ‘widely responsive’ law-making procedures on epistemic grounds (chap. 13). He then selects democracy in particular, because of its compatibility with political equality (chap. 14). This suggests interesting parallels between Gaus's position and Estlund's epistemic proceduralism (discussed earlier in the text). Finally, note that, for Gaus, democracy does not straightforwardly entail majority rule (pp. 240–3).

⁵⁴ See Davis, ‘Justice: Do It.’

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⁶¹ There are exceptions to this general reliability, such as the case of persistent minorities, which Christiano explicitly discusses in The Constitution of Equality, pp. 296ff.

⁶² In my discussion so far I have looked at Christiano's most recent work on democracy. In his earlier The Rule of the Many (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996) his understanding of justice was slightly different, in terms of equal consideration of interests, rather than in terms of equal public advancement of interests. Equal consideration, however, does not seem to offer a plausible outlook on justice (which, I suppose, explains Christiano's move away from it). A society which considered everyone's interests equally, but consistently only advanced the interests of a small subset of its citizenry, would hardly count as just.

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⁷² Cf. Rawls's method of reflective equilibrium as discussed in A Theory of Justice.

⁷³ Cf. Christiano's account of the ‘division of labour’ between citizens (choosing the aims) and experts/officials (choosing the means) in a democratic society in The Rule of the Many, chap. 5.