Deference and delegation: What is the difference?
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Deference and delegation: What is the difference? Gopal Sreenivasan
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Delegating a policy question to a panel of experts is similar in some ways to deferring to an expert about the right answer to some personal decision, but also crucially distinct from it. Most importantly, delegation is compatible with understanding why the expert’s decision is correct or incorrect, whereas deference excludes such understanding. As a matter of administrative logic, however, delegating agents cannot be required to understand whether the policy questions they delegate are decided correctly. This has important implications for the role of moral experts in delegated policy-making. Notably, while conventional academic wisdom regards deference to moral experts as highly objectionable, no analogous objection applies when policy questions are delegated to panels that include moral experts. Keywords delegation · moral deference · moral expertise · political legitimacy · democracy · administrative logic
1. Consider two different kinds of policy question that might be settled by legislative decision. On the one hand, there are questions like, should gene editing be allowed? Or on what basis should ventilators be allocated during a pandemic? On the other hand, there are questions like, what should the national budget for space exploration be? Or should foreign manufacturers be allowed any role in building the national broadband infrastructure? For ease of reference, let me call the former ‘morally loaded’ policy questions and the latter ‘morally unproblematic’ policy questions. The distinction will not have to bear much weight. In a democracy, the ultimate authority for deciding these questions is presumably the citizenry as a whole. However, in a representative democracy, the operative G. Sreenivasan () Department of Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA E-Mail: [email protected]
G. Sreenivasan
authority is likely, in the first instance, to be some legislature or other. For convenience, let us assume that it is the national legislature. Within political philosophy, it is controversial just which conditions are necessary and sufficient to make decisions by a national legislature politically legitimate (and the same goes for their upshot, laws). For simplicity, I shall assume that these conditions include both procedural and substantive conditions, as is very plausible. To be legitimate, any decision by the national legislature has to satisfy the applicable conditions on two levels, once for the constitution of the legislature itself (e.g., proper election of its members) and once for the decision at hand. By way of partial illustration, let ‘majority rule plus epsilon’ stand in for the conditions that suffice to make a national legislature’s decisions politically legitimate. ‘Epsilon’ serves as an opaque marker for your favourite substantive conditions on political legitimacy (e.g., consistency with every citizen’s constitutional rights,
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