Collective Wisdom and Individual Freedom
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 44 Issue S1, Pages 168 - 176.
By Christopher McMahon
The paper distinguishes two ways of understanding a wise society. A
society can be wise by virtue of possessing mostly true evaluative
beliefs. Or it can be wise by virtue of employing rational procedures
of collective belief formation. If the first possibility involves the
society's being, in Margaret Gilbert's sense, a plural subject of
evaluative beliefs, social wisdom will, as Gilbert says, entail an
abridgement of individual freedom. But, this paper argues, if a
society's being wise is understood as its employing rational procedures
of collective belief formation, social wisdom positively requires
individual freedom.
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