Empowerment, Self-Trust, and Democratic Deliberation

Democratic deliberation presupposes citizens who can treat their judgement as entitled to enter public reasoning as the judgement of an equal. This paper asks whether evidentialism, or anti-pragmatism about reasons for belief more broadly, can account for that requirement. Consider a woman deliberating in a sexist environment. Her evidence may suggest that speaking will be costly and that deference is relatively safer. Yet sustaining belief in her entitlement to judge may partly constitute the civic self-trust needed to participate as an equal. Post hoc usefulness is not enough, since it can amount to a rationalisation of favourable outcomes. The paper asks whether practical considerations can count ex ante as reasons for belief, by reference to the role of agential standing-beliefs in keeping agency available under disempowering conditions. Building on Fricker’s (2007) account of epistemic injustice and Li’s (2025) account of doxastic injustice, the paper treats epistemic empowerment as one species of doxastic empowerment. A subject may understand her situation accurately while still losing the standing-beliefs through which agency remains available. I argue that at least some empowerment-based considerations have normative weight as reasons for politically relevant standing-beliefs. This claim is selective. I call the corresponding disposition EMPOWER, a form of doxastic faith in oneself that can make belief virtuous where the evidence is permissive. The relevant belief must still empower in the right way, i.e. by supporting agency without gradually eroding the agent’s capacities or flourishing. A further issue concerns beliefs that empower one agent by undermining the standing of others. In democratic deliberation, the anti-disempowerment constraint is internal to the kind of standing at issue. A standing-belief counts as democratically empowering only if it preserves the equal standing of other participants. Beliefs that make one’s standing depend on superior status therefore fall outside the scope of civic self-trust. The result is a more discriminating form of pragmatism, limited to empowerment-based reasons for politically relevant standing-beliefs.