Is it rational to trust the experts?

(No)

Milgram experiment (1963)

The ‘argument from authority’ (argumentum ab auctoritate) can be generalised as follows: experts in the field concerning X claim that X is true, therefore, ‘X is true’ is a rational conviction. I argue that it is not rational to trust the advice of experts under any circumstances, because 1) a conviction based on the presumption of correctness of the convictions of others violates the principle of sufficient reason, and 2) it typically involves a category mistake - conflates technical advice with moral advice - and purports (falsely) to delegate the moral responsibility for one’s own choices to others.

1. The principle of sufficient reason

Every individual is at the risk of violating the principle of sufficient reason by assuming certainty about uncertain propositions.

The principle of sufficient reason can be expressed as follows: for every fact F, there must be a sufficient reason that F is true. It follows that the knowledge that F is true obtains only in virtue of the knowledge of a sufficient reason that F is true. A sufficient reason is such that it precludes the possibility that F is false. Crucially, the knowledge of a sufficient reason that ‘F is probably true’ is not logically equivalent to the knowledge of a sufficient reason that ‘F is true’.

Proof that it is irrational to believe that F is true without the knowledge of a sufficient reason that F is true:

Let P signify the knowledge that F is true. The law of non-contradiction: P cannot be true and false at the same time and in the same respect, or ¬(P ∧ ¬P). To assert that ‘P is true’ without a sufficient reason implies that ‘P is true without a sufficient reason’, therefore any claim can be true without sufficient reason, therefore the negation of P can also be true without sufficient reason, therefore contradiction.

In short, any assertion of fact that violates the principle of sufficient reason is self-negating (violates the law of non-contradiction).

The conviction that the opinion of experts is true without knowing a sufficient reason that it is true is therefore false (a logical fallacy). A practical way out of this bind is to accept the advice of experts as a working hypothesis, provided there are no moral objections to trying it out, but not accept it as ‘therefore’ true or right.

2. Implied delegation of moral responsibility

Expert advice is not merely about value-neutral technical facts (what ‘is’), but is also normative in the practical sense (what one ‘ought’ to do). When public experts ‘give advice’ they are persuading you to act in a particular way, telling you what ‘you ought to do’, and thus make a moral judgment in their own right and give implicit moral advice (often without being aware of it), or make a judgment about ‘your best interest’ (a subject-matter they are not experts on).

Let us say that the expert advice is intended to persuade you to act in a particular way, and you uncritically accept it on technical or utilitarian (risk vs. benefit) grounds. It still remains to be determined whether following a technically true advice would be morally right. The question of whether the advice of experts is morally wrong or right is typically outside the domain of their technical expertise, and yet this distinction alone can disqualify their advise.

Let us consider the strongest possible case for expert advice, where the technical expert is also a renowned expert in moral philosophy. Even in this case it would be wrong to delegate moral judgment to an expert on morality, because such a delegation purports to abrogate our own moral responsibility. Moral responsibility of an agent cannot be delegated, it applies to every intentional action of the agent, including the act of agreeing and intending to follow expert advice, which would amount to agreeing and intending to do something morally wrong, because experts can be morally wrong (see Milgram experiment). Implicitly agreeing and intending to do something ‘possibly morally wrong’ is itself morally wrong. In short, experts must never be trusted, on moral grounds.

There is also a purely existential reason why the advice of experts cannot be rationally trusted. Experts in a particular field may agree that misleading the public is the rational thing to do in the interest of humanity. For example, the experts may have reached moral consensus that anyone who would delegate their moral authority to experts is inherently immoral, practicing renunciation of moral agency and thus implicitly negating their own moral status, therefore ought to be exterminated, and so the experts may decide to advice the majority with false or harmful information in order to accomplish the demise of anyone who would be morally defincient in this way.