A single ruler can act on expert judgement rather than on what is popular

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from what the word enlightened is doing in the phrase. The claim is not that any autocrat governs well, but that a ruler who is both competent and benevolent is better placed than an electorate to identify what a country needs. On this account the difficulty with democracy is not that voters are foolish but that most questions of government are technical: how a currency should be managed, how a disease should be contained, how land and water should be allocated. Proponents argue that answering such questions well requires study that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to undertake, and that asking them to choose anyway produces decisions made on impressions rather than on evidence. An enlightened ruler, on this view, faces no such constraint. Expert advice can be sought and acted on directly, without first being translated into a form that will survive a campaign. Where a measure is correct but unpopular, it can simply be adopted. Proponents argue that democracies routinely know what they ought to do and fail to do it, because the politician who proposes the unpopular remedy is replaced by one who promises there is no need for it. The argument concludes that the standard by which a government should be judged is the quality of its decisions, and that quality depends on the knowledge brought to bear rather than on the number of people consulted. If a ruler genuinely possesses that knowledge and genuinely intends the public good, proponents argue, the consultation adds nothing except delay and distortion, and the resulting government will be better than a democratic one at the thing governments exist to do.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the argument assumes the very thing in dispute. It asks what follows if a ruler is competent and benevolent, but the question is whether any arrangement can make a ruler so, and unaccountable power is the arrangement least likely to. They add that the technical framing is misleading: questions such as how land or health care should be allocated turn on whose interests count, not on expertise, and an expert has no special authority to settle them. Critics also note that voters delegate technical work to civil services and specialists in every democracy, so the choice is not between expertise and popularity but between expertise that answers to the public and expertise that does not.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Most contested questions of government are not technical but distributive, since they turn on whose interests count, and expertise gives no authority to settle that. [Rejecting P2] A ruler free to act on advice is also free to ignore it, and unaccountable rulers select advisers who confirm them, so the premise describes a liberty rather than a competence. [Rejecting P3] Consultation is not merely a filter on decisions already made; it supplies information about needs and effects that no expert body possesses, so excluding it lowers decision quality by the premise's own standard. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that a wise and benevolent ruler would decide well, which assumes the wisdom and benevolence rather than showing any arrangement secures them.