The ‘tyranny of the ignorant’ is often thought to be the main evil to be avoided in developing public policy concerning science and technology. It is taken to be obvious that, since ordinary citizens are largely ignorant of relevant scientific and technical knowledge, public debate about science and technology must be framed and controlled by experts. On an aggregative model of democratic legitimation, this implies a highly constrained role for democracy. Democratic “input” may be necessary as a way of ensuring that relevant values are represented in the decision-making process and democratic procedures may to help ensure transparency and accountability in setting public policy. It is the experts, however, who must retain an overriding epistemic warrant: No matter how fairly or efficiently it is done, the mere aggregation of ignorance cannot transform it into knowledge.

Various proposals have been produced to address this ‘epistemic democratic deficit’. Kitcher (2001), for example, proposes an idealized scheme for democratic deliberation about science and technology policy based on the “tutored preferences” of deliberators.

While proposals of this sort are clearly valuable, what often escapes notice, however, is the contrary danger of a ‘tyranny of the tutor.’ As C.B Macpherson (1977) noted in his account of technologically mediated direct democracy, considerable power (but no special wisdom) accrues to those who formulate the questions. I argue that we ought to explicitly recognize that the ‘tutoring’ relation runs both ways in debates about technology. Epistemic considerations relevant to risk assessment (McBurney and Parsons, 2001), normative issues of consent (Shrader-Frechette, 1991), and insurance negotiations (Lynch and Wells, 2001) each provide examples of how democratic deliberation about technology can be seen, contrary to predominant view, as a process of rectifying epistemic deficits on the part of regulators and public policy officials.