Politics mixes expert trust with shared commonsense moral judgment, not expertise alone.

Evidence

Democracy sometimes depends on trust in communities of special knowledge because it is impossible for every person to work up a scientifically grounded understanding of every domain of expertise that is relevant to politics (and everything else in life). Politics is not all about expertise, though. It is also about what we know from experience. It is about our understanding of what is plausible and implausible in the world of intractable facts. And it is about widely shared judgments that form the moral horizon line for a community. One does not need an expert ethicist to know that torture is inhumane in the extreme, for instance. Nor does one need an expert psychologist to know that separating young refugee children from their parents is traumatic. The shared world of facticity and moral judgment is what we think of as common sense, “that part of our mind and that portion of inherited wisdom,” writes political theorist Hannah Arendt, “which all men have in common in any civilization.” — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 285

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates common sense as the morally shared ground that no expert substitutes for — a definition to carry forward.