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Benjamin Michael Miller

Profile picture for Benjamin Michael Miller

Contact Information

304A David Kinley Hall

Assistant Professor

Research Interests

My research is mostly focused on thinking about democratic citizenship and the role that citizens should play in the preserving and improving democratic well-functioning. In democratic theory and philosphy, I am most interested in identifying which skills and value commitments citizens need in order to excel in their obligations as citizens.

Much of my research concentrates on understanding citizenship from analyzing the history of political thought. I am especially focused on understanding Aristotle's conception of good citizenship. Many research centers, scholars policy-makers, and schools today (especially in the UK) are attracted to Aristotle's theory of character education and brand themselves as neo-Aristotelians or proudly claim to be influenced by Aristotle. My own view is that Aristotle's theory of virtue is fundamentally illiberal in its basic foundations and cannot be made to fit with liberal democracy's major principle of respecting pluralism. I make this argument in my book manuscript, Character Education and Democracy: What Aristotle Tells Us about the Demands of Liberalism.

I am also deeply interested in contributing to interdiscilinary work at the cusp of political philosophy and empirical political science. Political philosophers, educational theorists, and political scientists tend to have extremely different understandings of what it means for a democratic citizen to be a good one. In today's empirical literature, the focus is almost exclusively on voting, and on what I call policy-matching--the view that a good citizen is supposed to identify their preferred policies and then vote for the candidate whose own policy platform best matches the citizen's own preferences. I know of no one in the history of political thought who believe that this matching task is a or the main job of citizens. Instead, today, most philosophers and theorist take citizens obligations to be grounded in certain liberal value commitments. They argue that good citizens should be picking leaders and supporting laws that will serve the interests of all citizens, and not just their own particular interests.

My research aims to bridge the gap between these two very different traditions of good citizenship by identifying new ways of bringing concepts in political philosophy over to empirical work on political sophistication, democratic backsliding, and affective polarization. In my view, recent alarm about citizens hating one another and supporting anti-democratic and authoritarian leaders speaks to the need to bring philosophical theories of good citizenship over to empirical research. In my view, understanding the role of citizens in preserving democracy requires a recognition that the job of citizens is not to satisfy their own preferences, but instead to be the gate-keepers of democracy and its fundamental principles of treating all people as free and equal.

Research Description

All of my research focuses on a single big question: How should democracies be designed, given the facts about human psychology and decision-making?

Democratic theory and practice are both based on two major assumptions: (1) human beings ought to be treated as free equals, and (2) we are all good enough at rational decision-making that we can expect the product of our collective, democratic decisions to produce politically acceptable outcomes.

My research, both on Aristotle and on contemporary democracy, starts from the worrying observation (using evidence from the social sciences) that (2) is false, and that all of us are actually pretty bad at making decisions. But if we aren't good at making political decisions, how can we expect that the collective results of our decision-making will lead to results we are aiming for? The quick answer is that we should not have this expectation.

What does this have to do specifically with democracy? Well, since (1) still holds, and because we have good reason to think that all of us, not just some of us, are bad decision-makers, we should still endorse democracy as the best form of government despite our bad decision-making tendencies. The problem is that since all currently existing democracies have been designed with the thought that we humans are good decision-makers, we should not be surprised if much of the design elements of democracies today are suboptimal; and not only suboptimal, but downright terrible.

As a result, many thinkers, including policy-makers, philosophers, and educators, endorse the idea that we should try to make citizens into better decision-makers in order to save/improve democracy. In other words, they want citizens to change so that our institutions will work better. People like this are big fans of civic education. My research on Aristotle leads me to the conclusion that this alternative is pretty much hopeless because of the persistent and permanent nature of our decision-making flaws and biases, and how demanding and difficult it would be to educate us all to be good enough decision-makers. Instead of trying to make human beings fit better with our current democratic institutions, I think we are better off trying to change the design of some of our democratic institutions so that they fit better with human beings as we currently are.

Because of this worry, what I do in all of my research is to try to think about alternative ways of understanding democracy so that our institutions, rules, and practices can be made to fit with the actual facts about our decision-making abilities, blind-spots, and biases. To do this, we have to take a lot of care to understand what parts of our current democracies are essential to democracy in general. And we have to spend some of that time considering what ideal principles of democracy look like. This is what democratic theory is all about.

Education

Ph.D. Stanford University, Department of Philosophy
M.A. Stanford University, Graduate School of Education
M.A. University of Auckland, Department of Philosophy
B.S. Northeastern University, Department of Philosophy & Religion
B.S. Northeastern University, Department of Psychology

Awards and Honors

2019 Clarence A. Berdahl Excellent Undergraduate Teaching Award in Political Science

Courses Taught

Intro to Political Theory
Justice in the Law
Classical Political Thought
Citizenship & Diversity
Ancient Philosophy
Children, the Family, and Social Justice

Additional Campus Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Political Science
Assistant Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Assistant Professor, Classics
Assistant Professor, European Union Center

Honors & Awards

2019 Clarence A. Berdahl Excellent Undergraduate Teaching Award in Political Science

Recent Publications

Kuklinski, J. H., & Miller, B. (2022). New Thrusts and New Opportunities in the Study of Citizen Performance in Democratic Societies. In T. Rudolph (Ed.), Handbook on Politics and Public Opinion (pp. 342–354). (Elgar Handbooks in Political Science). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800379619.00038

Miller, B. (2021). Virtue, Knowledge, and Political Instability in Aristotle's Politics: Lessons from the Eudemian Ethics. Polis, 38(2), 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1163/20512996-12340325

Miller, B. (2020). Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of Political Participation. In The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education (pp. 17-33). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_34

Miller, B. M. (2019). The Importance of Demopolis for Today’s Political Science. Polis, 36(3), 511-515. https://doi.org/10.1163/20512996-12340247

Miller, B. (2019). What Open-Mindedness Requires From Us. Educational Theory, 69(4), 517-528. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12383

View all publications on Illinois Experts