There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming
your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain
that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of
deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to
inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you
to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle
way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision using their
opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions.
Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that
shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then
build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and Campbell-Moore (2020) to show that
this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the
expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the
conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense,
showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection
and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection
