Abstract
Deliberative conceptions of democracy often view the concepts of justice and political legitimacy as essentially tied to the judgments of (reasonable) citizens whom they treat as equal normative authorities. This gives immediate normative significance to political disagreements about different conceptions of justice and legitimacy. Furthermore, this leads many deliberative democrats to endorse the reasonable acceptability of justifications offered for the exercise of political power as a criterion of legitimacy. The chapter teases out the consequences of this view with respect to the legitimacy of democratic decision procedures. It demonstrates that the normative resources of deliberative conceptions of democracy do not suffice to specify which of a number of reasonably acceptable decision procedure we ought to endorse. To make headway in the specification of the most reasonable decision procedure, we thus need to introduce further arguments citing epistemic benefits of different forms of democratic decision-making.
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Notes
- 1.
This demand presumes that these actors have an effective sense of justice, that is, they can be motivated by moral reasons.
- 2.
Deliberation here means public debate with the aim of reaching a decision.
- 3.
It is noteworthy in this context that adequately informed does not mean fully informed. There are cognitive and structural limits to the information at the disposal of each citizen even under conditions of ideal deliberation (see the local knowledge argument and the argument from complexity in the next chapter).
- 4.
Reasonable disagreement does have epistemic significance in another sense. As it features in Rawls’s burdens of judgment argument, for instance, it opens the door for the toleration of reasonable comprehensive doctrines different from one’s own. Cf. Rawls (1996): pp. 56ff.
- 5.
If we take into view the ethical commitments to a particular community which Rousseau thought were preconditions for the possibility of a society effectively regulated by a general will over time, the rejection extends to this form of a pre-political consensus as well.
- 6.
Rawls provides an (incomplete) list of these sources for reasonable disagreement between comprehensive doctrines stretching from difficulties in accessing complex evidence, over the balancing of the relative importance of relevant considerations, to the conditionality of our judgment in view of our total experience that taken together explain why we disagree so often on important matters even when we conscientiously reason with one another about practical matters (which, according to Rawls, makes the resulting pluralism of doctrines reasonable); cf. Rawls (1996): p. 56.
- 7.
Cf. Rawls (1996): p. 10.
- 8.
The roots of the rationalization of the lifeworld thesis lie in the Webberian analysis of modernity as a process and result of the rationalization and “disenchantment” of the world; cf. Weber (1978). Habermas expands on this analysis and injects into it the concept of “communicative reason.” For Habermas the lifeworld remains a reservoir of shared meaning which is in constant need of replenishing itself through what he calls “communicative action,” that is, non-strategic action which aims at establishing freely agreed-upon action norms. Cf. Habermas (1984, 1998). See also the entry “The Rationalisation of the Lifeworld” in Edgar (2006): pp. 127–130.
- 9.
- 10.
Cf. Habermas (1992b).
- 11.
Cf. Wittgenstein (1998).
- 12.
Rawls (1996): p. 8.
- 13.
This might include pointing out irreconcilable elements and “pathologies” of modernity, which figure more prominently in Habermas’s work, and it is precisely fear of internal inconsistencies in the modern liberal view of the social world which motivates Rawls’s Political Liberalism.
- 14.
Insofar as Rawls tries to spell out the self-understanding of democratic citizens, “we,” “us,” and “our” can be read as an attempt to capture this self-understanding. The reference to “we,” “us,” and “our” is thus meant to refer to persons who share the two commitments spelled out presently.
- 15.
Rawls (1996): p. 37.
- 16.
A stickler might note that Rawls uses the definiendum (“oppression”) in the definiens (“oppressive use of state power”). What Rawls wants to say is still easily understood (which is why the stickler is indeed a stickler).
- 17.
Rawls (1996): p. 217.
- 18.
Of course, Rawls is not the only one who cherished a plurality of individual lifestyles and a protected private sphere in which individuals could safely pursue their private interests. Rather, he stood paradigmatically for the overwhelming majority of contemporary political theorists who share this attitude with many important historical figures of political thought, among them Rousseau, who argues that citizens ought to enjoy not only political and moral but also civil freedom. Other examples are Locke, Kant, Mill, and Hegel among many others. A more ancient example of this attitude is the emphasis Thukydides places on the protected private sphere of Athenian citizens in his funeral speech—a fact, he says, Athenians take pride in.
- 19.
In an argument for freedom of conscience, Jeremy Gaus similarly emphasizes the epistemic dimension of the manifestation of our attitude of equal respect in political circumstances: “To respect a person’s reason and his freedom of thought is to grant to him a right to think as he pleases in the sense not only of external moral rights, but a claim that his deliberations properly determine what he ought to believe. When someone says he has a right to his opinion, he is not merely claiming that no one can legitimately force him to abandon it; he is insisting that his opinions properly track his own deliberations. That is, freedom of thought supposes the right to believe that which one has deliberated on and has determined to be well founded. Alternatively, as I shall say to stress its epistemic aspect, one has some warrant to believe that to which one’s deliberations lead. I shall call this respect for the people’s deliberations” (Gaus 2003: p. 151).
- 20.
This thought also expresses the opposition some deliberative democrats express against Rawls’s conception of public reason as a component idea of his conception of political liberalism which specifies important aspects of the content of public reason.
- 21.
Habermas (1996): p. 103.
- 22.
Cf. fn 57 supra.
- 23.
Bohman and Rehg (1997): p. ix.
- 24.
Elsewhere, we find the claim that “Because it comes at the close of a deliberative process in which everyone was able to take part, […] the result carries legitimacy” (Manin (1987): p. 359).
- 25.
Cf. Cohen (1989).
- 26.
Cohen (1989): p. 3.
- 27.
Cohen (1989): p. 4.
- 28.
Cohen (1989): p. 4.
- 29.
Cf. Benhabib (1996): p. 70.
- 30.
Cf. Habermas (1992a): p. 93; The Habermasian program of discourse ethics is to give an interpretation to Kant’s conception of the universalizability of moral norms that is adequate to “post-metaphysical” thought and the conditions of modernity.
- 31.
Cf. Habermas (1996).
- 32.
See also fn 9 supra.
- 33.
Rehg and Bohman (1996): p. 91; emphasis in the original.
- 34.
Habermas (1996): p. 166; my emphasis.
- 35.
Cf. Estlund (1997): p. 180.
- 36.
Compare, for example, Habermas (1996): p. 322f., where he describes the “thought experiment” actual deliberators undertake when assessing their actual deliberative practice in light of a context-transcending ideal of that practice.
- 37.
Larmore (1987): p. 57f.; citation in the original omitted.
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
Benhabib (1996): p. 73.
- 41.
Cf. Gutman and Thompson (2004): p. 102 ff.
- 42.
- 43.
- 44.
Cf., for example, Habermas (1996): Chap. 3 and Cohen (1998): p. 193. Joshua Cohen argues that a “principle of deliberative inclusion” can motivate the inclusion of negative liberties which do not stand in direct relation to the autonomous exercise of political power in the “a priori” institutional structure of deliberative democracy. As already mentioned, Gutman and Thompson also go beyond the presuppositions of discourse and draw on a richer ideal of free and equal personhood; cf. Gutman and Thompson (2004): p. 24. Rainer Forst develops the idea of a “basic structure of justification” in Forst (2012): esp. Chap. 8. However, he argues that the criteria of reciprocity and universality of justifying reasons are at the same time substantive and procedural and procedure-dependent and procedure-independent.
- 45.
Cf. Rawls (1996): Lecture VI: The Idea of Public Reason.
- 46.
- 47.
Deliberative democrats ordinarily also count other aspects like a sufficient provision of health care, education, and a baseline of material well-being among the presuppositions of deliberative democracy.
- 48.
Cf. Bohman and Richardson (2009).
- 49.
Cf. Bohman (1998).
- 50.
Bohman (1998): 401.
- 51.
Bohman (1998): 401 f.
- 52.
What Bohman refers to as “the coming of age of deliberative democracy”, one can read as a departure from this core commitment.
- 53.
Sen (2009): p. 330.
- 54.
Sen (2009): p. 331; I have omitted references cited in the original.
- 55.
Habermas (1996): 306.
- 56.
Cohen (1998): p. 197.
- 57.
Cohen (2009): p. 250.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Another example is Rawls, who simply tells his readers that “when, on a constitutional essential or matter of basic justice, all appropriate government officials act from and follow public reason, and when all reasonable citizens think of themselves ideally as if they were legislators following public reason, the legal enactment expressing the opinion of the majority is legitimate law” (Rawls 1997: p. 769; my emphasis).
- 60.
However, deliberation might help to minimize it. Gutman and Thompson thus suggest that citizens practice an “economy of disagreement.” Cf. Gutman and Thompson (1996): p. 84ff.
- 61.
Gutman and Thompson (2004): p. 121.
- 62.
Gutman and Thompson (2004): p. 25.
- 63.
Gutman and Thompson (2004): p. 111.
- 64.
Gutman and Thompson (2004): p. 122.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Cf. ibid.
- 67.
Gutman and Thompson (2004): 117.
- 68.
Habermas invokes the “radical democratic embers of the original position” in his critique of Rawls; cf. fn 89 supra.
- 69.
See also Chrisitano’s critique of Waldron’s theory of democratic legitimacy based on a thoroughgoing respect for judgments in Christiano (2009). This point differs from the problem Frank Michelman identifies in theories advocating such an ideal of “deep democracy” (his term). While he is concerned with the conceptual impossibility of the deliberate pursuit of the ideal of deep democracy, my analysis concerns the conceptual impossibility of the ideal itself; cf. Michelman (1997).
- 70.
Gutman and Thompson (2004): p. 12.
- 71.
Gutman and Thompson (1996): p. 31.
- 72.
It might be held to be superior on other grounds which are excluded from the justificatory contexts due to the requirement of publicity.
- 73.
I suspect that Gutman and Thompson want to make the stronger claim that majority rule is in fact generally the most justified decision-making procedure. However, because they do not state this explicitly, I refrain from ascribing to them this stronger claim. In either case, to make my point it suffices to show that even the acceptance of the weaker claim has the same deleterious consequences.
- 74.
Gutman and Thompson (1996): p. 32.
- 75.
See fn 110 supra.
- 76.
Christiano (1997): p. 248.
- 77.
Cf. Estlund (2008).
- 78.
I adopt Estlund’s labeling here. Epistemic proceduralism is any view which combines a commitment to fairness with a claim to epistemic virtues of certain fair procedures. Cf. Estlund (2008): p. 98 ff.
- 79.
Estlund (2008): p. 80.
- 80.
Estlund (2008): p. 96.
- 81.
See also Forst (2012): p. 186 fn 105.
- 82.
This is not to say that the decision process is only of instrumental value to them.
- 83.
- 84.
Estlund (1997): p. 193.
- 85.
There might be more such procedures. It suffices to make my point, however, that there is more than one.
- 86.
Habermas (1996): p. 179f.; my emphasis.
- 87.
See also Gaus (2008) for an interesting argument that simple majority rule does not track ideal discourses.
- 88.
Benhabib (1996): p. 72; my emphasis.
- 89.
Cf. Benhabib (1996): p. 71f.
- 90.
Benhabib (1996): p. 72; my emphasis.
- 91.
See fn 136 supra.
- 92.
Habermas (1996): p. 306.
- 93.
We could also call them impartial or neutral reasons. However, this invites confusion with the impartiality or neutrality of justifying reasons as, for example, political liberalism demands it. See, for example, Rawls (1996).
- 94.
This is where Wollheim (1962) locates his famous paradox of democracy.
- 95.
Another normative analogue are reasons to compromise. They are independent of what you might want to do when you do not see a need to compromise. The need to compromise, however, gives you a reason not to act on your dependent reasons (see also Chap. 5; Conciliatory Democracy and the Politics of Compromise).
- 96.
The legitimate enactment of L gives you a peremptory reason for action if the reason excludes other reasons from deliberation about what ought to be done. H.L.A. Hart (1982) introduced the term in the essay “Commands and Authoritative Legal Reasons.” In an effort to shift the emphasis from the level of deliberation to the level of action, Joseph Raz uses the term “pre-emptive reasons” (1986, 38 ff.).
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Ebeling, M. (2017). Deliberative Democracy and the Normative Authority of Citizens. In: Conciliatory Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57743-6_2
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