Abstract
It is common to interpret Kant’s idea of public reason and the Enlightenment motto to ‘think for oneself’ as incompatible with the view that testimony and judgement of credibility is essential to rational public deliberation. Such interpretations have led to criticism of contemporary Kantian approaches to deliberative democracy for being intellectualistic, and for not considering our epistemic dependence on other people adequately. In this article, I argue that such criticism is insufficiently substantiated, and that Kant’s idea of public reason is neither at odds with deference to a certain kind of authority, nor with making judgements of character in rational deliberation. This view is corroborated by recent work on Kant’s epistemology of testimony.
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Notes
I here refer to an article that originally appeared in Res Publica (O’Neill, 2002. The article has later been reprinted as Chapter Ten in O’Neill (2007). While it is appropriate to emphasize the work of Habermas and Rawls, another scholar that ought to be mentioned in this context is Onora O’Neill, who has done important and influential work on the relation between publicity, enlightenment and political progress in Kant. In particular, see chapter two in O’Neill (1989).
Dryzek (2000: 53) writes: ‘Kant […] regarded the defining feature of Enlightenment as escape from the immaturity entailed in taking an argument on trust, based on the character of the speaker’. In this context he refers to an unpublished manuscript of O’Neill’s. I assume that the manuscript referred to is an earlier draft of O’Neill (2002). Young (2000: 65) characterises Habermas as an adherent to a theory of ‘purely rational discourse’ which ‘abstracts from or transcends the situatedness of desire, interest, or historical specificity’. As opposed to this, Young emphasises rhetorical elements such as emotional appeal, figurative speech, non-verbal communication, and orientation to one’s particular audience as the ‘flesh and blood of any political communication’ (ibid.).
I am not going to discuss Rawls or Habermas explicitly in this article. My argument mainly focuses on Kant, but I believe it is possible to argue in a similar fashion regarding the positions of both Habermas and Rawls.
This goes for Habermas as well as for Kant, although I will focus on the latter in this article.
It is not clear whether there is anything specifically Aristotelian about the rules of thumb proposed by O’Neill. Even though Aristotle emphasizes the role of character as a rhetorical means of persuasion, rhetorical ethos is not derived from the social or political position of the speaker, but ‘should result from speech’ (Aristotle 1991: 38). In other words, the focus on character within Aristotelian rhetoric does not relate to the credibility of the speaker due to his institutional connections, but has to do with the way in which a speaker presents himself through speech. One could also question whether appealing to Aristotelian rhetoric is the best approach to the topic of trustworthiness in this context. As pointed out to me by an anonymous referee, the trustworthiness of institutions and scientific publics is generally of greater significance with regard to expert authority than the trustworthiness of individual scientists. While this does not necessarily rule out character judgements as irrelevant, a greater focus on institutionalized critique within expert communities may be in place when assessing the trustworthiness of experts.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease”.
These are Kant’s own examples.
Of course, no authority is exempted from scrutiny in principle. When Kant demands that officials and taxpayers must obey, and not argue, he has their role as officials and taxpayers in mind. But the persons who at one point are required to ‘conduct themselves in an entirely passive manner so that through an artificial unanimity the government may guide them towards public ends,’ may also regard themselves as members of ‘the community as a whole, or even of the world community’ (Kant 1983: 42). So far as individuals are regarded as citizens—of particular communities or of the world—they should be free to argue and to speak their own mind. That is to say: they should have the unrestricted freedom to publicly criticize any defects within military service or any injustices inherent in the tax structure.
We may call this sense of being an authority ‘Hobbesian’. Cf. Hobbes’ famous phrase: ‘auctoritas, non veritas facit legem’—‘authority, not truth, makes law’.
Referring to Wittgenstein, Peter Winch has made a distinction similar to that between social and epistemological authority, arguing that authority (epistemological), as distinct from power (social authority), is inherent in the participation in rule-governed activities, such as speaking a language, playing chess, trying a legal case etc. (Winch 1967).
Except for the relationship between adults and children, I assume that the authority of experts is restricted to the discovery of what are existing states of affairs, as well as to considerations concerning how descriptive knowledge most effectively may be employed in order to reach given ends. As for the ends—how things ought to be—there are no experts.
This seems to be true regardless of whether a social authority is or is not justified in having a particular position in an institutional hierarchy.
Such standards are not exempted from criticism. Even if it is not up to the individual doctor or nurse to decide upon the standards of the discipline of medical care, what is regarded as right and wrong may still become the subject of critical discussion, and the discipline may, as a consequence, be altered and improved.
It seems to me that O’Neill arrives at the opposite conclusion with regard to Kant because of a too hasty extrapolation from the abstract idea of intersubjective validity to a concrete model of public deliberation where any consideration that refers to the persons engaged in discussion ought to be excluded.
In order to do Wolff justice, one ought to mention that this is written in the context of a discussion on moral responsibility. For the sake of argument, I here assume that the quote implies an ideal of autonomy, understood as self-sufficiency, in an epistemic sense.
That O’Neill actually makes this observation is surprising in light of his own account of the alleged Kantian perspective on rational discourse. I assume that his awareness of Kant’s recognition of testimony is the reason why O’Neill generally speaks of a Kantian rather than Kant’s model of public deliberation, even if this model is extrapolated from Kant’s notion of using one’s own understanding without the guidance from another.
For a good introduction to the epistemology of testimony see Adler (2006). David Hume is often conceived as the classic representative of a reductionist position, whereas Thomas Reid is conceived as the classic representative of a non-reductionist position. Fricker (1994, 2002) and Lyons (1997) are contemporary proponents of reductionism. Coady (1992), Hardwig (1985) and Weiner (2003) are contemporary proponents of non-reductionism.
In the same context Kant makes a remark regarding mathematical proofs that stand in direct opposition to Wolff’s claim: ‘for if the perceived and verified agreement between the judgements of one geometer and those of all others who devote themselves […] to the same subject did not prevail, then even mathematicians would not be free from having somewhere fallen into error’ (Kant 1978: 11).
Insofar as Kant’s concept of autonomy primarily has to do with his moral philosophy, this need not imply an obvious contradiction on O’Neill’s part.
According to the translation O’Neill refers to, the phrase is: ‘for one of those witnesses it was after all his own experience’. Quoted from O’Neill (2002: 258).
Quoted from Gelfert (2006: 636)
Gelfert links this balancing of perspectives to our common ‘epistemic predicament of sometimes giving and sometimes receiving testimony’ (Gelfert 2006: 635). I am not convinced that this is an entirely accurate account. Gelfert’s further explication, ‘if we desire to be believed—as we all, at times, do—we ought also believe the word of others’ (ibid.), smacks too much of the Golden Rule, as Kant interprets it (cf. Kant 1991: 230). Kant’s point cannot be that we should treat other people in a certain way because we want to be treated similarly at some other point in time where the roles have changed. More plausibly, the ‘presumptive obligation’ to trust other people has to do with the requirement that we should only act on universalizable maxims, a requirement which an incredulous person fails to satisfy in prioritizing his or her own perspective vis-à-vis the perspectives of other persons. It is of no interest whether we would like to be treated the one or the other way if we were in the position of the other. The crucial issue is whether the adopted maxim can be rationally acknowledged by all affected parties given their different positions here and now.
Cf. supra note 14.
This relevant distinction was pointed out to me by an anonymous referee. At the same time, I believe one should not overemphasise Kant’s fixation on testimony as way of transferring experiences from one person to another. When arguing that testimony can give rise to knowledge, he exemplifies by pointing to historical and geographical facts, and the latter are often of such a kind that knowledge about them cannot be acquired by experience alone. For instance, there seems to be no experience whatsoever that could sufficiently justify my belief that Berlin is the capital of Germany. With regard to this piece of knowledge, I am entirely dependent on the words of others.
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Acknowledgments
Several people have contributed to making the present text a better article. I would like to thank John O’Neill for encouraging the writing of it in the first place, as well as for valuable comments and suggestions. I also have benefited greatly from comments and proposals by Kristian Skagen Ekeli (in particular), Daniel Gaus, Bjørn Kåre Myskja, and two anonymous referees.
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Mikalsen, K.K. Testimony and Kant’s Idea of Public Reason. Res Publica 16, 23–40 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-009-9105-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-009-9105-3