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The Idea of Public Reason
Abstract
Ideals of democratic participation and rational self-government have long informed modern political theory. As a recent elaboration of these ideals, the concept of deliberative democracy is based on the principle that legitimate democracy issues from the public deliberation of citizens. This remarkably fruitful concept has spawned investigations along a number of lines. Areas of inquiry include the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements.The anthology opens with four key essays—by Jon Elster, Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and John Rawls—that helped establish the current inquiry into deliberative models of democracy. The nine essays that follow represent the latest efforts of leading democratic theorists to tackle various problems of deliberative democracy. All the contributions address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens. Although the authors approach the topic of deliberation from different perspectives, they all aim to provide a theoretical basis for a more robust democratic practice.
Contributors James Bohman, Thomas Christiano, Joshua Cohen, Jon Elster, David Estlund, Gerald F. Gaus, Jürgen Habermas, James Johnson, Jack Knight, Frank I. Michelman, John Rawls, Henry S. Richardson, Iris Marion Young
... Siden den greske antikken har diskusjoner om medborgerskap vaert kjernen i sosial og politisk teori (Collins, 2006), og begrepet har dannet grunnlaget for bredere debatter om hvordan samfunn og politisk deltakelse bør organiseres (Arendt, 2013;Fraser, 2009;Rawls, 1997). Etter andre verdenskrig har teorier om medborgerskap inspirert ulike krav om rettigheter blant marginaliserte grupper, ofte knyttet til diskusjoner om rase, klasse, kjønn og annen identitetspolitikk (Crane, 2002;Sadiq, 2017). ...
... According to Cohen, deliberative outcomes should be settled only by reference to the " reasons " participants offer. In this emphasis Cohen joins Joseph Bessette (who coined the term " deliberative democracy " Bessette 1979 Bessette , 1982 Bessette , 1994), John Rawls (1993 Rawls ( , 1997), Habermas and many subsequent theorists. ...
... 98–9; Rawls, 1997b, p. 778). This is because 'many citizens of faith reject [the moral value of personal] autonomy as part of their way of life' and thus could not reasonably accept it as part of a political conception of justice (Rawls, 1997a, 132–3). ...
Five arguments in favour of deliberative democracy are considered. These focus on its educative power, on its community-generating power, on the fairness of the procedure of public deliberation, on the epistemic quality of its outcomes and on the congruence of the deliberative democratic ideal ‘with whom we are’. The first four arguments are shown to be inadequate. The fifth argument, it is claimed, not only provides the most convincing defence of deliberative democracy but can also be used to decide rationally between competing interpretations of the deliberative ideal. By way of illustration, the essay concludes with a critical discussion of the rival versions proposed by Rawls and Habermas.
Hukuk devletini otoriter, totaliter, faşist devletlerden ayıran iki nitelik vardır. İlki, özgür ve eşit yurttaşların seçim yoluyla kendilerine uygulanacak üstün kuralları yapacak siyasilere vekalet vermesidir. Cebri hukuk düzenine meşruiyet temin eden, kendi kendine yönetimin özünü oluşturan hukuk devletinin olmazsa olmaz koşulu olan bu unsur, demokratik ilke olarak adlandırılabilir. Diğer nitelik ise tüm kamu gücünün anayasal/yasal kurallara uygun olarak kullanılmasını zorunlu kılan yasallık ilkesidir. Yüksek Mahkemelerin herkesi bağlayan nihai kararları, yalnızca kuralların yapımında yurttaşların eşit katılımına izin vermediği için değil özerk ve sorumsuz hakimlerin kullandığı kamu gücünün her tür yaptırımdan muaf olması nedeniyle de hukuk devleti için sakıncalıdır. Makale hukukun üstünlüğünden meşruiyete, güçlü ve zayıf anayasa yargısından siyasi soruna kadar çok sayıda kavramı açıklamayı ve bu kavramların demokratik teoriyle ne kadar uyumlu olduğunu irdelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bu bağlamda tespit edilen sorunlara çözüm önerisi olarak anayasal düzenin vesayet mercii haline gelen yüksek yargı yetkilerinin daraltılarak zayıf anayasa yargısına geçilmesi ve Meclise Anayasa Mahkemesi (AYM) kararlarını ortadan kaldırma yetkisinin tanınması önerilmiştir.
The deliberative ideal is now a central topic in democratic theory. Theories of deliberative democracy are a critical response to liberal democratic thought, and in particular to the liberal theories of democracy that dominated American political science in the mid‐twentieth century. As a research project, the “deliberative turn” is relatively recent, emerging as a coherent strand of theory over the last three decades. Despite its relative novelty, at this point deliberative theory is now a relatively mature field, and has moved far beyond an early theoretical stage and into many areas of democratic practice. Theorists of deliberative democracy attempt to elaborate definitions of democracy that are simultaneously normatively ideal and practical. They seek to provide a definition of democracy that supplants what it sees as the thin, liberal, and “aggregative” model of democracy with one based in participation, rational deliberation, and a politics centered on a strong conception of the public good. Deliberative theorists also aim to make practical contributions, by discovering and fostering deliberative opportunities within existing institutions.
W niniejszym artykule podjęto próbę określenia kategorii wyjątku w dyskursie na temat wolności wyrażania przekonań przez mniejszości religijne, a także nazwanie grup wyznaniowych jako dominujące i niedominujące. Warto zauważyć, że rzecznik praw obywatelskich Gruzji kilkakrotnie wymienia słowo „wyjątek” w swoim raporcie z 2020 r. Zakładanie czegoś jako wyjątku nie oznacza tylko, że jedna grupa otrzymuje przywilej nad inną i naruszona jest zasada równości. Dokonanie wyjątku od ograniczeń nałożonych przez pandemię w ogóle, w szczególności oznacza stworzenie sytuacji, w której rząd wykracza poza porządek prawny zagrażając suwerenności prawa. Z drugiej strony nie ulega wątpliwości, że nawet w stanie sanitarno-epidemiologicznym praworządność powinna być przestrzegana i trzeba jej chronić.
Making use of the liberal concept of civil disobedience, this paper assesses, under which circumstances instances of illegal digital protest—called “hacktivism”—can be justified vis-à-vis the pro tanto political obligation to obey the law. For this, the paper draws on the three main criteria for liberal civil disobedience—publicity, nonviolence, and fidelity to law—and examines how these can be transferred to the realm of the digital. One of the main disanalogies between street and cyberspace protests is the tendency of hacktivists to remain anonymous, which in turn calls into question their fidelity to law (the third criterion). The paper argues that there are functionally equivalent alternatives to what can be called the “acceptance-of-legal-consequences-condition” (ALCC) associated with the fidelity to law. As a result, the ALCC is not a necessary condition for hacktivists to showcase their fidelity to law, thereby resolving the apparent disanalogy.
This paper aims to integrate epistemic versions of deliberative democracy into policy studies in order to develop a policy impact tool (PIT) for e‐rulemaking initiatives. In building its argumentation, the paper assesses and engages with epistemic democracy and online deliberation design while considering policy‐related dilemmas and the specific challenges of deliberative e‐rulemaking. The PIT aims to introduce a concise procedure along with a number of basic indicators that can be used to understand and evaluate the quality of discourse and the policy potential of deliberative e‐rulemaking. In order to build this tool, (a) we rely on the importance of comparative text analysis; (b) we develop a threads index, which will categorize citizens' input in the major arguments spelt out in the deliberation; (c) we propose argumentation and discourse analysis to evaluate arguments vis a vis their justification and identify the policy‐valuable arguments and; (d) we provide a concise procedure and the benchmark for the assessment of the policy potential and impact of the preceding deliberation.
In this chapter, I use data collected from the Internet to map the evolution of the media system of the Movement which provided the architecture to foster and sustain the development of its political community. I introduce two key concepts to help interpret what happened within the online community of the M5S: everyday political talk and network individualism. Finally, I provide some descriptive statistics of different traits of the online community and on the crowd of users surrounding it.
The paper explores the activities of the Dublin Society as a form of public reason. Founded in 1731 when the Irish legislature and all trade policy was under the oversight of the British parliament, the Dublin Society undertook two roles usually under the purview of the government: economic improvement and public reason. Rawls’ definitions of public reason, with some qualifications are used. Given the nature of Irish governance, the Society transmutes the idea of public reason into the economic realm. Through its various projects, experiments, contests, schools, and publications, which all had public input, the Society develops a process whereby factual conclusions and social consensus can be made on the Irish economy. Although it did not fully escape the prejudices of its time, the Society provides a larger space than Irish political institutions for members of the public to engage in public reason as economic citizens rather than political or religious ones.
Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo.
En la ética y la filosofía política contemporáneas es común apelar a alguna for-ma de consenso hipotético para justificar contenidos normativos. En el presente artículo llamo a esta posición “contractualismo” y defiendo tres tesis al respecto. Primera, es correcta la objeción común al contractualismo de que la estipulación de un consenso hipotético en una situación ideal de deliberación no añade nada a la justificación del contenido normativo en cuestión. Segunda, esta objeción da pie a lo que llamo “el dilema contractualista”: cuando hay una situación de des-acuerdo entre dos agentes sobre si un contenido normativo x es correcto, apelar a un acuerdo hipotético en condiciones ideales de deliberación como medio para justificar x, equivale a caer en petición de principio o a establecer una trivialidad. Tercera, a la luz del “dilema contractualista”, el contractualismo no debe ser en-tendido como un método de justificación normativa.
Policy makers frequently use arational appeals and nudges—such as those relying on emotion, cognitive biases, and subliminal messaging—to persuade citizens to adopt behaviors that support public goals. However, these communication tactics have been widely criticized for relying on arational triggers rather than reasoned argument. This article develops a fuller account of the nonconsequentialist objection to arational persuasion by state actors, focusing on theories of decisional autonomy and metadecisional voluntariness. The article concludes by proposing ethically justifiable limitations on state communications that should be compelling to both critics and advocates of arational persuasion. © 2016 The Author Law & Policy
We are said to be witnessing a transformation in political authority associated with a revolution in the global activities of corporations. The ‘corporate social responsibility movement’ is heralded as revolutionary in providing enhanced corporate accountability in international commerce. This movement is widely regarded by students of business, law, and politics as an innovative dimension of global governance that is contributing to greater sociality in the global political economy (Ougaard 2006; Testy 2002; Haufler 2001, 2006). Indeed, John Ruggie (2004), the former Assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), and a major architect of the UN Global Compact, which seeks to govern corporations through voluntary commitments to socially responsible practices, regards the movement as evidence of a new ‘transnational public sphere’ and a new non-state-based public space. Comprised of statements of best practices, codes of conduct, standards, and voluntary arrangements concerning corporate labour, human rights, environmental, and governance practices, the corporate responsibility movement is seen as governing corporate behaviour at home and abroad, whilst also opening up space for broader participation and the articulation of a variety of social concerns that are not routinely addressed in corporate decision-making. For Ruggie, this signals the provision of much needed public goods and the articulation of an incipient global civil society and global public sphere.
What should we do if climate change or global injustice require radical policy changes not supported by the majority of citizens? And what if science shows that the lacking support is largely due to shortcomings in citizens' individual psychology such as cognitive biases that lead to temporal and geographical parochialism? Could then a plausible case for enhancing the morality of the electorate—even against their will –be made? But can a democratic government manipulate the will of the people without losing democratic legitimacy? This paper explores the problems that governmental manipulation of voters pose for democratic legitimacy and the tensions between non-manipulated input and morally acceptable output. These venerable issues of political theory resur-face in light of recent suggestions to tackle today's global mega-problems by Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu. They suggest that to avert the looming catastrophe, governments should alter psychological traits of the citizenry through biomedical means, from pharmaceuticals to genetics. However, we argue that a government cannot rule with democratic legitimacy if elected by a will of the people it manipulated before. Normatively, conferring power from the governed onto governors is a one-directional relation that is incompatible with manipulation. But while it is tempting to rebut suggestions to morally enhance the people as antithetical to essential ideas of democracy, swift rebuttals tend to overlook the deeper challenge: Majoritarian decision-making may lead to inacceptable outcomes. The dilemma between input and output runs through major works in political theory. Rather than wishfully ignoring the dangers of democracy, democratic theory has to provide answers.
Understanding relations among online users involved in political discussions can help us understand similarities and differences with corresponding offline interactions. Online communities generally demonstrate too high a level of homophily among users to be illustrative. But online political discussions do not necessarily prevent diversity of opinions. The discussion Forum of Italy's Five Star Movement provides an interesting case study because of the diverse political orientations of participants and the wide range of discussion topics. I apply network analysis to map in detail the relations among the Forum's users to unravel network characteristics and actor behaviours. After harvesting 86,943 discussions and 461,297 comments published by 84,203 unique users, I capture features of the network topology to understand: whether users participate in various discussions; if discussions fragment in multiple threads showing assortative mixing tendencies; and if comments concentrate around few discussions approaching a power-law like distribution. This paper aims to improve understanding of the argumentative political discourse, but has also applications for political institutions interested in enhancing computer-mediated public reasoning.
Introduction At a panel on the state of the discipline at the 2001 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Professor David Laitin said that political theory plays an indispensable role in contemporary political science, because it provides the foundational questions that the rest of the field tries to answer (Laitin 2001a). For Laitin, however, political theory's continuing relevance is a sign of political science's immaturity (Laitin 2001b: 24). Political theory's function of “accounting for and justifying different public outcomes” should be taken up by political science generally. Such investigators, he argues, may do better than theorists have been doing lately, as they may avoid getting mired in “diversionary tacks inducing us to grapple with ontologies or epistemologies” (23). Laitin's vision for a theory-free political science fails to account for the special nature of political science's object of inquiry: political actors are historically constituted, limited rational beings in the process of making their collective worlds. What differentiates a political science that includes theory from a “purified,” “positive” political science is this: only the former can account for its object of inquiry qua constructor of value. However, Laitin's point about diversionary tacks applies all too well, both to political theory and to the discipline of political science as a whole. In focusing too narrowly on subdisciplinary methodological issues, political scientists and political theorists alike have missed opportunities to address political questions of broad, substantive interest (cf. Isaac 1995).
Narrative has become a fashionable concept in the everyday practice and analysis of democratic politics. Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, activists and commentators all talk about the importance of constructing and controlling narratives in democratic debate. Yet astonishingly, the pre‐eminent way of thinking about public debate in democratic theory – deliberative democracy – has almost nothing to say about narrative. Drawing on the substantial bodies of literature on narrative in general, and on its relationship to public debate in particular, this article argues that narrative is in fact a crucial aspect of democratic deliberation. In light of the ‘systemic turn’ in deliberative theory, which sees deliberation as occurring across a range of differentiated but interconnected spaces, it suggests that narrative is a crucial device by which people talk and think about complex and contested issues. It argues that deliberative democrats must come to terms with narrative because its pervasive influence can affect deliberative systems in important ways. The article outlines these potential impacts – both those that reinforce deliberative ideals and those that conflict with them. It concludes by looking at the broader implications for the practice, theory and study of deliberative democracy.
In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligations derive from the ideal of mutual accountability that is supposed to guide political deliberation in a deliberative democracy. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply.
While an environmental ethic is not explicitly developed in A Theory of Justice, or Political Liberalism, it is possible to extrapolate some principles dealing with non‐human nature, and thereby some environmental protections, with what Rawls provides. However, his inability to provide a non‐anthropocentric environmental ethic might threaten the stability of a ‘well‐ordered’ society, and this possibility gestures to the potential ‘problem’ of pluralism in general. Certain environmentalists will be dissatisfied with the status of their environmental values in a Rawlsian society. If the group is ‘unreasonable’, then while they are not technically threats to ‘stability’ (in that they are not part of the ‘overlapping consensus’ to begin with), they might instead be threats to the well‐orderedness of the society. If the group is ‘reasonable’, Rawls must hope that they will also agree with enough of the political conception of justice, and be swayed by appeals to reasonableness, that they will join in the overlapping consensus despite their environmental concerns. There appear to be reasons to believe that, at least given a well‐ordered society, this will often be the case.
The paradox of deliberative democracy is that the prerequisites of deliberation must be produced through deliberation itself. This essay, thus, proposes that deliberative democracy requires two levels of deliberation: One is instrumental deliberation, a procedural tool, through which people negotiate and make decisions; the other is dialogic deliberation, or dialogue, through which people construct the concept of the self and other, the sense of community, and public reason. Relying on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, Buber’s concept of dialogue, and Giddens’s theory of structuration, we propose that informal and nonpurposive everyday political talk, the practical form of dialogic deliberation, is the fundamental underpinning of deliberative democracy. Through everyday political talk, citizens construct their identities, achieve mutual understanding, produce public reason, form considered opinions, and produce rules and resources for deliberative democracy.
Der Beitrag befasst sich mit neuen, horizontal-dialogischen Formen politischer Steuerung in transnationalen Räuumen. Es wird
ein normativanalytisches Modell deliberativer Politik entwickelt, um das demokratische Potenzial transnationaler Handlungen
und Strukturen zu beurteilen. Untersuchungsleitend ist, dass das nordamerikanische Große-Seen-Regime eine hohe demokratisch-deliberative
Qualität aufweist, während internationales Regieren eher zur Entdemokratisierung neigt. Damit stellt sich eine fesselnde Forschungsfrage:
Inwiefern bietet die deliberative Politik im Große-Seen-Regime einen Modellfall, dessen empirische Analyse es erlaubt, Rückschlüsse
auf Voraussetzungen und Wege zu ziehen, mit deren Hilfe sich auch ähnliche Bereiche grenzüberschreitender Politik „demokratisieren“
lassen?
The article addresses new, horizontal and dialogue-oriented forms of political governance in transnational spaces. A normative-analytical
model of deliberative governance will be developed to appraise the democratic potential of transnational structures and actions.
The research is guided by the observation that the North American Great Lakes Regime reveals a high democratic-deliberative
quality whereas international governance rather tends to de-democratization. This raises a challenging research question:
To what extent does the deliberative governance of the Great Lakes Regime provide a model case, which allows drawing conclusions
on institutional prerequisites and means how to “democratize” governance in similar issue areas.
SchlagwörterDeliberative Politik-transnationales Regieren-Demokratie
KeywordsDeliberative Politics-Transnational Governance-Democracy
Researchers are increasingly interested in creating chimeras by transplanting human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) into animals early in development. One concern is that such research could confer upon an animal the moral status of a normal human adult but then impermissibly fail to accord it the protections it merits in virtue of its enhanced moral status. Understanding the public policy implications of this ethical conclusion, though, is complicated by the fact that claims about moral status cannot play an unfettered role in public policy. Arguments like those employed in the abortion debate for the conclusion that abortion should be legally permissible even if abortion is not morally permissible also support, to a more limited degree, a liberal policy on hESC research involving the creation of chimeras.
In democratic societies, legal procedures are to ensure legally correct and rationally acceptable decisions, i.e. decisions that can be defended both in relation to legal statutes and in relation to public criticism. But can the legal system via the discretion of the judges itself really autonomously settle normative questions? On this constitutionalists and proceduralists disagree. The problem is whether the substantial factors are legitimate, and whether the judges' interpretations of the situations are correct. Robert Alexy conceives of the legal discourse as a special variant of the general discourse but this blurs the distinction between legislation and application. There is a danger of assimilating law and morality and of overburdening the legal medium itself. Moral and legal questions point to different audiences, raise different validity claims and require different procedures for resolving conflicts. The author favours a variant of constitutional proceduralism hinged on discursive proceduralism which sets the terms for a fair procedure of reason giving. This standard for correctness is imperfect but ensures that the substantial, 'pre-political' principles entrenched in modern constitutions as basic rights are subjected to discursive testing in a deliberative process.
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