Deliberative Democracy, Diversity, and Restraint (original) (raw)
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A Human Right to Deliberative Justification
The Journal of Politics, 2018
A core principle of liberal political theory is that citizens are owed a justification for public policies. But are non-citizens owed a justification for policies when their human rights are at stake? In this article, I explain what type of justification is owed to noncitizens, and I propose a principle for when policies must be justified. I argue that noncitizens have a moral human right to an actual, deliberative justification. Unlike other approaches, deliberative justification enables non-citizens to participate in justification procedures, it empowers them to contest public policies, and it is held in independent institutions. Since a concern about non-citizen justification is that there is no compelling standard for when policies must be justified, I propose a Human Rights Duty Principle. It improves upon the coercion, democratic origin, and all-affected interests principles for when justification is required.
Trauma and Memory, 2022
Public reason's paradigm, configured by John Rawls in Political Liberalism [1 st Or. ed. 1993, 2005], is increasingly criticised for its limits in regulating a deliberative praxis able to deal with democratic pluralism. In fact, deliberative theorists usually tend to stretch and modify the ideal of a political use of public reason in order to point out the consequences of Rawls' theses in multicultural societies, so that the philosopher's paradigm turns out to be weakened from a normative point of view; this approach paves the way to aporias as the one between cultural minorities' freedom of expression and normativity of communication. In the first section of the present article I begin my analysis from a recent publication by Monique Deveaux [Deliberative Democracy and Multiculturalism, 2018] to study an example of public reason's theoretical weakening and its aporetic effects; in the second section new research perspectives are hypothesised in order to offer an alternative proposal to the removal of liberalism's criteria in multicultural democracies. More specifically, I propose the concept of "history" as a point of balance between democratic inclusion and normativity of communication in contemporary liberal democracy.
Completing Public Political Reason
Nearly twenty years ago I published an essay arguing that public reason as Rawls understood it was incomplete with respect to at least some constitutional essentials or matters of basic justice. This incompleteness, I maintained, placed the ideal of public reason, and so the associated values of liberal legitimacy and political autonomy, beyond the reach of democratic citizens engaged in public political deliberation and decision-making. Scholarly inquiry into Rawls's idea and ideal of public reason has advanced a great deal over the last twenty years. James Boettcher and others have clarified and shed important light on both the Rawlsian idea and ideal and the more compelling of the rival conceptions of public reason, often themselves rooted in rival conceptions of constitutional liberal democracy. In this essay I revisit my worry that even under favorable conditions Rawlsian public reason will prove incomplete in a way or to a degree that effectively pushes the values with which it is associated beyond the reach of democratic citizens. But I focus in this essay on a form of incompleteness unaddressed in (though I think implicit in and so consistent with) my earlier essay. As James Boettcher notes, the examples of incompleteness proffered in my earlier essay were of two sorts: cases of too many reasons and cases of too few reasons. The new cases that I proffer below are cases of too few reasons. But they are of a distinctive form and it is not obvious whether they are amenable to the handling James Boettcher proposes in response to the cases identified in my earlier essay. Without taking a view on whether they are, I offer here my own proposal for how to handle them while keeping faith with the commitments undergirding public reason and the weighty goods that trail in its wake. An attractive possibility is that together Boettcher and I will have helped not only to clarify potential problems for Rawlsian public reason but also to support an optimistic assessment of its ability to meet these problems. Were this possibility to be realized, the relative gravitational force of rival conceptions of public reason drawn from rival conceptions of constitutional liberal democracy might be diminished. I begin with some brief preliminary and I hope clarifying remarks about public reason and the values associated with it. I turn then to the issue of public reason's completeness or lack thereof. After a brief remark or two following up on my aforementioned paper from many years ago, I argue that justice as fairness is incomplete with respect to another important class of political issues concerning constitutional essentials or basic justice. I argue further that its incompleteness in this regard is not peculiar to it but will be widely shared by other reasonable political liberalisms. Drawing on a distinction between public reason and public political reason, I then try to show that permitting citizens to resolve these sorts of disagreements by reasoning publicly with one another as reasonable persons committed to diverse but reasonable comprehensive doctrines and not simply reasonable citizens committed to diverse but reasonable political conceptions of justice need not undermine the commitments and values served by either public reason or public political reason.
A Rawlsian Idea of Deliberative Democracy
In my thesis, I develop a framework based on John Rawls's Political Liberalism that addresses the question: how is it possible for democratic institutions and their decisions to be legitimate, given that (i) they are supposed to be governed by the "will of the people", but (ii) the people will disagree with each other about what political institutions ought to do about any given issue? Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson advance a deliberative democratic response to this question, which has served as the basis of governments' attempts to "strengthen democracy". They argue that political decisions are justified insofar as they are made in a process that allows citizens to exchange reasons that are respectful and moral. Furthermore, although a binding decision must be made at some point, it should be possible to revisit any decision after a period of time.
Rawls's wide view of public reason: Not wide enough
Res Publica, 2000
What sorts of reasons are i) required and ii) morally acceptable when citizens in a pluralist liberal democracy undertake to resolve pressing political issues? This paper presents and then critically examines John Rawls's answer to this question: his so called wide-view of public reason. Rawls's view requires that the content of liberal public reason prove rich enough to yield a reasoned and determinate resolution for most if not all fundamental political issues. I argue that the content of liberal public reason will prove inadequate in this regard far more often than Rawls suspects.
The Idea of "Free Public Reason
Ratio Juris, 1995
In this paper the nature and the role of Rawls's idea of a "free public reason" are examined with an emphasis on the divide between the private and the public spheres, a divide which is the hallmark of a liberal democracy. Criticisms from both the so-called Continental tradition and the Communitarian opponents to liberalism insist on the ineffectiveness of such a conception, on its inability to establish a political consensus on democracy. But it would be a mistake to see a contractarian theory of justice, such as Rawls's justice as fairness, as grounding the social contract in a public use of reason. Such a contract would indeed be susceptible to endless conflicts and renegotiations and would never achieve consensus. Therefore, a distinction must be made between the values of justice that are present in and through the "original" contractual position and the values ofpublic reason that regulate the public sphere and guarantee its stability.
Deliberative Democracy and Public Reason
Veritas (Porto Alegre), 2010
O artigo reexamina as concepções habermasianas de política deliberativa e democracia procedimental à luz de outras teorias deliberativas, de forma a explorar as suas semelhanças e diferenças e investigar o quanto devem à ideia de razão pública e as implicações práticas daquela ideia.