Autonomy and Deliberation Paper
Deliberate and Free:
Autonomy and Heteronomy in Political Deliberation
Lucas Swaine
Department of Government
Silsby Hall
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
E-mail: Lucas.Swaine@dartmouth.edu
Prepared for the Political Philosophy Workshop, Brown University, March 8, 2007.
Comments are welcome; please do not cite without permission.
Deliberate and Free: Autonomy and Heteronomy in Political Deliberation
I. Introduction
Political liberalism means to distinguish itself from comprehensive liberal theories. Comprehensive versions of liberalism promote the view that personal autonomy or individuality is crucial for people’s pursuit of the good, extending the legacies of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. But political liberals contend that high reliance on personal autonomy risks tarnishing liberalism as a partisan or “sectarian” doctrine.[1] They note that there are a variety of reasonable conceptions of the good afoot in liberal democracies, remarking that while some affirm or aspire to ideals of personal autonomy, others do not. Political liberals express motivation to be fairer to ways of life expressing no particular affinity for personal autonomy, based on the understanding that there seem to be numerous reasonable citizens who reject the idea that people need to be empowered to stand back and assess their beliefs, principles, and ends.[2] The problems here run deep. While many reckon that liberalism requires a strong commitment to personal autonomy in order to be morally robust, Charles Larmore reflects that such a philosophy of individualism has become “simply another part of the problem” of how to handle reasonable disagreement about the good life.[3]
One special objection to political liberalism is that no such view is philosophically sustainable: autonomy must make its way in, the critic contends, if a political theory is to count as liberal or ethically defensible in any proper sense.[4] I agree that liberalism cannot stand down from its rightful commitment to enabling citizens individually to exercise their rights and liberties: liberalism must aim to empower people to participate well and fruitfully in a wide range of crucial political activities that includes voting, advocacy, and deliberating publicly with fellow citizens. The question is whether there is any way to uphold this commitment without relying excessively on the value of personal autonomy. Indeed, critics often express doubt as to whether there is any way adequately to accommodate, as fully respected participants in the democratic project, those members of liberal democracies with no wish to embrace personal autonomy. Is there a way to include such people without conceding that they will inadvertently be sidelined politically, or admitting that even the reasonable elements of their conceptions of the good will be eroded? Can political liberalism bring in non-autonomous ways of life, creating a more moral, inclusive, and promising standard for liberal democracy? In short, can political liberalism survive without a heavy reliance on personal autonomy?
I believe that political liberalism can rise to meet the critics’ challenges if it properly acknowledges the respectability of heteronomy, a less demanding standard without aspirations to the critical and self-reflective characteristics of the autonomous personality. This philosophical recognition will lay groundwork for a more morally and politically defensible version of liberalism, one that outstrips comprehensive schemes that vaunt personal autonomy as liberalism’s primary normative commitment.
In this paper, I will not assess whether heteronomous lives may be good for those who live them, or better than autonomous ways of life in certain respects. My focus will be on whether heteronomous people can rise to meet one of the central challenges of democratic citizenship: the capacity to be significant, ethical, and positive contributors to political debate. The plan for this paper is straightforward. I begin by outlining and defining the concepts of autonomy, heteronomy, and political deliberation, with an aim to provide suitable and apt characterizations of the terms. I subsequently consider what is good and important about political deliberation, with respect to the outcomes deliberation can provide for democratic publics and the procedural values deliberation aims to incorporate. I then turn to the important matter of whether heteronomous people can be helpful contributors to political deliberation, looking at both their potential as individual participants in public debate as well as the overall effects their inclusion can provide for group deliberations. I examine and consider empirical findings that bear upon the case I develop, and conclude that liberals should reconsider the power and potential of heteronomous people and their conceptions of the good, in order to build a morally compelling version of political liberalism.
II. The Concepts: Autonomy, Heteronomy, Political Deliberation
What should one understand by “autonomy,” “heteronomy,” and “political deliberation”? I aim to provide concise working definitions that capture and reflect the common understandings of these notions; and so I shall characterize each concept in order. Since I mean chiefly to discuss personal autonomy in this paper, I will clearly identify any instances where I to refer to the autonomy of groups, institutions, or nations.
A. Autonomy and Heteronomy Defined
In considering the components of a working definition of autonomy, two qualifications are in order. First, autonomy cannot simply be construed as freedom from external authority. It is true that the idea of autonomy carries connotations of freedom from authority and rule of various kinds, but autonomy cannot be limited to that alone. For one who is merely free from external authority could simply follow his whims and fancies in a fickle and self-absorbed manner. An autonomous person is surely more disciplined than that, even if he neither rises to the level of one who makes and gives laws for himself (Kant, Korsgaard), nor achieves full-flowered individuality (Mill). In the spirit of the distinction between liberty and license, various theorists of autonomy agree with this first qualification. Stanley Benn does so where he describes what he calls an anomic chooser, outlining the deficiencies of those who make choices in that fashion and distinguishing the condition from autonomy.[5] Richard Dagger seems to concur, elaborating the importance of enabling people to “govern their desires.”[6] What is more, the person who is free from external authority may well have no options from which to choose his path in life. This is another reason why mere freedom from external authority cannot suffice as a definition of autonomy. Joseph Raz drives at this point where he notes that autonomy contrasts both with a life of no choices, and with an existence “of drifting through life without ever exercising one’s capacity to choose.”[7] Nor does the criterion of freedom from external authority say anything at all of “internal” conditions that seem necessary for making meaningful choices, such as having language, enjoying a basic education, and the like. Freedom from authority simply does not capture the ideal of autonomy, and cannot suffice as a proper description of the idea.
As a second qualification, autonomy should not be misunderstood as simple self-direction. This is because a person can be self-directed in following the commands of a religious authority, for instance, or in living according to the dictates of some other authority figure who provides strict guidelines for living. A self-directed person can act willingly and with proper compliance under those conditions, internalizing the command issued by the authority, seeing the duty he has and performing it conscientiously. The idea of autonomy is not compatible with such a manner of living, since it carries with it notions of reflection and the critical adoption of rules and life-plans, all of which look quite different than the thinking and behavior of a merely self-directed person. The merely self-directed person may have some of the same qualities as the autonomous individual, but the kind of attitude and disposition characteristic of personal autonomy sets the two apart as different conditions.
A reasonable definition of autonomy cannot be too permissive, however, since autonomy must be distinguished from such less demanding conditions as heteronomy and anomie. With these considerations in view, and keeping in mind the guidance that common usage of “autonomy” provides, I shall define autonomy as a condition in which one engages in unforced and considered choosing, complemented by a self-reflective disposition and an attitude of revisability with respect to one’s interests, aims, and attachments. To elaborate, I will parse this definition by picking out the four components of this basic conception of autonomy: (a) unforced choices; (b) considered choosing; (c) an attitude favorable towards modifying or changing one’s ends, attachments, and interests, as appropriate; and (d) a self-reflective disposition.
(a) Unforced choosing. Consider first the unforced choice condition of autonomy.[8] This condition stipulates that a person must not be made to choose options before him under such constraints as physical coercion or psychological threat. As Benn describes it, the autonomous person is one who acts free from physical constraint, neither liable to penal sanctions nor subject to exploitation or duress.[9] This fits with Will Kymlicka’s suggestion that an autonomous person leads her life from the inside, without facing “discrimination or punishment” merely for so doing.[10] Raz notes that coercion is generally invasive of one’s autonomy;[11] he points out that it “diminishes a person’s options.”[12] For a person to be independent and autonomous in a meaningful sense, Raz remarks, a person must be largely free from manipulation.[13] He suggests that manipulation “perverts the way that [a] person reaches decisions, forms preferences or adopts goals.”[14] This seems reasonable, and so I shall include manipulation along with duress as conditions from which persons must be free in order to act autonomously. Benn adds deception to the list, proposing that people fail to act autonomously where they are led to believe that some options are unavailable to them when in fact they are.[15] I shall also include a relative lack of deception as a constitutive element of unforced choosing. This unforced choice condition is common to views of autonomy and should not be especially controversial, as far as it goes.
(b) Considered choosing. Second, autonomy includes a condition according to which a person must engage in considered choosing, that is, evaluating and assessing of the options at hand prior to making choices.[16] This criterion of autonomy is necessary because without it a person could simply choose quickly or carelessly without thinking carefully about what they were doing, even when deciding on matters of real and lasting importance. The need to engage in considered choosing does not hold for all decisions one makes, of course; it does not require actors to go overboard on matters of little importance, such as which tie to choose each morning.[17] The choices at issue here are significant, not trivial, those which are of moment to the person in question and to her conception of the good.[18] To engage in considered choosing, an actor will need knowledge of the options before herself; and including this stipulation says nothing of the range and quality that those options must have, which are independent issues that I assess below.
This second condition is not meant to be excessively restrictive, since people who function at a normal level meet the criterion, whether or not they are autonomous. Benn notes that a normal person knows her own preferences, character, and beliefs, and also thinks that her decisions make a difference in some way and are not irrelevant; she will have goals and projects, and will participate in pursuing individual and collective goods, concerned about her own success and failure in those respects.[19] When faced with dilemmas or important decisions, this person will do something: she will think about her options, she may consult relevant authorities or experts, and she will choose a course of action. Such people may be entirely prepared to take responsibility for their actions; however, the person who engages in both unforced and considered choosing could still be a “slave to convention,”[20] as Benn puts it, unless other criteria were added. To be clear: considered choosing does not necessitate deep reflection, but instead an earnest, if modest, attempt to evaluate and assess matters at hand prior to acting. This is part of normal functioning, and while it is an important element of autonomous action, it does not suffice for autonomy.
Conditions (a) and (b) jointly capture the idea of minimal self-direction. While not enough for autonomy, they suffice for heteronomy, a less demanding condition. Benn takes time to describe heteronomy, bugbear of the Kantian, noting that heteronomous people display standard human features. Heteronomous people recognize canons for drawing inferences and assessing evidence, they have capacities to make decisions and act on them, given their preferences, they understand that changes in belief can require changes in action, as appropriate, and they formulate and pursue projects in rational ways.[21] A heteronomous person often has a nomos from which he receives ideas and guidelines on how to live; many religious people are heteronomous in this way. The heteronomous person could be said to pursue the good “as he sees it,” meeting one of Raz’s conditions of autonomy in that regard.[22] However, as Dagger notes, heteronomy lacks criteria indicative of a more thorough form of self-government.[23] This is true even though the constitutive components of heteronomy are compatible with the two further constitutive elements of autonomy that I describe below. Together, conditions (a) and (b): (i) allow that a person can believe that he has valuable options from which to choose, although it does not require this;[24] (ii) are consistent with an actor’s options not being morally repugnant;[25] (iii) allow that actors may have structural opportunities to choose from the options before them,[26] although they do not require or logically imply that the opportunities are broad; (iv) are consistent with a wide range of conceptions of the good—liberal, theocratic, comprehensive, non-comprehensive, religious, secular, and autonomous—despite the fact that autonomous conceptions of the good require more than what conditions (a) and (b) set down.
On the conception of heteronomy I describe, heteronomous people are not automatons: they do not simply perform actions robotically, acting on the commands of an external source without thinking about their actions whatsoever. While there are some people who behave in such radically unreflective or non-conscious ways, we normally call them brainwashed where they meet two conditions: their initial values are changed by some intrusive process, and the person in question suffers from a diminished capacity rationally to evaluate alternative paths of action.[27] I do not wish to take issue with the view that brainwashing is a real phenomenon; it is just not my focus here. Only a small number of people could count as brainwashed, presumably, and the condition is distinguishable from normal human functioning and heteronomy. With this in place, it is sensible to see heteronomous people as occupying the large middle ground between the fully autonomous individual and the brainwashed person. Furthermore, I agree with Robert Audi’s suggestion that autonomy is compromised by internal or external compulsion, dissociation, or cases of weakness of will where one acts against one’s better judgment.[28] While each of the three traits Audi describes is undesirable, I would simply note that weakness of will, dissociation, and compulsion can impair heteronomous as well as autonomous people—none is peculiar to heteronomy.[29] Nevertheless, I accept that compulsion and dissociation affect a wide range of persons, and that weakness of will is a common impairment, too. I assume that both heteronomous and autonomous people may operate above these hindrances, but wish to allow that they can have their heteronomy or autonomy compromised by the impediments, to greater or lesser degrees.
To be clear, it is true that many heteronomous people are religious and subscribe to religious conceptions of the good. However, not all heteronomous people are religious: Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson indicate that people with non-religious conceptions of the good can be heteronomous, too. They insinuate that heteronomy is a shortcoming, not only in cases where people adhere to non-religious doctrines in insufficiently critical ways, but more broadly, where schools fail to equip children to “become effective citizens,” or where attitudes and behavior are excessively influenced by mass media.[30]
The third and fourth criteria of autonomy, reflected in the definition I have provided, are the following:
(c) Attitude of revisability. This condition of autonomy stipulates that, with respect to one’s ends, beliefs, principles and attachments, a person must have an attitude such that none of the above is seen as incorrigible, given, or unable to be rejected. This fits with Benn’s notion that an autonomous person’s values and principles are not simply adopted ready-made, but are his: they are affirmed through a “still-continuing process of criticism and revaluation.”[31] The autonomous person operates with the assumption that beliefs about the good life are “fallible and revisable,”[32] and presents an attitude reflecting that assumption, instead of adopting the outlook that his beliefs about the good are set in stone. This fits with Rawls’s description of people who are able to “‘stand back’ from [their] current ends to ‘survey and assess’ their worthiness.”[33] An attitude of revisability is an important part of living one’s life from the inside, and this condition sets apart the autonomous from the heteronomous person.
It would be a mistake to think that an autonomous person must stick fast to his principles and ends, however. Raz notes that autonomous people can change their minds and be spontaneous, dropping one pursuit to embrace another.[34] An autonomous person might reach such a decision after engaging in new experiences, reflecting on life’s direction, or evaluating his character and actions in light of existing community standards and norms. Following this thought, it seems fair to put before the autonomous individual an attitude whereby he is willing to appraise and possibly revise not just his own performance, which the heteronomous person may do, but “also the very standards he uses for the appraisal,” as Benn suggests.[35] Benn’s view resonates in an intimation of Kymlicka’s: namely, that for an autonomous person, “[no] end is immune from … potential revision.”[36] And so even if it were sensible to say that an autonomous person could decide to follow rules provided by some external authority, issuing from a figure or doctrine assumed to be correct and truth-promoting, those rules, doctrines, and authority figures would be subject to reappraisal according to this criterion. Kymlicka does not expressly state this latter point, but it coheres with his and Benn’s understandings. In Kymlicka’s words, “[no] matter how confident we are about our ends at a particular moment, new circumstances or experiences may arise, often in unpredictable ways, that cause us to re-evaluate them.”[37]
The requirement laid down by an attitude of revisability is stronger than mere recognition of evidential or inferential canons, since the latter apply broadly across quotidian life and do not necessarily grind against with religious practitioners’ matters of faith. An attitude of revisability also allows for changing one’s view of oneself, as can occur where an individual rejects prevailing social standards and struggles to achieve an identity she can call her own.[38] In Elizabeth Gross’s estimation, autonomy “implies the right to accept or reject [given] norms or standards according to their appropriateness to one’s self-definition.”[39] The attitude that principles, values, and ends may be revised runs the gamut: it sounds out beliefs regarding good and bad, socially acceptable and unacceptable roles, and the existence of otherworldly powers and ends.
(d) Self-reflective disposition. Autonomous people are often said to have a capacity to be self-reflective. While that seems correct, an autonomous person cannot simply possess that capacity, they must have a disposition to be reflective, too. That is, the autonomous actor actually will be reflective, as opposed to simply having the ability to be reflective while rarely if ever using that capacity. In other words, the autonomous person is not just capable of being self-reflective, she does reflect upon her life.[40] This criterion of autonomy is sensible to include partly because one would not call a person autonomous if she rarely or never were that way, independent of whether she had the capacity to think deeply about herself, her principles, her community’s standards of self-appraisal, and so on. And this seems to hold true whether the person has an attitude that her ends, beliefs, and principles can rightly be revised as appropriate.
Dagger argues that autonomy can remain in capacity, maintaining that a self-reflective disposition, as I have described it, is not necessary. But his view is conflicted: for he also seems to imply or require actual reflection and action on the part of persons in order for them to count as autonomous. Dagger describes autonomy as involving the “ability to reflect upon one’s beliefs, desires, and circumstances”; the autonomous person needs to be “aware” of alternatives, he writes, able to “think critically” about them.[41] However, in discussing the putative right to autonomy, he claims that such a right “does not allow us to accept every tradition or way of life simply on its own terms.”[42] This restriction would presumably necessitate actual, reflective action on the part of persons. Furthermore, Dagger argues that people are autonomous, as opposed to merely heteronomous, to the extent that they “choose the principles by which they live.”[43] Acts of choosing go beyond the mere capacity to choose or to govern oneself, which Dagger suggests suffices for autonomy whether or not it is ever actualized.[44] There is more than one juncture where Dagger’s view displays this tension.
Raz, similarly, denies that self-reflection is definitive or constitutive of autonomy, though his arguments are consistent with the holding that those individuals who exhibit critical independence are autonomous. Raz contends that many conceptions of autonomy are “over-intellectualized,”[45] a trend he is keen to buck. But the kind of critical independence I have described features widely in philosophical accounts of personal autonomy, and there seems to be good reason to include it given the arguments I have canvassed and considered to this point. For an autonomous person does not simply absorb “unreflectively” norms of propriety from those around him: if he did, he would be “uncritically internalizing” received mores.[46] Instead, the autonomous person is prepared to appraise not just own his performance according to existing social standards, which a heteronomous person may well do, but “also the very standards he uses for the appraisal.”[47] So he is willing and in a sense disposed to engage in meta-assessment, an important feature of autonomy which Raz’s view lacks. Autonomy must involve a disposition to be self-reflective in order that the person in question does not find himself hampered by bad decisions made without sufficient reflection, or plagued by insidious norms uncritically accepted; such is the autonomous individual’s commitment to himself.
Conditions (c) and (d) provide a measure of what I shall call critical independence; and when all four conditions are present, they suffice for autonomy. To reiterate, an autonomous person has features making her different from her heteronomous counterpart, since the latter may well be governed by a nomos “taken over from others.”[48] Conditions (c) and (d) do not suffice for autonomy, taken without (a) and (b), because one who is critically independent could have her autonomy seriously hampered if she were forced to choose one option instead of another, or if she were to choose from some set of options without assessing their relative merits.
The definition of autonomy I have provided is intended to reflect a reasonable minimum understanding of the term; and I do not mean for the definition to be especially problematic or controversial. As it stands, the definition has the following four virtues: first, it allows the possibility that autonomy “admits of degree,”[49] and that people can possess it to a greater or lesser extent.[50] Autonomy can be cultivated, neglected, or impaired, according to this definition.[51] Second, the definition allows that persons may need a broader or narrower range of options to count as adequate for autonomy.[52] Raz notes that the range must contribute to meaningful choice, too: if the only options available to a person are tantamount to choosing one of two nearly identical cherries from a bowl, he contends, the person would not rightly be said to be autonomous.[53] As such, Raz proposes that one needs a greater range of meaningful options than can be chosen, with those options actually varying, in order to have autonomy.[54] The definition I have provided allows for this; and it permits that an individual will need opportunities to choose between options, too, although exactly how frequent those opportunities must be it does not stipulate. Third, and furthermore, the definition allows that autonomy could be a condition that exists over time, over series of choices, and that an autonomous person is thereby self-creating.[55] I leave this out of the definition of autonomy because if an actor meets the four criteria I have listed, she will be self-creating in an important sense.
Fourth, the definition resounds with a variety of conceptions of autonomy. Benn defines autonomy as a “character trait amounting to a capacity to act on principles … that are one’s own” because one has made them so through a process of rational reflection on the principles and values assimilated from one’s social environment.[56] Audi describes autonomy as both a potential guide and a “measure of self-government” for those who develop it.[57] Gerald Dworkin maintains that autonomy exists where a person “identifies with his desires, goals, and values, and such identification is not itself influenced in ways which make the process of self-identification in some may alien to the individual.”[58] John Tomasi’s “A-people” are drawn from the set of autonomous persons, since it is in the latter group where one finds exemplars of people who lead “highly mobile, experimental, fallibilist, reflective, and self-aware lives.”[59] The account I have provided coheres with these understandings; and it also fits with Kymlicka’s influential view of personal autonomy as it relates to culture. In Liberalism, Community and Culture, Kymlicka notes that the range of options before people is not chosen, but rather is “determined” by their cultural heritage.[60] He argues that while the decision about how to live one’s life must always be one’s own, that decision, “is always a matter of selecting what we believe to be the most valuable from the various options available, selecting from a context of choice which provides us with different ways of life.”[61] Kymlicka contends that people need to have a rich and secure cultural structure to see their options clearly, to become “vividly aware” of the options at hand, and to intelligently examine them before choosing.[62]
Kymlicka expands his case in Multicultural Citizenship, elaborating the idea of a societal culture as one that “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities.”[63] Membership in one’s own societal culture helps to enable “meaningful individual choice,” and it supports self-identity, too;[64] societal cultures “are important to people’s freedom,” as he says.[65] Kymlicka reflects that liberalism is committed to granting people wide freedom of choice in terms of how they lead their lives. Liberalism “allows people to choose a conception of the good life, and then allows them to reconsider that decision, and adopt a new and hopefully better plan of life.”[66] As such, people need “access” to a societal culture, one that is one’s “own.”[67] And here autonomy is important: Kymlicka avers that his liberal view “insists that people can stand back and assess moral values and traditional ways of life, and should be given not only the legal right to do so, but also the social conditions to enhance this capacity (e.g. a liberal education).”[68] As Kymlicka pithily puts it, “[we] must endorse the traditional liberal belief in personal autonomy.”[69] The definition I have furnished fits well with Kymlicka’s understanding of autonomy, although merely accepting the definition does not commit one to any philosophical or political endorsement of Kymlicka’s position on the value of autonomy.
I note finally that one who accepts the conceptions of heteronomy and autonomy I offer here is not thereby committed to any particular view of freedom and responsibility. Instead, they are compatible with a variety of views in that regard, and with the dispositional approach developed by Michael Smith.[70] I wish to allow the possibility that heteronomous people can orthonomous: that is, that they have a capacity to be ruled by right.[71] Laying out autonomy and heteronomy in these ways should allow that heteronomous and autonomous people each might be orthonomous members of civil society in liberal democracies, although whether they can achieve that benchmark remains to be determined.
B. Political Deliberation Defined
James Bohman observes that many advocates of deliberation improperly define the concept and that in many cases the concept is not defined by theorists or advocates at all.[72] The same is true for the more specific idea of deliberative democracy: while its advocates tend to rally around some central ideas and values, deliberative democracy “[does not] signify a creed with a simple set of core aims.”[73] The lack of a clear, core, and universally-shared set of aims on the part of deliberative theorists raises no insurmountable barrier to my purposes in this paper, however. I aim to look broadly at the principles, values, procedures, and ends promoted by theorists who advocate deliberative democracy, to see how well heteronomous people fare on those fronts. Nevertheless, it is important here to provide an appropriate working definition of political deliberation, and to try to capture the phenomenon in such a way that it does not exclude out of hand the various, differing normative conceptions of deliberation that theorists promote. To that end, I shall define political deliberation as public consideration and debate regarding policies, procedures, or laws.
The elements of this definition need to be clarified and explained. First, political deliberation is public, involving interpersonal and inter-group discussion and interaction.[74] It occurs between individual parties, amid groups and other groups, in institutions, and often with the involvement of political figures. Second, political deliberation includes debate and consideration: as I characterize it, public deliberation has reason-giving as a desideratum, although need not include it in fact. Many deliberative democrats wish for political deliberation to include adducing public reasons, following the enterprising advances of John Rawls,[75] but I shall allow that, as a matter of definition, it may not. This permits the “everyday talk” of Jane Mansbridge to be included under the rubric of political deliberation, where one finds non-ideal discussion, rhetoric, private reasons, emotional outbursts, browbeating, and power plays.[76] If deliberative processes often “[fall] significantly short of [the] ideal” of deliberative democracy, as Ian Shapiro suggests they do, it makes sense not to exclude those processes from the broad rubric of political deliberation.[77] This allows for a useful, reasonable definition, and it has the benefit of not making some particular normative conception of deliberation true by stipulation. In addition, the characterization I provide permits, but does not require, a wide variety of normative conceptions to count as forms of political deliberation. It allows that debate can and should be normatively well-oriented and helpful, that political deliberation best occurs in the form of discourse and dialogue, and that political deliberation might rightly aim to establish some procedures and outcomes, and avoid others.[78]
By “consideration” I mean nothing remarkable: consideration involves the three elements of reflection, assessing the weight of reasons at hand for different courses of action, and the process of cogitating, pondering, and thinking through a specific issue. Consideration can have a beginning and an end, it can go on for shorter or longer durations, and it may be more or less consultative. Common use of “deliberation” implies a measure of carefulness but I decline to include this as a definitive trait; this permits one to hope that deliberative processes and procedures will be fairly cautious and thorough, while not demanding it by definitional fiat. To be clear, there is no political deliberation where some political actor decides a course of action without any consultation or debate, or where she declines to consider possible alternative routes to pursue. Political deliberation cannot exist where one finds mere decisionism, as exists in cases where, for instance, a dictator decides matters with no public debate or consideration whatsoever.[79] But I wish to leave the degree of carefulness in consideration open here; as I understand it, political deliberation ranges from thoughtful, respectful discussion among friendly community members, to heated, angry exchanges between political adversaries. The definition I provide also allows that political deliberation need not be a continuous event, but that it can occur at intervals.[80] This permits normative conceptions of deliberation to be more or less demanding regarding citizen involvement.[81]
This leads to a third characteristic of political deliberation: its scope. The scope of political deliberation normally ranges across governmental institutions, although some theorists wish to extend it to civil society as well.[82] The scope of deliberation is not agreed upon, however, and there are reasons for considering it undesirable to apply the concept of political deliberation to voluntary associations.[83] For instance, William Galston worries about overextending the scope of deliberation, noting that for some important areas of people’s lives political deliberation should have no place.[84] One hypothetical example is the unpalatable case where state institutions deliberate over whom an individual citizen should marry.[85] Galston correctly suggests that marital decisions of that kind should not be a matter for political deliberation, even if the prospective two parties in question were included in the discussion. Mansbridge agrees with the thought, noting how many questions that affect all citizens “should not be decided through formal government,” and proposing that people may quite reasonably make the collective decision not to permit formal government pronouncements “to touch the areas in which the CEO, cardinal, anchorwoman, or individual acts.”[86] For the sake of the argument at hand, I will proceed with a standard scope of political deliberation in view but allow that the conception of the public forum may be expanded or diminished; the case I make should not be affected by such modifications.[87] I will also include voting and advocacy within the scope of political deliberation,[88] noting that citizens can at times advocate or vote on issues in which they reckon they have no personal stake, or where they would not be affected directly by any of the prospective policy outcomes (e.g., on resolutions for protecting visible minority status, when one is not a member of the minority in question).
Fourth, political deliberation is at a minimum procedural, applying to public decision-making processes. Because its processes often lead to binding decisions on citizens, one understands its importance and relevance to citizens’ pursuits: political deliberation tends to have coercive implications, often touching citizens’ lives in personal ways. Deliberative procedures yield decisions and policies on abortion, school vouchers, gay marriage, immigration laws, war measures, tax apportionment, legal accommodations for minority groups, and so on. Mansbridge observes that deliberation in public assemblies regularly aims to “[create] a collectively binding decision,”[89] to which Gutmann and Thompson add the normative point that the decisions can and often should be temporary and politically provisional, leaving them open to reconsideration in future.[90] Nevertheless, deliberation sometimes results in deadlock; and this is to be expected if, as Alan Wertheimer reflects, one does not assume that there is always a “right answer to [the] issue” under discussion.[91] These considerations stand with the normal sense and understanding of deliberation, as Mansbridge suggests,[92] and the elements of provisionality and imperfection reflect the spirit of collective problem solving that animates democracy.[93]
Whether political deliberation must affirm substantive principles in the deliberative procedures it advocates is a point of disagreement.[94] Gutmann and Thompson argue that deliberative democracy needs substantive principles for teeth, maintaining that one cannot coherently propose that any recommended procedural constraints are authoritative or correct if one takes a purely procedural view of deliberation.[95] For instance, they claim, since deliberative democracy is committed to reciprocity, any proponent needs to affirm substantive positions on liberty, opportunity, fairness, and mutual respect.[96] Gutmann and Thompson point out that these added considerations bear directly on claims of how citizens should be treated, which surely procedural theories wish to include.[97] They conclude that deliberative theory “can and should go beyond process”: it needs to embrace principles and values pertaining to both substantive and procedural matters, such as equal rights and opportunities to vote, and freedom of speech as a background condition for participation.[98] I suspect that Gutmann and Thompson are largely correct about the general normative commitments deliberative theorists should or must hold, and the conception of political deliberation I provide is consistent with the definition of deliberative democracy they offer.[99] However, the definition of political deliberation I have furnished does not assume the need for the normative principles Gutmann and Thompson advocate, leaving the question of deliberative democracy’s more specific and substantial normative commitments open for investigation.
III. What Is Good About Political Deliberation?
Political deliberation is a good thing for pluralistic political orders in which one finds a variety of people, cultures, and ways of life. In democratic societies the fact of “pluralism as such” is evident: one finds broad religious, cultural, and philosophical diversity across citizens, much of which people are happy to hug and protect.[100] Nevertheless, there also exist considerable differences and discrepancies between people and groups that many find undesirable or downright problematic. Gutmann and Thompson outline a variety of antidemocratic biases motored by money and power in liberal democracies, arguing that they distort good policies and laws.[101] But they contend that deliberation can help to resolve problems of inordinate power and influence that the extremely wealthy may enjoy.[102]
Liberal democracies also display differential treatment between sexes, disenfranchisement of members of racial minorities, and other sorts of differences and discrepancies that many find flatly intolerable. On this front, deliberative theorists emphasize how good deliberation can help resolve unwarranted and unjust treatment of the less fortunate, as well as diminish citizens’ apathy or acquiescence to such practices. Bohman is bullish on the prospects of deliberation, here, claiming that “it is through public deliberation that we can best preserve a cooperative, tolerant, and democratic form of pluralism.”[103] Deliberation is also supposed to be useful in cases where it is not obvious how best to proceed on some difficult or divisive public matter, or where how people should even think about proceeding is not clear, at least not to all.
This emphasis on the importance of deliberation stands directly against the model of snap judgment popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.[104] That intuition-following standard may work for individual life, although I suspect that probably it does not; but it also provides a too-easy case for denying the importance of autonomy in political deliberation. The quick case might take the following form: “Life goes well individually without careful consideration or cogitation before choosing among options, and so it goes well without autonomy. This surely means that political deliberation will go well with without autonomy, too.” There are two debilitating non-sequiturs here: (a) one cannot assume that what counts as life going well or fruitfully is identical both for any single individual and the group of which she is a member; and (b) individual choice-making does not at all obviously take the same form as decision-making processes for large groups. There are some similarities between decision-making at the individual and group levels, to be sure, but the two are relevantly different. For instance, mass publics contain a variety of perspectives, views, conceptions of the good, and methods of analysis, and so they cannot reason in the same way as do individual persons. This suggests that the snap decision method, even if it were auspicious for one’s own life, is simply not a workable political option. After all, when it comes to political issues, the process of following intuitions and making snap decisions would by its nature omit consideration and discussion of the various parties who will be affected, the rights and liberties that may be expanded or restricted by legislation, possible unintended consequences of new laws and policies, and so forth. It is therefore sensible to suppose that political action without deliberation would regularly result in actions that exclude minorities, cause harm to vulnerable parties, or yield bad policies otherwise. And this is to say nothing of how public consideration and debate over matters of policy and law, before matters are decided, lend a desirable form of intentionality to public lawmaking. Political deliberation allows decisions to aspire to be expressive of the will of the group: if the deliberation goes well, the resulting decisions may be legitimate and justified.
A. Desirable Outcomes and Valuable Procedures
I have suggested that carefulness in debate and consideration are important elements of what one could call healthy political deliberation; but more must be said on this matter. For one might wonder what, exactly, political deliberation should aim to achieve by way of the procedures or outcomes it can offer for a deliberating public. Deliberative theorists propose that political deliberation has many virtues; and they identify aims of political deliberation, too, potential benefits resultant from properly functioning and well-oriented democratic discussion and debate. Here, I will outline some of the more prominent aims and goals that deliberative theorists single out. Placing the purported benefits and values of political deliberation clearly in view will help to distinguish a workable standard for determining how well heteronomous people fare in deliberation, and whether they are inferior to their autonomous counterparts in this regard.
For the sake of simplicity, I will divide the aims of political deliberation into two kinds: aims for outcomes and procedures, respectively. Consider first the outcomes of deliberation that deliberative theorists variously promote. Some argue that political deliberation produces efficient outcomes by utilizing aggregative processes in which people’s preferences are seen as exogenous and given; but this putatively valuable outcome is often criticized as being insufficiently ambitious and normatively confused.[105] Deliberative theorists hope for more: when deliberation works well, they suggest, it has the potential to achieve consensus on tough and divisive issues.[106] Bohman proposes that deliberation aiming at consensus can reduce social fragmentation, contending that it holds promise for overcoming social inequalities.[107] He joins Gutmann and Thompson, who contend that political deliberation can yield corrective measures for past errors, injustices, and political or legal mistakes;[108] and he shows solidarity with Young, who emphasizes how deliberation can lessen or even remove illegitimate manifestations of power in political institutions.[109] What is more, political deliberation is said to have the potential to promote not only mutually respectful processes of decision-making,[110] but a “thicker kind of respect” between citizens, helping them to see the reasonableness of others’ views. On this point deliberative theorists are quite correct: well-oriented political deliberation can yield justifications for the laws, policies, and procedures that people collectively impose upon each other;[111] I have elaborated a related argument at length elsewhere.[112] There does indeed appear to be reason to think that justifications arrived at through deliberation can provide legitimacy to the very decisions that people reach, in the dynamic processes of deliberative decision-making, imperfect though those processes tend to be. In short, political deliberation has the potential to encourage “public-spirited perspectives on issues,” as Gutmann and Thompson put it, promoting greater participation as well as the sense of the legitimacy of citizens’ determinations.[113]
Second, deliberative theorists identify procedural values that political deliberation should strive to incorporate, pertaining to the very methods and practices of deliberation that structure public discourse and decision-making. These procedural values are different than the outcomes of deliberation, although hale and hearty deliberative procedures are often thought to complement and facilitate excellent outcomes. Outcomes can be made better, even legitimated by procedure, theorists argue, where deliberation is done well. As with the outcomes of deliberation, one observes naturally variation from theorist to theorist on just what procedural values political deliberation should embody. However, theorists converge interestingly on the two procedural values of reciprocity and inclusiveness, in particular.
Gutmann and Thompson emphasize that political deliberation requires reciprocity for constructive and well-oriented processes of public discussion and debate.[114] As they put it, reciprocity’s basic premise is that “citizens owe one another justifications for the institutions, law, and public policies that collectively bind them.”[115] Here, they follow Rawls’s arguments from Political Liberalism. Political deliberation that functions well will not only work to provide justifications for laws and policies, but will also display mutual respect, which is “part of the meaning of reciprocity.”[116] Gutmann and Thompson suggest famously that reciprocity in deliberation asks people to make claims that others “can accept in principle.”[117] They are clear on the normative importance of reciprocity for deliberation,[118] and to the central value of reciprocity they adjoin three additional principles “that provide the content of deliberative democracy”: basic liberty, basic opportunity, and fair opportunity.[119] Other deliberative theorists generally do not dispute these procedural norms. Bohman shows concordance with the idea, reflecting that illegitimate political decisions do not reach a level of reciprocity: “they are not addressed to an audience of politically equal citizens.”[120] And Mansbridge maintains that Gutmann and Thompson’s conception of reciprocity “applies well to everyday talk.”[121] That Gutmann and Thompson’s conception of reciprocity does not admit all of the chatter in everyday talk seems evident, however, since they wish to exclude discussion of slavery policies in democratic deliberation on the grounds that slavery is not a moral position.[122]
A second procedural value deliberative democrats identify is inclusiveness. Iris Marion Young strongly advocates on behalf of this value.[123] As she puts it, the collective problem-solving that deliberative democracy promotes “depends for its legitimacy and wisdom on the expression and criticism of the diverse opinions of all the members of society.”[124] Political discussion and decision-making should include “all those affected” by the prospective decision in nontrivial ways.[125] Furthermore, just how people are included matters to deliberation, too. On most accounts, it is not enough to say that people only need, say, a formal right to join public discussions, since that does not take seriously the prospects of unequal levels of inclusion. Young advises that deliberations should include concerned parties “equally” in the decision making process; this is an important qualification on inclusion, she maintains, that deliberation should aim to achieve.[126] As Young puts it, people should have an “equal right and an effective opportunity to express their interests and concerns,” on any appropriate understanding of deliberative democracy.[127] Bohman seems to agree, where he states that people should have equal opportunities to participate.[128] Bohman proposes that the inclusive element of deliberative democracy should also involve “[reflecting] on the general interest or [the] common good”;[129] Young criticizes this notion, but both concur that inclusiveness and broad participation in discussion and debate are important for healthy political deliberation.[130]
It is in this sense that political deliberation should not aim to rebuild ancient Athens: democratic deliberation must actually include people’s voices, allowing them to speak for themselves and support representatives of their own choosing, instead of merely proceeding on assumptions about what others think they really desire or are best suited for in life.[131] Young reflects that the conditions of “inclusive decision-making” can help to achieve “more just and wise political judgments,” and many advocates of deliberative democracy concur.[132] However, some take pains to add the capstone argument that the principles of deliberative democracy are themselves contestable: Gutmann and Thompson make this point, contending that deliberative principles are not only subject to change, but are are “self-correcting.”[133] They maintain that citizens should “continue to reason together” when faced with disagreement: this is part of the dynamic character of deliberation, as Gutmann and Thompson describe it, at least when it is properly democratic.[134]
IV. Autonomous Versus Heteronomous Deliberation
To this point, I have provided characterizations of autonomy, heteronomy, and political deliberation, and laid out a series of central aims and values advocated by deliberative theorists with respect to political deliberation. With this groundwork in place, I turn to the central issues pertaining to autonomy and heteronomy in political deliberation. Can heteronomous people contribute to public debate in a positive, fruitful manner? Or do citizens need to be autonomous, for deliberation to go well?
Before proceeding further, it is necessary to distinguish carefully between autonomy as it pertains to groups, on the one hand, and personal autonomy, on the other. The idea of autonomy applies to deliberative bodies as a whole, such as juries, committees, boards of governors, and similar groups and institutions. As with personal autonomy, collective bodies are autonomous where they are not excessively influenced or hindered by external forces, where they have choices to make and decisions to reach, and where they display a measure of critical independence in their workings. For instance, we say that juries are autonomous when they are given a case to mull over and decide, within constraints of law; they are not directed to decide the case in some particular manner; and no outside parties interfere with their deliberations. Neither taking directions from a judge nor asking for legal direction or informational assistance compromises their autonomy. One must not overextend the example, since jury deliberations are not supposed to reach accommodations or compromises,[135] but their capacities and actoions as a group make the point, here. Groups are autonomous in their deliberations where they consider and debate some course of action, they choose the course of action in question, they show critical independence, and their group discussions and decisions are free from threat of force, sanctions, other coercive measures.[136]
It is a familiar and vexing problem that groups, assemblies, and even entire publics can be misdirected in their reasoning and discussions. This occurs where political figures provide deliberating bodies with false or misleading information, for instance, where deliberative groups are threatened with punishment if they do not accept some outcome, or where deliberations are placed under duress of a different sort. I am primarily concerned with the extent to which heteronomous people, at the individual level, may or may not be good participants in political deliberation. To reiterate, individual citizens are heteronomous where they engage in considered and unforced choosing, and autonomous where they also display an attitude of revisability and a self-reflective disposition. Their actions and choices become part of political deliberation when they join in larger discussions respecting matters of public concern, or when they vote or advocate for some specific measure. This enables one to see four ways in which, with respect to political deliberation, autonomy at the individual level is different than group autonomy: first, for deliberating groups, autonomy can be enhanced or diminished by factors outside of the group as a whole, but those factors may not affect some of the individual members comprising the deliberative body. Second, the group’s ability to discuss, reflect on, and choose a course of action is a function of the structure and composition of the group as a whole, and not of any single individual. Third, groups can have a mixture of more or fewer autonomous people and still be autonomous in a deliberative sense.[137] Fourth, individual members of groups may deliberate, autonomously or otherwise, with each other and even within themselves. That is, it makes sense to say that members of deliberative groups can and do deliberate on issues solo, where they reflect or engage in silent dialogue with themselves alone.[138]
Given the differences between individual and group-level autonomy, with respect to deliberation, how do heteronomous people fare in their contributions to public debate? One false start would be to claim that healthy public debate requires the “autonomous employment of practical reason,” and to contend that heteronomy is therefore undesirable. The reason that this is an infelicitous way to proceed is because the notion of autonomy is ambiguous: it could mean freedom from manipulation as a group, or critical independence at the individual level, or both. I shall assume for the moment that the deliberating group’s autonomy is not at issue; that is, that they are not controlled from the outside, they can come to their own decision about some outcome to endorse or reject, that nothing in principle prevents them from engaging in considered choosing of their own, and that the group is to that extent at liberty to choose their path in a careful, self-reflective, and self-critical manner.
Springing off the line with the claim that “autonomous citizens are good citizens” constitutes another misstep. It is easy to sprint to the conclusion that possessing personal autonomy suffices to make one a virtuous citizen. But that conclusion is false: autonomous people can engage in a variety of practices that count as bad on practically any conception of citizenship. They may self-reflectively choose to deceive others or to pursue base forms of self-interest, for instance. An autonomous person might also be disrespectful of her fellow citizens or continually decide to take advantage of others’ work by free-riding on their provision of public goods. Not all autonomous people display virtues, either as citizens or as private persons; indeed, there are many examples of unreasonable autonomous people, such as the hardhearted Nietzschean nobleman, the conceited and manipulative woman who brims with amour-propre, or the critically independent scoundrel with a dark desire to dominate others, insisting on the truth of his own view when other, reasonable people do not agree.[139]
For that matter, autonomous people feature face special perils in their capacities as citizens. Autonomous people may be more inclined to be excessively self-assured, overly confident, or even unconcerned and aloof when it comes to social and political issues. And it is ironic that they can develop such attitudes precisely in cases where they believe they have laid a law down for themselves and reached a superior position because of it. Alternatively, the autonomous individual might suppose that a vicious view of personal interaction is correct, on the grounds that they arrived at it and they are a “self-authenticating [source] of valid claims.”[140] Nothing in the nature of autonomy prevents a person possessing that trait from being shameless and base, either personally or as a citizen, so the fond thought that autonomous citizens are good citizens is just not correct. To be fair, simply being heteronomous does not make one virtuous, as person or as a citizen, either. Heteronomous people can succumb to a variety of vices, too, and if all one knew were that someone were heteronomous, their virtue and competencies as a citizen or private party would be left undetermined. For instance, a heteronomous person may subscribe to a hateful or harmful doctrine, they may not be sufficiently critical of their own ways at points where criticism is strongly warranted, or they may vote or advocate on measures simply because others do the same, even if the measure were against everyone’s objective interests.
I am not arguing that autonomous people are precluded from being good people or fine citizens. Indeed, it could be that autonomy is necessary for good citizenship, even though I have argued that autonomy is not sufficient for it. And so this brings up a special issue for heteronomy and citizenship in liberal democracies: If deliberative capacities and contributions count among the virtues of citizenship, how do heteronomous people fare? Is autonomy necessary for good citizenship, and is heavy reliance on autonomy justified on these grounds?
To see whether personal autonomy is necessary for good citizenship, I will turn to autonomous and heteronomous people’s respective deliberative potential, to examine them in comparison philosophically. Taking autonomous people first, one sees how their deliberative propensities and capacities appear to provide a series of strengths and skills that apply favorably to political deliberation. The advocate of autonomy may point out three central benefits that autonomous people bring to the deliberative table: first of all, an autonomous person will tend to be reflective and critical, given her attitudes and dispositions, and so will not be inclined to accept status quo on important political issues. This is a good thing, the advocate might propose, since democratic polities exhibit social and political problems that need continually to be identified and addressed. Autonomous people’s critical independence and reflective attitudes make them more likely to see inequalities and injustices, as well as less prone to accept institutions perpetuating undesirable power relations, violating rights and freedoms, or establishing unjust conditions. Second, autonomous people’s dispositions and attitudes help them to be chary in considering points pro and con when they participate in political deliberation. Autonomous citizens have an increased likelihood of observing burdens of judgment and offering acceptable, public reasons for the measures that they advocate, the proponent may contend, and they will be more liable to be suspicious of non-public reasons offered to justify restrictive policies and laws.[141] Third, one might submit that autonomous people will be more likely than others to hold politicians and public figures accountable for their wrongdoings: autonomous individuals are by their nature self-critical and reflective, and so will be inclined not to be deferential to others or quickly accepting of people’s policy proposals in political deliberation. These traits and dispositions of autonomous people make them an important part of healthy political deliberation; so the advocate of autonomy might argue.
But are these putative advantages of autonomy accurate? In the first place, autonomous people could still accept status quo in cases where they develop disaffection with politics or where they find themselves bored or unconcerned with social and political problems for other reasons. Autonomous people enjoy the option to disengage from politics to pursue personal ends of self-discovery and romantic indulgence,[142] after all, or they may stroll silently into the forests of a quietist, conservative doctrine akin to that cultivated by Michael Oakeshott.[143] Second, even when they do not reconcile themselves to existing practices, and become involved in the fray of political deliberation, it is well within an autonomous person’s capacity to deliberate badly. For example, an autonomous person may misidentify sources of problems, misconstrue causal processes, or advocate on behalf of foolish ideas and ends. There is nothing in the nature of autonomy that makes such a person perspicacious, circumspect, intelligent, or prudent: those features are not part of personal autonomy, they are not necessary for it, and they do not obviously correlate with autonomy in any meaningful way. Third, while it could be the case that autonomous people are more likely to give public reasons to fellow participants in public deliberation, being autonomous provides no assurance that one will do so. There are scads of examples of deceitful, manipulative, and simply bad public offerings from autonomous parties engaged in political deliberation, where the reasons for some policy are not public, reasonable, or even applicable to others who would be significantly affected. To put the matter slightly differently, the mere possession of personal autonomy neither makes one a believer in mutual respect nor motivates one to observe guidelines of reciprocity in public debate. It also does not make one an advocate or practitioner of more inclusive dialogue—autonomous people often overlook people deserving of inclusion or respect, as they have with religious minorities in liberal democracies. What is more, many people displaying the characteristics of personal autonomy are vicious in their dealings as individual persons or as citizens, as I have argued, working to exclude those about whom they have decided they simply do not care. It is tempting to think that personal autonomy makes for fine deliberation and good citizenship, but there is little cause to believe that such is truly the case.
A. Heteronomous Participants in Political Deliberation: Three Concerns
I turn now to the other side of the deliberative coin, to that of heteronomous people, whose comparative deficiencies in public discussion liberals have often assumed. Here, I shall proceed in the opposite manner to the way in which I addressed autonomous people, looking at the alleged inherent weaknesses of heteronomous persons, to see how well they fare when it comes to their potential to contribute to political deliberation.
At the outset, it is important to do away with some misconceptions about heteronomous people. For instance, one unwarranted assumption seems to be that heteronomous people cannot be well educated; that is simply not true, unless one characterizes the common and peculiar elements of autonomy in such a way that they include by definition high levels of education. That seems both unreasonable and unfair: there are many examples of people adhering to religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines, who neither possess the critical independence of autonomy, nor aspire to achieve that value, and yet who have the benefit of a thorough education.[144] Another slight often made against the heteronomous is that their actions cannot be intentional or self-directed: they lack self-control and are at best followers of society. As I described at the outset of this essay, however, these criticisms are inaccurate: heteronomous people can and do engage in careful choosing, directing themselves under the auspices of a set of teachings. They can be critical of themselves and others, when prompted, and they will be social nonconformists in cases where they embrace a doctrine that is not commonly held or widely accepted. In addition, critics sometimes intimate that people lacking personal autonomy will be unable to reflect on matters of importance, but that is also false.[145] Provided simply that they are normal and not psychologically impaired, and given that they operate above the level of brainwashed people, heteronomous people can and will reflect on matters of importance to them, even though they will not be prone to do so continually, and despite the fact that they may not see themselves as being self-authenticating sources of ethical laws or principles of action. And this can make their choices good and their lives go well: heteronomous ways of life are by no means obviously inferior to autonomous ones, and for some people a life of heteronomy may be good and fulfilling.[146]
But the issue here is not whether individual lives of heteronomy might be rewarding. Instead, it is whether heteronomous parties can contribute well to political deliberation; and this is a different matter. Here, too, some special misconceptions about heteronomous people must be immediately dispatched. First of all, is it important to note that heteronomous people can have the benefit of fundamental civic knowledge and skills required by Gutmann and Thompson: namely, an “understanding of political systems, world history, and economics,” and “literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking,” respectively.[147] Heteronomous parties can also have the benefit of deliberative competency and “attitudes needed for citizenship,”[148] provided simply that these criteria do not include critical independence as I have described it. What is more, heteronomous people can and regularly do engage in deliberative dialogue with others, understanding and employing principles of preclusion in deliberation.[149] That is, heteronomous people can understand very well the idea that some topics should, at times, be left off an agenda. Nothing in the nature of heteronomy makes these important elements of deliberation problematic.
An astute analysis of heteronomous people’s potential contributions to healthy political deliberation requires a closer look. I will focus on critical normative elements of deliberation that deliberative democrats variously promote, to see whether heteronomous people in liberal democracies: (a) can be bound by mutual respect; (b) can participate in providing public reasons for positions that they advocate; (c) will be prone to adducing inaccessible reasons for their favored positions.
I take these important matters in order. The first worry is that heteronomous people may be precluded from being bound by mutual respect, where the latter takes form as part of “the meaning of reciprocity,” as Gutmann and Thompson suggest.[150] This looks like a cutting concern, but in fact it has far less bite than many argue or assume. For heteronomous people can both present their own positions, and regard others’ views, in reasonable and ethical ways.[151] Heteronomous people can also display a willingness to attend carefully to others citizens’ concerns: they can be “open to listen to others,” as Young describes.[152] Heteronomous parties are well able publicly to acknowledge or “greet” people respectfully, listening carefully to their claims and responding in kind; they can recognize others as being “included in the discussion,” and nothing in a heteronomous person’s constitution makes that problematic.[153] Indeed, many heteronomous people display empathy for others who are disenfranchised, marginalized, impoverished, or otherwise suffering, working to ameliorate the material conditions of the less fortunate and trying to include them in social and political discussion.[154] Heteronomous people lack the critical independence characteristic of their autonomous counterparts; but they can nevertheless enjoy the sort of “enlarged thought” with which Kant was concerned, free to think from others’ standpoints when it comes to knotty social and political problems.[155] Nothing in the nature of the heteronomous person is preventative on this front.
To this one might voice concern that heteronomous persons cannot be provisional regarding principles or policies they propose, or that such people simply will not accept that decision-making processes should allow, or even encourage, revision.[156] Neither of these is fair, however: for heteronomous people can certainly look at the impact of a policy or procedure that their society adopts, to see how it measures up against its stated aims or how its implementation appears to be affecting a community. Philosophically speaking, heteronomous parties can also accept limitations on the scope of what is and is not state’s business to decide, and may freely enter into deliberations over the issue of where that scope should be set. Interestingly, the autonomous person may be less likely to accept those limitations, since she is more inclined to see such matters as open to be revisited, and is disposed to do so, too. Heteronomous people can also be what Gutmann and Thompson describe as “accountable members of the body politic,”[157] learning to live with disagreements between themselves and those holding different views; and in cases where their preferred candidates, policies, or proposals do not win the day, heteronomous people can follow the rule of law, as appropriate.[158] However, they need not by their nature be limited merely to “polite, orderly, dispassionate” argument in their interactions with others: heteronomous citizens can engage in protest activities and contentious action, in addition to the full range of activities comprising normal political participation.[159] In short, heteronomous people enjoy the ability to embrace mutual respect for their fellow citizens, rightly seeing themselves as part of a shared public sphere. As far as mutual respect is concerned, it looks like nothing in principle prevents heteronomous people from displaying it to their fellow citizens.[160]
Second, one might charge that, even though they may show respect for others, heteronomous citizens will be disinclined to demand or provide public reasons in political deliberation. Since the provision of such reasons is a central, crucial element of mutual respect, reciprocity, and healthy political deliberation, one could argue, heteronomous people lack civility and are therefore deficient in a very important sense.[161]
Three things must be said on this matter. First of all, it is just not the case that public reasons lie beyond the grasp of heteronomous people, logically speaking: when it comes to political deliberation, heteronomous parties can engage in giving reasons that other citizens might reasonably accept. This certainly seems true on an attenuated understanding of public reasons, where such reasons merely require that others recognize the reasons’ relevance, if not their ultimate weight, to an issue at hand.[162] Second, heteronomous people actually do engage in providing public reasons for and against policies, procedures, and laws. They do so when they advocate against the distribution of condoms in high schools on grounds of the importance of abstinence for integrity and self-respect, for instance. Heteronomous people also work to provide public reasons to their fellow citizens when they advocate against tolerating religious communities that practice polygamous marriage, on the argument that such arrangements may be physically or psychologically harmful to women and children. In such cases the reasons heteronomous parties offer may not be fully convincing to others, they may not be the best reasons, they may not be articulated especially eloquently, and they may not be what there is most reason for the public or community to follow. But no reasonable view of public reason requires that any or all reasons offered for or against some proposed course of action actually have to be what there is most reason to do. Neither would any such view demand that participants meet a less exacting, but still too burdensome, standard of providing excellent defeasible reasons that could be overridden by other reasons or considerations in public deliberation. Such standards would themselves be unreasonable, and, if followed, they would reduce democratic deliberation to a virtual whisper. Setting the bar for admissible public reasons so high would preclude individuals, groups, and the entire public from learning in the process of debate. And this is to say nothing of how such views would not take seriously the phenomenon of people arriving conscientiously at mistaken conclusions regarding the policies or laws a public should enact, or their advocating respectable positions that would probably be a mistake for a community to adopt, all things considered.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, I suspect that one should transform the idea of mutual respect such that it does not rely on mutually acceptable reasons as central component of publicity. The motivating desire behind a normative model of public reason based in mutually acceptable reasons is itself reasonable and understandable: Gutmann and Thompson warn that standards falling short of mutually acceptable reasons could permit merely self-regarding arguments to count as equal ingredients of public reason, or allow stronger parties to take advantage of others’ weak bargaining position.[163] These concerns prompt them to advocate on behalf of the necessity of mutually acceptable reasons,[164] further to their call for reasons in democratic deliberation that are “mutually acceptable in content.”[165] Gutmann and Thompson add that, at least when it comes to religious reasons adduced in public debate, people should provide such reasons only if they meet criteria of mutual acceptability and general accessibility.[166] And they are not alone in plumping for accessibility: Bohman apparently agrees, since he proposes that public reasons must be communicated so that “any other citizen might be able to understand them.”[167] But he also seems to join Gutmann and Thompson in advocating a standard of reasons “all could accept,” describing public reasons as those “everyone finds acceptable” and which “must be convincing to everyone.”[168] Young follows this lead, endorsing an interactive version of deliberative democracy in which people must “justify their claims and proposals in terms acceptable to all.”[169] As she puts it, citizens should express themselves in ways that making them “accountable” to all others: participants in public deliberation “must express reasons for their claims in ways that others recognize could be accepted, even if in fact they disagree with the claims and reasons.”[170]
These ideas sound tantalizing, but they suffer from ambiguity. For they fail to distinguish adequately between: (a) reasons that a person can accept in principle but does not accept now; (b) reasons someone can now accept in principle, although she accepts neither that the reason is relevant to the case in question, nor that the reason is good otherwise; and (c) reasons that are mutual in the sense that they hold narrowly for a speaker and her audience, as opposed to broader mutual reasons for an entire public to act, think, or feel a certain way. Additionally, the formulations fail clearly to mark off the differences between reasons that one should accept and those they do accept. This latter concern also applies to the distinction between arguments that one should find convincing, and cases that do convince: what convinces a person is not always what should convince them, since people can adopt false premises as starting points, make mistakes in reasoning, draw erroneous conclusions based on false or misleading data, and so forth. To put the matter differently, there can exist a reason for someone to act, think, or feel a certain way, but that person might still neither wish to accept that reason nor find it convincing.[171] And these issues remain even if one substitutes the idea of reasons that are “mutually acceptable in content” for those that are mutually acceptable in principle.
Bohman does press forward to refine and improve his perspective, maintaining that while forms of public deliberation should “involve all citizens,” they need not do so with the same reasons.[172] He subsequently expands his view further still, arguing that public reasons must be such that “all deliberators can understand and potentially accept them,”[173] but conceding that people may not be convinced for the same reasons.[174] Bohman goes on to make the metaphysical claim that there is not just one form of public reason: he distinguishes between singular and plural forms of public reason, describing the former as having a single norm of deliberation and the latter involving different publicly accessible reasons.[175]
That people may not all be convinced by the same reasons in public deliberation seems correct, but this does not militate in favor of plural or multiple forms of public reason. For it is implausible that there is more than one public reason for any democratic polity: there are principles of public reason that unite them, even though they are not “impartial” in a crass sense, and their adoption does not require “moral compromise.”[176] A better conception of public reason should move past the standard of mutually acceptable reasons, or reasons that are convincing to everyone, to reasons that others should accept, given their reasonable concerns and commitments. This is not to say that there is something wrong with either mutually acceptable or all-convincing reasons; each of those kinds of reasons can be good when one is able to find them, and can count as desiderata of public reason. The problem is simply that neither is able to stand as a necessary component of public reason itself. In contrast, the standard of reasons that others should accept expressly allows that there will be some reasons that particular parties in public dialogue should accept, which do not hold for others. This is a desirable innovation because, first of all, there will be some agent-relative reasons for people to accept policies, procedures, or laws.[177] A reason for one person to ( is not necessarily a reason for another person to do so; many parties in liberal democracies simply are not similarly situated in the relevant sense, given the facts of reasonable pluralism and pluralism as such.[178] Second, some of the reasons for people to act, think, or feel certain ways comprise crucial points of justification for the political legitimacy of a liberal order, including why people should affirm liberal institutions at all. I have argued elsewhere that this is especially evident with regard to citizens of liberal democracies holding theocratic conceptions of the good, but the point is robust for citizens of liberal democracies generally.[179]
The schema for public reason that I am proposing is different than T. M. Scanlon’s, who advocates a standard based in reasons people cannot reasonably reject.[180] And the schema allows that a wide variety of concerns, commitments, values, principles, and ends can be reasonable, taking them as a starting point. As such, it does not rely on unreasonable, illiberal commitments, nor does the schema depend on the reasons actually being acceptable or convincing at any one time, either for some or for all people. The conception of public reason I propose also finds a solid ground in the value of liberty of conscience and in principles deriving from that value that people broadly can share. With principles of liberty of conscience, citizens can strengthen and enliven their moral positions, building good reasons for themselves and others to pursue a broad variety of policies and laws consistent with liberal principles; this is in keeping with Gutmann and Thompson’s concern regarding citizens not having to “[compromise] their own moral convictions.”[181] And heteronomous people can be included as participating partners in the version of public reason I am advocating, without doing damage to their reasonable commitments or to their non-autonomous ways of approaching and embracing their conceptions of the good. Heteronomous people can participate in the provision of reasons that others should accept, and there is no cause to think that this understanding of public reason would exclude them.
Finally, a third concern one could raise regarding heteronomous citizens’ participation in political deliberation pertains to the ability of their contributions to be understood and assessed by others. Here, there is a “private reasons” problem, one might suggest, stemming from the inaccessibility of the reasons that heteronomous people likely will offer in public debate. Even though heteronomous people may not be limited to offering inaccessible reasons when they advocate on some public issue, will they not at least be more prone to adduce inaccessible reasons?
In the first place, it is important to note that there is no logical connection between heteronomy and inaccessibility. Heteronomous people can adopt rules and principles by which they aim to provide accessible reasons and arguments for their advocacy and voting, and can acquire motivations to provide reasons that others should accept for instituting policies and laws. There is nothing in the nature of heteronomy that makes adoption of these ideas and traits problematic: the absence of critical independence does not preclude heteronomous people from bringing on board principles and motivations to provide accessible public reasons to fellow citizens. And citizens who possess autonomy are not by that fact destined to provide accessible reasons, either. Autonomous people can offer inaccessible reasons in pressing for a variety of policies and laws, or they may not bother to provide (or be able to provide) any broadly accessible reasons for the ways in which they advocate and vote.
It could still be the case that heteronomous people will be more inclined to adduce inaccessible reasons in public debate, given that they often embrace doctrines packed with private directives. This is certainly a concern raised by many liberals and deliberative democrats, especially when they reflect on heteronomous religious people and the question of how to assess their contributions to political debate.[182] Here, one can offer a second response to the third concern: there is some cause to think that inaccessible reasons could be good reasons, at least on some occasions. It is true that this point depends on what counts as an accessible and an inaccessible reason, respectively, but the issue is by no means purely a matter of semantics. Consider Gutmann and Thompson’s apprehension on this front: they remark that if one were required to accept inaccessible reasons in public deliberation, one would be pressed to the morally unacceptable limit of accepting a whole sectarian doctrine.[183] But that does not follow: acceptance of a single inaccessible reason does not require adoption of an entire doctrine or conception of the good. For instance, a seemingly inaccessible or recondite religious reason to ban abortion might require acceptance of a handful of metaphysical notions, but it need not implicate or rely upon any view of baptism, marriage, apostolic succession, or dietary restrictions. Nor would such a reason entail any specific view or position on welfare, gun control, or international politics, even though those views often correlate in citizens’ attitudes at the aggregate level. This is not to say that abortion should be outlawed or that such prohibitive measures may rightly be advanced based on inaccessible reasons. Rather, it is simply that allowing the acceptability of some inaccessible reasons in political deliberation would not obviously implicate very many elements of some specific conception of the good, reasonable or unreasonable, much less an entire partisan doctrine. With this in view, cause for discouraging or disallowing inaccessible reasons in democratic deliberation must lie elsewhere.
Gutmann and Thompson reinforce their position by emphasizing the importance of testability for any reason’s accessibility and ultimate acceptability in democratic deliberation, suggesting that a reason’s accessibility is ensured just where its empirical and theoretical reasoning can be assessed.[184] This provides a potentially firmer criterion on which to disallow inaccessible reasons: if one cannot evaluate and assess the grounds for the reason, it cannot stand. While it seems to provide promising grounds for disallowing inaccessible reasons, here one must consider the possibility that good reasons may not all be amenable to testing. It is difficult to accept that this possibility is false in principle: for one, inaccessible reasons can at least meet the criterion of being relevant to issues, even if people do not all agree on their weight and some see the reasons as carrying no weight at all.[185] Second, some crucial reasons people regularly offer in political deliberation are not obviously accessible, either in the sense of being empirically testable or of being subject to theoretical assessment and verification. Consider the normative notion that people are all moral equals, or the thought that citizens possess moral rights. Neither idea is and testable empirically, and in fact these foundational liberal notions have proven notoriously difficult to justify, even though claims based on moral rights and equality are regularly used in efforts to legitimate a wide variety of policies, procedures, and laws in liberal democracies.[186] Neither will tests of reasoning based on “relatively reliable methods of inquiry” get one off the hook very easily, here.[187] For the use of such methods for centuries disallowed enfranchisement of African Americans and women: seemingly reliable moral methods of assessment confirmed and reconfirmed the mistaken ideas that Blacks were inept and unequal, and that women’s place was not among honored male social and political leaders. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the moral equality of persons cannot be justified, nor do I suppose that citizens have no moral rights, at base. The point is that each of these critical democratic ideas might well count as inaccessible and thus inadmissible, at least on Gutmann and Thompson’s argument, and yet one would not wish to exclude them from the content of political deliberation or public reason.
An additional problem concerns the potential incomprehensibility of reasons that heteronomous participants offer in the course of political deliberation. It is sensible here to draw a distinction between inaccessible and incomprehensible reasons: taking them in order, an inaccessible reason is one that cannot be understood unless and until one learns some relevant set of facts, rules, principles, symbols, or ways of speaking. One needs to acquire informational entrée, as it were, able to see the potential force of otherwise inaccessible reasons once one has been initiated. Incomprehensible reasons, on the other hand, are different in kind than their inaccessible counterpart. One simply cannot make sense of an incomprehensible reason: it is impenetrable to any who do not have the reason, so to speak, and cannot be made intelligible even through initiation or the provision of some metaphoric handbook for reasoning.
It seems sensible to suggest that those offering inaccessible reasons to their fellow citizens, in the course of political deliberation, should try to explain to others why the reason in question is a good one. That might mean adducing other grounds for the inaccessible reason, explaining why the reason must remain private (e.g., if it concerns state secrets), providing other reasons than the inaccessible one, or proposing to provide justification “in due course.”[188] Nevertheless, while an inaccessible reason can count as admissible, because it could be a reason that others should accept, I submit that uninitiated citizens need not accept it. This is because various sectors of the public might otherwise endorse or pursue plans of action that there is no reason for them to accept. A reason that remains inaccessible to the broader public—and is not, say, revealed or translated into accessible forms—cannot be known to be a good reason to the citizens in question, without elaboration. What is more, citizens can and have been deceived by public figures claiming to have recondite, classified, or privileged information. Therefore, even if an inaccessible reason to ( were indeed a good reason for many or all citizens to (, and a reason they should accept, citizens may permissibly refuse to follow it without grounds for accepting such a reason clarified.[189]
For reasons that some sector of the public considers incomprehensible, there the case appears even trickier. But it is not impossible to clarify the moral boundaries of deliberation on this front. The onus is on she who has a putatively incomprehensible reason to explain why it is a reason at all. The alleged reason normally will not seem incomprehensible to the person who holds it, of course; but not every inclination to support a course of action gives one a reason to pursue it, not even for the person who possesses the proclivity. To put the point more starkly, it is simply not true that all thoughts regarding what a democratic citizenry should do actually have good reason behind them. As such, those who offer seemingly incomprehensible reasons for against some policy or law should be prepared to explain: (a) why they reckon their reason is a reason; (b) how they arrived at affirming the reason; (c) how the reason fits with other reasons, commitments, beliefs, and facts they affirm; (d) the relative weight of the reason, with respect to other reasons; and (e) why other citizens should follow their recommendation based on said reason, if it is discordant with how others think and what they believe. After all, the person offering such a reason could simply be mistaken that it is a reason; people at time make errors about what there is reason for themselves or others to do. Alternatively, the person with the seemingly incomprehensible reason could be suffering from a cognitive impairment of some kind, a prospect that no citizen can or should exclude a priori. Not all disagreement in political deliberation is reasonable or rational: disagreement sometimes emerges where people have mistaken or clouded reasoning. Burdens of judgment can lead reasonable people to different conclusions on difficult and divisive social and political issues, but not all disagreement in political deliberation is that way. Heteronomous and autonomous citizens alike should stand prepared to engage in discussion with those providing apparently incomprehensible reasons for or against some policy or law, to try to determine whether there is any good reason for people to follow the course of action in question, and those offering reasons that may seem incomprehensible should anticipate their duty to elaborate the grounds and warrant for their views.
While existing standards of accessible and inaccessible reasons remain vexed, the model of providing reasons others should accept endorses accessibility in a more skeletal, defensible sense. It is that positions, policies, and laws should gain warrant through processes of justification, and must be justifiable to the various parties who will be affected on terms those people should accept. This means that specific policies or procedures citizens ultimately advocate or oppose cannot stand disconnected from the process of providing reasons, or remain mysterious otherwise. But I also suspect that accessibility will need to be further reconceived to accommodate agent-relativity: reasons should be accessible to the parties for which reasons are intended, relative to the reasonable beliefs, principles, and ends they embrace.[190] In advocating different reasons for different people, I am not disputing universal applicability of the scientific method or the value of its findings; but one must be sensitive to the fallibility and changeability of scientific recommendations;[191] and where parties wish to dispute relevance of empirical matters to an issue at hand, [192] they should aim at reasons their target audiences should accept, taking as a starting point the reasonable concerns and commitments within their conceptions of the good. This idea of agent-targeted accessibility applies to conclusions of the reasoning process (e.g., “You should therefore agree that same-sex marriage is morally permissible”), as well as to the process of reasoning through points in deliberation (e.g., “This line of reasoning follows logically from the former”). These points hold irrespective of the matter of whether there are strategic benefits to providing broadly accessible reasons in public debate, and they are similarly distinct from the more pragmatic questions of what liberals can do to effectuate change in people’s attitudes and beliefs in cases where they object deeply to liberal institutions and values.[193]
This means that the broad, public accessibility of reasons offered in political deliberation should not count among strict requirements of public reason or deliberation. Reasons should be accessible insofar as accessibility is implied by the fact that some group of others should accept a reason, but only this much is necessary. As for ease of comprehension of reasons proffered in public deliberation—which is distinct from whether a reason is comprehensible at all—I do not expect that that sense of accessibility can qualify as a requirement, either. Easy comprehension of scientific findings, for example, would necessitate understanding and expertise that is beyond most lay people. Translating or boiling down reasons to levels of easy comprehension can serve as a complement to scientific reasons, or other reasons that are difficult for some to comprehend, but that hardly means that more difficult reasons should be excluded. The same goes for ease of acceptability of reasons: reasons that others should accept may not be willingly taken on board by a target audience, both with regard to conclusions speakers might offer and the chains of reasoning leading there. Nor do reasons others should accept need to be psychologically agreeable to a target audience, desirable though agreeable reasons may be: sometimes, reasons others should accept can be jarring and initially seem implausible. These considerations deflate Ian Shapiro’s suggestion that religious fundamentalists will not be impressed with the “relatively reliable methods of inquiry” Gutmann and Thompson suggest as a standard.[194] Shapiro makes a fair point, but here one must be careful: what impresses another party is not necessarily the same as what they have most reason to do, think, or feel.
V. Deliberation in Practice: Autonomous and Heteronomous Citizens in Discussion
I have argued that heteronomous participants in political deliberation can display mutual respect, provide public reasons for and against policies and laws, and sidestep problems of inaccessibility. This still leaves open the question of the healthful or harmful effects heteronomous people bring to bear for deliberation at the group level. If heteronomous people’s contributions are welcomed and fully included in political deliberations, is there any reason to think that the group will adopt auspicious deliberative procedures or achieve desirable outcomes? What approaches might be employed to enliven and fortify political deliberation, given empirical findings regarding how citizens actually deliberate?
I propose that including heteronomous parties in political deliberation can help to strengthen the deliberative outcomes of groups. First of all, even if it were true that heteronomous people will be more likely than autonomous citizens to provide inaccessible reasons in public debate, and taking it for the sake of argument that they may even be prone to doing so, those actions can have salutary effects for the group’s deliberations as a whole. This is because where heteronomous people do give inaccessible reasons for or against some proposed policy or law, their action can prompt both reconsideration and responses from others, including those strongly advocating broadly accessible reasons in public debate. Gutmann and Thompson note that citizens need to assess their positions “at some time”;[195] occasions where citizens provide inaccessible reasons can be good opportunities for this, and the back and forth between those advancing inaccessible or incomprehensible reasons and members of the larger deliberative group could help each side to reexamine their views. To those worried that such allowances would give heteronomous people normative carte blanche to advocate on behalf of false or deficient views, John Stuart Mill’s arguments in favor of freedom of speech are instructive: he notes that even false views can serve a useful purpose, inasmuch as they prompt people to reconsider their true opinions and familiarize themselves with why they believe what they do, so that they hold their beliefs as living truths and not as dead dogma.[196]
I propose that there are five further, special benefits that inaccessible reasons can furnish for political deliberation. First, an inaccessible reason can prompt citizens to think hard about what is wrong, not only with the reason at issue, but with inaccessible reasons generally. That is, inaccessible reasons can prompt participants to consider why accessibility or publicity may be desirable or important in democratic discourse. Second, the resultant discussions can prompt people to reconsider whether the particular reasons they offer in political deliberation actually are inaccessible to others or are inapplicable to the target group for which the reasons are intended. It is often the case that those providing reasons to others think their own reasons to be powerful, applicable, accessible, and understandable to anyone who looks at them in the right way. People may be incorrect about this, however, and discussions about a particular reason’s seeming inaccessibility in political debate can help participants to reconsider the reasons they give to others.[197] Third, inaccessible reasons offered in political deliberation can stimulate people to consider whether they are actually now in a position where another deliberator has offered them a good reason to (: to vote or advocate in some way on a policy or law, to support or oppose legislation, to take or avoid some political action, and so on. These three benefits apply broadly to people across democratic polities: for the current inability to see reasons one should accept, and to offer good reasons for others to (, applies to heteronomous and autonomous people, religious and secular parties, the rich and the poor, members of minorities as well as majorities, and to those who hold virtually any doctrine or conception of the good.
Fourth, the entire process of providing reasons to others itself can be tested and reexamined by including heteronomous people in public deliberation. It is true that both autonomous and heteronomous people can, respectively, meet or fail to achieve desirable deliberative standards individually, and that heteronomous people will tend to depend on external standards from which to draw various principles for action, opinions, and views. Provided that both autonomous and heteronomous people are included respectfully in political deliberation, the discussions and interactions can spur on participants to learn the strengths and shortcomings of different methods of providing reasons (e.g., providing reasons drawn from an external source of authority, versus offering reasons affirmed by oneself through methods of reflection and cogitation). Indeed, this may be especially helpful for moving forward in cases where the “deliberation of citizens of good will” is unable to solve or make progress on some difficult political problem.[198] This helps to assuage Lynn Sanders’s notable contention that endorsement of deliberation smacks of “suspicious antidemocratic associations.”[199] Fifth, inclusive political deliberation can allow participants to encounter and consider others’ ways of life, to think about how those ways of life might be important to the people who live them, and to reflect on the conception of the good one has or aspires to hold. Encouraging opportunities for such interaction and rumination is different than advocating on behalf of autonomy, since the latter asks for a self-reflective disposition that is more demanding than the sort of cogitation I am promoting here. Participants can learn about other people’s beliefs and practices from the discussions and disclosure that political deliberation provides, and in the process deliberating parties should be expected to be able to learn about themselves, and their conceptions of the good, as well. These five benefits of deliberating together with heteronomous people augment Bohman’s contention that including sub-cultural expressions in political deliberation can “enrich the public reasons” available in the public sphere.[200]
The empirical matter of how heteronomous and autonomous people actually deliberate, and what impact on groups their inclusion provides, is a complex and important issue requiring a variety of sources of evidence properly to assess. But it is critical to learn and think about these processes if one agrees that political deliberation is necessary for a healthy democratic polity, and more so if one supposes that deliberation should embody certain procedures and aim to achieve some specific outcomes. I cannot hope to provide in this paper a great deal of evidence on whether heteronomous people do well or poorly when it comes to the three deliberative concerns I raised in their regard: the extent to which they are bound by mutual respect, the regularity of their provision of public reasons, or the frequency with which they offer inaccessible reasons in favor or against policies and laws. Similarly, there does not appear to be any existing evidence directly linking autonomous people’s behavior to those three measures, or showing how heteronomous and autonomous parties compare relative to one another. What I can adduce will be recommendatory and suggestive. My larger concern is with whether liberals might reconsider the normative potential of heteronomy and whether there are prospects for engaging heteronomous parties to encourage them to affirm politically liberal values; so the facts on the ground are definitely important and must be collected and examined carefully.
A recent set of studies finds that advanced industrialized democracies have of late experienced the growth of critical citizens, people who “value democracy as an ideal yet who remain dissatisfied with the performance of their political system.”[201] Citizens in advanced democracies now show low confidence in political leaders over the long term, it appears, even though they are better off in almost every respect than they were previously.[202] This is part of the phenomenon of “post-materialism” that Ronald Inglehart describes, whereby shifts in the basic values of postindustrial democracies have led citizens to become increasingly critical of a variety of traditional sources of authority.[203] Russell Dalton finds “clear evidence of a general erosion in support for politicians in most advanced industrial democracies,” as well as declining levels of party identification and waning public confidence in political institutions.[204] Publics themselves now appear to be “more likely to act in autonomous, elite-challenging fashion”;[205] and this seems to be part and parcel of a “greater willingness to challenge authority.”[206] These observations resonate with findings from Voice and Equality, where the authors determined that lower levels of voter turnout in America have not meant a decline in such forms of political activism as contacting public officials or contributing to campaign funds.[207] Even so, the challenging activities do not show that citizens of advanced liberal democracies are becoming increasingly autonomous at the individual level. For citizens can engage in any of these forms of behavior without being especially self-critical; and many may presently be wandering, set free from adherence to external standards but also lacking the critical independence and self-established guidelines for action typical of the autonomous person. That older, more traditional sources of authority are losing their grip in postindustrial democracies does not mean that autonomy is taking their place. It would be quite a magical feat for autonomy to appear under such conditions, and the observations do not require one to jump to the unlikely conclusion that citizens have developed the attitudes and dispositions comprising critical independence, those which are characteristic of autonomy. Indeed, if one accepts that most people in democratic polities are heteronomous, it is very plausible to assume that there remain many such people in the democratic mix, even though many may now be searching for new sets of principles and values to structure their lives.
However, since findings show the rise of “citizen intervention in politics,”[208] one needs to be concerned with how citizen interventions turn out, why the involvements occur, and what practices of political deliberation bring the interventions into existence in the first place. The good news is that while publics remain upset with officeholders they do not yet seem to have lost faith in values of democratic governance.[209] And so while heteronomy has not fended off the more negative aspects of eroding support for political institutions, the waning confidence and diminishing deference to traditional institutions provides a fresh opportunity for inculcating new beliefs, for “bringing heteronomous people back in,” as it were, to help encourage them to adopt and promote politically liberal values. This approach might fit well with people who are “becoming more active in new ways,”[210] since it could help to direct their efforts in politically concordant and auspicious directions. Encouragement of this sort would allow and respect the heteronomous approaches that many adopt, permitting them to draw their guidelines for action from an external source of liberal values and principles. If those principles were well conceived, they could direct people to engage in deliberative interactions with others unlike themselves, to be respectful and inclusive of others and their concerns, to avoid being excessively deferential to politicians, and to embrace toleration, freedom of conscience, and human equality.
When it comes to studies focusing on political deliberation inside democratic polities, Cass Sunstein has observed polarization between deliberative groups: left-leaning participants tend to join groups better suited to their ideology, and right-leaning people are more likely to join with conservative deliberative groups.[211] Furthermore, once in the networks of such ideologically-biased groups, group deliberation appears to prompt participants to develop more extreme versions of their prior biases, instead of mitigating them or leaving the participants’ views constant.[212] Gutmann and Thompson express understandable concern here, suggesting that while freedom of speech and association are deeply important, deliberative democrats should “not want to encourage a process that promotes extremism.”[213]
One way to work to mollify these problems could be to encourage a mixture of heteronomous and autonomous people in deliberations. This might be salutary inasmuch as it could prompt people to rethink how and why they hold the views that they do, and on what grounds they provide reasons in one political direction or another. But so doing would still leave unresolved the ideological dilemma of polarization, since autonomy and heteronomy do not obviously correlate with positions on a left-right continuum. To help with this problem, deliberative theorists have advocated a few measures that have been demonstrated at least temporarily to fend off polarization, such as moderators to ensure people get a fair airing of their views, experts to help answer pertinent factual questions, and significant information available to participant deliberators prior to their deliberations beginning.[214]
I propose that a more realistic and auspicious way to address the problems of polarization is for liberals to infiltrate existing discussion networks, engaging with others who hold different ideological positions and conceptions of the good. Liberals could discuss the value of cardinal liberal principles and the importance of liberal institutions for people’s pursuit of their conceptions of the good, along with agent-targeted reasons for others to accept and affirm those institutions. This could be very helpful for political deliberation, especially since one will rarely find moderators, experts, or a surfeit of advance information provided on issues to be publicly discussed. But even prior to so doing, liberals might reconsider the prospects of reaching out to the many citizens of liberal democracies who appear to have lost faith in traditional forms of authority. For those people could be approached with new reasons and ideas regarding liberty of conscience and the importance of affirming political institutions that honor that value. And these citizens may be receptive and ready for a new version of political liberalism favorable to entirely respectable heteronomous ways of life, if liberals thoughtfully and constructively engage with them, listening to their concerns and using a respectful voice in discussion.[215] Indeed, both autonomous and heteronomous liberals could take the ideas and values of political liberalism to the citizens of liberal democracies who are currently adrift, and to social networks of conservative and theocratic citizens, too, entering into fruitful and mutually transformative discussions with them. There is good reason to think that such measures could help prompt those people to affirm liberal institutions,[216] and the approach could assist “more of the people who routinely speak less” to have meaningful opportunities for political involvement and interaction, as well.[217]
As for the prospects of more inclusive deliberation effectuating changes, it is worth noting James Fishkin’s and Robert Luskin’s findings that deliberation can change people’s preferences, both at the individual and aggregate level.[218] Deliberation has also been found to have the capacity to structure the preferences of members of a deliberating group, too, along a set of underlying preferences.[219] Political deliberators could rally around principles of liberty of conscience, since they apply to both autonomous and heteronomous people and their conceptions of the good, and there seems to be strong reason for citizens across the board to accept those principles. They could also discuss preferences and ideas regarding how to deliberate, what kinds of reasons to allow or avoid in public discussions, and what kind of expectations citizens should have of politicians, political figures, and religious authorities who wish to enter into the deliberative fray. But it is important to emphasize that there is no clear reason to think that more autonomous people will drive the process of preference structuration in deliberative groups, or that they are what makes actual outcomes of these deliberations normatively better. For there is evidence that people display cognitive biases in favor of the positions they currently hold, and that arguments must be unambiguous and direct to change people’s positions.[220] These findings do not appear to exclude autonomous people, those displaying critical independence of the sort I have described; and so it suggests that autonomous people cannot be presumed to be inured to the need to have their views modified somewhat, for their own benefit, where they engage with others different than themselves. The pursuit of a single, “common voice” in political deliberation may be an exclusionary or otherwise undesirable aim, but sound principles of liberty of conscience are principles that all people can and should affirm, and they can help to guide interactions between citizens by providing their own, solid ground for voting and advocacy on a broad range of positions and views.
VI. Conclusion
If the arguments I have provided in this paper are sound, heteronomy is not a problem needing to be solved when it comes to the difficult question of how to promote healthy political deliberation in liberal democratic life. Quite to the contrary, the case leads one to believe that liberalism’s commitment to personal autonomy should be attenuated, certainly where theorists press for autonomy as a competitor or opponent to heteronomous ways of life. For heteronomous conceptions of the good can be very respectable from the point of view of good citizenship, especially where those conceptions harmonize with cardinal liberal principles, and heteronomous people can be positive contributors to democratic deliberation at both the individual and aggregate levels.
The version of political liberalism I advance does not shy away from placing due requirements on heteronomous people, however. For citizens naturally will need to be wary and at times politically critical, and the view I promote allows for a modicum of “rational revisability” without militating toward the position that citizens should aspire to the sort of critical independence emblematic of autonomy.[221] The ideals of heteronomy allow for this modest requirement, and heteronomous people can accept the notion without their having to adopt the disposition continually to question their standards of self-appraisal or to make undue revisions to their attitudes, beliefs, or conceptions of the good. The politically liberal view I describe also allows heteronomous people to focus their energies on projects and goals consistent with fundamental principles of liberty of conscience. And it puts a stop to unnecessary discord between autonomy and heteronomy, since both standards can be seen as fully respectable: both heteronomous and autonomous people can contribute well or badly in political deliberation, and both can be good or bad citizens. Nothing naturally prevents heteronomous people from displaying an affinity for liberal democratic principles and values; to the contrary, there is cause to think that heteronomous people can embrace them, being motivated to take part in a wide array of constructive political actions. The empirical findings regarding citizens’ attitudes and behaviors in advanced democracies are a bit off-putting, to be sure, but they also indicate new opportunities for political liberalism. Liberals could recruit heteronomous people to advance fresh liberal ideals, here: this is far better than having them stand against liberalism, or floating free with no affiliation whatsoever, especially if, as I have suggested, there is reason for them to affirm cardinal liberal principles for their pursuit of the good.
In the end, liberals should work to overcome their fixation on autonomy, reconciling themselves to the fact that there is room for a substantial amount of healthful, reasonable agreement and disagreement coming from a variety of comprehensive doctrines and conceptions of the good, heteronomous and autonomous. With the predictable political upheavals to come, citizens of liberal political orders will need sound principles in hand, if they are to deliberate and decide wisely, as well as staunch allies in the effort to articulate, build, and defend fundamental liberal values and institutions. Principles of liberty of conscience can light the way forward as publics reflect on the courses of action they chart, and inclusive political deliberation has potential to spread those principles broadly, engaging, inspiring, and liberating citizens across the globe.
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[1] Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 232. Cf. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 [1993]), pp. 196-200.
[2] See Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Cf. Michael J. Sandel, “Freedom of Conscience or Freedom of Choice?” in Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace: The Religious Liberty Clauses and the American Public Philosophy, ed. James Davison Hunter and Os Guinness (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990), pp. 74-92.
[3] Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 131.
[4] See Kymlicka (2002), pp. 228-44.
[5] Stanley I. Benn, “Freedom, Autonomy and the Concept of a Person,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 76 (1975/76): 109-30, at p. 124.
[6] Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 117 ff.
[7] Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 371. Cf. Raz’s discussion of integrity and its lack: “The failure to make choices through lack of initial commitment disguised under the flurry of an initial infatuation, does diminish the autonomy of the agent’s life. It resembles self-deception” (p. 384; see pp. 381-85).
[8] Cf. John Kekes, Against Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 17-18, describing a similar condition.
[9] Benn (1975/76), p. 111.
[10] Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 81.
[11] Raz (1986), pp. 154-55, 369, 371, 376-78, 410, 418-20; Raz also include a discussion of how in some cases coercion can assist with one’s autonomy, at pp. 156-57.
[12] Raz (1986), p. 377.
[13] Raz (1986), pp. 377-78.
[14] Raz (1986), pp. 377-78. He argues that independence is a “condition” or “constitutive element” of autonomy, although he adds that it is not sufficient in itself; see pp. 372-74 ff. See also p. 376, on autonomy also not allowing “simulation or deceit”; cf. pp. 420-21.
[15] Benn (1975/76), p. 112.
[16] Kekes (1997), p. 18.
[17] Cf. Benn (1975/76), p. 127.
[18] Kekes (1997), pp. 16-17.
[19] Benn (1975/76), p. 118.
[20] Benn (1975/76), p. 123.
[21] Benn (1975/76), p. 116 ff. Benn’s conditions compare interestingly to John Rawls’s description of the second of the “two moral powers” he ascribes to persons, namely, “a capacity for a conception of the good”; see John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 [1993]), p. 19. Rawls elaborates this moral power as “the capacity to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of one’s rational advantage or good” (ibid.); cf. pp. 19-20, 29-35.
[22] Cf. Raz (1986), pp. 411-12.
[23] Dagger (1997), pp. 30-40.
[24] Cf. Raz (1986), pp. 204, 378, 381, 395, 398, 410-11, 418-25.
[25] Raz (1986), pp. 418-19.
[26] Raz (1986), pp. 410, 418, 425.
[27] See Michael Smith, “A Theory of Freedom and Responsibility,” in Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 84-113, at pp. 98-99.
[28] Robert Audi, Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 197 ff.
[29] Weakness of will is different than deferring to someone in authority, or accepting as authoritative an external source or standard for action, where so doing is part of one’s better judgment. Heteronomous people need not act against their better judgment, and so it is fair to consider weakness of will something that may at times adversely affect heteronomous parties and their pursuit of the good.
[30] Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 36. See also Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education, revised edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
[31] Benn (1975/76), p. 124.
[32] Kymlicka (1995), pp. 81, 83, 91-92.
[33] See Kymlikca (1995), p. 81.
[34] Raz (1986), p. 384.
[35] Benn (1975/76), p. 129.
[36] Kymlicka (1995), p. 91.
[37] Kymlicka (1995), p. 91,
[38] Cf. Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. and intro. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995).
[39] Elizabeth Gross, “What Is Feminist Theory?” in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (eds.), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), pp. 199-204, p. 193.
[40] Benn (1975/76), p. 124.
[41] Dagger (1997), pp. 38, 127.
[42] Dagger (1997), p. 40.
[43] Dagger (1997), p. 38 ff.
[44] Dagger (1997), pp. 30, 32, 120.
[45] Raz (1986), p. 371.
[46] Benn (1975/76), pp. 124, 126.
[47] Benn (1975/76), 129; cf. Kekes (1997), p. 19.
[48] Benn (1975/76), p. 124.
[49] See Dagger (1997), pp. 33, 34, 38, 121; see also Raz (1986), pp. 155-56, 373, 391, 409.
[50] Dagger (1997), p. 30. See also Audi’s distinction between the scope and degree of autonomy, where the former applies to the range of activities in which one is or may be autonomous, and the latter concerns the amount of autonomy one has with regard to specific activities (1997, p. 196).
[51] Dagger (1997), p. 30.
[52] Raz (1986), pp. 155, 204-05, 373-74, 378, 379.
[53] Raz (1986), p. 398.
[54] Raz (1986), p. 398.
[55] Raz (1986), pp. 204, 265, 369, 387, 390-91, 407, 427. Cf. Dagger (1997), pp. 38, 39, 123; cf. also Rob Reich, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 89-112.
[56] Stanley I. Benn, “Wickedness,” Ethics, Vol. 95 (1985): 795-810, at p. 803.
[57] Audi (1997), pp. 198-99.
[58] Gerald Dworkin, “The Concept of Autonomy,” in The Inner Citadel, ed. John Christman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 54-62, at p. 61; Lawrence Haworth, Autonomy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
[59] John Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society, and the Boundaries of Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 17.
[60] Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 165.
[61] Kymlicka (1989), p. 164.
[62] Kymlicka (1989), p. 165.
[63] Kymlicka (1995), p. 76.
[64] Kymlicka (1995), p. 105; cf. p. 83.
[65] Kymlicka (1995), p. 80; cf. Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). pp. 228-31.
[66] Kymlicka (1995), p. 80.
[67] Kymlicka (1995), pp. 84-86 ff.
[68] Kymlicka (1995), p. 92.
[69] Kymlicka (1995), p. 163.
[70] Smith (2004), pp. 84-113.
[71] Smith (2004), p. 109; see also Philip Pettit and Michael Smith, “Backgrounding Desire,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 99 (1990): 565-92; Pettit and Smith, “Freedom in Belief and Desire,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 93 (1996): 429-49; Pettit and Smith, “Practical Unreason,” Mind, Vol. 102 (1993): 53-79.
[72] James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 24-25.
[73] Stephen Macedo, “Introduction,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 3-14 at p. 4.
[74] Cf. Bohman (1996), p. 25. Jane Mansbridge defines “political” as “that which the public ought to discuss”; this is too restrictive for the purposes of definition, however, as it does not cover various politicized topics and issues that many may think should not be discussed. Her understanding also does not provide a clear way to determine exactly what a public ought or ought not to discuss. See Mansbridge, “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 211-39, at p. 214.
[75] See Rawls (2005), pp. 211-54. See also Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1983 [1784]), pp. 41-48.
[76] See generally Mansbridge (1999); see also Frederick Schauer, “Talking as a Decision Procedure,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 17-27; and Ian Shapiro, “Enough of Deliberation: Politics Is about Interests and Power,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 28-38.
[77] Shapiro (1999), p. 29. Cf. Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory, Vol. 25 (1997): 347-76, esp. at pp. 348, 370.
[78] See Bohman (1996), pp. 7, 17. See also James D. Fearon, “Deliberation as Discussion,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 44-68.
[79] Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also Sanders (1997), noting deliberation’s “connotations of cautiousness and order” and suggesting that “deliberation is by definition not hasty” (p. 356).
[80] Cf. Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 18, 25, 44, 56, 117; Gutmann and Thompson suggest that deliberative principles need to be employed “at some time” to assess political activities (p. 56), but add that deliberative democrats “do not favor continual deliberation” on every principle or law (p. 117).
[81] See John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[82] See, e.g., Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy, ed. David Estlund (Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell, 2002), pp. 87-106; Mansbridge (1999); Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 32-36.
[83] See Gutmann and Thompson (2002), pp. 34-35. The scope of political deliberation also should not extend to elements of life inside theocratic communities ensconced in liberal democracies, where those communities meet educational, human rights, and freedom of exit criteria for their members. See Lucas Swaine, The Liberal Conscience: Politics and Principle in a World of Religious Pluralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), chapter 3.
[84] William A. Galston, “Diversity, Toleration, and Deliberative Democracy: Religious Minorities and Public Schooling,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 39-48, at p. 40.
[85] Galston (1999), pp. 39-40. This is of course a different matter than whether political deliberation may cover more general issues, such as how old parties should be in order legally to marry.
[86] Mansbridge (1999), p. 215.
[87] See Mansbridge (1999), p. 212; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 112-14, 359; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 333 ff.
[88] On the importance of voting and advocacy, see Paul J. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapters 4, 5, passim. See also Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 142; Alan Wertheimer, “Internal Disagreements: Deliberation and Abortion,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 170-83, at pp. 180-82.
[89] Mansbridge (1999), p. 212.
[90] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 116-19.
[91] Wertheimer (1999), p. 171 ff.
[92] Mansbridge (1999), p. 216.
[93] Cf. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1927).
[94] See Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 95. See also Jack Knight, “Constitutionalism and Deliberative Democracy,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 159-69; Cass R. Sunstein, “Agreement without Theory,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 123-50, at pp. 147-48; Iris Marion Young, “Justice, Inclusion, and Deliberative Democracy,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 151-58. See also Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s replies to these criticisms, in “Democratic Disagreement,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 243-79, at pp. 261-68.
[95] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 96, 207. See also Galston (1999), p. 47.
[96] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 109.
[97] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 123.
[98] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 96, 109, 123, 207.
[99] Cf. Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 7.
[100] Cf. Rawls (2005), p. 36.
[101] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 48-53.
[102] Cf. Bohman (1996), p. 36.
[103] Bohman (1996), p. x. Bohman stops short of contending that only deliberation will produce such effects, or that deliberation is sufficient to achieve the sort of political order he envisions.
[104] See Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2005).
[105] See Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 13. See also Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 19-21; Norman Daniels, “Enabling Democratic Deliberation: How Managed Care Organizations Ought to Make Decisions about Coverage for New Technologies,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 198-210, at p. 200.
[106] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 27-29, 79, 90; the authors appear to limit prospects for consensus to groups that are not intractably large.
[107] Bohman (1996), p. 1; see also chapter 3.
[108] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 11.
[109] Young (2000), pp. 17, 175-77; see also Bohman (1996), p. 14; Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), chapter 7; Mansbridge (1999), pp. 224-25; Jack Knight and James Johnson, “Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory, Vol. 22 (1994): 277-96.
[110] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 11, 79.
[111] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 13, 23, 58, 98, 126, 133.
[112] See Swaine (2006), chapters 1, 4.
[113] Gutmann and Thompson (2006), pp. 10-11; see also Macedo (1999), Gutmann and Thompson (1996). Cf. Joseph Raz, “Disagreement in Politics,” American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 43 (1998): 25-52; Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chapter 8.
[114] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 133.
[115] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 133.
[116] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 133-35 ff. To say that mutual respect is part of the meaning of reciprocity is not necessarily to suggest that the former is the ground for the latter; cf. p. 134.
[117] Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 55
[118] Cf. Gutmann and Thompson (1996), defining reciprocity as “seeking fair terms of cooperation for their own sake” (p. 2).
[119] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 137 ff. Cf. generally Stuart Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[120] Bohman (1996), p. 26; cf. also Bohman’s nontyranny, equality, and publicity conditions (pp. 35-37).
[121] Mansbridge (1999), p. 213; but cf. her subsequent suggestion that it applies only “fairly unproblematically” (p. 222).
[122] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 70.
[123] See Young (2000), esp. chapters 1-3; Young (1999); Habermas (1996), pp. 76-79, 315-16, 373-87.
[124] Young (2000), p. 6.
[125] Young (2000), p. 23.
[126] Young (2000), p. 53; cf. Hampshire’s proceduralist view, in Hampshire (2000).
[127] Young (2000), p. 23; cf. p. 52. This is a sophisticated restatement of a comment made by King Edward I, in his summons of the Model Parliament in 1295: “What touches all, should be approved of all.” See also Bernard Manin, “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,” Political Theory, Vol. 15 (1987): 338-68, at pp. 352, 359.
[128] Bohman (1996), p. 16. See Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), for an extended list of conditions required for ideal deliberation.
[129] Bohman (1996), p. 5; he also suggests that cooperation is an important element of deliberative democracy.
[130] Young (2000), pp. 7, 43-44; cf. generally Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995. See also Sanders (1997), pp. 359-62; Bohman (1996), pp. 16, 34.
[131] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 8.
[132] Young (2000), p. 31.
[133] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 42, 57.
[134] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 20; cf. p. 126. Bohman (1996) expresses a similar view here, discussing what he calls “precommitment” and “proceduralism” in deliberation (pp. 47-53), and advocating a “dynamic” view of public reason (p. 75 ff.).
[135] Bohman (1996), p. 45; Wertheimer (1999), p. 171. Cf. Sanders (1997), pp. 363-69.
[136] Cf. Cohen (2002). I do not expect that autonomy at the group level can reasonably require deliberative groups to reflect critically upon the standards by which they make assessments, however. That criterion would necessitate sustained, self-critical group discussion of the standards they use, whereas in many instances deliberative groups are placed under temporal constraints that do not permit such reflection (e.g., in cases of juries). In addition, deliberative groups often form and dissolve quickly, or their membership shifts significantly, and so requiring that they reflect on the standards of assessment they employ would be a tall order. Group deliberation on standards of assessment is consistent with their being autonomous, but should not be a necessary part of it.
[137] It is logically possible that deliberative groups may be made up of exclusively heteronomous members and still enjoy deliberative autonomy.
[138] See generally Hampshire (2000); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978 [1762]).
[139] See Rawls (2005), pp. 60-61.
[140] Rawls (2005), p. 32.
[141] Cf. Rawls (2005), pp. 54-58, 60-62, 81-82.
[142] See generally Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), chapters 1, 2, passim; Rosenblum, Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
[143] See Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1991), pp. 407-37; Lucas Swaine, “Political Theory and the Conduct of Faith: Oakeshott on Religion in Public Life,” Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 4 (2005): 63-82.
[144] See, e.g., examples from Jan Feldman, Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
[145] Cf. Smith (2004), p. 107. An ability or capacity to reflect on important issue is different than a disposition toward doing so regularly, or to seeing one’s values and ends as revisable.
[146] I make a case to this effect in “Advancing Liberalism: Progressing Beyond Autonomy” (unpublished paper), American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., September 1-4, 2005.
[147] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 35-36.
[148] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 49, 59.
[149] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 65; cf. Bohman (1996), pp. 59-66.
[150] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 133-35 ff.
[151] See Rawls (2005), pp. 60-61; Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 81. On the importance of being able to seek to justify one’s actions publicly, see Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 95.
[152] Young (2000), p. 38; cf. p. 24. See also Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
[153] Young (2000), p. 61; see pp. 57-63.
[154] See Bohman (1996), pp. 39, 63-64. See also Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Irene Glasser, More Than Bread: Ethnography of a Soup Kitchen (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988); Development, Women, and War: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Haleh Afshar and Deborah Eade (Oxford: Oxfam, 2004); Katarina West, Agents of Altruism: The Expansion of Humanitarian NGOs in Rwanda and Afghanistan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001); Nicholas O. Berry, War and the Red Cross: The Unspoken Mission (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
[155] See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987 [1790]), § 49 (“On the Powers of the Mind Which Constitute Genius”), pp. 181-88.
[156] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 111, 118.
[157] Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 128.
[158] Cf. Bohman (1996), pp. 174, 186-87, 200.
[159] Young (2000), p. 49; see pp. 47-50. See also Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapters 6, 7, passim; Mark Traugott (ed.), Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
[160] Cf. Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 80.
[161] See Rawls (2005), pp. 440-90; Swaine (2006), chapter 4; David Estlund, “Deliberation Down and Dirty: Must Political Expression Be Civil?” in The Boundaries of Freedom of Expression and Order in American Democracy, ed. Thomas R. Hensley (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001). Cf. Young’s conception of publicity (Young [2000], pp. 168-70).
[162] See Daniels (1999), p. 201.
[163] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 99.
[164] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 100; cf. pp. 101, 102; cf. also p. 116, discussing reciprocal reasons.
[165] Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 53.
[166] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), pp. 51-52.
[167] Bohman (1996), p. 26.
[168] Bohman (1996), pp. 5, 26; cf. pp. 75-76.
[169] Young (2000), p. 26.
[170] Young (2000), p. 25; cf. pp. 52-53. See also Gutmann and Thompson (1996), discussing the idea of terms different parties “can accept in principle” (pp. 52-55).
[171] Cf. Young (2000), p. 25.
[172] Bohman (1996), p. 17; cf. pp. 78-79.
[173] Bohman (1996), p. 38; cf. also p. 44 ff; and see Young (2000), p. 25.
[174] Bohman (1996), p. 45.
[175] Bohman (1996), p. 83 ff; cf. Young (2000), chapter 2, discussing the “plurality of modes of communication.”
[176] Bohman (1996), pp. 84-85, 89-93; cf. p. 240. Bohman calls moral compromise the process of “give and take of discussion and debate” (p. 91); this is a very weak conception of moral compromise, however, since there is no logical requirement that discursive interchange involve any change in one’s own position at all, much less a moral compromise. There is not much to disagree with in Bohman’s description, but the standard really does not require or embody moral compromise as it is commonly understood. In describing the content of public reason, one does better to involve the giving of reasons that others should accept, reasons that hold given others’ reasonable concerns and commitments.
[177] Cf. Gutmann and Thompson (2004), who in contrast advocate on behalf of reasons from a “disinterested perspective” (p. 72).
[178] See Rawls (2005), pp. xxvi, 36-37, 58-66, 135-44, 374 n. 1, 441 ff.
[179] See generally Swaine (2006).
[180] See T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 191-206, 210-23 ff. Reasons or principles that someone cannot reasonably reject could be those which a person should or must accept, but they could also be reasons or principles toward which one is neutral.
[181] Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 3.
[182] Cf. Macedo (1999), p. 8; Gutmann and Thompson (1996), pp. 56-57.
[183] Gutmann and Thompson (1996), pp. 56-57.
[184] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 72; see also Bohman (1996), p. 39. It is a familiar fact that complex scientific reasoning and empirical evidence can be difficult for lay people to assess. The accessibility of many scientific arguments and reasons seems to depend on their ability not only to be tested, but also to be translated into more rudimentary, less complex findings, facts, and conclusions.
[185] See Daniels (1999), p. 201 ff.
[186] Cf. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 2-4, passim; Ronald Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 10 (1981): 185-246; Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 10 (1981): 283-345; Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
[187] Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 56.
[188] Rawls (2005), p. 462, 463-65 ff.
[189] In some cases, reasons for citizens to ( may need to remain inaccessible; this is familiar in circumstances when specific war measures need to be approved and the provision of adequate information might jeopardize the public or its government. In those circumstances, the parties recommending (-ing should explain: (a) why access to the reasons to ( cannot be granted; (b) why citizens should follow the party recommending (-ing; (c) whether (and when) those with access can provide access to information on the issue on question; and (d) why alternative courses of action to (-ing, that may have fully accessible reasons behind them, are inadequate.
[190] Processes of reasoning and standards for empirical testing may be more amenable to being universalized, but there too some premises, ideas, and assumptions can be expected reasonably not to be shared by everyone. Nevertheless, with respect to standards of reasoning and empirical testability, it remains sensible to aim to provide reasons that others should accept for or against some proposition.
[191] Government agencies often change their guidelines on nutritional recommendations and vitamin supplementation, for instance.
[192] One example here is whether the success of providing inoculations or blood transfusions to improve bodily health warrants state imposition of those procedures, over recipients’ (or recipients’ families’) objections.
[193] See Swaine (2006), chapter 4.
[194] Shapiro (1999), p. 30; cf. Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 56.
[195] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 56.
[196] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978 [1859]), p. 34. There is a further, epistemological benefit to encountering and considering false views that Mill adduces: namely, that if one does not know competing views on an issue, one “has no ground for preferring” his own (p. 35). These points also hold where inaccessible reasons are partly true, or where there is some truth in an opinion advanced on inaccessible grounds; the condition of opinions being partly true (instead of completely true or totally false) Mill calls the “commoner case” (p. 44).
[197] Cf. Sanders (1997), suggesting that many citizens may need to “learn how to give reasons” for deliberation to work effectively and well (p. 353; cf. p. 62).
[198] Cf. Bohman (1996), p. 155 ff.
[199] Sanders (1997), p. 349, passim.
[200] Bohman (1996), pp. 135-36.
[201] Pippa Norris, “Conclusions: The Growth of Critical Citizens and Its Consequences,” in Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, ed. Pippa Norris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 257-72, at p. 269.
[202] Ronald Inglehart, “Postmodernization Erodes Respect for Authority, but Increases Support for Democracy,” in Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, ed. Pippa Norris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 236-56, at p. 250.
[203] See Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press). See also Pippa Norris, “Introduction: The Growth of Critical Citizens?” in Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, ed. Pippa Norris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1-27, at p. 24.
[204] Russell J. Dalton, “Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies,” in Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, ed. Pippa Norris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 57-77, at pp. 63, 65-69. See also Robert E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 197-201, passim.
[205] Inglehart (1999), p. 250.
[206] Dalton (1999), p. 69.
[207] Verba, Scholzman and Brady (1995), p. 71. The authors did not include illegal political protest activities in their treatment; see p. 43, n. 6.
[208] Inglehart (1999), p. 250.
[209] Dalton (1999), pp. 69-72 ff.
[210] Norris (1999), p. 258.
[211] Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 10 (2002): 175-95.
[212] See Tali Mendelberg, “The Deliberative Citizen: Theory and Evidence,” Political Decision Making, Deliberation and Participation, Vol. 6 (2002): 151-93; Cass Sunstein, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sunstein (2002).
[213] Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 54.
[214] See Gutmann and Thompson (2004), p. 54; James S. Fishkin and Robert C. Luskin, “Bringing Deliberation to the Democratic Dialogue: The NIC and Beyond,” in A Poll with a Human Face: The National Issues Convention Experiment in Political Communication, ed. Maxwell McCombs and Amy Reynolds (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), pp. 3-38.
[215] See Swaine (2006), p. 136; Robert Audi, Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 157, 165-66, 175; Rawls (2005), p. 217. Cf. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
[216] See Swaine (2006), chapter 4, passim. This strategy holds promise for small groups, too, since processes of communication appear to be most efficient in groups of two or three; see Mansbridge (1999), pp. 223-24.
[217] Sanders (1997), p. 352.
[218] See James S. Fishkin, The Voice of the People, expanded edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Fishkin and Luskin (1999); Robert C. Luskin, James S. Fishkin, and Roger Jowell, “Considered Opinions: Deliberative Polling in Britain,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 32 (2002): 455-87.
[219] Cynthia Farrar, James S. Fishkin, et al., “Experimenting with Deliberative Democracy: Effects on Policy Preferences and Social Choice” (unpublished manuscript), presented at ECPR Conference, Marburg, Germany, September 18-21, 2003. See also David Miller, “Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice,” Political Studies, Vol. 40 (1992): 54-67; Knight and Johnson (1994); John Dryzek and Christian List, “Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Response to Aldred,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 34 (2004): 752-58.
[220] See Peter Suedfeld and Philip E. Tetlock (eds.), Psychology and Social Policy (New York: Hemisphere, 1992); John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robyn M. Dawes, “Behavioral Decision Making and Judgment,” in The Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th edition, ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey (New York: McGraw Hill, 1998), pp. 497-548. Cf. Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
[221] Cf. Kymlicka (2002), p. 244.
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