Democratic deliberation, respect and personal storytelling

Abstract

In pluralistic deliberative settings, where people come from different cultural and social backgrounds, sharing personal experiences and narratives in the first person is often advocated as a preferential means to bridge the informational and motivational gap between members of different social groups. Whatever the epistemic merits of personal storytelling in democratic deliberation may be, the request for transparency and disclosure of people’s private experiences that this practice entails may be objectionable on moral grounds, because it disrespects people as agents who have practical authority over their own lives. Having people disclose their personal stories in public can humiliate them, reify them and abridge their personal liberties. What is worse, these harms are especially likely to be inflicted upon members of marginalised or disadvantaged minorities. For deliberativists, this should be a matter of concern because respect for people as agents is arguably one of the founding principles of democratic deliberation.

Keywords:

• Democratic deliberation
• respect
• storytelling
• minorities
• humiliation

Notes

1. For similar distinctions between these roles of personal testimony, see Gutmann & Thompson, 1996; Bennett, 2016; Polletta, 2006, 117.

2. Robert Goodin’s ‘deliberation within’ (Goodin, 2000), which is intended to explain how ‘solitary’ deliberation is possible, indirectly confirms this point since it represents this practice as a second-best by which we try to simulate the kind of dialogue we would have with others if we could have access to an actual conversation with them.

3. It is important to remark that, notwithstanding her insistence on the need to pay attention to the ‘concrete other’ and ‘first person self-descriptions’ in discourse ethics, Benhabib herself is sceptical about the use of unorthodox forms of communication in democratic deliberation (Benhabib, 1996).

4. Even so, Kant warns us against exceedingly exposing our weaknesses to our friends (Kant, 1991, pp. 261–62).

5. Annabelle Lever has convincingly argued that asking people to disclose their vote and the reasons behind it infringes on a democratic right to privacy that protects their status as competent political agents (Lever, 2007). My objection to personal storytelling revolves instead on a more conventional understanding of privacy as the protection of the status of persons as moral agents, which is nonetheless an essential presupposition of a deliberative conception of democracy.

6. For useful examples of ‘participatory research’ and ‘citizen science’, see Ottinger & Cohen (2011), Sadd et al. (2014).

7. Of course, theories like the one concerning sexual harassment often need to emerge through the personal narrations of members of minorities who engage in consciousness-raising. However, although the claims and theories arising from consciousness-raising can contribute importantly to democratic deliberation, consciousness-raising itself is not an instance of democratic deliberation because it is not public, nor is it addressed to a universal audience.