![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
A central discussion in the theory of deliberative democracy in recent decades has focused on whether democratic deliberation, and consequently those participating in it, should aim, at least ideally, for political consensus. Thus, pluralist deliberative democrats have criticized the consensualist approach to deliberative democracy for neglecting the moral importance of political disagreement because of their fixation with reaching consensus. The debate between these two positions, initiated in the 1990s, has evolved in recent years toward more precision and sophistication. However, some vagueness and ambiguities remain in many of the contributions and prevent us from getting an exact idea of the object of discussion. This article starts making further distinctions about several types of agreement and disagreement in order to clarify much more precisely the exact niche of dispute between these two views. They do not need to disagree on the value of many forms of disagreement and consensus. Their dispute consists only in a controversy about the relative value of post-deliberative, operative, substantive, legislative, regulatory, or adjudicative reason-based consensus as opposed to the corresponding reason-based disagreement. Finally, the article argues that this relatively small niche is made smaller by certain considerations. The most important of them is that this controversy remains at a high theoretical level and lacks practical importance: it only affects the kind of personal ideal commitment or aspiration that virtuous deliberators should have when entering into a deliberative process, and has no concrete consequent institutional implications.
Acknowledgment
I want to thank Enrico Biale, Federica Liveriero, and Diego Pardo for their constructive comments, which helped to improve this work significantly, as well as Sabrina Voss, who gave editorial assistance.
Notes
1. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for his/her request of greater clarification on this point.
2. Even if they do not have firm beliefs when they enter into the deliberative process, they must aspire to learn from others and contribute to a collective process to find the truth (or correctness). Again, this is understood to be part of the concept of deliberation itself.
3. In fact, Cohen acknowledges that, ‘even under ideal conditions, there is no promise that consensual reasons will be forthcoming’ (Cohen, Citation1989, p. 23).
4. Such a commitment is compatible with many concrete meta-ethical positions, ranging from moral realism to moral constructivism, quasi-realism, and projectivism or universal prescriptivism, but it certainly excludes others, like moral skepticism, nihilism, emotivism, and those that would deny that there are objectively or inter-subjectively correct moral solutions to our political and moral problems. I will return briefly to meta-ethical issues in Section ‘Meta-ethical pluralism and consensualist deliberative democracy’.
5. The stability and peacefulness of the system might well be indirect contributors to the legitimacy of such systems (e.g. Rawls’ view advocated in Rawls, Citation1993). Therefore, this kind of consensus, based not on reasons but on other considerations like those mentioned in the text, might be somehow connected with political legitimacy. However, it is important to note that such a connection is only indirect and contingent: an agreement based on confusion or manipulation is not necessarily more stable and it may also undermine the legitimacy of the system in other important ways.
6. The same happens with other requirements of ideal deliberation, such as the availability of complete information or infinite time. Access to greater quantities of relevant information is generally better for actual deliberation. But this is not invariably true. Access to more partial information while still lacking decisive counterbalancing information may be epistemically worse, leading to a more biased, less balanced assessment of such information. Thus, approaching the ideal of complete information is not a naïve, plainly incremental approach to the availability of such information. Instead, it involves a complex assessment of the amount of information and its quality and proximity to the situation, and having access to a fully balanced, complete set of information. The same occurs with infinite time and time constraints.
7. Michael Fuerstein argues that participants in deliberative processes should not explicitly aim for consensus or agreement, but just limit themselves to welcoming it as an essential byproduct when it occurs. I cannot fully address here all of Fuerstein’s important remarks. His main argument is that such agreements might be only spurious coincidence or a convergence of beliefs, and it is by no means clear why such a thing should have any value (Fuerstein, Citation2014, p. 288). What is needed is an epistemic concern for correct or acceptable decisions, the agreement upon which might be valuable. This is just another way of saying that their aspirations should only be to reach the kind of consensus that is properly based on reasons. Fuerstein seems to believe that such aspirations, then, cannot offer guidance or orientation to real deliberators since they cannot know in advance what kind of consensus is properly based on reasons. It is true, as I conceded, that the commitment to an (ideal) aspiration to reach reason-based consensus is unrelated to the adoption of any concrete decision rule. It is also right that deliberators cannot discriminate between (a) a consensus based on proper reasons and (b) a consensus based on, for instance, misguided joint beliefs. But this does not mean that such a commitment to reason-based consensus cannot offer any guidance. Deliberators will certainly be able to identify a consensus that appears to be based on reasons from an agreement that they know is simply the result of an act of manipulation, deception, or threat. They can never be sure if (a) is properly based on reasons, and therefore, perfectly legitimate, but they will know that (b) is not.
8. If there is a plurality of objectively correct decisions, deliberation can help us to distinguish them from the incorrect ones. If there is no objectively correct solution, deliberation can still be useful for self-clarification and self-understanding, as well as win-win compromises among divergent preferences and interests (Mansbridge et al., Citation2010). What is more, deliberation can serve the purpose of identifying areas of disagreement where they were not obvious or salient in the first place. I thank the anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to this last point.
9. Waldron quotes a long passage by David Gauthier that apparently reflects what he criticizes in the text. It is not obvious to me, however, that Gauthier refers to how to design actual deliberative procedures. His reference to unanimity seems to be for him a reasonable expectation of an ideal process of deliberation, rather than a requirement for actual procedures.
10. Besson emphasizes that, for instance, Habermas holds that there is ‘no alternative to violence and coercion, but a consensus arrived at in moral or ethical discourses or, at least, in procedurally regulated negotiations’ (Besson, Citation2005, p. 230). Therefore, consensualists should be committed to the aspiration of reaching consensus in actual deliberative processes as well. Like Waldron, she also cites a passage from Gauthier about unanimity that seems to exemplify such a commitment.
11. This distinction between operative and second-order disagreements mirrors the distinction drawn by Besson (Citation2005, ch. 1–3) between what she calls political-moral disagreements and the sources of such disagreements. However, she identifies only three types of sources of disagreement: verbal, conceptual, and normative, and includes within the latter two further subtypes, epistemic and metaphysical. I place verbal and conceptual in the same category as ‘conceptual disagreements’, but distinguish between four other types of disagreement: factual, methodological, normative, and metaphysical.
12. It should be noted that not all conceptual disagreements about political concepts are second-order disagreements in the sense that they ground or generate operative disagreements. The mere divergence in the use of a concept does not amount to a conceptual disagreement that is politically relevant. I can use a term differently than you do, and if we both know our respective uses of the term, it cannot be the reason for an operative disagreement.
13. Our political disagreement about the regulation of abortion, for instance, might derive from differing views on our metaphysical beliefs about human life. Even if we agree on all the relevant empirical facts, we might disagree on when human life starts. The result is that we hold different normative views. This shows that, even if different in nature, this fourth kind of second-order disagreement is connected with political disagreement.