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ABSTRACT
This rejoinder represents a final installment in a debate between myself and Paul Gunn over the feasibility and desirability of deliberative democracy. Here I argue that our debate has helped clarify an ambivalence in the literature surrounding the ends and means of deliberative democracy. I specify two ways to understand both ends and means, establish their importance in deliberative theory, and show how they can be combined. I conclude by showing how this systemic view incorporates and overcomes several challenges facing modern democracy, such as the necessity of expert authority, the role of partisanship, and the problem of social complexity.
Notes
1. To be sure, other conceptions of how public spheres operate also stress how state regulations and market imbalances impact interactions in public sphere. See Fraser 1992.
2. Spragens 1990, cited in Young Citation2002, 40.
3. This dichotomy is consistent with that of Rousseau, who distinguished between the will of all and the general will: “There is often a considerable difference between the will of all and the general will: the latter looks only to the common interest, the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a sum of particular wills; but if, from these same wills, one takes away the pluses and the minuses which cancel each other out, what is left as the sum of the differences is the general will” (Rousseau [1762] Citation1997, 60).
4. I remain agnostic about whether deliberation is underpinned by moral norms as the basis for social cooperation, or by a pragmatic search for legitimacy as collective problem-solving, which those in the “realist” tradition of political theory prefer (e.g., Williams Citation2005).
5. Moreover—because individual self-interests are intrinsically self-justifying—we could not simply discard individual views even if an omnipotent individual could “prove” that he or she is able to determine the common good in advance of the deliberative constitution of the common good. In this sense, the two ways of understanding deliberative democracy as an end are interrelated.
6. I am therefore arguing—in contrast to Owen and Smith Citation2015—that deliberation must undergird a democratic system and take priority over other democratic models (i.e., nondeliberative yet still democratic mechanisms must be deliberatively justified).
7. Even if a common good does exist pre-deliberatively (as I accept it does hypothetically), Muirhead (Citation2016) is right that we could not in advance determine which experts would have access to that state of affairs.
8. I am also committed to the view that experts are better able to determine how to enact the common good than lay citizens, who might lack specialized knowledge about discrete areas and who tend to have less time to study them. Of course, this is a probabilistic argument, which is precisely why citizens should be able to vote out partisan groups periodically, which has a knock-on effect on experts.
9. Inclusive deliberation between diverse viewpoints may well generate “smarter” results, as Landemore argues. However, this is not a certainty. The theorem from Lu Hong and Scott Page invoked by Landemore has been contested mathematically and shown to struggle in some political contexts as it requires agreement on the problem at hand (Quirk Citation2014). Yet political deliberation is needed precisely when there is reasonable disagreement. At any rate, even if the Hong and Page thesis holds, the necessary deliberation might be too time consuming and costly to be realistic. Therefore, shortcuts and heuristics that work toward epistemically good solutions are required and can be deliberatively justified.
10. This view of the common good rests on a type of “rational truth” rather than “factual truth,” to use Arendt’s (Citation1961) words.