Democratic Equality by James Lindley Wilson

Author:James Lindley Wilson [Wilson, James Lindley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691190914
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2019-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

III. Fair Deliberation as Appropriate Consideration

What have we learned? I begin with some remarks about how we should understand citizens’ claims to properly democratic deliberation, and address what constitutes a fair hearing for citizens’ judgments, given those claims. Finally, I discuss what this implies about the relationship between political equality and economic and social inequalities.

III.A. CONSIDERATION AND THE PLURALITY

OF DELIBERATIVE INTERESTS

Equal-influence views identify citizens’ interest in the prevalence of a view they have settled on before interpersonal deliberation as their central interest in this common process of judgment formation—or, at least, as the central interest relevant to political equality. But the idea that we best conceive citizens as battling for the supremacy of their pregiven preferences is one of the old canards that theories of deliberative democracy were developed to deny. On the contrary, common deliberation at its best can hardly be conceived as an exercise of power at all.34 I do not claim that power does not operate in processes of common deliberation. Rather, if we conceive of power as a counterfactually defined probability of overcoming resistance to the advancement of one’s ends, then citizens who respect one another as equals do not aim primarily to exercise power. They do not have a purely strategic orientation to fixed ends, because they are willing to alter their ends upon persuasion. None of this implies that citizens do not or should not engage in instrumental behavior—just that they should regulate their instrumental pursuits according to a suitable ethic of fair deliberation. Fairness in deliberation requires limits on power inequalities, so as to prevent abuses in a sufficiently robust way, but this does not mean fairness consists in equality of power. Because deliberation involves forming judgments, citizens aim to form and develop views that they do not already have at hand, to organize their views in a coherent way, and to discover which views on particular matters fit best into their broader structure of value judgments. Similarly, they are concerned that others respect their authority over common life, not that they can causally contribute to the changing of others’ minds at the same level as others.

Citizens have a variety of interests in the deliberative process. Citizens have interests in an environment conducive to autonomous and informed judgment formation. This includes protections from manipulation, and communicative structures that do not skew citizens’ receptivity to advocacy. These protections must be continuous, rather than satisfied in a starting-gate manner that leaves citizens vulnerable if they mismanage their entitlements. Citizens are entitled to have their judgments receive appropriate consideration by others—that is, to have a fair hearing for their judgments. This is both a matter of an advocate’s capacity to command attention, and a listener’s granting the advocate consideration required for that fair hearing. (This entitlement, too, is continuous, and generally cannot be lost.35) When these interests and claims to consideration are satisfied, the result is not only fair hearings for any given citizen’s judgments, but also a fair system of deliberative synthesis—responding to diverse judgments in a way that recognizes the equal authority of each citizen.

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