Deliberative Democracy

On many science-related policy questions, the public is unable to make informed decisions, because of its inability to make use of knowledge obtained by scientists. Philip Kitcher and James Fishkin have both suggested therefore that on certain science-related issues, public policy should not be decided on by actual democratic vote, but should instead conform to the public’s counterfactual informed democratic decision. Indeed, this suggestion underlies Kitcher’s specification of an ideal of a well-ordered science. This article argues that this suggestion misconstrues (...) the normative significance of CIDDs. At most, CIDDs might have epistemic significance, but no authority or legitimizing force. (shrink)

(Pre-publication draft November 2015: Partial content of "Introduction: The 2030 Agenda," Journal of Global Ethics 11:3 [December 2015], 262-270) This introduction briefly explains the process through which the Sustainable Development Goals have developed from their receipt in 2014 to their passage in September 2015 by the UN General Assembly, and it considers their development in prospect. The Millennium Development Goals, which spanned 1990-2015, present a case study that reveals the changeability of such long-term multilateral commitments. They were enmeshed in overlapping (...) and inconsistent national and intergovernmental commitments reaching from 1995 to 2005, and the text of those goals also evolved, stabilizing for the last time in 2007. The Sustainable Development Goals and attendant commitments should be expected to evolve similarly over their fifteen year run. This presents a concern, for among the three committees established by the UN to create the goals, the two committees charged with public consultation were retired as planned in 2014. The process evident thereafter has displayed a shift towards a strategy of enrolling broad public endorsement that leaves such consultation and specific responsibility to those consulted in doubt. This bodes ill for public deliberation on the goals and for public accountability as the agenda proceeds towards 2030. (shrink)

How might discourse generate political change? So far, democratic theorists have focused largely on how deliberative exchanges might shift political opinion. Responding to empirical research that casts doubt on the generalizability of deliberative mechanisms outside of carefully designed forums, this essay seeks to broaden the scope of discourse theory by considering speech that addresses participants’ identities instead. More specifically, we ask what may be learned about identity-oriented discourse by examining the practice of religious preaching. As we demonstrate, scholars of homiletics—the (...) study of preaching—have identified three core features that support its focus on identity: its unconditionality, its appeal to authoritative texts and traditions, and its diffuse instrumentality. We then ask what each of these features might look like in more straightforwardly political contexts. Finally, we address several normative questions raised by this practice, as a way of exploring the promises and dangers accompanying identity-oriented discourse more generally. (shrink)

The chapter develops a taxonomy of views about the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. Prominent approaches to epistemic democracy, epistocracy, epistemic libertarianism, and pure proceduralism are examined through the lens of this taxonomy. The primary aim is to explore options for developing an account of the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. The chapter also argues that a number of recent attacks on democracy may not adequately register the availability of a minimal approach to the epistemic responsibilities (...) of citizens in a democracy. (shrink)

In the last two decades, a robust consensus has emerged among philosophers of science, according to which political, ethical, or social values must play some role in scientific inquiry, and that the “value-free ideal” is thus a misguided conception of science. However, the question of how to distinguish, in a principled way which values may legitimately influence science remains. This question, which has been dubbed the “new demarcation problem”, has until recently received comparatively less attention from philosophers of science. In (...) this paper, I appeal to Rawls’ theory of justice (1971) on the basis of which I defend a Rawlsian solution to the new demarcation problem. As I argue, the Rawlsian solution places plausible constraints on which values ought to influence scientific inquiry, and moreover, can be fruitfully applied to concrete cases to determine how the conflicting interests of stakeholders should be balanced. After considering and responding to the objection that Rawls’ theory of justice applies only to the “basic structure” of society, I compare the Rawlsian solution to some other approaches to the new demarcation problem, especially those that emphasize democratic criteria. (shrink)

Governments are often so focused on short-term gains that they ignore the long term, thus creating extra unnecessary burdens on their citizens, and violating their responsibilities to future generations. What can be done about this? In this paper I propose a package of reforms to the ways in which policies are made by legislatures, and in which those policies are scrutinised, implemented and evaluated. The overarching aim is to enhance the accountability of the decision-making process in ways that take into (...) account the interests of persons in the future. (shrink)

In 2017, Ukraine’s Parliament passed legislation that introduced a new health financing arrangement which relied on general tax revenues to finance a set of health services for the entire population. This legislation was in line with key principles for financing universal health coverage. However, health professionals and some policymakers have been critical about elements of the reform, including its reliance on general taxes. Using qualitative methods and drawing on deliberative democratic theory and criteria for procedural fairness, the study argues that (...) acceptance and sustainability of reforms could be strengthened through a fairer decision-making process. It suggests that three main factors limited the extent of participation and inclusiveness in the process. First, a perception among reformers that a fast-paced reform was required because there was only a short political window in which to address long standing issues with oversized and unaffordable health care system. Second, there was lack of trust among reformers in the motives and capacity of some stakeholders due to their vested interests. Third, there was under-appreciation of the importance of engagement with the lay public in a way that would treat them as active agents with valuable insights on key reform options. These findings highlight a profound challenge for policymakers. In retrospect, some of those involved in the reform design and implementation believe that meaningful engagement with the public and those who opposed the reform might have strengthened its legitimacy and its ability to endure. At the same time, the study shows how challenging it is to have an inclusive process in settings where some actors may be driven by unconstrained self-interest or lack the capacity to be knowledgeable interlocutors. It suggests that investment in deliberative capital, defined as the attitudes and behaviors that facilitate good deliberation, and civil society capacity may help overcome this difficulty. (shrink)

In this essay I situate John Dewey’s pragmatist approach to democratic epistemology in relation to contemporary “epistemic democracy.” Like epistemic democrats, Dewey characterizes democracy as a form of social inquiry. But whereas epistemic democrats suggest that democracy aims to “track the truth,” Dewey rejects the notion of “tracking” or “corresponding” to truth in political and other domains. For Dewey, the measure of successful decision-making is not some fixed independent standard of truth or correctness but, instead, our own reflective satisfaction with (...) the practical results. I argue that this approach better reconciles epistemic democracy with traditional models of popular authority (“the will of the people”) and bolsters the defenses of the epistemic democrat against elitist alternatives. (shrink)

In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as (...) plausible liberal principles of public justification. And second, the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular motivating reasons for coercive laws and policies is untenable on multiple grounds. Public reason liberals should focus on assessing the justificatory reasons offered for and against coercive laws and policies rather than requiring citizens to offer adequate secular motivating reasons for such laws and policies. (shrink)

La tesis central de este trabajo es que la tradicional tensión entre substancia y procedimiento socava las estabilidad de la justificación de la concepción liberal más extendida de la legitimidad (la Democracia Deliberativa). Dicha concepciones enfrentan problemas serios a la hora de articular de manera consistente dos dimensiones que parecen ir naturalmente asociadas a la idea de legitimidad: la dimensión procedimental, vinculada a la equidad del procedimiento, y la dimensión epistémica, asociada a la corrección de los resultados. En este trabajo (...) sostengo que a) esa tensión surge de la adopción de una concepción epistemológica social de tipo "veritativo-consecuencialista; b) es posible manejar dicha tensión mediante el remplazo de la epistemología subyacente por una concepción epistemológica social de tipo procedimentalista de orientación pragmatista y c) dicha operación orienta el diseño institucional en una dirección experimentalista. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional response to the (...) listening problem: the establishment of what we call Receptive Publics, discursive spaces designed to improve listening skills and to give space for counterhegemonic ideas. (shrink)

It is widely believed that open and public speech is at the heart of the democratic ideal. Public discourse is instrumentally epistemically valuable for identifying good policies, as well as necessary for resisting domination (e.g., by vocally challenging decision-makers, demanding public justifications, and using democratic speech to hold leaders accountable). But in our highly polarized and socially fragmented political environment, an increasingly pressing question is: do actual democratic societies live up to the ideal of inclusive public speech? In this essay, (...) I explore Maxime Lepoutre's defence of discursive democracy from the challenge of defective public discourse. I argue that political ignorance, dogmatism, and social fragmentation present more formidable challenges to discursive democracy than Lepoutre acknowledges. As a result, his account occasionally veers from warranted optimism to unwarranted idealism. (shrink)

Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators’ attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents’ informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, (...) linguistics and philosophy about the role of questions in speech and thought, we propose a different model in which beliefs are treated as answers directed at specific questions. Here, questions are formally represented as partitions of the space of possibilities and individuals’ information states as sets of questions and corresponding partial answers to them. The state of conversation is then characterised by individuals’ information together with the questions under discussion, which can be steered by various deliberative inputs. Using this model, deliberation is then shown to shape collective decisions in ways that classical models cannot capture, allowing for novel explanations of how group consensus is achieved. (shrink)

Invited critical discussion of recent work from the African tradition on the topic of political power and perhaps some closely related topics.

As the use of nudges by governmental agencies becomes more common, the need for normative guidelines regarding the processes by which decisions about the implementation of specific nudges are taken becomes more acute. In order to find a justified set of such guidelines one must meet several theoretical challenges to Libertarian Paternalism that arise at the foundational level. In this paper, I identify three central challenges to Libertarian Paternalism, and suggest that Susan Hurley's political philosophy as presented in her Natural (...) Reasons (1989) can be viewed as offering powerful responses to them. (shrink)

Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other. Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article suggests that democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also make valuable contributions to projects of just social (...) change. I identify a long-term and a more short-term argument for the value of democratic municipalist agency in Bookchin's thought and claim that the latter provides a compelling case for the valuable contributions this form of action can make to the achievement of a wide variety of visions of social justice. This provides a useful partial corrective to recent political theorising about the nature of the partisanship and trade unionism necessary to secure social justice. (shrink)

This article discusses the growth of the populist radical right as a concrete example of the scenario where liberal democratic ideas are losing support in broadly liberal democratic societies. Our goal is to enrich John Rawls’ influential theory of political liberalism. We argue that even in that underexplored scenario, Rawlsian political liberalism can offer an appealing account of how to promote the legitimacy and stability of liberal democratic institutions provided it places partisanship centre stage. Specifically, we propose a brand-new moral (...) duty binding ‘reasonable’ partisans committed to pluralism. This duty establishes conditions where partisans must strategically transform society’s public reason (i.e. transform the visions for society their parties campaign on) in ways that promise to attract back support from illiberal and antidemocratic competitors. While this strategic behaviour might seem impermissible, we show that Rawls’ distinctive account of sincerity in democratic deliberation is uniquely placed to justify it as perfectly ethical. (shrink)

Contrasting two models of deliberative democratic multiculturalism, one by Seyla Benhabib and another by Luis Villoro, this paper contends that the differences between these two models outweigh the similarities, and that Villoro’s model is more promising insofar as it preserves the trust required in the institutions that mediate democratic deliberation in multicultural societies.

We are facing a crisis of trust in expertise today. Fewer and fewer people trust experts, and more and more politicians openly ignore expert consensus. 'Democracy in the Post-Truth Era' asks what might happen to democracy if we reject the fundamental liberal assumption that people are capable of making informed choices. The book explores the potential impact on society if people, including politicians, never appreciate the relevance of expert opinions. What if people cannot choose between supporters and opponents of key (...) issues such as the causes of climate change, effectiveness of vaccines and ways of combating economic and social crises? Applying social epistemology to these questions, the book considers whether democracy can be defended in the post-truth era. (shrink)

In order for democratic deliberative interactions in educational settings to fruitfully occur, certain favorable conditions must obtain. In this chapter I chiefly concern myself with one of these putative conditions, namely that of school integration, believed by many liberal scholars to be necessary for consensus-building and legitimate decision-making. I provide a critical assessment of the belief that integration is a necessary facilitative condition for democratic deliberation in the classroom. I demonstrate that liberal versions of democratic deliberation predicated on this condition (...) are puzzlingly inattentive both to the inevitability of segregation, as well as the inequities occasioned by ‘school integration’. I then move to probe the possibilities for democratic education in the absence of integration. I argue that neither the possibilities for deliberation nor the cultivation of civic virtue turn on an environment being ‘integrated’. Indeed some kinds of segregation may be more conducive to fostering both deliberation and civic virtue. (shrink)

Reflectivists consider reflective reasoning crucial for good judgment and action. Anti-reflectivists deny that reflection delivers what reflectivists seek. Alas, the evidence is mixed. So, does reflection confer normative value or not? This paper argues for a middle way: reflection can confer normative value, but its ability to do this is bound by such factors as what we might call epistemic identity: an identity that involves particular beliefs—for example, religious and political identities. We may reflectively defend our identities’ beliefs rather than (...) reflect open-mindedly to adopt whatever beliefs cohere with the best arguments and evidence. This bounded reflectivism is explicated with an algorithmic model of reflection synthesized from philosophy and science that yields testable predictions, psychometric implications, and realistic metaphilosophical suggestions—for example, overcoming motivated reflection may require embracing epistemic identity rather than veiling it (à la Rawls 1971). So bounded reflectivism should be preferred to views offering anything less. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine whether it is possible to improve democracy by encouraging ordinary citizens to participate in political decision-making and if participation in deliberative institutions can make citizens more competent decision-makers. By using qualitative data, we analyze the discussion from the Belgrade citizens? assembly focused on the topic of expanding the pedestrian zone in the city center. The CA was organized in Serbia for the first time, as part of a research project aimed at promoting and advancing innovative (...) democratic practices in the Western Balkans. The goal was to encourage the involvement of citizens in discussions of public interest. Our hypothesis was that, through the process of participation and deliberation in CA, ordinary citizens can make reasonable and informed choices, increase their knowledge of the issue discussed, and become more motivated to participate in political decision-making on the local level. Our qualitative content analysis suggests that deliberation had a positive impact on participants? knowledge of the chosen topic of the assembly. It also shows that citizens used exhaustive explanations rather than brief statements, could differentiate the good arguments from the bad, and more often appealed to general rather than private interests. Participants in the assembly reported a significant increase in interest in political decision-making that affects their lives, as well as a sense of being informed about politics. Finally, we wanted to draw attention to the challenges and open questions that remain, namely those that concern the impact of a deliberative body on political decision-making in the real world. (shrink)

Citizen assemblies hold out the promise of reviving democracy. However, the ways that they are currently conceptualised and organised limits their egalitarian appeal.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 329-342, September 2022.

The article develops and defends, with a detailed argument, a certain moral-instrumentalist conception of deliberative democracy according to which, so the main thesis, a certain form of deliberative democracy is the best means for the binding realisation of moral values. This conception combines an epistemic component, according to which deliberation serves to determine which measures most serve the general good, with a participatory component, according to which democratic voting serves to give moral insight social power. Because of the dispute about (...) the criteria of the general good, these two components also have the function of continuing the discussion about the criteria of the general good and of deciding, respectively, on the criterion to be implemented in terms of maximum social support. (shrink)

This book advances a novel justification for the idea of "public reason": citizens within diverse societies can realize the ideal of shared political autonomy, despite their adherence to different religious and philosophical views, by deciding fundamental political questions with "public reasons." Public reasons draw upon or are derived from ecumenical political ideas, such as toleration and equal citizenship, and mutually acceptable forms of reasoning, like those of the sciences. This book explains that if citizens share equal political autonomy—and thereby constitute (...) "a civic people"—they will not suffer from alienation or domination and can enjoy relations of civic friendship. Moreover, it contends that the ideal of shared political autonomy cannot be realized by alternative accounts of public justification that eschew any necessary role for public reasons. In addition to explaining how the ideal of political autonomy justifies the idea of public reason, this book presents a new analysis of the relation between public reason and "ideal theory": by engaging in "public reasoning," citizens help create a just society that can secure the free compliance of all. It also explores the distinctive policy implications of the ideal of political autonomy for gender equality, families, children, and education. (shrink)

Suppose that a majority of jurors decide that a defendant is guilty (or not), and we want to know the likelihood that they reached the correct verdict. The French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) showed that we can get a mathematically precise answer, a result known as the “Condorcet Jury Theorem.” Condorcet’s theorem isn’t just about juries, though; it’s about collective decision-making in general. As a result, some philosophers have used his theorem to argue for democratic forms of government. This (...) essay explains Condorcet’s theorem and how philosophers have used it as an argument for democracy. (shrink)

Religion after Deliberative Democracy responds to gaps exposed by the case of religion in deliberative democratic theory. Religion's persistent visibility in political life has called for new solutions for healing deeply divided societies. In response, the author begins with Jeffrey Stout’s pragmatist vision of democracy before providing a series of supplements in subsequent chapters. Past legacies are refigured in a rapprochement with Jürgen Habermas’s work which is differentiated from the distinctive relevance of Hannah Arendt’s vita activa. New developments in comparative (...) political theology are complemented by recent systems theory approaches to institutional interactions. Peaceful protest movements are reframed in light of the trust-building capacities of minipublics. The result is reason for renewed confidence in democratic practices attuned to fostering political plurality and capable of responding to persistent religious partisanship. This book fills a crucial space in the literature on religion and democracy and will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy of religion, theology, pragmatism, and political theory. (shrink)

This article explains how the issue of inclusion is central to Habermas’s theory of democracy and how it is deeply rooted in his conception of a political public sphere. After recalling Habermas’s views on the public sphere, I present and discuss various objections raised by other critical theorists: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth and Iris Marion Young. These criticisms insist on the paradoxically excluding effects of a conception of democracy that promotes civic participation in the public (...) debate. Negt, Kluge and Fraser develop a Marxist line of analysis that question who can participate in the public sphere. Honneth and Young criticize in various ways the excluding effect of argumentation: are unargumentative speeches excluded from the public debate? I show how Habermas’s model can provide some responses to these various objections by drawing inspiration from his treatment of the gap between religious and post-metaphysical world views. (shrink)

AbstractIn this paper I provide a decolonial critique of received knowledge about deliberative democracy. Legacies of colonialism have generally been overlooked in theories of democracy. These omissions challenge several key assumptions of deliberative democracy. I argue that deliberative democracy does not travel well outside Western sites and its key assumptions begin to unravel in the ‘developing’ regions of the world. The context for a decolonial critique of deliberative democracy is the ongoing violent conflicts over resource extraction in the former colonies (...) of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that deliberative democracy cannot take into account the needs of marginalized stakeholders who are defending their lands and livelihoods. The paper contributes to the literature by (1) offering a critique of hegemonic models of democracy that cannot address issues of inequality and colonial difference and (2) offering possibilities to imagine counterhegemonic alternatives for a democratization of democracy from below. (shrink)

This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on (...) an ‘oracle assumption’ and this is shown to highlight more general difficulties for applying the benefits of diversity to the realities of political problems. The paper then develops a new model of deliberation—based on an relationship between cognitive diversity and diminishing returns to cognitive type—which does not involve an oracle assumption and can therefore support the epistemic value of deliberative democracy even for complex problems. The benefits of diversity are also argued to be better realised though sortition than either democratic elections or epistocracy, pointing to the value of deliberation between randomly selected citizens. Finally, and contrary to past work, the new account suggests that diversity cannot alone establish the superiority of democratic deliberation over all non-democratic alternatives, and that it is insufficient to mount a purely epistemic argument for deliberative democracy. The paper therefore furthers our understanding of the epistemic value of deliberative democracy by clarifying when and to what extent diversity is a benefit to political problem solving. (shrink)

Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can be violated in specific (...) ways, but that many of the norms governing rational deliberation can also be violated, not just without penalty, but often for significant political gain. As a result, the level of noise has come to drown out the signal. The post-truth political condition is the cumulative result of innovations developed by actors who adopt an essentially strategic orientation toward political communications. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jason Brennan’s recent epistemic argument for epistocracy relies on the assumption that voter competence requires knowledge of economics and political science. He conjectures that people who would qualify as competent are mostly white, upper-middle- to upper-class, educated, employed men, who know better how to promote the interests of the disadvantaged than the disadvantaged themselves. My paper, first, shows that this account of voter competence is too narrow and, second, proposes a modified account of this concept. Brennan mistakenly reasons as (...) though it is obvious that socially disadvantaged and oppressed people, by virtue of lacking sufficient knowledge of political science and economics, do not belong on an epistocratic council. This is because there is another way of being competent: possessing first-personal experience and knowledge unique to disadvantaged or oppressed situatedness. Once voter competence is characterized accurately and more holistically, epistocracy’s problematic implications of privileging already dominant genders, races, and classes, which characterize Brennan’s account, no longer arise. (shrink)

The American criminal justice system falls far short of democratic ideals. In response, democratic communitarian localism proposes a more decentralized system with a greater emphasis on local control. This approach aims to deconcentrate power and remove bureaucracy, arguing local control would reflect informal cultural life better than our current system. This view fails to adequately address localized domination, however, including in the background culture of society. As a result, it underplays the need for transformative, democratizing change. Rejecting communitarian localism, I (...) defend a mass deliberative democratic approach to criminal justice reform that relies on institutions outside localities to democratize local institutions and background cultural patterns. Nonetheless, local institutions must be empowered to exert democratic control, as well as to influence institutions outside the locality. This process of democratic co-development offers greater hope for political equality, non-domination, and inclusive democratic deliberation about criminal law than democratic communitarian localism. (shrink)

In dit artikel onderzoek ik of de standaardbenaderingen van burgerschapsonderwijs in de Lage Landen geschikt zijn om jonge mensen voor te bereiden om de huidige politieke realiteiten tegemoet te treden, laat staan om onrecht te bestrijden. Ik laat zien waarom een nadruk op ‘democratische principes’ of de rechtsstaat de status quo waarschijnlijk niet zal veranderen zolang opvoeders er niet in slagen de aandacht voor de waarheid te cultiveren die nodig is om te kunnen oordelen over rivaliserende normatieve claims. Met name (...) op tolerantie gebaseerde interpretaties van burgerschap zullen weinig bereiken in afwezigheid van burgerlijke deugden – vooral moreel oordelen en morele moed – die nodig zijn voor dissent. Dissent omvat minimaal een bereidheid om de waarheid te spreken tegen de macht. Maar het ernstigste probleem betreffende burgerschapsonderwijs op school betreft de legitimiteit ervan, gegeven dat dat onderwijs gebaseerd is op een door de overheid opgelegd curriculum met als doel een gewenste respons op de boodschap ervan op te leggen en te conditioneren. Daardoor staat het per definitie vijandig tegenover dissent. (shrink)

We argue that deliberative decision-making that is inclusive, transparent and accountable can contribute to more trustworthy and legitimate decisions on difficult ethical questions and political trade-offs during the pandemic and beyond.

The central concept in modern democratic theory outlined by a well-respected authority.

According to a frequent objection coming from the tradition of political realism, deliberative democracy is impotent in the face of actors who, wielding power and money, refuse to engage in deliberation, or seek to distort deliberative processes. With the aim of disproving this objection, in this essay I proceed in three steps: first of all, I show that the realpolitik objection is based on a dyadic, two-person theoretical model of argumentative speech acts. To this model, considered limited and unsatisfactory by (...) many sociolinguists, I counter a more complex and articulated framework. Second, I aim to demonstrate that this latter framework is capable of accounting for a temporally and spatially enlarged democratic deliberation which can be rejected or distorted barely, if at all, by agents relying on positions of power. In the third section, I highlight the many and important differences in grounding, nature and finalities between the model of enlarged democratic deliberation and forms of power politics based on strategic calculations and tactical alliances. Finally, I focus on the application of the model to societies characterized by structural injustices and distortions, with the aim of showing how it can help marginalized and victimized groups have their requests heard and discussed in the public sphere and in deliberative settings. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that core parts of the scientific process involve non-epistemic values. This undermines the traditional foundation for public trust in science. In this article I consider two proposals for justifying public trust in value-laden science. According to the first, scientists can promote trust by being transparent about their value choices. On the second, trust requires that the values of a scientist align with the values of an individual member of the public. I (...) argue that neither of these proposals work and suggest an alternative that does better. When scientists must appeal to values in the course of their research, they should appeal to democratic values: the values of the public or its representatives. (shrink)