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Deliberative democracy: input vs. output, (“Problematization. Incases in…

- - - - Ideally consensus/ majority is necessary due to time constraints etc. // identity/will emerges // ideas and reasons compete from those that have found articulation in civil society// certain types of reasons 'work' ideal = impartiality, non-ideal - need to win majority therefore reasons of general appeal // continuous process
        
        Discussions in deliberative democracy
        
        Different types of reasons: Forst - justification, Bohman = accepted in fact// Cohman - raesonable to all (Rawlsian public reason// Habermas - impartiality // Lafont - reasonably accept
        
        The symbolism of majority: Waldron - symbolism of equal power + recognition of dissent; Lafont, Habermas, Cohen - discussion is ongoing - emergence of identity 'subjectless' identity, temporary close, to be resumed again (i.e. have to face the 'minority' that did not agree again).
        
        Which liberties are necessary (see above)
        
        The role of judiciary - ensuring that power takes a legitimating form. Habermas goes further - it ensures that people can function in society.
        
        Focus on input
        
        Much of deliberative democracy focuses on what I call 'input': how to ensure that the voices of 'the people' are 'heard.'
        
        Common thread: continual emergence from a body where each has equal standing; the only legitimate laws are ones where the people (understood in this way) are both subject and author
        
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        assumption of reasonable pluralism
        
        Habermas but discourse principles still matter in bargaining – they regulate bargaining from a standpoint of fairness “disciplined by its equal distribution among the parties, …equal opportunity for pressure, so that all affected interests can come into play and have equal changes of prevailing.” P. 167
        
        p. 179 – what makes majority rule legitimate? It is a proviso decision: one that can be reversed with different majorities. It ‘represents an ongoing discussion; the decision records, so to be speak, the interim result of a discursive opinion-forming process….. Doubt about the legitimacy of majority decisions on matters with irreversible consequences are revealing in this regards. Such doubts are based on the view that the outnumbered minority give their consent to the empowerment of the majority only with the proviso that they themselves retain the opportunity in the future of winning over the majority with better arguments and thus of revising the previous decision.”
        
        Democratic procedure: fair balancing of interests; clarification of ethical self-understanding and moral justification of regulations.
      - Cohen (1997)- importance of 'reasonable to all' as opposed in the general interest. The latter, through something like a utilitarian calculation could end up violating certain rights we consider very important.
        
        This comes from an ‘aggregative conception’ of democracy. “… institutionalizes a principle requiring equal consideration for the interests of each member, or more precisely, equal consideration along with a presumption of personal autonomy…. Establish a scheme of collective choice – majority , plurality, bargaining… - that gives equal weight to the interest of citizens in part by enabling them to present and advance their interests…. And when we face outcomes that disadvantage people who are the likely targets of such views, we have strong evidence of a failure of the process to give equal consideration to the interests of each.” P. 411
        However, on an aggregate view, there is no reason why a procedure should end up protecting ‘substantive’ liberties – the aggregative just looks at ‘how intense’ and not the stringency or nature of the convictions one may have with religion.
- - - - Why is this not said? I can speculate that it has to do with the effort to juxtapose DD against aggregate conceptions of the common good. The idea being that we want something more substantive that simply bargaining. We also want something that is more inclusive, that we need to explain ourselves to all
      - This needs to happen for two reasons: using the same general reasons can be interpreted differently. One and the same result can be explained with different reasons.
        
        The agreement (Habermas) that public reason feeds into the process suggests that there is a possibility of tracing a line of reasoning from beginning to end. Reasons are supposed to be powerful
        
        example of meritocracy
- - - - Waldron: DD are consensus minded: “A good theory may make idealistic assumptions about people’s motivation, but even if it does, it should hold on to a sense that in the real world, even after deliberation, people will continue to disagree in good faith about the common good, and about the issues of policy, justice, and right that we expect a legislature to deliberate upon.” P. 2189
- - - - “democratic procedure – which alone provides legitimating force to the law-making process in the context of social and ideological pluralism – from a discourse-theoretical standpoint. Here I assume a principle that I cannot discuss in detail, namely, that a regulation [content/output] may claim legitimacy only if all those possibly affected by it could consent to it after participating in rational discourses.”
        
        p. 17 “when citizens judge… whether the law they make it legitimate, they do so under communicative presuppositions that must themselves be legally institutionalized in the form of civil rights..”- procedure and content.
- - - - “politically autonomous citizens can understand themselves as authors of the law to which they submit as private subjects only if legitimately generated law also determines the direction in which political power circulates.”
      - the normative content, and not the pragmatic content necessarily. “Democratic procedure, which establishes a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of self-understanding and of justice, grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are obtained insofar as the flow of relevant information and its proper handling have not been obstructed. According to this view, practical reason {} resides in the rules of discourse and forms of argumentation that borrow their normative content from the validity basis of action oriented to reach understanding. In the final analysis, this normative content arises from the structure of linguistic communication and the communication mode of sociation.” P. 296-7
- - - - Majority decision – gives recognition to equal standing, each vote is equal such that it matters where the halfway point is. Anyone’s reason is not conclusive, but it still counts in favour of X.
        
        “Society needs a mechanical procedure precisely because resource to a substantive procedure would reproduce not resolve the decision-problem in front of us. P. 2213. The reasons supporting majority decision are reasonable in circumstances of politics.
        
        … “will not be convinced then that equal respect entails majority decision, for he will know that majority decision can lead to outcomes which do not appear to give individuals the substantive respect to which they are entitled.
        
        Once again, however, we can see that this broad notion of respect is unusable in the circumstances of politics. It is because we disagree about what counts as substantively respectful outcome that we need a decision-procedure; in this context, folding substance back into procedure will necessarily privilege one controversial view about what respect entails and according fail to respect the others.” P. 2212
- - - - This is not to undermine the importance of abstract reasoning, but to shed light on the importance of the concrete policies that 'conclude' debate; the things that is ultimately coercive
        
        Looking at the example of civil disobedience from Habermas - what we see is that a distinction needs to be made - there is civil disobedience when one cannot back-up the law because the reasons supporting it are illegitimate. I believe he states they disagree with the law: the law is illegitimate.
        
        It is possible, although I believe there are far fewer examples of civil disobedience simply for the reasons given (often those reasons are manifested in the law themselves - or not) if you can find different reasons for supporting the law - that is you take no issue with the output and its effects, you would just defend it differently. Although this is possible, it does not make the fact that it is the actual legislation and policy that one takes issue with. Even if it is just the supporting reasons - what is desired is a change in the wording, a statement that
      - If we look at the types of reasoning and discussion that can happen, essentially backwards (proposal first, reasons later) or forwards (reasons first, proposal later); agreement on the proposal is a necessary feature constitutional democracy; agreement for the same reasons is desirable, but not necessary
        
        This feature enables 'agreement' versus consensus and makes the system 'feasible.' But it also means that having an identity emerge from a set of reasons can have different meanings: emergence - as in creating something together - or emergence as in we do not have to have our reasons 'reach each other' they just have to be compatible with the same output
      - A potential objection are certain performative actions, like taking responsibility for the sins of the past.
- - - - Moral norms = rationally motivated consensus; legal norms – rationally motivated agreement. The latter which obligations we ought to take on. “self-legislation, which implies moral autonomy at the level of the individual will, takes on the meaning of political autonomy at the level of collective will-formation.” We come to agreement on universal moral norms; we generate through rational discourse legal norms. “this explains why the common ground of shared beliefs, …, also generates communicative power.” 4.2.1
- - - - “….procedures… function as the most important sluices for the discursive rationalization of the decisions of an administration bound by law an state…..The public opinion that is worked up via democratic procedures into communicative power cannot “rule” of itself but can only point the use of administrative power in specific directions.” 7.1.2
        
        Ultimately, (quoting Fraser) it is a free public that determines what is of collective concern – through argumentation.
        
        see disussion of Dahl - and bottllenecking of technical knowledge 7.3: p. 320 – the importance/role of functional coordination in complex societies and the difference between lay and experts is not enough. “Dahl has recognized the danger that these ‘cognitive’ problems of functional coordination displace other, namely moral and ethical, problems and overburden the problem=solving capacity of democratic procedures. Various symptoms of such a cognitive overburdening of deliberative politics lend support to the assumption, by now widely accepted, that discursive opinion- and will-formation governed by democratic procedures lacks the complexity to take in and digest the operatively necessary knowledge.”
        
        “political influence supported by public opinion is converted into political power- into a potential for rendering binding decisions – only when it affects the beliefs and decisions of authorized members of the political system and determines the behaviour of voters, legislators…. Just like social power, political influence based on public opinion can be transformed into political power only through institutionalized procedures.” P. 363
        
        “interplay of a public sphere based in civil society with the opinion- and will-formation institutionalized in parliamentary bodies and courts the limited scope for action that civil society and the public sphere afford to noninstitutionalized political movements and forms of political expression.’
        
        Public opinion is relieved of decision-making – it can be undifferentiated. However, the quality of public opinion is contingent on the ability for it to be translated in such a way that it can be put into practice – into the political system
        
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- - - - Political communication is general but “they ultimately issue in the decisions of legislative bodies.” Political will formation aims at legislation: horizontally agreed rights only manifest interpreted and developed in law; administration is programmed through laws. 4.3.1.
        
        “The priority of laws legitimated in democratic procedures has the cognitive meaning that the administration does not have its own access to the normative premises underlying its decision… cannot substitute legislation and adjudication.”
        “the utilization of administrative power on the part of the legislature and judiciary is unobjectionable only insofar as this resource is necessary for the institutionalization of the corresponding discourses.”
        
        “On the one hand, they must enable the communicative power of a rationally formed will to emerge and find binding expression in political and legal programs. On the other hand, they must allow this communicative power to circulate throughout society via the reasonable application and administrative implementation of legal programs, so that it can foster social integration through the stabilization of expectations and the realization of collective goals.” P. 176
        
        Law “forces” argumentation to take a certain shape, a shape that reflects the things that legitimize power (communicative power). “..procedural norms regular participation and the distribution of roles in discursive processes of opinion0 and will -formation; they limit the spectrum of admissible topics, questions, an arguments; and they link argumentation to decision making. In this way the instrument of law is reflexively deployed so that discourses for making and applying law can be socially expected in specific places at specific times.” P. 178
        
        therefore he wanted a type of restriction on political debate to ‘neutral’ topics of justice. However, the nature of political debate – along discourse theoretical lines – is about context-dependent conceptions of the good life. Therefore, it is unavoidable to include these topics (it is in essence part and parcel of what politics is about). The neutrality is found in discourse principle.
- - - - His example is freedom of religion – that it is reasonable to have transcendent moral or religious beliefs and that any collective agreement that requires someone to violate those beliefs is unreasonable. This leaves a lot of things unsaid – like squaring these types of freedoms with other reasonable obligations like mandatory childhood education. But that seems to be evading the real kind of difficult questions…
        “We have failed to provide a justification for the exercise of power by reference to considerations that all who are subject to that power, and prepared to cooperate on reasonable terms, can accept.” P. 418
      - However - this has to do with whether deliberative democracy is too radical - that oppressive policies and legislation will emerge from the 'legitimate' discussions. His point is that there are inherent restrictions on the content.
    - - It is not about how deliberation can generate legitimate output - one that is emergent from 'the people.' : “liberties of the moderns.” Denying general freedom of expression (unrelated to political input) is not something that can be defended from the principles of inclusion/democracy. (Habermas has a more comprehensive understanding however). “…one element of that strategy: the need to protect inputs to a process of discussion. But as with religious liberty, so too, with expressive liberty: the deliberative view also ties protections to acceptable outcomes of a deliberative process, outcomes, that is, that can be justified given the requirement on finding reasons acceptable to others under conditions of reasonable pluralism.” P. 420
        
        1997: "3. Rights of the ancients – rights to participation. (in reverse order)
        The personal moral reasons that shape an individual’s perspective give her reasons to want to shape her society. If she does not have the right to bring forth those reasons, then you are denying her equal standing – the background conditions of citizens as equals. 2) the reasons one gives for discriminating against one or other group in terms of political rights will likely depend on reasons that are not going to be considered acceptable nor acceptable from the perspective of the person
        
        There seems to be a lack of recognition of the point I have been trying to make about this article: the fact that the reasonable disagreement will emerge not at the very abstract 'equality' but how it is cashed out. the deliberative procedure needs to be able to show how it can deal with this in a legitimate manner. To say that all output will be justified with reasons that are reasonable to all from their own perspective bypasses the disagreement aspect.
- - - - but this assumes that people would claim that some are considered less-worthy. The point is, is that from context-dependent view, reasonable disagreement necessarily allows for a disagreement on what it means to treat people equally.