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Deliberative Democracy and the Epistemic Benefits of Diversity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

James Bohman
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Abstract

It is often assumed that democracies can make good use of the epistemic benefits of diversity among their citizenry, but difficult to show why this is the case. In a deliberative democracy, epistemically relevant diversity has three aspects: the diversity of opinions, values, and perspectives. Deliberative democrats generally argue for an epistemic form of Rawls' difference principle: that good deliberative practice ought to maximize deliberative inputs, whatever they are, so as to benefit all deliberators, including the least effective. The proper maximandum of such a principle is not the pool of reasons, but rather the availability of perspectives. This sort of diversity makes robustness across different perspectives the proper epistemic aim of deliberative processes. Robustness also offers a measure of success for those democratic practices of inquiry based on the deliberation of all citizens.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , October 2006 , pp. 175 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

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References

Notes

1 See Aristotle, , Politics, IV 14, 129 8b12–20Google Scholar.

2 Mill, J. S., On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Collini, S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, particularly the second chapter of On Liberty, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.”

3 On the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic justification of deliberative democracy, see Christiano, Thomas, “The Significance of Public Deliberation,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Bohman, J. and Rehg, W. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 243–279Google Scholar. Christiano argues that public deliberation is best regarded as having instrumental value, to the extent that it promotes correct reasoning and good outcomes.

4 See Wimsatt, William, “Robustness, Reliability, and Overdetermination,” in Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences, ed. Brewer, M. and Collins, B. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981), 124–163Google Scholar and Wylie, Alison, Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archeology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 For discussions of the varieties of theories of deliberative democracy, see, among others, Bohman, James, “The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 4 (1998), 418–443Google Scholar; Chambers, Simone, “Deliberative Democratic Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003), 307–326CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and from a Rawlsian perspective, Freeman, Samuel, “Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (2000), 371–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For a fuller development of the argument of this section, see Bohman, James, “Deliberative Toleration,” Political Theory 31:6 (2003), 757–779CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 On “the epistemic value of quantity,” see Estlund, David, “Political Quality,” Social Philosophy and Policy 17 (2000), p. 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar; his “epistemic difference principle” is formulated on p. 147. More input is valuable from the participants' perspective only if it increases the possibility of each perspective being heard. Increasing input could be democratically justified to the worst off only if it increases the number of perspectives in discussion. In order that the worst off (here the least effective in deliberation) may accept the epistemic difference principle, the relevant value is the diversity of perspectives rather than quantity of input.

8 Young, Iris, Democracy and Inclusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Examples include such puzzles as the familiar case of the three people facing each other and who must (without directly communicating) figure out the color of the paint (red or green) on their own face, when given only the information that there is at most one with green. In fact, they all have red paint on their face. They can see the faces of the others but not their own. Initially, the task seems impossible, since seeing the others with red paint is both consistent with one's having red and consistent with one's having green. However, by taking the perspective of the others into account, they realize that the others cannot fi gure out the color on their own head, and thus gain new information, viz., that one's color cannot be green. For if one's own color is green, then the others would have been able to deduce that their own color is red. In this case, each gains novel information i* by recognizing the knowledge or ignorance of others in an initial state of information i, where i* otherwise would have been inaccessible without the uptake of alternative perspectives responding to i. Thanks to Joe Salerno for this example.

10 See Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 153–155Google Scholar.

11 Ruggie, Gerald, Constructing the World Polity (London: Routledge, 2000) p. 186Google Scholar. Besides its ultimate origins in George Herbert Mead, multiperspectival inquiry is common in feminist and democratic contexts, including multinational and transnational institutions. For a general account of multiperspectival inquiry as essential to practical and critical social science, see Bohman, James, “Critical Theory as Practical Knowledge,” in Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Roth, P. and Turner, S.. (London: Blackwell, 2002), 91–109Google Scholar.

12 Longino, Helen, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Longino defends democratic criteria for judging good scientific practice. My argument here does not depend on such a strong analogy between science and democracy.

13 See Daston, Lorraine, “Objectivity and the Escape form Perspective” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992), 597–618CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 On the distinction between neutrality and partiality, see Lacey, Hugh, Is Science Value Free? (London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar. For their use in a social scientific context, see Mark Risjord, “Race, Method, and Neutrality: Franz Boas' Critique of Evolutionary Anthropology,” The Philosophy of Social Sciences, forthcoming.

15 Adam Smith expresses this ideal in this way when considering two people with conflicting interests: “Before we can make any proper comparison of opposite interests, we must change our position. We must view them, neither from our place nor from his, neither with our own eyes nor with his, but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connexion to either, and who judges impartially, between us.” Cited in Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” p. 605. Mill, to the contrary, argues that the business of government “is best left to those who are directly interested.”

16 Dewey, John, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry in The Later Works. Volume 12 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 499Google Scholar.

17 Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, p. 20.

18 Benhabib, Seyla, The Claims of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 140–141Google Scholar.

19 See Schauer, Frederick, “Amending the Presuppositions of a Constitution,” in Responding to Imperfection, ed. Levinson, S. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 145–162Google Scholar. Thus, constitutional revision does not take place exclusively through the explicit amendment process or popular sovereignty, but also with the historical development of the community and its practices.

20 Sabel, Charles, “Constitutional Orders: Trust Building and Response to Change,” in Contemporary Capitalism, ed. Hollingsworth, J.R. and Boyer, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 159Google Scholar.

21 Joseph Weiler points to the case of Gayusuz versus Austria that went to the European Court of Human Rights and led to the extension of social security benefits to third country nationals (p. 719). See Weiler, , “An ‘Ever Closer Union’ in Need of a Human Rights Policy,” European Journal of International Law 9 (1998), 658–723Google Scholar.

22 On this as the central issue for epistemic conceptions, see Estlund, David, “Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Bohman, J. and Rehg, W. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 173–204Google Scholar.

23 For such an ideal proceduralist account, see Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy, p. 72–75.

24 For an argument for this principle of institutional differentiation as promoting optimal deliberation, see Bohman, James, Democracy Across Borders (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), chapter 4Google Scholar.

25 Michelman, Frank, Brennan and the Supreme Court (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 59Google Scholar.