Two
interrelated problems about democracy in a modern, pluralistic society are
central to my ongoing research in political philosophy. The first concerns the cognitive and
epistemic status of John Rawls’s political liberalism and, specifically, the
idea of reciprocity that forms the
core of his idea of public reason and its place in deliberative democracy. The second concerns conceptualizing the
pluralistic, political ethos that
must be expected of citizens of a well-functioning, diverse deliberative
democracy, as well as the institutional mechanisms used to strengthen and
secure it.
The
first project starts with a central interpretive question about the cognitive
status of John Rawls’s later philosophy:
Should we read his political liberalism as suggesting a historicist and
contextualist revision of his Theory of
Justice as advocated by Richard Rorty?
Or can we still read him as making universalistic and
context-transcendent claims about democratic society and its liberal political
conceptions of justice, even given Rawls’s affirmative disavowal of a claim to truth for his “freestanding,” political
conception of justice in favor of “reasonableness”? I think there is plenty of evidence that even
in limiting the ambitions of his political conception to reasonableness rather
than truth, Rawls nevertheless intends his claims of political justice to be
objective and normatively binding.
Furthermore, I will argue that Jürgen Habermas is wrong in seeing Rawls
ultimately rests the normative propriety of political liberalism merely on the
nonpublic reasons found in citizens’ multifarious comprehensive
worldviews. Still, addressing these
interpretive issues raises a deeper point: I intend to argue that Rawls was too
hasty in ceding truth to
comprehensive doctrines, and abdicating a potential, limited role for truth in
the domain of the political. Rawls’s
claims to political reasonableness, I take it, are best read as at least
implicitly lending his claims the cognitive and epistemic status of partial,
incremental insight rather than
exhaustive, metaphysical essence:
they illuminate a limited, political part of, but do not claim to exhaust the
whole of our understanding of the right answers. I will argue that this is not far off from
Rawls’s own intentions.
In
particular, I believe that Rawls’s theory is actually committed to seeing, as
autonomous politically moral insight, the criterion
of reciprocity—i.e. the requirement that when citizens propose what they
take as the most reasonable fair terms of social cooperation (in a political
conception of justice), they must also reasonably think it at least reasonable
for others to accept them, as free and equal citizens, and not as dominated,
manipulated, or due to an inferior sociopolitical position. I plan to argue that, based on Rawls’s own
commitments, acting according to this criterion—i.e. being politically
reciprocitous—is something that reasonable democratic citizens must understand
each other to sincerely be able to do based on considerations of political
reciprocity themselves (i.e. for its
own sake), and not necessarily because of reasons stemming from their broader,
disparate worldviews. This point, in
turn, can serve to deepen our understanding of the structure of a reasonable
overlapping consensus as well as its relationship to public reason—i.e. how
exactly are political conceptions of justice to be “embedded” into reasonable comprehensive
doctrines in order to respect the idea of reciprocity undergirding democratic,
political legitimacy and public reason.
In
this final element, my first project dovetails nicely with my second. The second project begins by engaging the
substantive debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls over the role of overlapping consensus in the latter’s
theory: does it merely have a functional role of ensuring societal stability,
as Habermas objects against Rawls, or is there a legitimate, further, cognitive
or justificatory role for overlapping consensus to play in securing the
rational acceptability of the family of political conceptions of justice that
are to serve as the content of a democracy’s public reasoning? I think Habermas is wrong to think that
overlapping consensus serves a merely functional role of securing stability of
a democratic regime. Still, the genuine
cognitive role overlapping consensus does play is not one of ensuring rational acceptability of the content of political conceptions of
justice. On the other hand, I think
Rawls is wrong to hold that citizens merely take into account the existence of overlapping consensus by
simply giving weight to the fact that
each citizen has embedded a liberal political conception of justice in their
comprehensive doctrines, without needing to look into the content each other’s doctrines.
Still, this peering into each other’s worldviews is not to assess the
reasons proffered therein for a politically justificatory role. Rather, this mutual inspecting of one’s fellow citizens’ comprehensive views has
a distinctive cognitive role:
ensuring that their commitment to this democratic society is embedded in the right way in their broader
worldviews. Overlapping consensus gives
us insight into the character of our
fellow citizens as well as the ethos of our political community: it allows us
come to ensure that a commitment to a democratic society and its public reason
is embedded properly in our fellow citizens’ worldviews, as a politically moral
insight, and to thereby secure a
relationship of civic trust among
fellow citizens.
Overlapping
consensus is thus best construed as an ongoing inquiry into the integrity,
authenticity, and sincerity of their commitment to democratic political reciprocity: it is a cognitive inquiry
into the status of their commitment and one that has implications about the
citizens’ view of their regime’s legitimacy as well as of the ethos of civic
trust within their political community.
Beyond serving a stabilizing role, a strong civic community is a
well-spring of politically moral insight, and the maintenance of communal bonds
of trust can be cognitively assessed
by citizens in terms of terms of the sincerity and integrity of their peers’
commitment to the mutual enterprise.
These are, of course, politically moral
expectations on citizens rather than legal ones, which would trample on
basic rights, but my research would continue by addressing the question of what
sorts of institutional mechanisms can
be legitimately used to foster a thin democratic ethos of civic trust. Habermas is wrong to simply cede the
motivational and ethical presuppositions of pluralistic deliberative democracy
to a “rationalized lifeworld” or a form of ethical life that “meets it
halfway”: more can be theorized about how democratic citizens can legitimately
and non-coercively assess and strengthen democratic, political ethos, and about
how the institutions of a democratic
society can legitimately do likewise. In
particular, I will critically engage with Habermas’s suggestions about the
reciprocal cognitive burdens those with monolithic, religious worldviews and
those with more fragmented, secular outlooks must assume in a deliberative
democratic society, and argue that defenders of modern democracy are best to
open their minds to learning from religious communities in theorizing about how
to build non-exclusive forms of civic community
and democratic ethos rather than, as
Habermas does, focusing solely on how religious citizens can contribute to
political reasoning while maintaining their identities. Charles Taylor, for instance, highlights the
continued, modern importance of “the festive,” which can be put to use by
democratic societies as a way to recognize, recollect, and celebrate the
diverse elements of our pluralistic
community and its multifarious worldviews and histories (a pluralistic,
nonabsolute take on Hegel’s Absolute Spirit), and thus play a cognitive and
community building role of mutual understanding and civic trust.
Further,
I would also like to explore the role that systemic sources of distrust and
mistreatment among citizens (ethnocentrism, racism, sectarianism, etc.) play in
undermining democratic ethos and our
presupposition of the legitimacy of deliberatively democratic outcomes. Distrust and disparate treatment of others
because of who they are rather than what they do, besides being morally
pernicious in and of itself, undermines both the cognitive and the ethical
bases of our best understandings of deliberative democracy. Rather than leaving this issue to “non-ideal
theory,” we must recognize that simply as a matter of realism, such unfortunate realities are always present in any pluralistic society, and thus that any realistic
understanding of deliberative democracy must try to understand what legitimate
institutional mechanisms can be leveraged against them. I do not think that pluralistic democracies
can remain institutionally neutral with regard to racists, sexists, and bigots
out of concerns over freedom of speech: promulgating a pluralistic, democratic
civics and civic education of mutual
tolerance and understanding, e.g., is a legitimate
institutional role for a democracy
that is concerned to protect its own cognitive, ethical, and motivational
presuppositions.
