Democratic Rule Must Be Reasoned

• Main Author: Richardson, Henry S
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 2003
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195150902.003.0005; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52142434/isbn-9780195150902-book-part-5.pdf

Abstract I have not yet integrated the idea of deliberative democracy into my account. This idea is currently popular and is taken by some simply to be obviously attractive. Others, reacting perhaps to the idea’s very popularity, deny its attractions. On both sides, there is vagueness and equivocation about what “deliberative democracy “ means. In part to avoid these confusions, I start instead with the term “reasoning.’’1 Those who engage in practical reasoning about what ought to be done are engaged in deliberation in a core or paradigm sense. I will argue that citizens in a democracy must rule by reasoning with one another. Collective self-rule thus must be reasoned. Hence, if you will, democracy must be strongly deliberative. The aims of this chapter will emerge more clearly if a limitation of the recent deliberative democracy movement is recognized, one that arises from aspects of that movement’s polemical context and from weaknesses in its philosophical development. Two features of the movement’s polemical context have tended to limit its vision. Some recent proponents of deliberative democracy have concentrated on opposing the sort of preference-aggregation approach shared, in various forms, by the public choice and social choice schools. Against these powerful intellectual constructs, advocates of deliberative democracy have insisted that a crucial function of democratic dialogue is to change preferences.2 Sometimes it is persuasive argument that does it, as in the case of Patrick Henry’s speech to the Virginia Assembly in 1775.3 Sometimes information is what does the trick; for instance, widespread publicity about endangered species has surely led people who otherwise would not even have heard about them to care about preserving them. Sometimes these two effects are mixed together: U.S. Senators who had not heard about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the 2000 presidential campaign probably soon afterwards formed some view about whether drilling for oil should be allowed there. This point ...