Happy New Year, everyone. I’m gonna try and get back on the horse with a post I’ve been mulling over for far too long.
I’ve talked before about the idea of deliberative democracy – that people should have a great deal of political power, but that they must provide reasons to each other for the decisions they make. I mentioned theorists like John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, but my introduction to the term actually came through the work of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In books like Democracy and Disagreement and Why Deliberative Democracy?, Gutmann and Thompson try to steer between the procedural and substantive poles and make the case that any successful democracy implies both. Equal access to power and mutual respect are necessary for the procedures of democracy to function properly, but they are substantial moral commitments. I find Gutmann and Thompson’s arguments to be clear and well-presented and a good picture of what a deliberative democracy should look like.
One of the things I find most interesting about their sense of deliberative democracy, though, is that they argue that it is a second-order system for answering political/ethical questions. What’s a second order system? It’s the system you use to figure out what system you’re going to use for settling contentious questions. Think of it this way. A law is the answer to a particular question – how much should we tax such-and-such, what should the penalty be for this action, etc. The first-order system by which we answer that question is our government – Congress, the executive branch, and so on. That system is put in place by the Constitution. Attempting to amend or even replace the Constitution would be a second-order question – important because it sets the ground rules for everything that follows, but hopefully giving room to maneuver when it comes to the nitty-gritty details.
Gutmann and Thompson see deliberative democracy as a second-order system for sorting out some of the contentious social and cultural controversies of early-21st-Century American life, such as the role of religious precepts in the lawmaking process. And I personally find that to be an appealing prospect. But I do wonder if part of the reason I find it appealing is that it stacks the deck in the direction I like. Most deliberative democrats say that the reasons that we provide to one another to justify a course of action should be publicly accessible – inspired, perhaps, by the empiricism of the scientific revolution, the idea is that if I say that something justified a particular course of action, you should be able to check my work and see if that justification actually holds. That would tend to “solve� the contentious social and cultural controversies of early-21st-Century American life by short-circuiting them, because many of these arguments rest on a conflict between pluralism and belief in a particular absolute moral code. Whether that code is divinely inspired or just part of a universal natural law, it does not appear to be publicly accessible. So many of the justifications that one side would offer can’t even be brought to the table.
Now, like I said, there’s a certain appeal to me here. But I’m a pluralist. And I doubt any absolutist is going to participate in a second-order decision process with me that would put them at such a disadvantage. My gut instinct is that deliberative democracy, with is combination of procedural and substantive concerns, is more like a first-order system that gets adopted once certain ground rules are accepted, and that a messier second-order system will have to determine whether we adopt the ground rules that deliberative democracy requires. But I’m still trying to work this one out for myself.