Democracy and disagreement pdf

This fine collection is essential reading for anyone who takes seriously the call for a more deliberative politics. Read Now ». Author : Stephen Macedo Laurance S.

The Ethics of Democracy Eric Beerbohm. Kramer, Larry. Deliberative Politics : Essays on Democracy and Disagreement. Practical and Professional Ethics Series.

New York: Oxford University Press, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Deliberative politics : essays on democracy and disagreement. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, Practical and professional ethics series. Stephen Macedo Ed. Includes bibliographical references and inder. Series : Practical and professional ethics. Albert Weale.

This effort to renew democratic politics is widely seen as a reaction to the dominance of liberal constitutionalism. But many questions surround this new project. What does deliberative democracy stand for? What difference would deliberative practices make in the real world of political conflict and public policy design? The problem is that there is no room left for criticism after a political decision has been declared to be correct.

It would be odd to criticize a decision one regards as correct. Internal criticism can indeed be effective in some situations. However, internal criticism is not what political theorists, philosophers, and critics usually aim at when they condemn a policy as incorrect, wrong, or unjust.

Conclusion Aggregative approaches to epistemic democracy based on the CJT are faced with a metaethical dilemma: on the one hand, moral realism seems to be the natural companion to epistemic democracy. However, majority views on most political issues are subject to constant change, and different legislatures reach contrary 11 Does the mixed-motivation problem arise also when epistemic democracy is based on moral realism? As mentioned above, some representatives support laws that are recommended by the prevalent values and norms of their community, while others decide on the basis of their beliefs about what the majority prefers.

In these cases, they apparently do not base their decisions on response-independent moral facts. That casts further doubt on the assumption that representatives are, on average, more than 0.

Hence, it is doubtful that representatives are, on average, more than 0. On the other hand, epistemic democracy does not fare better with non-realist metaethics such as conventionalism or majoritarianism.

Because representatives have different motivations for voting the way they do, we cannot expect that they are both competent and sincere. Whichever metaethical account we adopt, the conditions for the application of the CJT are not met, and so the CJT-based argument for the reliability of democratic decision procedures does not get off the ground.

Although I have focused in this article on the CJT, which is usually applied to binary choices made by majority vote, I should stress that the metaethical dilemma of epistemic democracy arises also when we turn to choices between more than two alternatives. Epistemic democrats have suggested several voting rules for such choices section 2. However, an epistemic interpretation of these rules, according to which they are likely to pick out the correct options, imposes conditions similar to the CJT; that is, voters have to be competent, independent, and sincere Young Borda count and pairwise majority voting make even greater demands on competence than majority rule and plurality rule, because they require voters to rank the options.

So, my objections against the applicability of the CJT work against these rules, too. I do not want to suggest that there is no way to resolve the metaethical dilemma. My article is not intended to deliver a final blow against epistemic theories of democracy, but rather to express a plea that their proponents should explicate and fix their metaethical basis. Epistemic democrats could either give a new interpretation of one of the metaethical accounts discussed in this article or proffer another metaethical account.

They could perhaps advocate some form of moral realism which is hypersensitive to local cultural and economic conditions and thus justifies contrary policies for different polities. However, using this loophole means giving up the claim that epistemic democracy is compatible with, and can be based on, a broad range of metaethical views. I am extremely grateful for the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers, who raised interesting objections and helped me clarify the paper in many places.

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