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Dilemma discorsivo : deliberazione democratica o coerente?
Full text linkIntrodotto da Lewis Kornhauser e Lawrence Sager nel 1986 e nel 1993, il paradosso dottrinale è entrato ormai a far parte del dibattito filosofico-politico recente. Nonostante sia stato isolato in ambito giudiziale, la sua rilevanza per le teoria deliberativa della democrazia è stata rivendicata da Philip Pettit, che in un articolo del 2001 lo riformula in termini pratici e di analisi della democrazia. Il neo-battezzato dilemma discorsivo si propone quindi come un'alternativa esclusiva tra due forme equivalenti di aggregazione dei giudizi individuali. Supponendo una combinazione di due o più premesse con una conclusione logica, è possibile richiedere ad un'ipotetica assemblea democratica di esprimere il proprio voto sulle premesse o sulla conclusione. L'esito paradossale si realizza quando la conclusione logicamente dedotta dal voto sulle premesse contraddice quella direttamente votata dall'assemblea.
Secondo Pettit si tratta, però, di un paradosso solo apparente, perché il vero dilemma consiste piuttosto nel decidere su quale base aggregare i giudizi individuali, se sulle premesse o sulla conclusione. Nel primo caso si ottiene la conclusione logicamente coerente con la decisione della maggioranza sulle premesse; nel secondo si rispetta il voto preso a maggioranza direttamente sulla conclusione. Il favore di Pettit va al primo corno del dilemma: prediligere la coerenza a discapito della democraticità della decisione collettiva preserva, infatti, la possibilità di dare ragioni coerenti per la decisione collettivamente presa. Quest'aspetto è a sua volta considerato essenziale per una teoria deliberativa della democrazia, che notoriamente viene definita dalla pratica dello scambio pubblico di ragioni e dalla giustificazione (e “giustificabilità”) razionale delle decisioni prese collettivamente.
A tale secca alternativa tra coerenza e democraticità si oppone nel suo ultimo libro Valeria Ottonelli, che più precisamente contesta il legame delineato da Pettit tra deliberazione e coerenza: non solo la seconda non è condizione necessaria della prima, ma anzi non può nemmeno esserne il prodotto. La neutralizzazione del dilemma dottrinale, secondo Ottonelli, passa allora per la negazione del ruolo della coerenza nella deliberazione collettiva.
Lo scopo di questo articolo è di mettere in discussione la soluzione di Ottonelli, contestandone in particolare la critica al ruolo della coerenza. In primo luogo, dopo una breve contestualizzazione della posizione di Pettit, prenderò in esame le critiche ad essa poste prima da Kornhauser e Sager e poi da Ottonelli stessa. In secondo luogo, analizzerò la distinzione fatta da entrambi tra coerenza (o integrità) diacronica e coerenza sincronica. Infine, vorrei proporre una tesi alternativa contro la soluzione di Pettit al dilemma discorsivo, che non passa da una svalutazione della coerenza, ma si basa piuttosto sull'impossibilità pratica di raggiungere un accordo unanime sulla struttura logica del dilemma stesso
No democracy for devils : democratic citizenship between interests and justice
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between interests and justice in normative democratic theory. I tackle this issue from the point of view of the citizens, as I want to enquire which moral duties democratic citizenship implies. Ordinary citizens of current democratic societies are expected to endorse and act on a conception of justice, and normally political philosophers require that it be one belonging to a certain acceptable set. John Rawls is the most prominent example: contemporary democratic citizens share a reasonable conception of justice, which regulates the terms of their social cooperation. Nevertheless the liberal tradition, by focusing on individual freedoms and rights, tends to give priority to these aspects rather than to a public commitment towards a common good or a shared conception of justice. Do liberal theories of democracy need to give priority to a public allegiance over their interests?
First, I sketch a brief introduction in order to make clear the liberal paradigm within which the problem is handled. Second, I compare two positions as representatives of the “justice first” and “interest-based” approaches. First, I address the case of Rawls, who grounds his conception of citizenship on the idea of public reason and on the duty of civility. Relying on a morally oriented interpretation of the notion of reasonableness, I argue that, in Rawlsian democratic model, citizens are required to prioritize a publicly shared conception of justice with respect to their comprehensive doctrines and interests. Second, I analyze the case of Thomas Christiano, who grounds the justification of democracy on the idea of “equal advancement of interests”. In this model, citizens are encouraged to publicly discuss their interests and their broad moral considerations in order to find and further the common good.
In the last part I introduce my own proposal, which focuses on the relationship between an objective conception of interest and democratic deliberation, which appears to be greatly underestimated in the current normative debate on democracy. Firstly, I distinguish between the notion of interest and the one of comprehensive moral values. Secondly, I separate it from a radically subjective interpretation of individual interest (i.e. what I think to be in my interest) that cannot ground more than a strictly procedural conception of democracy, with little space for deliberation. On the contrary, an objective conception of interest has different assets. First, it does not restrain citizens to considerations of justice in the public space. Second, it allows for an epistemic interpretation of both the ideas of deliberation and of the common good. Third, contra pure deliberative theories, it secures a link to democracy, because, in case of irresolvable disagreement, it justifies recourse to majoritarian rule in order to make a decision. Finally, it has an intuitive and direct motivational effect, as it aims at providing citizens with reasons based on their rational interest to participate and comply with democratic procedures
How dirty can democratic hands get?
Full text linkAlthough liberal moralist theories have never fully tackled it, the dirty-hands problem has always been taken into account in the tradition of political realism. From Machiavelli’s Prince, this problem has forced philosophers to deal with the ‘irrationality of the world’ (in Weber’s terms) and to appreciate the distinction lying between purely moral and political domains.
Richard Bellamy, then, is not the first theorist who confronts himself with this issue, when he claims that (1) it can be correctly approached only in a realist tradition that does not plan to sanitize politics and that (2) democracy puts some strong constraints on the Prince’s available dirty actions. However, whereas Bellamy rightly points out the failure of moral idealism at imposing a single conception of justice as a frame of the political debate, he does not give a convincing account neither of the two consequences of such a failure nor of democracy’s specificity in successfully constraining the Machiavellian Prince.
In this paper I claim that the reasons of these shortcomings depend on three considerations Bellamy seems to overlook. First of all, he gives an ambiguous account of democratic hypocrisy, since the same hypocrisy that he regards as an intrinsic flaw of moral idealism turns out to be one of the major strengths of a realist democracy. Second, he includes within a democratic system a patronizing conception of politicians who know and pursue the public interest better than the citizens who elected them. I suggest that this sort of conception is highly controversial and inconsistent with any thorough conception of democracy. Finally, I claim that Bellamy’s problems stem from his unspecified conception, in this article, of what is distinctively ‘political’ in democratic political life
How Do We Justify Democracy? : Proceduralism, Instrumentalism and the Independent Criterion
No full textWe live under democratic regimes. We don’t live too badly. We think this depends (in part) on the fact that we live under democratic regimes. Hence, we may find those regimes good in this respect. But is democracy really justified? And are we to take its outcomes as legitimate even though we may find them sometimes plainly wrong? In my paper I want to tackle two related issues that concern democracy: its justification and legitimacy.
First of all, I intend to clarify a small confusion that happens to blur the debate: the one between single outcomes and democratic procedures. This may seem a minor point, especially because many democratic theorists declare manifestly to embrace it. However, they do not always follow consistently such intent, as I will try to show. Intuitively, such a distinction serves to understand that, while we can take certain democratic outcomes to be unjustified, their legitimacy hinges only on the kind of procedure that issued them, rather than on their objectionable content.
This is particularly relevant if we aim to account for the so-called ‘circumstances of politics’: insofar as the ‘fact of disagreement’ is true (and I will assume it is), cooperation would be jeopardized if it were to fall or stand with unanimous agreement over what to do. Nevertheless, contrary to what Waldron seems to think, we disagree over decision-making procedures as well. Hence, if we take outcome legitimacy to depend on democratic procedures, these very procedures ought to become the new focus of inquire.
Secondly, then, I turn to the justification of democracy, for which there are two well-known broad approaches: instrumentalism and proceduralism. My second aim in this paper is to propose a new ground to draw a line between these two and to reframe such opposition as instrumentalism versus intrinsecalism. While instrumentalism qualifies those accounts that view democracy as a contingent condition to realize some further value or interest, intrinsecalism takes democracy to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the realization of other aims.
Therefore, I intend to argue that: (a) a proper justification requires to conceive an independent criterion that acts as justifier of democracy; (b) the connection between such criterion and democracy itself may be either necessary or contingent. Whereas, for instance, Fabienne Peter’s account qualifies as properly procedural or intrinsic, I take David Estlund’s account to exemplify an instrumentalist approach to democratic justification4. However both of them misunderstand their standing in the debate exactly because they lose sight of the distinction between outcome and procedure, or so I try to argue.
The paper is organized as follows. The first section regards the distinction between justification and legitimacy of outcomes. Section two introduces a reformulation of the possible justifications of democracy and proposes to use an independent criterion whose connection to democracy serves as qualifier of the justificatory approach. Finally, in section three I criticize Peter’s and Estlund’s accounts, while trying to argue for the relevance of my endeavor
Political Legitimacy and a Natural Duty to Democracy
Full text linkPolitical legitimacy is a weird concept. It is so because it encompasses both a descriptive and a normative side. On one hand, we say that a certain political regime is legitimate insofar as it is actually supported and seen as legitimate by the majority of people under it (Weber 1947). On the other hand, we want the concept of legitimacy to convey also some normative meaning and such political regime to fulfill moral requirements about its structure and functioning (Simmons 1999).
Normative political theory deals with the second account of legitimacy and engages in the hard task of clarifying the concept without collapsing it on the one of justice. Namely, the problem is to distinguish legitimacy from justice, in order to show how a state can be legitimate and legitimately exercise its power even though it can appear to be unjust to some of its citizens.
If this is the case, legitimacy and justice in turn call on the question of political obligation. Indeed, we may be said to have a political obligation to obey the laws because they are just or because a legitimate political authority has issued them. In the first case it is the justness of these laws that impose a moral duty to obey them. However, since we happen to disagree on such justness, we need to impose the very same political obligation on each other through appeal to the way these laws have been produced.
Now, we have different ways to look at the normative side of political legitimacy. We can take a state to be legitimate only as long as its citizens have consented to it and hence are under obligation to comply (Simmons). We can oppose that a good justification of a state in virtue of its structure and functioning renders such state legitimate without binding its citizens to compliance (Waldron 1987, 1999). Or, we can think that a good justification entails legitimacy, which in turn entails political obligation (Christiano 2008).
In this paper, my aim is twofold. First, I aim to reconstruct these three main positions over the issue and illustrate how justification, legitimacy and obligation can fit together, depending on other relevant factors, as actual consent (Simmons), hypothetical consent (Waldron), democracy and natural duty (Waldron, Christiano). Second, I intend to show how the major divide among these accounts is due to the way they approach the question of our natural duties. In fact, while Simmons contends that we can act morally without thereby having the duty to create a state, both Waldron and Christiano make it a point of a moral natural duty we all share to establish a morally defensible and just state. However, to ground the final legitimacy of a political regime on individuals’ moral duty to act in a certain way constitutes a dangerous threat to its stability. In fact, if the legitimacy of public laws depends on their being democratically taken by morally motivated citizens, the stabilizing effect of democratic procedures gets neutralized by the substantial appeal to people’s motives
What Does It Mean to Justify Democracy?
Full text linkIn my paper I want to tackle two related issues that concern democracy, its justification and legitimacy. First of all, I intend to clarify a small confusion that happens to blur the debate: the one between single outcomes and democratic procedures. This may seem a minor point, but it is relevant in order to understand that, while we can object that outcomes are unjustified, their legitimacy depends on the kind of procedure that issued them and does not vanish away with outcome justification.
If the first intent of this paper is purely explanatory, my second aim is to propose a new ground to draw a line between the two major accounts for democratic legitimacy: proceduralism and instrumentalism. While the latter qualifies those accounts that view democracy as a contingent to realize some further value or interest, the former take democracy to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition to the realization of other aims.
Therefore, the paper is organized as follows. The first section regards the distinction between justification and legitimacy of outcomes. I take Waldron’s circumstances of politics to be a good reason to draw a line between the two and I argue that outcome legitimacy depends on the procedure that issues it. Section two introduces a reformulation of the possible justifications of democracy and proposes to use an independent criterion whose connection to democracy, either necessary or contingent, serves as qualifier of the justificatory approach. Finally, in section three I criticize Fabienne Peter’s and David Estlund’s accounts because they both lose sight of the distinction between outcomes and procedures, while trying to argue for the relevance of my endeavor
Perchè la democrazia? (Valeria Ottonelli, I principi procedurali della democrazia, il Mulino, Bologna 2012, pp. 296)
No full textNo Democracy for Devils : Democratic Citizenship Between Interests and Justice
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between interests and justice in normative democratic theory. I tackle this issue from the point of view of the citizens, as I want to enquire which moral duties democratic citizenship implies. Ordinary citizens of current democratic societies are expected to endorse and act on a conception of justice, and normally political philosophers require that it be one belonging to a certain acceptable set. John Rawls is the most prominent example: contemporary democratic citizens share a reasonable conception of justice, which regulates the terms of their social cooperation. Nevertheless the liberal tradition, by focusing on individual freedoms and rights, tends to give priority to these aspects rather than to a public commitment towards a common good or a shared conception of justice. Do liberal theories of democracy need to give priority to a public allegiance over their interests?
First, I sketch a brief introduction in order to make clear the liberal paradigm within which the problem is handled. Second, I compare two positions as representatives of the “justice first” and “interest-based” approaches. First, I address the case of Rawls, who grounds his conception of citizenship on the idea of public reason and on the duty of civility. Relying on a morally oriented interpretation of the notion of reasonableness, I argue that, in Rawlsian democratic model, citizens are required to prioritize a publicly shared conception of justice with respect to their comprehensive doctrines and interests. Second, I analyze the case of Thomas Christiano, who grounds the justification of democracy on the idea of “equal advancement of interests”. In this model, citizens are encouraged to publicly discuss their interests and their broad moral considerations in order to find and further the common good.
In the last part I introduce my own proposal, which focuses on the relationship between an objective conception of interest and democratic deliberation, which appears to be greatly underestimated in the current normative debate on democracy. Firstly, I distinguish between the notion of interest and the one of comprehensive moral values. Secondly, I separate it from a radically subjective interpretation of individual interest (i.e. what I think to be in my interest) that cannot ground more than a strictly procedural conception of democracy, with little space for deliberation. On the contrary, an objective conception of interest has different assets. First, it does not restrain citizens to considerations of justice in the public space. Second, it allows for an epistemic interpretation of both the ideas of deliberation and of the common good. Third, contra pure deliberative theories, it secures a link to democracy, because, in case of irresolvable disagreement, it justifies recourse to majoritarian rule in order to make a decision. Finally, it has an intuitive and direct motivational effect, as it aims at providing citizens with reasons based on their rational interest to participate and comply with democratic procedures
How Do We Justify Democracy? : proceduralism, instrumentalism and independent criterion
Full text linkWe live under democratic regimes. We don’t live too badly. We think this depends (in part) on the fact that we live under democratic regimes. Hence, we may find those regimes good in this respect. But is democracy really justified? And are we to take its outcomes as legitimate even though we may find them sometimes plainly wrong? In my paper I want to tackle two related issues that concern democracy: its justification and legitimacy.
First of all, I intend to clarify a small confusion that happens to blur the debate: the one between single outcomes and democratic procedures. This may seem a minor point, especially because many democratic theorists declare manifestly to embrace it. However, they do not always follow consistently such intent, as I will try to show. Intuitively, such a distinction serves to understand that, while we can take certain democratic outcomes to be unjustified, their legitimacy hinges only on the kind of procedure that issued them, rather than on their objectionable content.
This is particularly relevant if we aim to account for the so-called ‘circumstances of politics’: insofar as the ‘fact of disagreement’ is true (and I will assume it is), cooperation would be jeopardized if it were to fall or stand with unanimous agreement over what to do. Nevertheless, contrary to what Waldron seems to think, we disagree over decision-making procedures as well. Hence, if we take outcome legitimacy to depend on democratic procedures, these very procedures ought to become the new focus of inquire.
Secondly, then, I turn to the justification of democracy, for which there are two well-known broad approaches: instrumentalism and proceduralism. My second aim in this paper is to propose a new ground to draw a line between these two and to reframe such opposition as instrumentalism versus intrinsecalism. While instrumentalism qualifies those accounts that view democracy as a contingent condition to realize some further value or interest, intrinsecalism takes democracy to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the realization of other aims.
Therefore, I intend to argue that: (a) a proper justification requires to conceive an independent criterion that acts as justifier of democracy; (b) the connection between such criterion and democracy itself may be either necessary or contingent. Whereas, for instance, Fabienne Peter’s account qualifies as properly procedural or intrinsic, I take David Estlund’s account to exemplify an instrumentalist approach to democratic justification. However both of them misunderstand their standing in the debate exactly because they lose sight of the distinction between outcome and procedure, or so I try to argue.
The paper is organized as follows. The first section regards the distinction between justification and legitimacy of outcomes. Section two introduces a reformulation of the possible justifications of democracy and proposes to use an independent criterion whose connection to democracy serves as qualifier of the justificatory approach. Finally, in section three I criticize Peter’s and Estlund’s accounts, while trying to argue for the relevance of my endeavor
Right or wrong, it’s democracy. Legitimacy, justification and the independent criterion
Full text linkContemporary normative theories of democracy generally aim to show that democratic outcomes are legitimate and hence they ought to be obeyed. As it is known, the battlefield is split between two major approaches: instrumentalism and
proceduralism. Yet, many philosophers of both approaches seem to overlook one distinction that ought to be crucial in their reasoning - or so I argue in this paper. First, I highlight this distinction between the justification of outcomes on one hand,
and their legitimacy on the other. If the justification of outcomes is unachievable given circumstances of pluralism and disagreement, their legitimacy derives from the procedures that bring them about. Hence both accounts present a justification of democratic procedures by reference to a criterion that is independent from the procedures themselves. Second, I propose to distinguish between instrumentalism and proceduralism on the basis of the connection that these approaches draw between the justifying criterion and democratic procedures. While for instrumentalism this is contingent and indirect, for proceduralism it is direct and necessary. Finally, I take into account two well-known taxonomies in epistemic democracy, which are provided by David Estlund and Fabienne Peter, and I argue that both blur the distinction between the justification of outcomes and their legitimacy and are thus unsatisfactory and misleading
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