WHY DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY?
GUTTMAN & THOMPSON
Justin Detmers TE 982
PREFACE
The text is a collection of essays
 Ch. 1: Primer for non-theorists
 Ch. 2: Analyzes the idea of reciprocity
 Ch. 3: “DD” is not only procedural, includes
substantive principles liberty and opportunity
 Ch. 4: DD accommodates even conflicting
views
 Ch. 5 & 6: Applying DD in US & UK

CHAPTER 1 – WHAT DD MEANS
Example: Going to war (Iraq); critiques of
preventative war
“Both advocates and the foes of the war acted as if
they recognized an obligation to justify their views to
their fellow citizens.”
“Most fundamentally, deliberative democracy affirms
the need to justify decisions made by citizens and
their representatives.”
WHAT IS DD?
1. Reason-giving requirement to free & equal
citizens
 The
reasons are neither merely procedural (“because the
majority favors the war”) nor purely substantive (“because
the war promotes the national interest or world peace”).
2. Reasons must be accessible to all
 Reasons
must be public; no veiled religious or secular
reasons
3. Must be binding for some time
4. DD is dynamic; supposed to change things
~ DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY DEFINED~
A form of government in which free and equal
citizens (and their representatives), justify
decisions in a process in which they give one
another reasons that are mutually acceptable
and generally accessible, with the aim of
reaching conclusions that are binding in the
present on all citizens but open to challenge in
the future.
WHAT PURPOSE DOES DD SERVE?

The general aim of deliberative democracy is to
provide the most justifiable conception for
dealing with moral disagreement in politics.
1.
2.
3.
promote the legitimacy of collective decisions
encourage publicspirited perspectives on public
issues.
promote mutually respectful processes of decisionmaking.
CLARIFICATION
Guttman and Thompson put forth a pluralistic,
not consensus idea of DD
 Scope: DD is called for domestically and
internationally (more cosmopolitan),
 More on domestic scope: in Gov’t not all civil
domains
 Representative, not direct DD

CHAPTER 2 MORAL DISAGREEMENT &
POLITICAL CONSENSUS
HOPE: citizens can at least agree on principles that
would remove decisions about a policy from the
political agenda.
Challenge … familiar liberal way of dealing with
moral conflict. The consensus on these higherorder principles that liberals propose is not
sufficient to eliminate moral conflict from politics,
and a more robust set of principles is necessary to
govern the conflict that inevitably and legitimately
remains.
HIGHER-ORDER PRINCIPLES CONSTITUTING THE
CORE OF CONSENSUS
1. principles of preclusion  denies unjustifiable
reasons (e.g. reject racist views)
2. principles of accommodation  toleration;
making sure mutual respect happens
Authors favor many Lockean views and consider
the role of religion
FUNCTIONAL EXAMPLE OF MORAL
DISAGREEMENT
Pro-choice and pro-life advocates can agree on all the facts
about fetuses (and the circumstances of women who
bear them) and still disagree in their beliefs about
whether the fetus is a person. Different plausible beliefs
lie at the base of the best arguments for and against the
legalization of abortion.

Although pro-life advocates sometimes invoke a religious conception
of human life, the belief that the fetus is a human life does not
depend on a religious conception. The pro-life belief derives its
plausibility from such secular considerations as the similarity of
successive stages of fetal development, just as the prochoice belief
partly derives its plausibility from the apparent differences between
a zygote and an infant. Both pro-life and pro-choice positions are in
this sense reasonable.
CHAPTER 3 DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
BEYOND PROCESS
Democratic principles must be substantive as
well as procedural
 Guttman & Thompson trouble pure proceduralism
Authors make point via health care case in the
United Kingdom in ’99:
 In 1999, the British Government created a new body, the
National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), which is to
provide assessments of treatments and clinical guidelines for
use by the National Health Service (NHS).
RECIPROCITY

Reciprocity holds that citizens owe one another
justifications for the mutually binding laws and
public policies they collectively enact
 providing
reasons that constitute a justification for
imposing binding laws on them
Reciprocity is to justice in political ethics what
replication is to truth in scientific ethics
 Reciprocity requires substantive principles

(e.g. ‘fair democratic will’ could seek to discriminate)
 Assumes the majority can act wrongly

CHAPTER 4 – IS DD DIFFERENT?
Deliberative democrats stress agreements, at least
initially
Deliberative democrats do not require that
competing first-order theories be rejected.
The points of convergence among and within
competing first-order theories are substantial.
Is different from other theories because it contains
within itself the means of its own revision.
CHAPTER 5 - JUST DELIBERATION ABOUT
HEALTHCARE
 Guiding Q: What standards should be used to
assess the process of making decisions about
health-care policy?
1.
2.
3.
4.
~Reciprocity Demands~
Accessible Reasons
Moral Reasons
Respectful Reasons
Revisable Reasons
PRACTICALLY
Governmental institutions should also be designed to
encourage deliberation on the merits of issues rather
than engage only in interest-group bargaining…
Not simply a cost-benefit issue
Goal to improve the quality of the decisions they make.
Revisability offers important protection against the
mistakes that citizens, health-care professionals, and
administrators all inevitably make.
IN SUM
“To the extent that the institutions for making these
decisions are deliberation-friendly in these ways,
the decisions that they produce will be more
mutually justifiable, and the healthcare policies
they represent will be more morally legitimate,
even if they are not always politically popular. By
making the process in which citizens decide the
future of their health care more deliberative, they
stand a better chance of resolving some of their
moral disagreements, and living with those that
will inevitably persist, on mutually acceptable
terms.”