The rhetoric of deliberation: Some problems in Kantian theories of deliberative democracy

Res Publica

Volumn 8, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 249-268

  O'Neill, John ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Aristotle; Deliberative democracy; Emotion; Kant; Rhetoric; Testimony

Indexed keywords

EID: 0041655145     PISSN: 13564765     EISSN: 15728692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1020899224058     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. S. Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
2. J. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds, Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (MIT Press, Cambridge Mass., 1997);
3. J. Cohen, "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy", in A. Hamlin and P. Pettit, eds, The Good Polity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 17-34;
4. J. Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
5. J. Elster, "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory", in J. Elster and A. Holland, eds, Foundations of Social Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 103-32;
6. J. Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
7. J. Fishkin, Democracy and Participation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991);
8. A. Guttman and D. Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996);
9. B. Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation", Political Theory 15 (1987), 338-68;
10. D. Miller, "Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice", Political Studies 40 (1992), 54-67.
11. For useful recent discussions see A. Armour, "The Citizens' Jury as Model of Public Participation: A Critical Evaluation", in O. Renn, T. Webler and P. Wiedemann, eds, Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 175-88;
12. A. Coote and J. Leneghan, Citizens' Juries: Theory into Practice (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 1997)
13. ; M. Jacobs, "Environmental Valuations, Deliberative Democracy and Public Decision-Making Institutions", in J. Foster, ed., Valuing Nature? (London: Routledge, 1997), 211-31;
14. S. Joss and J. Durant, Public Participation in Science: The Role of Consensus Conferences in Europe (London: Science Museum, 1995);
15. J. Gordon, Canadian Round Tables and Other Mechanisms for Sustainable Development in Canada (Luton: Local Government Management Board, 1994);
16. K.P. Rippe and P. Schaber, "Democracy and Environmental Decision-Making", Environmental Values 8 (1999), 75-88.
17. In particular, while participants may be formally "equal", dialogue takes place against the background of large asymmetries of social, institutional and economic power. It is not just the internal workings of deliberative institutions that matters here, but the context in which they operate. Deliberative institutions are open to being used strategically. Indeed, some of the new institutions that are claimed to be deliberative, in particular focus groups, are often employed in political practice not to allow deliberation to take place but rather to close it down.
18. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1996), 340.
19. I. Kant, "An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'", in H. Reiss, ed., Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54-5.
20. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), A738/B766.
21. J. Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 14.
22. Kant, "Perpetual Peace", Appendix II, in H. Reiss, ed., Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science (op. cit.
23. Kant, "An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'", Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science (op. cit.
24. "For a concept of the understanding, which contains the general rule, must be supplemented by an act of judgement whereby the practitioner distinguishes instances where the rule applies from those where it does not. And since rules cannot be in turn provided on every occasion to direct the judgement in subsuming each instance under a previous rule (for that would involve an infinite regress), theoreticians will be found who can never in all their lives become practical, since they lack judgement." - Kant, "On the Common Saying: 'This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice'", in H. Reiss, ed., op cit.
25. Cf. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 389.
26. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. W. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 293-4.
27. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Critique of Judgement, op. cit., 294-5;
28. cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., A820-821/B848-9.
29. Habermas, The Legitimation Crisis of Late Capitalism, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 108.
30. Plato, Gorgias, trans. D. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 454e.
31. Kant, Critique of Judgement, op. cit., section 53, 197.
32. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
33. In the same tradition, see also the criticisms of Young's defence of rhetoric in public communication in S. Benhabib, "Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy", in S. Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67-94, p. 92ff.
34. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 220.
35. Gorgias, Praise of Helen, Diels-Kranz 82B11,
36. translation from P. Curd, A Presocratics Reader, trans R. McKirahan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 376-7.
37. For an excellent discussion of Gorgias's position and Plato's response see R. Wardy, The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and their Successors (London: Routledge, 1996), chs. 2 and 3.
38. J. O'Neill, The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics (London: Routledge, 1998), ch. 12;
39. "Against Reductionist Explanations of Human Behaviour: Rational Choice and the Unified Social Science", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXXII (1998), 173-88.
40. I discuss these views in O'Neill, "Rhetoric, Science and Philosophy", Philosophy of the Social Sciences 28 (1998), 205-25
41. and The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics, op. cit.
42. O'Neill, "I gotta use words when I talk to you", History of Human Sciences 8 (1995), 99-106.
43. Young's defence of rhetoric, storytelling and greeting in public discourse is open to being read in this way - I. Young, "Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy", in S. Benhabib, ed., ", History of Human Sciences op. cit., 120-35.
44. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. M. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 269-70.
45. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), Book 1.2.
46. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1946), Ibid.
47. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Ibid., 1356a 1-20.
48. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Ibid., 1356a 26.
49. Kant, "An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?Rhetoric, '", op. cit., 54.
50. A classic statement of what I describe as the Kantian position is offered by Wolff, in his In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 13-14:
51. The responsible man is not capricious or anarchic, for he does acknowledge himself bound by moral constraints. But he insists that he alone is the judge of those constraints. He may listen to the advice of others, but he makes it his own by determining for himself whether it is good advice. He may learn from others his moral obligations, but only in the sense that a mathematician learns from other mathematicians - namely by hearing from them arguments whose validity he recognizes even though he did not think of them himself. He does not learn in the sense that one learns from an explorer, by accepting as true his accounts of things one cannot see for oneself. Since the responsible man arrives at moral decisions which he expresses to himself in the form of imperatives, we may say that he gives laws to himself, or he is self-legislating. In short, he is autonomous. I criticise this view of the autonomous thinker at length in O'Neill, The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics, op. cit., ch. 7.
52. How far Kant is himself a Kantian in this sense is, I think, a moot question. Unlike Wolff, Kant does recognise the fact that much of our belief is founded upon testimony and hence relies upon faith in others (Kant, Critique of Judgement, op. cit., 468-9).
53. However, his writings on enlightenment do tend to assume epistemic self-sufficiency as a condition of intellectual autonomy. It is also the case that Kant's positive remarks on testimony suggest that he takes individual observation to have epistemic priority over testimony - we are justified in trusting testimony since "for one of those witnesses it was after all his own experience" (Kant, Critique of Judgement, op. cit., 469).
54. For critical discussion of this form of individualism, see A. Coady, Testimony (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), chs. 1, 4 and passim.
55. J. Dryzek, Testimony op. cit., 15.
56. Aristotle, Rhetoric, op. cit., 1356a 1-20.
57. Aristotle, Topics, trans. W. Pickard-Cambridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), Book I, ch. 1.
58. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), Book I, ch. 3.
59. M. Burnyeat, "Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Logic of Persuasion", in D. Furley and A. Nehamas, eds, Philosophy and Rhetoric: Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3-56.
60. Aristotle, Topics, op. cit.
61. Aristotle, Topics, op. cit., Book I ch. 4.
62. Aristotle, Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 3.1.
63. Aristotle, Rhetoric, op. cit., II.1.
64. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Ibid.
65. O'Neill, Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World (London: Routledge, 1993), ch. 8.
66. S. Shapin, "Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science", Perspectives on Science 3 (1995) 255-75, pp. 255-6;
67. cf. Shapin, A The Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
68. I have little quarrel with some of the more carefully stated claims of Barnes and Bloor: "[O]ur equivalence postulate is that all beliefs are on par with one another with respect to the causes of their credibility. It is not that all beliefs are equally true or false, but that regardless of truth and falsity the fact of their credibility is to be seen as equally problematic." - B. Barnes and D. Bloor, "Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge", in M. Hollis, ed., Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 21-47, p. 23. I reject the claim that credibility is purely a matter of sociology.
69. Likewise, much in Shapin's A Social History of Truth, op. cit., is quite consistent with the position developed here.
70. My main disagreement is with the book title and the justification offered for it in chapter one: the book is a social history of credibility. For an excellent discussion of the issues of realism and relativism in Shapin's book see P. Lipton, "The Epistemology of Testimony", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29 (1998), 1-31.
71. Shapin, "Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science ", op. cit., 257.
72. For a discussion of the issues involved here see the last chapter of Shapin, A Social History of Truth, op. cit..
73. O'Neill, Ecology, Policy and Politics, op. cit., ch. 8.
74. I develop this point further in O'Neill, The Market: Ethics, Information and Politics, op. cit., ch. 7.
75. See for example Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), IV ch. 13 paragraph 29.
76. Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of The Metaphysic of Morals, trans. M. Gregor (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 210-1;
77. for a discussion see Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 178-9 and passim.
78. Aristotle, Rhetoric, op. cit., Book ii ch. 2 1378a 31-3 and ch 8 1885b 12-5.
79. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, op. cit., book II ch. 6 1106b 18-23.
80. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Ibid.18-23. , Book I ch. 13.
81. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 393-4.
82. For a discussion see Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, op. cit., 141-58.
83. O'Neill, "Cantona and Aquinas on Good and Evil", Journal of Applied Philosophy 14 (1997), 97-106.
84. Seneca, "On Anger", in J. Cooper and J. Procope, eds, Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
85. For a discussion see M. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 11.
86. However, Seneca's view of the role of emotion in rhetoric is complex. He defends what might be called a two-audience view - that there is the unadorned language of truth that the wise talk to each other, and the rhetorical language suitable for the masses: "[L]anguage . . . which devotes its attention to truth ought to be plain and unadorned. Popular style has nothing to do with truth. Its object is to sway a mass audience, to carry away unpracticed ears by the force of its onslaught. . . ." - Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 83.
87. This two-audience view is popular in the history of rhetoric. It is defended for example by Averroes, for whom the division of labour between logic and rhetoric is related to their respective audiences: logic addresses those educated in the arts of demonstrative argument, rhetoric those who lack either the natural ability or the time to learn them - Averroes, The Decisive Treatise Determining the Nature of the Connection between Religion and Philosophy, in A. Hyman and J. Walsh, eds, Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973), ch. 1 and ch. 3, 301 and 311.
88. Locke also defends it: see An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P. Nidditch, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), Book III ch. X, paragraph 34, 508.
89. Given this view, Seneca's concern with the role of emotions in rhetoric is more to do with its effect on the speaker than on the audience. He allows the rhetorician to feign emotions such as anger in oratory in order to move others, but not to be himself moved by them - Seneca, "On Anger", An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, op. cit., II. 17.
90. This paper was written with the support of a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. Earlier versions of the paper were read to a symposium on Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis: Deliberation, Judgement and Public Policy, at the University of Zurich and conferences on Environmental Justice, Global Ethics for the 21st Century (University of Melbourne) and on Kantian Approaches to Applied Ethics (University of Central Lancashire): my thanks for comments made on those occasions. My special thanks to Bob Brecher, Graeme Chesters, John Dryzek, Alan Holland, Tom Regan and Peter Schaber for their comments.