ABSTRACT
What is “public deliberation”? In the previous chapter, I addressed the question of how public deliberation can help protect legitimizing communication from manipulation. The distinction between bona fide and fictitious public legitimization is of crucial importance to this study as it considers the justification of minority claims as a means to influence minority policies so as to better align them with the needs and interests of minority communities. To use a term I introduced at the beginning of this book, the justification of minority claims can lead to the communicative empowerment of these communities, and may also offer an alternative to the political forms of their empowerment (the disadvantages of the political forms of empowerment were discussed in Chapter 3). Hence, if the legitimization of such claims is manipulated in some way, this will make the communicative empowerment of minorities impossible. That is why in this chapter I will focus in more detail on public deliberation, viewing it, above all, as a method of legitimate collective decision-making. Undoubtedly, not every collective decision is legitimate from the perspective of those affected by it – even if it remains uncontested, that is, if it appears to be consensual. Let us imagine, for instance, a consensus on some issue that has been reached through a discussion at the office of an authoritarian boss, or through a spontaneous unanimous vote at some forum on the proposal of a charismatic speaker, or a decision made by a group of people to harm someone who is oblivious to their intentions. What are the conditions that must be followed in the decision-making process in order to guarantee that the decision made will be seen as legitimate by everyone affected – that is, everyone agrees to, approves of, and is willing to abide by it? In other words, what criteria should be met in the decision-making – or communication – process for a decision to be accepted as legitimate by everyone concerned? One obvious possible way to answer this question is to start from the tautological formula that “a collective decision is legitimate if everyone concerned agrees to it.” We have here nothing more than an “inverted” definition of legitimacy. This answer to the above question would make sense only if it is complemented with criteria regarding the way consensus is reached. In other words, if
there are specific requirements that must be met for it to be real, rather than fictitious. There is a difference of opinion in the literature on this topic. Some authors are more comprehensive in formulating such conditions than others. The general tendency is to seek an answer to the question, “What would motivate a rational person to freely accept a decision as legitimate?” Political philosophy offers different solutions to this problem. One of these solutions can be found in the model of deliberative democracy, and it stipulates that collective decisions made by the method of public deliberation may claim to be legitimate. What does this mean? I will begin with a relatively brief interpretation on this issue. In his book Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy, James Bohman (1996, 16) proposes the following conditions which he thinks are necessary for the “ideal procedure” of democratic deliberation:
the inclusion of everyone affected by a decision, substantial political equality including equal opportunities to participate in deliberation, equality in methods of decision making and in determining the agenda, the free and open exchange of information and reasons sufficient to acquire an understanding of both the issue in question and the opinion of others, and so on.
