Dennis Thompson - founding Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Professor of Public Policy and Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy in the Government Department at Harvard University - and Amy Guttmann - President of and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania - continue their introductory series. (See part 1)
The first purpose of deliberative democracy is to promote the legitimacy of collective decisions.
This is a response to the first source of moral disagreement - scarcity of resources. Citizens would not have to argue about how best to distribute health care or how to balance environmental protection and economic growth if these goods and services were unlimited or not in conflict.
Deliberation often cannot resolve moral disagreements because there are reasonable differences about how health care or scarce organs should be distributed. But in the face of scarcity, deliberation can help those who do not get what they want or even what they need come to accept the legitimacy of a collective decision.
The hard choices that public officials make should be more acceptable even to those who receive less than they deserve, if everyone's claims have been considered on the merits, rather than on the basis of the party's bargaining power. Even with regard to decisions with which we disagree, most of us take a different attitude toward those decisions that are adopted merely by virtue of the relative strength of competing political interests, and those that are adopted after careful consideration of the relevant conflicting moral claims.
Even deliberation that yields mutually acceptable justifications does not of course make up for the welfare payments that a desperately sick person fails to receive or an educational opportunity that a deserving person misses out on. But it can help sustain a shared sense of legitimacy that makes possible collective efforts to secure more organs in the future, and to live with one other civilly in the meantime.
To serve this legitimizing purpose in the face of disagreement, deliberative forums should expand to include the voices of as many as possible of those now excluded.
Such inclusion risks intensifying moral conflict. But the benefit of taking this risk is that inclusive deliberation brings into the open legitimate moral dissatisfactions that are suppressed by power-oriented methods of dealing with disagreement.
Deliberation does not seek consensus for its own sake. It seeks an agreement that can be justified on reciprocal terms, terms that citizens who may continue to disagree can all accept.
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