Bohman James 1105

06Bohman (bc/d) 1/17/03 1:56 PM Page 85
James Bohman
Reflexive public deliberation

Democracy and the limits of pluralism
Abstract Deliberative democracy defends an ideal of equality as political

efficacy. Jorge Valadez offers a defense of such an ideal given cultural
pluralism of ethnopolitical groups. He develops an epistemological account
of the fact of pluralism as entailing incommensurable conceptual frame-
works. While his account goes a long way towards identifying the problems
with neutrality and many other liberal solutions to the problem of
pluralism, it is still too liberal in certain ways. First, he draws the limits of
deliberation and political inclusion too narrowly, giving little role for the
toleration of non-liberal groups and too great a role to autonomy in delib-
eration. Second, incommensurability overemphasizes the theoretical nature
of cultural conflicts and the need for background agreements on certain
political values and thus also underappreciates practical solutions that leave
disagreements intact. Finally, the contemporary fact of pluralism is not
limited to relations among distinct cultures in this way, but is far more
multidimensional, given multiple political memberships and the mutual
interdependence and intense interaction among widely dispersed groups.
Key words cosmopolitanism · deliberation · democracy · pluralism ·
toleration
Any feasible ideal of democracy must face the unavoidable social fact
that the citizenry of a modern state is heterogeneous along a number of
intersecting dimensions, including race, class, religion and culture. Some
of these differences, for better or worse, may become a basis for some
citizens’ self-identity. If the ideal of democracy is also deliberative and
thus requires that citizens commit themselves to making decisions
according to reasons they believe are public and acceptable to others,
then such diversity raises the possibility of deep and potentially
irresolvable conflicts. Such conflicts are especially deep when these
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 29 no 1 • pp. 85–105

PSC
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0191-4537(200301)29:1;85–105;029835]
86
Philosophy & Social Criticism 29 (1)
dimensions of democratic politics and cultural identity intersect and
interact with the vast inequalities and social complexity also typical of
modern societies. Jorge Valadez has written the most extensive treat-
ment of this problem to date. His discussion of cultural diversity is
striking in its use of the social science literature as a way to specify the
real problems that diversity presents, particularly the challenges that the
diversity of cultural groups presents to political participation. Moreover,
he also introduces important epistemological aspects of the problems of
cultural diversity. Because standard liberalism, Valadez rightly argues,
ignores this dimension of cultural pluralism by often appealing to neu-
trality, the fact of cultural pluralism challenges us to reflect on the fact
that ‘the will of the people’ no longer refers to a homogeneous collec-
tivity. Such a challenge demands that democracy recognize that its
citizens do not necessarily share the same culture, so that its forms of
deliberation would have to become more expansive and inclusive in
ways that retain the commitment to constitutive democratic values.
My own work on deliberative democracies shares Valadez’s method-
ology and many of his basic goals. With the danger of exaggerating the
gaps between us, I want to take a step back and look at the assump-
tions underlying the disagreements that remain between us. On the
whole, I want to argue, these are not assumptions about deliberative
democracy: we are both fundamentally committed to the ideal of
equality of political efficacy as central to deliberative democracy. Rather,
they are traceable to differing conceptions about what the fact of plural-
ism entails. I see current pluralism as much more multidimensional than
a focus on ethnopolitical groups can capture, especially if these groups
are to be granted rights of self-determination and control over the future
of their cultures. Indeed, many interpretations of multiculturalism are
confined to those forms of pluralism left over from the expansion of the
modern nation-states that assimilated various peoples, or ethnopolitical
groups, into the territory of a unified and powerful modern state. Rather,
pluralism today is not solely due to the ‘fact of irreconcilable values’ or
even ‘incommensurable conceptual frameworks’ within unified national
communities, but rather is traceable to another set of social facts: to the
facts of globalization, to the increased interaction among societies and
cultures and the increased immigration across national borders, both of
which have profound consequences of political and cultural member-
ship. Given the sort of pluralism that is now more often at stake in con-
temporary political life, Valadez’s solutions pick out a too narrowly
cultural range of problems. This liberal emphasis on culture leads to a
surprisingly limited form of deliberative democracy. I want here to
sketch a more emphatically pluralistic alternative, and to try to diagnose
some of the reasons why Valadez and I disagree about the implications
of cultural pluralism for deliberative democracy. Where he sees
87
Bohman: Reflexive public deliberation
incommensurability, I see conflict; and conflict is exactly what deliber-
ation is about so long as it is public in character and not undermined
by what I have called ‘communicative inequalities’ and ideological bias.
Perhaps there is an uneasy fit between the deliberative and more liberal
and ethnopolitical conceptions of democracy in Valadez’s book, leading
him to assume that a more unitary conception of political community
is required for successful deliberation than I think is necessary, feasible,
or even desirable.
I develop this disagreement in three ways. First, I defend a particu-
larly deliberative conception of toleration that is in sharp contrast to
the more standard liberal one and to Valadez’s emphasis on autonomy.
Given the basic dilemma between cultural unity in deliberation on the
one hand and the fact of cultural incommensurability on the other hand
that he leaves unresolved, Valadez draws the limits of deliberation in
the situation of cultural conflict too narrowly. Indeed, there is surpris-
ingly little role for toleration in Valadez’s notion of deliberative demo-
cracy, nor any epistemic role for diversity in correcting our ideals and
institutions of deliberation. The pluralism that is permissible for Valadez
is limited by his demand that members of cultural groups can deliber-
ate only on the basis of a commitment to liberal values, however
variable their interpretations of them may be. Second, in contrast to his
pervasive appeal to incommensurability, I explore the more central
problem of deep conflict that cultural pluralism poses for deliberative
toleration. Finally, I turn to a different account of the fact of pluralism
in its contemporary form in which groups are not only widely dispersed
but interact closely and intensely with other groups. Two dimensions of
contemporary pluralism are salient: first, that citizens of a democracy
no longer should be thought to have some single group identity that
produces well-defined frontiers of conflict; and second, that new forms
of diversity due to migration and globalization challenge the assump-
tion that unitary national communities are either the only location for
politically mediated cultural diversity or the best way to organize
expanded and multiple political membership.
Toleration, not autonomy: the priority of political equality

An admirable and realistic feature of Valadez’s analysis of multi-
culturalism is that he clearly sees that not all cultural differences can be
resolved in the context of democratic deliberation. Implementing delib-
erative democracy in multicultural societies is made difficult by three
facts of pluralism in these societies: the absence of a unitary political
community; moral and cognitive incommensurability; and significant
inequalities among various ethnopolitical groups. The first problem is
88
not distinctive of multicultural societies: class and race might produce
the same results. So it is the latter two claims that are central to the limits
of deliberative democracy for Valdez. But the inequalities among groups
that are significant are relative to political participation, and political
participation is limited for some groups due to incommensurability. On
the one hand, Valadez insists that the cultural differences worth talking
about may be properly described as due to ‘incommensurable concep-
tual frameworks’ (31); in cases of incommensurability cultural gaps are
so large that a fundamental and necessary requirement for deliberation
is absent: ‘that the cognitive and moral frameworks of participants are
sufficiently similar to permit the mediation and adjudication of differ-
ences between them’ (41). Incommensurability is specifically cultural,
and thus a requirement for genuine multiculturalism. Otherwise, we
argue that the reason for the lack of success in deliberation has to do
with other factors, such as resources or capabilities rather than cultural
differences. On the other hand, classifying the various types of cultural
groups allows us ‘to gauge the prospects of the creation of the unitary
political communities necessary for the effective functioning of deliber-
ative democracy’ (47–8). This combination of views on the fact of diver-
sity and the requirements of political community leads him to adopt a
surprisingly pessimistic prognosis for the possibility of deliberation
across cultural differences for all but ‘assimilationist’ minority groups,
that is, for those groups who want to join the political community, albeit
a political community with an expanded sense of unity. Both of these
assumptions lead Valadez to the further conclusion that in the end delib-
eration is limited in its capacities to deal with the inequalities that result
from such differences and the need for unity, mitigating them rather
than eliminating them (101). While I agree that deliberation itself cannot
eliminate inequalities, I find this conclusion based on dubious premises.
Indeed, if we reject both incommensurability and the desirability of
unitary community, then we expand the limits of deliberation and its
ameliorating effects. Tolerant and reflexive deliberation provides the
more pluralist alternative.
Valadez rejects extreme versions of the incommensurability thesis
typical of popular translation models of intercultural understanding.
However, he still holds that cultural frameworks are incommensurable
when they are ‘so distinct that there is no shared set of beliefs or prin-
ciples of epistemic validation on which the participants in public delib-
eration can rely to reach agreement’ (58). But he goes on to give a much
more specific account of what this means: it entails the lack of shared
principles of adjudication or beliefs on which to base mutually accept-
able reasons (58). But this cannot be such a global condition that there
are no shared beliefs or principles, since even to know that some such
disagreement exists requires that members of different cultural groups
89
have some basis of communication and of giving and asking for reasons.
Incommensurability is then necessary to make deep cultural differences
the basis for the limits of deliberative democracy; yet, at the same time,
this seems to be a highly misleading description of the nature of the
conflict over adjudication. Rather than incommensurability, conflicts are
deep when we have a specific second-order conflict or set of such con-
flicts; that is, the conflicts over adjudication are more reflexive than the
description of incommensurability suggests. In cases of such reflexive
moral and epistemic conflicts about justification itself, we have incom-
patible but not incommensurable first-order principles; in this case what
is required is not just intercultural understanding but reflexive deliber-
ation, the basis of which is toleration of reasons and their justifying
background principles. Second-order incompatibility is not unique to
intercultural deliberation, but already present in conflicts between those
who accept religious reasons as compelling and those who do not.
Indeed, this is just the sort of case that calls for toleration. In situations
of pluralism, toleration must be reflexive in just this sense. Otherwise,
second-order challenges to the limits of the ideals of toleration and
public reason will not be permissible.
As the product of the specific historical situation of religious plural-
ism, many now argue that liberal toleration is increasingly inadequate
to deal with pluralism along more than one dimension at a time.
Depending on the target, critics argue that liberalism is either too thin
or too thick. For some critics, liberal toleration is purely negative,
having to do with prohibiting arbitrary interference with others rather
than with engaging them morally. These critics argue that thin liberal
neutrality leads to a ‘dynamic of toleration and oppression, sustained
by the morally minimal and instrumental nature of liberal toleration’.1
Instead, a positive or ‘liberating’ conception of toleration is not based
on an observer’s perspective of what is needed for the stability of a
democracy, but rather upon taking up the perspective of the citizen who
seeks redress from forms of subordination that inhibit her or his ability
to give effective voice to her or his dissent.2 Other critics take the
opposing side, seeing liberal toleration as based in the culturally specific
conception of autonomy and thus as imposing liberal norms and a com-
prehensive moral doctrine on those deemed intolerant.3 A deliberative
conception is not liberal in that it, too, rejects toleration based on neu-
trality and autonomy. But like the liberal conception, it asks how it is
that toleration could be morally justified to free and equal citizens, each
from his or her own point of view.
It has historically been the case that those who are tolerated, rather
than those who are tolerating, more often challenge regimes of tolera-
tion. For example, current challenges to the liberal regime of toleration
now in place come from religious groups, which from the liberal
90
perspective seem to be merely ‘the recurrence of sectarian and cultic reli-
giosity and of fundamentalist theologies’.4 Such a challenge could emerge
in a deliberative regime. More often than not, it takes the form of the
contestation of certain regulative principles guiding deliberation.
Consider Gutmann and Thompson’s principle of reciprocity.5 The con-
straint to reciprocity, they claim, putatively undermines claims such as
those of religious fundamentalists in Tennessee not to have their children
read various books because these books violate their religious beliefs:
‘The parents’ reasoning appeals to values that can and should be rejected
by citizens of a pluralist society committed to protecting the basic lib-
erties and opportunities of all citizens.’6 In excluding religious reasons
as ‘non-reciprocal’ or ‘unreasonable’, the substantive principle of reci-
procity begins to look very much like the liberal conception of
autonomy or neutral publicity and less and less like a principle that
promotes democracy and deliberation.
Should citizens (especially religious ones) rationally accept such ex
ante constraints in order to participate in public deliberation? Joshua
Cohen offers political equality as a rationale for rejecting such con-
straints. Reasonableness as a constraint on acceptable public reasons is
limited by the larger norms of democratic institutions: ‘if one accepts
the democratic process, agreeing that adults are, more or less without
exception, to have access to it, then one cannot accept as a reason within
that same process that some are worth less than others or that the inter-
ests of one group are to count for less than others.’7 It seems clear that
reciprocity in Gutmann and Thompson’s sense is similarly constrained,
as should be autonomy in the liberal sense that Valadez defends. Here,
too, the guiding ideal of deliberative democracy shows that fair pro-
cedures are insufficient by themselves if democracy demands that all
participants be given equal standing and have their particular reasons
taken seriously. In this way, citizens could justifiably contest a deliber-
ative regime of toleration even if based on principles of reciprocity and
reasonableness on egalitarian grounds, so long as those principles are
interpreted such that religious citizens cannot expect their reasons not
to have any influence, other things being equal. Such citizens can appeal
to democratic principles to urge that the regime be revised, since it
cannot be justified to them as participants in public deliberation.
According to this argument, then, toleration in a deliberative democracy
is based on the principle of political egalitarianism: that is, the equal
availability of and capability to achieve political influence for all citizens
over all decisions that affect them.8 Valadez accepts just this principle
and calls it ‘equality of political efficacy’. This form of equality has the
consequence that participants in deliberation should be committed to
‘epistemic egalitarianism’ and thus to the fair distribution of epistemic
resources necessary to motivate political participation.
91
Epistemic egalitarianism is certainly the democratic motivation for
intercultural understanding as a way to mitigate ‘inequalities in
political efficacy that arise from the fact that minority proposals are
less likely to be regarded as reasonable by members of the majority
culture’ (93). However, political equality itself already entails the com-
mitment to toleration despite differences, a commitment to political
effectiveness in deliberation even in the case of second-order conflicts.
Since religious differences ought to count as cultural differences on any
definition of culture, they too produce the conflicts over adjudication
and persistent inequalities that Valadez makes the central problems of
multiculturalism. Given his concern about the ways in which the frame-
works of a majority culture can cause deliberative disadvantages, it is
puzzling to see that Valadez deals with religious differences in a way
very similar to Gutmann and Thompson, with the same potential intol-
erance that excludes whole types of reasons and disagreements based
on reflexive challenges to the framework of adjudication. Just as in
Gutmann and Thompson, ‘fundamentalist cultures’ are rejected for
being unjust and for violating ‘central tenets of epistemological egali-
tarianism’ and for making ‘intercultural understanding and cooper-
ation difficult’ (139). But these are precisely the sorts of cases in which
our commitment to political egalitarianism is tested and in which the
advantages of deliberative democracy in cases of conflict are most
apparent. A deliberative democracy that is guided by epistemological
egalitarianism thus appears to be intolerant.9 It does not permit chal-
lenges to its standards of justification or to its central value of indi-
vidual autonomy. Because this value fixes public reason and political
justification, Valadez argues that ‘a multicultural democracy should
exclude those cultural practices that do not permit individuals and
communities to live their lives according to their own moral vision,
assuming that this vision falls within the broad boundaries set by the
overarching values and practices of a liberal democracy’ (142–3). I will
return later to the problem of intolerant groups that obviously moti-
vates Valadez here in his discussion of fundamentalism. The problem
is that this rationale as stated is too broad. What then is to be done in
the United States with citizens who embrace fundamentalism? Couldn’t
any traditional society, fundamentalist or not, be said to have similar
problems with the boundaries set by liberal democracy? In these ques-
tions, Valadez seems to agree with Rawls that citizens must share a
political conception of justice that is broadly based in liberal autonomy
and on that basis may exclude some reasons as non-public. So under-
stood, deliberative democracy fails to treat all citizens as equals,
excluding ex ante citizens’ reasons and perspectives that do not accord
with a particular fixed ideal of public reason. For them, such decisions
are not legitimate in light of democratic ideals, since they violate their
92
political equality as having the right to contribute to the definition of
the society in which they live.
With this understanding of the priority of political egalitarianism
in mind, we can see just why Valadez’s conception of political egali-
tarianism may be too liberal. The main difference between a liberal and
deliberative conception of toleration can then be put this way: Those
tolerated in a democracy have to be addressed as equals rather than
subordinates, however fairly they are treated when they have no
capacity to influence decisions. Furthermore, those tolerated in a delib-
erative democracy must be able to see that their deeply held convic-
tions, when expressed as reasons for others, have the same public worth
as the reasons of others. The recognition of their value does not mean
that those reasons will or should carry the day, since they, too, must
be reflexively acceptable to those for whom they are offered as a justifi-
cation without subordination. This justification cannot merely be a
matter of the self-expression of a sincere belief; nor can it be justified
to the community from a third-person perspective as a requirement of
social stability or the common good. Neither of these attitudes estab-
lishes sustained critical engagement with the reasons of those to whom
one has addressed the justification of a regime of toleration. Those
citizens who are intolerant may also be unable to sustain such critical
engagement and fail to convince others for that reason. But they do so
not because they challenge the existing regime of toleration, but
because they fail to live up to the expanded conception of toleration
that they tacitly appeal to in suggesting a new and more reflexive
regime.
Why call such a justification reflexive? A deliberative regime of tol-
eration is ‘reflexive’ precisely because the appeal to a free and open
process of public deliberation is able to make sense of and to counten-
ance just such challenges in ways that a liberal regime cannot. It is
reflexive in a stronger sense as well; it connects toleration to norms and
obligations of public communication, as the medium in which tolera-
tion as a standard of critical engagement is contested and deliberated
upon. Deliberative toleration is connected to communication in three
ways. First, it is an attitude toward the reasons of others; they must be
taken seriously, even as they are criticized or rejected. That is, they must
be understood and taken up in discussion in such a way that the original
speakers cannot reject. Second, it is an attitude toward the speakers,
who are equals without subordination only if their communication is
treated in such a way that it may be effective. Third, it must also be a
communicative attitude toward the perspectives of those to whom one
is attempting to justify a decision in deliberation. In a deliberative
context, toleration requires the capacity not merely to let the other
person or group alone regardless of our negative attitudes, but to take
93
up their perspective. Intolerance is thus a failure of perspective-taking,
so that the limits on the scope of toleration may not be sufficient to
maintain the free and open public communication needed for delibera-
tion inclusive of all citizens. Neither demanding that citizens exercise
virtues of civility and be educated for cultural understanding nor simply
prohibiting uncivil speech legally will be sufficient to maintain the struc-
ture of communication necessary for deliberation among diverse but
equal citizens. Here, too, we see how reflexivity makes possible a prin-
cipled distinction between toleration and intolerant challenges to public
reason: whereas tolerant challenges aim at maintaining precisely this
structure of political communication that is the proper object of any
regime, intolerance undermines the possibility of just such free and open
communication. Intolerance is self-defeating, in that it does not offer
any way for those who object to toleration to be accommodated.
Toleration, democracy and communication: pluralism and

deliberation
Valadez delimits the scope of deliberative democracy in one further way:
in terms of the political aims of the groups who suffer the political
inequalities of being members of a minority culture. Assimilationist
groups who desire to participate as equals in shared practices of delib-
eration are best served by accommodation; other groups who want to
challenge or succeed are not. This classification is based in part on how
it is that groups think that it is best to achieve self-determination and
control over the development of their culture. This classification gives
little place for mutual toleration and respect as fundamental attitudes
of all citizens in pluralist contexts.
These attitudes of toleration have various potential objects. At the
most abstract level, toleration ought to be extended to all persons as
bearers of human rights, including rights of self-expression. This may
be expressed in duties not to interfere with or to prohibit such expres-
sions.
Such negative, perfect duties are not the most appropriate level of
description for democratic contexts in which citizens are already
engaged in practices of deliberation. The language of rights, permis-
sions and prohibitions is not sufficient, in that we do not violate the
rights of others to self-expression when we fail to seriously consider
their reasons in deliberation. In order to capture the obligations of
public deliberation, Onora O’Neill correctly argues that it is com-
munication itself that is ‘the proper object of toleration’ in a demo-
cracy.10 In deliberative settings, citizens manifest their equality with
each other not only by not interfering with their acts of expression; they
94
also do so by sustaining the conditions for communication. How do
they do this? They do so reflexively, in their communication with each
other in public deliberation and in their attitudes towards others as
participants in a public process.11 This concern of participants with the
publicity of communication has special importance when the inclusive
character of both discussion and reason-giving are themselves the
special object of deliberation.
If publicity is the more general norm and attitude of concern for the
structures and processes of communication in a democracy, then toler-
ation demands that citizens be concerned with the structural features of
public debate and discussion through which deliberation takes place.
Two aspects of such communication are the more specific objects of tol-
eration. First, toleration in a weak sense is directed towards the reasons
that others offer in communication; they must be taken seriously and
not disqualified ex ante (either in principle or in fact). Toleration is
needed in the public process aimed at discovering whether a reason is
publicly acceptable or not. Publicity in this sense is historical rather than
formal. If the public character of a reason in this sense is better seen as
an outcome of an actual process of discussion, then it is not necessarily
significant if the reason is religious or secular.12 When communicating
with an audience as heterogeneous as the citizens of a large and plu-
ralistic polity, such disqualification threatens the public character of
political communication in which reasons are considered on their own
merits. However, taking a reason seriously does not entail that we
refrain from criticizing it (even if we think it is reasonable in Rawls’s
sense). Indeed, the opposite is true: no reason can be expected to receive
uptake by others unless it passes their critical scrutiny; that is, a criti-
cism must be addressed to them as one that they could accept. Being
tolerant thus does not exclude criticism; it in fact demands it, since
without it others will not form the expectation that their reasons as
publicly expressed shaped the course of the debate. Toleration is directed
both towards policies that might accommodate a minority view and also
towards the minority’s reasons put forward in deliberation. This inclu-
sion of other citizens’ salient reasons, such as they are, is a means toward
preserving the public character of communication and the inclusive
character of the democratic community of citizens.
This brings us to the second feature of communication that is the
object of toleration. Taking reasons seriously is not all that deliberation
requires. Toleration in the strong sense does not extend directly to the
reasons as such but to the perspectives that inform these reasons and
give them their cogency. Before a reason can first be seen as a reason
and then potentially as one that passes the critical scrutiny of all citizens,
the perspectives of others must be recognized as legitimate; in light of
this inclusion of their perspective, groups recognize themselves as
95
contributing to democratic decisions. The toleration of perspectives is
then closely related to recognizing them as equal members of a political
community, where membership is recognized despite the potential for
persistent disagreements and deep conflicts. As Scanlon puts it, what tol-
eration expresses is recognition of common membership that is deeper
than these conflicts, recognition of others as ‘just as entitled as we are
to contribute to the definition of our society’.13 Epistemic egalitarianism
ought to promote toleration, not inhibit it, since what it promotes is not
only political effectiveness, but also free and open communication. In
that case, no one has control over the definition of society, since it is
dispersed in the body of all citizens.
Conflict, not incommensurability

This account of toleration based on political egalitarianism serves to
undercut the claim that disagreements about moral and epistemic prin-
ciples of adjudication are due either to incommensurability or to
unacceptable practices and inequalities that necessarily violate the
norms of public reason: if toleration in deliberation is reflexive, it is able
to accommodate the second-order challenges to standards of toleration
and publicity. The distinguishing feature of a deliberative regime of tol-
eration is that it justifies toleration to the tolerated and is thus open to
their challenge. This standard of justification permits just such second-
order challenges to practices of regulation and protection that are
needed to maintain public communication. How then might delibera-
tion about toleration proceed? In this section I want to develop an
account of public deliberation about practices of toleration using
examples of intersecting forms of toleration, one that have religious,
social and cultural differences at the origin of various conflicts. These
examples show that the greatest difficulty is not the everyday challenges
to principles and standards of deliberation but rather those conflicts that
intersect various levels, dimensions and domains in extremely diverse
societies. The key to their solution is subjecting the regime of toleration
to the regulative principle of equal standing or non-subordination in an
inclusive community.
The defining historical moment of the liberal regime of toleration is
the emergence of religious pluralism and the distinctive zero-sum char-
acter of religious conflict within a particular political community. With
the emergence of genuinely multicultural and even global polities,
religion has lost its central place and become only one aspect of plural-
ism among many. It has at the same time taken on increasing signifi-
cance between societies, exacerbated today by unprecedented migration
and the rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world. In light
96
of this historical difference between the newer and the older situation
of religious toleration, it is now important to disaggregate the fact of
pluralism in two ways if we are to make sense of the need for a new
regime of toleration: pluralism now needs to be distinguished accord-
ing to aspects and dimensions. These distinctions will in turn suggest
further differences in types of conflicts according to their complexity
and degree of tractability and to the demands of toleration.
Under contemporary social conditions, the fact of pluralism has a
number of different aspects having to do with different sorts of diver-
sity. Such aspects can be defined along several axes: cultural, social, and
epistemic diversity. Cultural diversity concerns the presence of different
groups with different interpretations of their identities; it has been dis-
cussed in terms of multiculturalism and recent disputes about ‘identity
politics’ including ethnic and various religious conflicts over the char-
acter of national culture. Epistemic diversity is a relatively recent
phenomenon having to do with the cognitive division of labor and the
emergence of scientific expertise and its claims to authority. Finally, I
include social pluralism, which is not the pluralism of self-identified
groups but of various social positions, as having a particular place in a
structure or process, such as at the periphery of a society or as being a
subordinate in a social hierarchy.
Each aspect of diversity can be measured along various deliberative
dimensions: in terms of values, opinions and perspectives. These roughly
correspond to the main aspects of diversity: diversity in terms of basic
moral or political norms (including conceptions of the common good);
in terms of different opinions (including beliefs about the way in which
beliefs are justified); and in terms of the perspectives afforded by
different social positions (primarily emerging with the range and type
of experience of one’s society). Divergence in values, opinions, and per-
spectives can be quite wide, and in this way produce conflicts. Taken
singly, however, such divergences need not be ‘deep’; a conflict is deep
only if it occurs along a number of different and overlapping dimen-
sions. It is these deep and overlapping conflicts that are the source of
need for toleration for democracy in pluralist societies, since democracy
in general and deliberative democracy in particular is a way of settling
differences of value and opinion in ways that make it possible for one
to reasonably accept the outcome. Ordinary politics employs egalitarian
norms of democracy to settle disputes and to accommodate even per-
manent disagreements along one dimension. Deep conflicts do not just
present a challenge to particular norms of adjudication due to moral or
epistemic incommensurability, but rather are due to overlapping and
intersecting second-order conflicts.
Conflicts of opinion are settled in fairly standard ways, using recog-
nized procedures and assumptions. Even when these do not work,
97
toleration of differences of opinion can leave wide disagreements in
place. In practices of inquiry, diversity of opinion is instrumentally
valuable for the goal that Mill describes as ‘having the truth win out in
the marketplace of ideas’. But epistemic diversity also has a negative
side that produces potential conflicts, when it overlaps with other
aspects of the fact of pluralism, such as the plurality of values. Epis-
temic diversity is valuable in the Millian sense only in light of shared
commitments to procedures and practices of evidence. In Christian
Science refusal cases or disputes about evolution in schools, the conflict
is not along a single dimension but involves overlapping disagreements
of values and opinion (especially beliefs about how to settle differences
of opinion). Diversity of values alone is not problematic given commit-
ments to democracy and its norms of freedom and equality; freedom
defines the scope of reasonable disagreement about values, limiting the
degree to which one group may impose their values on others and
thereby restrict their freedom. Such ideals commit participants in
democracy to finding solutions that can be agreed upon by all those
affected. But once again this solution becomes problematic when the
norms of democracy are called into question by moral values such as
cultural self-determination (which see some forms of democracy itself
as oppressive) or epistemic values that see little worth in dialogue or
discussion (as in the case of religious fundamentalism). Similarly, differ-
ences in perspective can be overcome by shared experiences in a wider
background culture that bridges the gap; commitment to other values
such as democracy may make citizens willing to undergo a democratic
process that entails subjecting oneself to such experiences to achieve a
shift in perspectives, as was the case in the American civil rights
movement. The civil rights movement succeeded to the extent that it
introduced new forms of political communication, a new language for
equal respect and toleration. These can help create what I have called
new ‘deliberative majorities’.14 Like Valadez, I have also argued that
different voting schemes may help to stabilize and create such deliber-
ative majorities, but collective cultural transformation (rather than
simply mutual understanding) seems also to be a common way to
achieve the basis for mutual respect and political equality.
In light of the problem of deep conflicts, a democratic pluralism
seems self-defeating. On the one hand, democracy seems to be directly
challenged by pluralism, since it appears to be a way of settling con-
flicts along a single dimension according to the single and perhaps
abstract aspect of their political significance. On the other hand, demo-
cracy seems to directly challenge pluralism by pointing out its possible
limits. The only way out of this paradox is to offer an account of the
basic norms and ideals governing the democratic process that underlie
the stronger conception of reflexive toleration undertaken in the last
98
section. That is, the facts of pluralism demand that we now must trans-
form basic democratic conceptions and ideals, while preserving their
normative core, if they are to be effective regulative principles of delib-
eration. The problem of a democratic pluralism is then to transform
such norms in such a way as to be able to avoid or to resolve overlap-
ping conflicts. The first task is to rethink what it means to resolve a
conflict in light of possibly permanent disagreement. Such conflicts seem
less trenchant, if the goal of deliberation in a tolerant democracy is not
to resolve disagreements into consensus, but rather to maintain ongoing
public communication and egalitarian social relations. Even this more
feasible goal requires rethinking basic ideals of publicity, impartiality,
and the rule of law. What is required is not a unitary political com-
munity, but a good set of formal institutions and informal practices of
toleration.
Transforming democracy, not differentiated citizenship

Even while endorsing values of political communities that seem appro-
priate to the nation-state, Valadez also explores the role of the inter-
national political community and the limits of the nation-state, both of
which call into question assumptions of unitary group and political
membership. Many of the limits that Valadez attributes to public delib-
eration as such are the limits of its current container, the modern nation-
state. Since the motivation for these changes is the emergence of new
dimensions and aspects of pluralism, it will also be useful to contrast
this approach to pluralism and multiculturalism with Kymlicka’s idea
of differentiated citizenship, which Valadez rightly calls overly ‘state
centered’ (157). Its form is the liberal nation-state that has depended on
a unitary political culture, just as its administrative functions have
depended on uniform policies enforced over an enclosed territory. In
contrast, Valadez sees the international community is taking up the
appeals of minority groups, and that is surely one of the roles of inter-
national judicial institutions that are aimed at enforcing basic human
rights such as the proposed International Criminal Court. In discussing
various enthnopolitical claims to self-determination, Valadez accepts
that ‘the justification of state powers to control territory and unilater-
ally determine immigration policies’ has to be placed in ‘a larger inter-
national context’ as such claims influence the life-opportunities of those
outside their borders (133). The implication of this concession is
striking: no community could set its own rule for membership or for
control over its territory. Furthermore, as almost every policy of one
state influences the life-possibilities of citizens all over the world, a plu-
ralist democracy requires multiple citizenships if it is not to place too
99
great demands on a single set of political institutions. Until now the
nation-state has been the sole mechanism for political integration in
fragmented modern societies, making it a central location for ethnic
conflict among groups who seek to gain control over its levers of
coercive power as a means to self-determination.
The strategy of differentiated citizenship tries to distinguish the
influence of that power over different groups along different dimensions
of difference. Such differentiation emerges in response to the liberal
regime’s idea of constraints as fair and impartial if they affect all equally
as citizens. But if there are different axes of obligation and value for
citizens with their various social and cultural identities, then such
policies cannot be considered impartial. Religious obligations with
regard to dress could be accommodated by differential rights exercised
by Sikhs and Muslims, as Kymlicka suggests for education or traffic
safety. Such differentiated rights establish a different kind of impartial-
ity that can be endorsed by each from his or her own different perspec-
tive, that is, justified to all citizens with his or her social and cultural
identities intact. However, differentiation can only solve a certain subset
of these problems of pluralism: it permits exemptions in many cases of
conflict among religious, cultural and political obligations. While it
provides the model of a certain type of solution, it is only one of many
possibilities, limited to those cases in which special rights and immuni-
ties may be granted within a broadly inclusive community without the
acceptance of subordination. The fact of wide and multidimensional
pluralism today suggests not just that the ideal of public reason and tol-
eration become reflexive, but that the conditions of the use of public
power must be transformed as well. Wider pluralism within the nation-
state seems to promote more nation-states, each seeking their own
unitary community and putative control over the development of their
own culture. One needs to ask about the costs of this process and the
fundamental incompatibility of such control with the very idea of a
deliberative democracy.
A society characterized by intersecting and overlapping forms of
pluralism that insists on the principle of political non-subordination
would also have to develop a cosmopolitan form of distributed as well
as differentiated citizenship, that is, the possibility of multiple, overlap-
ping and intersecting citizenships, along the lines of federal distribution
of power or regional government. Such a distributive conception of
power is less closely tracked to the social and cultural sources of conflict
than to the functional differentiation of institutions of democratic self-
governance. Without the uniformity over a territory that is demanded
by a nation-state, such a distribution of power could produce insti-
tutions responsive to a wider variety of salient reasons, especially as
various principles informing the rule of toleration and the rule of law
100
are challenged. They would not only be more responsive, but would
also open an institutional space for creating non-uniform solutions that
are less likely to be intolerant. Both the differentiation of citizenship and
its multiplication in a wider set of institutions endowed with public
power make possible a broader range of solutions that the parties to
various conflicts would find acceptable, each from their own perspec-
tive and subject to the constraints of democratic principles generally.
Federal and regional governance structures are still able to set regulatory
constraints; the framework of these constraints as reasons-responsive is
precisely what enables democratic challenge to be effective. Given that
there are overlapping and intersecting levels and forms of political
organization, a broader framework for deliberation would have to be
set by regulative cosmopolitan institutions with their own regime of
democratic toleration. Such a framework is the only feasible political
solution to a variety of problems of globalization, including the lack of
political accountability of global regulatory institutions.
Differentiated and multiplied citizenships are solutions for demo-
cratic institutions only if they do not violate principles of equal influence
and non-subordination. In the first case, the same institutions become
more responsive to challenges to the framework for toleration; in the
second case, solutions to problems of pluralism require new kinds and
levels of institutions, in that newer deep conflicts may not be resolvable
on democratic grounds if a single set of institutions, such as those of the
territorial nation-state, are supposed to respond to all the challenges and
demands of a diverse citizenry. It seems now to be the case that such
responsiveness requires a greater degree of institutional division of labor
in contemporary cosmopolitan democracies. Pluralism requires new
institutional forms, and discussing pluralism only at the cultural level
without reference to new institutions is a fruitless enterprise.
Conclusion: challenging toleration, challenging limits of the

nation-state
The superiority of the deliberative regime of toleration consists in its
ability to deal with second-order challenges and overlapping and inter-
secting deep conflicts. Moreover, deliberation also shows why the two
are not identical. In a deliberative democracy, debates about the basic
principles of governance and shared political life belong on one end of
the continuum of deliberative problem-solving. Far from being avoided,
appeals to the interpretation of fundamental principles are an everyday
occurrence in a deliberative democracy, especially when pluralism
produces conflicts along a number of dimensions (as is the case in
debates about the wall of separation of church and state in school
101
voucher programs). Such debates can become pitched conflicts, whose
constant recurrence indicates a lack of problem-solving capacity in the
existing deliberative framework. Spurred by persistent deep conflicts
(and not merely everyday persistent disagreement), such debates can
lead to a period of ‘constitutional politics’ such as was the case in the
Reconstruction period and the New Deal in United States history when
the deliberative framework of rights and powers had to shift to solve
problems and conflicts.15 The deliberation that occurs in periods of con-
stitutional politics shows that the ideal of public reason ought not to be
fixed. In these cases, deliberation about principles of adjudication is
much more fundamental than merely proposing acceptable exemptions
or special privileges typical of differentiated citizenship. Rather, it
requires rethinking the very normative framework for deliberation that
is the basis for the reasons responsiveness of its institutions. It may well
be that it requires a shared experience among citizens that democratic
organization and its existing forms of toleration are not working (or the
political order more generally in the case of international politics), an
experience often associated with the lack of even indirect control over
new and emerging aspects and dimensions of pluralism and differenti-
ation in modern societies.
Religious toleration has played a crucial role in the emergence of
modern citizenship. It became the basis for a distinctly universal identity
within the political community of a modern nation-state that united
citizens across social and cultural differences. Both multiculturalism and
cosmopolitanism challenge the adequacy of this universal identity,
despite its appeal to an ever-wider community of citizens. Deliberative
toleration looks at the problem of inclusion from the other way around.
Precisely because of the successful inclusion of ever more citizens in a
non-naturalistically or non-culturally based community of principle, the
conflicts inherent in wide pluralism challenge the institutional frame-
work that made this inclusion possible. Once again, current religious
conflict over toleration provides a ready example. The emerging chal-
lenges to the liberal regime of toleration even in its expanded multi-
cultural form are increasingly transnational, as religious political
movements such as some forms of Islam attempt to challenge liberal
political culture and the constitutional state. At present such religious
movements coalesce around salient forms of cultural conflict because
they provide the only source of organized and effective alternatives.
Rather than simply oppose such fundamentalism or even extend toler-
ation to ‘decent hierarchical societies’ as Rawls suggests, this challenge
requires a cosmopolitan response and a cosmopolitan regime of tolera-
tion that can take full advantage of mechanisms of the differentiation
and the multiplicity of citizenship. The nation-state is no longer the sole
container for political identity or for practices of toleration and public
102
reason, and it is no accident that liberal anti-cosmopolitanism depends
on a very limited conception of the duties and obligations of toleration
between societies. As Rawls put it, liberal toleration applied in the inter-
national sphere ‘asks of other societies only what they can reasonably
grant without submitting to a position of inferiority or domination’.16
My argument is that we can indeed have ‘toleration by public reason’
even given wide pluralism, but only if deliberation is robust enough that
the terms of toleration themselves may be submitted to challenge and
deliberation. It is not a question of what other societies may reasonably
grant us, but how the reasons and perspectives of others can be included
in ways that recognize them as free and equal.
The reflexive form of toleration possible in a deliberative democracy
indicates the shape of such a future regime of toleration and suggests
how it could solve the deep conflicts that heterogeneous societies
engender. This toleration is not simply the neutral attitude of refraining
from criticism or interfering actions, but the communicative attitude of
taking the reasons of others seriously and recognizing them as the
addressees of the justificatory principles of toleration. Rather, it permits
a kind of cosmopolitan impartiality that all citizens may accept given
that they have the reasonable expectation that their challenges to a
regime of toleration will be heard. This sort of testing must now increas-
ingly be done at a cosmopolitan level, in international society as the
most inclusive community of citizens. The inclusiveness of this com-
munity will be tested by the challenges to toleration and democracy
raised by the many religious groups and indigenous peoples around the
globe who seek non-subordination. Since it cannot solve overlapping
and intersecting conflicts, the liberal nation-state does not hold out the
promise of a regime of toleration that these groups cannot reasonably
reject. For other societies not to be in a position of inferiority and sub-
ordination, they must be recognized as equal members of a cosmo-
politan political community whose institutions are based on equal access
to influence and freedom as non-domination.
The cosmopolitan challenge to liberal states is now to construct a
reflexive and deliberative regime of toleration and non-subordination in
order to maintain the structures and media of communication in which
such an engaged and pluralist dialogue can take place. A reflexive regime
would have to be democratic and organized on the scale of the salient
dimension of pluralism. This requires not just a more inclusive audience
for the public use of reason but a more inclusive political community
than is possible in the modern nation-state, which has not yet mastered
the possibilities of the plurality of sources of public reason in cosmo-
politan societies. Ethnopolitical groups that have been denied national
communities do not seem any more in position to meet these challenges,
and the affective dimensions of ‘ecological consciousness’ that Valadez
103
rightly celebrates operate primarily at the sub-national level. The key
question is whether current challenges to democracy and liberalism will
produce new reflexive forms or lead to the rejection of the principles of
political egalitarianism. Guided by its practical orientation to success-
ful public communication and the standard of non-subordination
among equal citizens, reflexive toleration is both a means and an end
for furthering democratization in a situation of undiminished pluralism
inside and outside the borders of the nation-state. If such ideals are to
be maintained, then the contemporary facts of pluralism require a more
reflexive understanding of norms that guide deliberation and a wider
understanding of the distribution of political power in a variety of insti-
tutions in which citizenship is exercised and conflicts are resolved.
Pluralism requires cosmopolitan forms of democracy, in order that
citizens have some political community to whom to appeal in cases of
tyranny and unequal capacity to exercise influence over the increasingly
global aspects of their lives. Jorge Valadez has taken deliberative demo-
cracy some steps in this direction. In an age in which the concept of
political community is expanding beyond its modern cultural and terri-
torial boundaries, pluralism and deliberation need to find new insti-
tutional sites and locations outside the nation-state.
Department of Philosophy, St Louis University, St Louis, MO, USA
PSC
Notes
1 Barbara Herman, ‘Pluralism and Moral Judgment’, in Toleration: An
Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996), p. 61; on ‘positive tolerance’ as distinguished from the repressive
character of purely negative toleration, see Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive
Tolerance’, in R. P. Wolff, B. Moore, Jr, and H. Marcuse, A Critique of Pure
Tolerance (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1965); specifically, a positive or liberating
conception has for Marcuse an epistemic conception, since ‘the telos of
toleration is truth’ (p. 90). Marcuse’s criticism of liberal toleration makes
one of the points that I am stressing here, that toleration need not be
skeptical or even non-epistemic. For an epistemic criticism directed at
Rawls’s idea of ‘toleration extended to philosophy’, see David Estlund, ‘The
Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the
Truth’, Ethics 108 (1998): 252–75. Estlund relies on a reflexive argument,
to the effect that political liberalism must admit the truth of its own view.
The argument here shows why it is false that toleration requires that we do
not criticize the comprehensive doctrines of others, or they ours; such
attitudes are not the attitudes citizens take up toward each others as free
and equal.
104
2 Marcuse. ‘Repressive Tolerance’, p. 95. The ‘liberating’ feature of democracy
is not mere or ‘pure’ toleration, but ‘the chance it gave to social dissent’.
3 See Rawls’s criticism of arguments for liberal neutrality based on autonomy
as a moral doctrine; for Rawls, liberalism as a moral doctrine itself ‘fails to
satisfy the criterion of reciprocity’. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. xliv–xlv; also p. 77ff.
Such a form of autonomy-based liberalism would include Kymlicka’s
arguments for the basis of toleration.
4 Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1997), p. 71.
5 Just as he criticizes Kymlicka’s autonomy-based argument for toleration,
Rawls criticizes Gutmann and Thompson’s view of deliberative democracy
for treating reciprocity as a norm in a ‘comprehensive doctrine’. See John
Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in his The Law of Peoples
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1991), p. 137.
6 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 65.
7 Joshua Cohen, ‘Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy’, in
Democracy and Difference, ed. S. Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996), p. 101.
8 For views that endorse political egalitarianism as essential to deliberative
democracy see Joshua Cohen, Thomas Christiano, Jack Knight and James
Johnson, and myself. See the essays in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on
Reason and Politics, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1997); I shall consider David Estlund’s argument against political
egalitarianism below. To the extent that his epistemic alternative is based
on principles that can be reasonably rejected, it results in political intoler-
ance.
9 This could be because Valadez defends a moral form of epistemic procedu-
ralism. For an epistemic view that is intolerant (in my sense) for very
different reasons, see David Estlund, ‘Political Quality’, Social Philosophy
and Policy 17 (2000): 127–60.
10 Onora O’Neill, ‘Practices of Toleration’, in Democracy and the Mass
Media, ed. J. Lichtenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
p. 167.
11 On the variability of norms of publicity as to their problem-solving
capacity, see James Bohman, ‘Citizenship and Norms of Publicity: Wide
Public Reason in Cosmopolitan Societies’, Political Theory 27 (1999):
176–202.
12 Robert Audi has long identified public with secular reasons. See his initial
article, and subsequent ones thereafter, ‘The Separation of Church and State
and the Obligations of Citizenship’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 18(3)
(1989): 259–96. For Rawls’s criticisms of this view, see ‘The Idea of Public
Reason Revisited’, p. 148.
13 T. M. Scanlon, ‘The Difficulty of Toleration’, in Toleration: An Elusive
Virtue, ed. Heyd, p. 231.
14 Valadez argues that my account of political equality never considers how
minority status leaves people without political efficacy; he proposes voting
105
schemes to break the stranglehold of majorities over the electoral process.
I discuss the very same use of voting schemes as related to the non-tyranny
condition of deliberative democracy, but put it in the larger context of a
deliberative majority created out of the process of the transformation of
public opinion in the public sphere. See James Bohman, Public Delibera-
tion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 184ff. Simply to appeal to
voting schemes alone is insufficient; such voting schemes do not empirically
promote proportional representation in the long run, but rather should
promote shared deliberation and interaction in electoral and parliamentary
settings.
15 Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991).
16 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 121.

Bohman James 1105

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bohman James 1105

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

06Bohman (bc/d) 1/17/03 1:56 PM Page 85

Reflexive public deliberation

Abstract Deliberative democracy defends an ideal of equality as political

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 29 no 1 • pp. 85–105

Toleration, not autonomy: the priority of political equality

Toleration, democracy and communication: pluralism and

Conflict, not incommensurability

Transforming democracy, not differentiated citizenship

Conclusion: challenging toleration, challenging limits of the

Department of Philosophy, St Louis University, St Louis, MO, USA

You might also like