Table Of ContentCONCILIATORY
DEMOCRACY
From Deliberation Toward a
New Politics of Disagreement
MARTIN EBELING
Conciliatory Democracy
This publication is part of the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence
“The Formation of Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt
am Main.
Martin Ebeling
Conciliatory
Democracy
From Deliberation Toward a New Politics
of Disagreement
Martin Ebeling
Berlin, Germany
ISBN 978-1-137-57742-9 ISBN 978-1-137-57743-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57743-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948717
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Editorial Note
In an effort to write in a gender-neutral fashion, I have made occasional
use of the pronoun “they” as a singular pronoun.
The Chicago Manual of Style states the following with regard to this
issue:
On the one hand, it is unacceptable to a great many reasonable readers to
use the generic masculine pronoun (he) in reference to no one in particular.
On the other hand, it is unacceptable to a great many readers either to
resort to nontraditional gimmicks to avoid the generic masculine (by using
he/she or s/he, for example) or to use they as a kind of singular pronoun.
Either way, credibility is lost with some readers.1
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, however, conveys a more
permissive attitude. It states,
Those who find it uncomfortable can take advantage of the various avoid-
ance strategies mentioned under he and/or she, to be used when grammati-
cal liberties with they/them/there are unthinkable. Yet that kind of response
to singular they/them/their is no longer shared by the English-speaking
1 Chicago Manual of Style (2010): sect. 5.46.
v
vi Editorial Note
population at large. Writers who use singular they/them/their are not at
fault.2
Furthermore, it notes,
The appearance of singular they/them/their in many kinds of prose shows
its acceptance by English writers generally. It recommends itself as a gender-
free solution to the problem of agreement with indefinite pronouns and
noun phrases.
I thus hope that my credibility does not suffer from taking this gram-
matical liberty.
2 The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004): p. 538.
Introduction
How ought we to react to our persistent political disagreement with other citi-
zens? In response to this question, I introduce a new conception of democ-
racy which I call conciliatory democracy. Its key innovation is to bring
the ongoing debate in contemporary epistemology about the significance
of so-called peer disagreement, disagreement between equally competent
judges of an issue, to bear on political disagreement and decision-making.
After providing arguments for such epistemic equality in politics, I con-
tend that citizens ought to pursue the epistemic conciliation of their con-
flicting judgments. The ideal of epistemic conciliation, finding a middle
ground between judgments, thus replaces the ideals of consensus and of
a compromise of interests at the center of much of democratic theory
today. Drawing on insight from public choice theory and the social sci-
ences all too often neglected in contemporary political philosophy, I fur-
thermore show that, and why, multi-party electoral competition tends to
produce conciliatory outcomes, i.e. political outcomes which correspond
to the epistemic conciliation of the divergent positions constituting the
input to democratic decision-procedures. This argument brings to the
fore another important innovation of my proposal, namely an elucida-
tion of the epistemic role of political parties in modern democracy.
In sum, this book delivers an altogether novel response to a question at
the heart of democratic theory. It is innovative in its epistemic approach,
in its elucidation of the vital role of political parties, and in reconciling
vii
viii Introduction
various strands of democratic theory. Additionally, it solves what we
can call the meta-problem of democratic theory: to develop a theory that
produces an overlap of the normative with the epistemic dimension of
democracy.
The fundamental question that plagued me when I started thinking
about the issues at the heart of this book was the question of how to
deal with the problem of political disagreement in politics. For a long
time, I had thought about this question exclusively from a normative
vantage point, and consequently treated political disagreement primarily
as a moral problem. However, it increasingly struck me that we underes-
timate its epistemic dimension. Often, disagreement confronts us as an
intellectually unsettling experience because we do not regard those we
disagree with as moral analphabets. Often we disagree with friends (and
foes) to whom we ascribe roughly equal moral competence about intri-
cate matters of justice and politics. This phenomenon points to the epis-
temic significance of political disagreement, which has not received much
uptake in democratic theory. Once we view disagreement as a moral and
an epistemic problem, we face the question of how political philosophy
ought to address each dimension and how it ought to bring the answers
it gives along each dimension into harmony.
I developed the ideas presented in this book at a time when two seem-
ingly unrelated events occurred. One of them was the 2012 US presi-
dential election; the other was the 300th birthday of the cultural critic,
writer, and political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While it is dif-
ficult to perceive at first sight, I believe that a closer look reveals a theme
bridging the time and distance between Rousseau’s thought and con-
temporary events. What I have in mind is his distinct vision of politics
and democracy, which contrasts sharply with the dire state of politics we
sometimes observe in contemporary societies. It is this contrast which
can enlighten our understanding and enable a critique of our political
practices. US-American society today is deeply divided on issues rang-
ing from economic policies to the permissibility of abortion, same-sex
marriage, minority rights, attitudes to climate change, and approaches
to foreign policy. What is more, the different sides seem united only in
their mutual distrust and their belief that they are the true guardians of
the common good, while all others hide their ulterior motives under a
Introduction ix
fake display of common good orientation. Furthermore, many people
judge the intellectual level of political discourse in US-American politics
as regrettably low and attribute it to an ill-informed public. The 2016
presidential election was a prime example of what has become known as
post-factual politics and included racist and misogynist attacks desguised
as challenges to the seemingly oppressive dictates of political correctness.1
Admittedly, we do not have to read Rousseau to find this state of
affairs deplorable. However, reading Rousseau brings to light an alterna-
tive which is, in many respects, very attractive. It is the ideal of a society
in which independent and adequately informed citizens cast their vote
according to their sincere judgment about what lies in the interests of
all. Furthermore, these citizens possess the virtue of intellectual humility.
They do not simply discard the judgments of their fellow citizens, but
accord them a weight equal to that of their own. This, again, contrasts
with the intellectual high-handedness with which actors on both sides of
the aisle often dismiss those with whom they disagree. A telling example
is a joke which spread after the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004.
Reportedly, young Democrats designed a map displaying both coasts in
blue and labeled the remaining regions of the country, all in red of course,
“the crazy bits in between.”2 We can easily imagine the joke going the
other way. Contrast this with Rousseau’s teachings, who advocated the
virtue of intellectual humility in politics and even thought that in some
circumstances citizens could readily admit that it was their own judgment
that might have been mistaken.
Surprisingly to our eyes and ears, he also thought that near unanim-
ity is the outcome we should expect of a vote and that more widespread
disagreement is a sign of a state in decline. This is, we readily agree, for
various reasons an unacceptable position for any conception of democ-
racy fit for complex and pluralistic societies. However, it should not
distract us from Rousseau’s insight that the political judgments of reason-
able citizens carry epistemic significance and do so because independent,
1 Unfortunately, the level of discourse has hit a new low in the 2016 presidential primaries. The
general critique applies to other democratic societies just as well, of course.
2 This anecdote is reported in a news article available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti-
cle-2223828/The-huge-divide-Obama-Romneys-ideology-makes-election-campaign-divisive-
recent-memory.html#ixzz2Y5NPoPAp; accessed on July 4, 2013.
