Resultados para 3L-NPC

In response to her criticisms of deliberative theory, Young holds to the basic tenets of Habermas’s deliberative democracy, that is, she believes it should be conceived of as having a decentralised civic-public basis, but also agrees to equal participation (or at least representation) of citizens at the political-public level.42 In addition, in response to some of the internal exclusions she identifies, Young advances some additional communicative norms, which she hopes can work to promote inclusion and which I will focus on in this section. Young provides a deliberative theory that is in many ways similar to Benhabib’s discourse ethics: Young places emphasis on a reasonability norm aimed at promoting openness and reciprocity, as well as on narrative, greeting and rhetoric (Young 2000, p.57-70). In this section I elucidate Young’s arguments about reasonability and narrative, while simultaneously showing that Benhabib’s argument against Young on this point, which I criticised in the last chapter, is based on a misinterpretation of Young’s ideas.

As I explained above, Young rejects the norm of reasonableness when it refers exclusively to arguing in universal terms, as for example we found in Habermas’s deliberative theory in chapter two. Instead, for Young, reasonableness is defined as being open-minded:

42 _{Young explicitly deals with representation in chapter five of Inclusion and Democracy (Young} 2000).

107 In the context of the model of deliberative democracy, I take reasonableness to refer more to a set of dispositions that discussion participants have than to the substance of people's contributions to debate. Reasonable people often have crazy ideas; what makes them reasonable is their willingness to listen to others who want to explain to them why their ideas are incorrect or inappropriate. People who think they know more or are better than others are sometimes too quick to label the assertions of others as irrational, and thereby try to avoid having to engage with them. Since reasonable people often disagree about what proposals, actions, groundings, and narratives are rational or irrational, judging too quickly is itself often a symptom of unreasonableness. (Young 2000, p.24, my emphasis)

As we can see from this quote, Young’s conception of reasonableness is aligned with Benhabib’s Arendtian idea of enlarged mentality, which I described in chapter two. According to this conception, what characterises reasonable practice in democracy is not limited to the manner in which we advance our personal positions, but includes our receptivity to others’ ideas and criticisms. This does not mean that actors must always simply accept their interlocutors’ ideas and criticisms, only that they must enter the process with the express intention of listening to others’ positions and accepting that their own initial positions may have to change. With this Young need not drop the norm of reasonableness in the sense of coming to discussion with the intention of forwarding our position from a perspective that others might reasonably accept. Young still endorses the idea, which I clarified in chapter one, that it is

unreasonable to ask someone to give up their basic rights in order that others may enjoy greater freedoms or goods. Young’s aim here is to dislocate reasonableness from rational, dispassionate argument, rather than from respect for others’ rights.

However, the idea that we should always take a universal stance is something that Young implicitly rejects when she puts a focus on narrative. As I illustrated above, for Young, focusing on reaching consensus through argument and/or relying upon a shared notion of the common good can create internal exclusions in the deliberative process:

Some internal exclusions occur because participants in a political public do not have sufficiently shared understandings to fashion a set of arguments with shared premises, or appeals to shared experiences and values. Too often in such situations the assumptions, experiences, and values of some members of the polity dominate the discourse and that of others is misunderstood, devalued, or reconstructed to fit the dominant paradigms. In such

108 situations arguments alone will do little to allow public voice for those excluded from the discourse. Another mode of expression, narrative, serves important functions in democratic communication, to foster understanding among members of a polity with very different experience or assumptions about what is important. (Young 2000, p.71)

Thus, Young’s solution is to argue for a place for personal and group narratives in democratic discourse, with the aim of increasing understanding amongst deliberators before a decision is taken. Young is therefore explicitly forwarding narrative as a means to restrain the power of dominant discourses.

Furthermore, where knowledge and understanding of differing perspectives doesn’t exist, Young suggests, narrative can expand our comprehension of values, practices and norms that would otherwise be unintelligible:

Under such circumstances, narrative can serve to explain to outsiders what practices, places, or symbols mean to the people who hold them and why they are valuable. Values, unlike norms, often cannot be justified through argument. But neither are they arbitrary. Their basis often emerges from the situated narrative of persons or groups. Through narrative the outsiders may come to understand why the insiders value what they value and why they have the priorities they have. (Young 2000, p.75)

In other words, narrative can help us to enlarge our understanding in a way that argument cannot: if another perspective is simply alien to us, we can’t incorporate it into our deliberation. On the other hand, through narrative we can at least potentially start to comprehend the premises that underlie a position that at first appears to be unintelligible. As a consequence, Young argues, narrative can help to improve social cohesion by debunking prejudice. Once we have entered into open narrative exchange, Young surmises, we cannot fail to dislodge false prejudices. Thus, what narrative can do is fashion a place where, despite wide-ranging values and lived experiences, deliberators might attempt to find solutions whilst paying heed to social difference. In chapter five, I will argue that far right activist Tommy Robinson’s meetings and exchanges with Muslims in his community illustrate this phenomenon: faced with the realities of his interlocutors’ lives, Robinson begins to feel uneasy about his strong prejudices against them.

109 Thus, Young’s theory puts an emphasis on the generation of knowledge and understanding: narrative is central to this, because it is a fundamental mechanism for bridging epistemic divides and exposing prejudice and myth. It’s therefore possible to see Young’s theory as one that adheres to Peter’s pure epistemic proceduralism (and Peter herself explicitly notes that Young’s theory is an instance of this kind of model). To recap, Peter holds that there is no independent measure of correctness for deliberative outcomes and argues instead that a fundamental strength of deliberative democracy is that it increases the knowledge of all involved. I agree that this epistemic gain is certainly a strong component in Young’s theory, but Young simultaneously forwards her model as one that can overcome exclusion and better identify and deal with injustice. Thus, in addition to putting an emphasis on the expansion of knowledge and enlargement of our mentalities, Young’s theory is instrumentally focused on the potential for social change, and warding against cycles of inequality. Therefore, Young’s theory incorporates Peter’s emphasis on the epistemic value of deliberation, while also holding that we need to aim for good outcomes—something I argued was necessary in chapter one by amalgamating Peter and Cohen’s models.

I’m now in a position to further demonstrate that Benhabib’s argument against Young is misplaced. As I explained in chapter two, Benhabib contends that Young’s focus on narrative brings her theory into irrevocable opposition with the necessary universalism of political legislation. I had argued that a strength of Benhabib’s discourse ethics is its focus on narrative and openness to others, which is a strength that Young is explicitly importing into her democratic theory. However, as I discussed, Benhabib criticised Young for this move, arguing that politics could not support narrative deliberation. I subsequently demonstrated that Benhabib’s stance

110 ignores the influential role that narrative commonly plays in political discourse and law. However, Young notes that an important strand of Benhabib’s criticism is the claim that Young is privileging narrative, greeting and rhetoric over argument (Young 2000, chapter three, note 31). In response, Young explicitly argues that she sees these forms of communication as enhancing and supplementing rather than replacing argument:

I do not offer practices of greeting, rhetoric, and narrative as substitutes for argument. Normative ideals of democratic communication crucially entail that participants require reasons of one another and critically evaluate them. These modes of communication, rather, are important additions to argument in an enlarged conception of democratic engagement. (Young 2000, p.79)

Young goes on to reiterate that finding and accepting starting premises for argument may require other forms of communication. Thus, Young’s argument is not that narrative should be the only, or even the most prevalent, form of democratic communication, but only that narrative can facilitate inclusion and reasonability. Neither does Young hold that our legislation and policy can be drawn up in partial and narratively-drawn ways; it’s highly unlikely that Young sees narrative as something that should be written into legal documents.

To sum up, Young’s focus on narrative and open-minded reasonability is forwarded as a way of dealing with social difference and internal exclusion in deliberation. Narrative has the ability to introduce a range of perspectives and convey the values and viewpoints of speakers in ways that argument cannot; whereas reasonability asks us to give credibility to others’ arguments, narratives and viewpoints. As a result, we hopefully break down prejudices between groups and guard against dominant viewpoints overwriting difference in deliberation. This in turn, as I have explicated, fits Young’s model into an amalgamated model incorporating Peter’s emphasis on the deliberative procedure creating increased knowledge and understanding and Cohen’s argument that we still must aim to reach good or just

111 outcomes. However, Young’s focus on narrative doesn’t mean that Young’s democracy falls foul of the criticisms Benhabib makes of it, given that Young nowhere contends that narrative should be the form through which legislation should be parsed, and she is clear that argument is still important for deliberation. I agree with Young’s arguments on these points: her deliberative theory thereby gains the means for highlighting where prejudice may exist and putting in place norms to help counter exclusion.

In the next section, I will move on to discuss narrative and reasonability in light of another problem of social difference, namely hermeneutical marginalisation, which captures how some injustices may be entirely absent from deliberation because there are insufficient narratives to explain them. I will argue that Young’s concept of social groups as a political resource helps her theory to guard against this problem. However, I will finish the section by identifying a tension in Young’s theory between this openness to groups, discourses and narrative, and her simultaneous assertion that groups must define their demands in deliberation only in terms of (in)equality.