Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation

7. Empathy and Democracy

Democracy needs the process of empathy. At the end of Chapter 5 I argued that deliberative theories, in order to address the empirical evidence, had to take the empathic process more seriously. The theoretical critiques surveyed in the previous chapter, though, make even more serious claims about the viability of deliberative democracy. The most persuasive way to answer those claims is to adopt a new model of deliberation that gives empathy a central place in democracy. Even more important, adopting a model of deliberative democracy that incorporates the process of empathy will allow me to demonstrate how democracy can make legitimate collective decisions while fulWlling its promise to give equal consideration to all citizens. In constructing this new deliberative theory, I will draw upon the most persuasive aspects of other theories and combine them with the process model developed in Chapter 3. The process of empathy is not a suªcient condition for democracy, but it is undoubtedly a necessary one. Deliberation, ReXective Consideration, and Empathy Before deWning what deliberation would mean under a model of deliberative democracy that takes empathy seriously, I want to highlight the background features within which such a model will function. I make these claims as assertions, and even though I believe they are defensible assertions , I will not defend them here because I believe that anyone who disagrees with them will never Wnd my model persuasive. First, democracies must function in a world characterized by a pluralism of values, identities, beliefs, experiences, and what Rawls calls conceptions of the good. I believe 7 empathy and democracy that this is a “fact” as Rawls claims (1996, 36), though it is not inherent only to liberal societies. While the degree of pluralism may vary, an examination of history demonstrates clearly that people living together are never going to agree about many important questions in life and are going to have di¤erent perspectives on the world. In some places and in some periods , people may not have had the opportunity or will to express their perspectives , but this does not deny that disagreements existed. We should not limit this fact, as Rawls does, to the claim that there are a variety of “reasonable ” comprehensive conceptions of the good. While this may be likely as Rawls deWnes it, it is unfruitful and unnecessary to predetermine what values, beliefs, conceptions of the good, and opinions are “reasonable.” It is unfruitful because it risks the imposition of a narrowly tailored conception of reasonable, and it is unnecessary because democratic practice itself can reveal the unreasonable without predetermining it. Second, we live in a world without an infallible authority to which people can appeal to resolve their di¤erences, similar to Habermas’s postmetaphysical thinking in ethics. There is no book, god, science, or nature that can provide unerring guidance for people in resolving political di¤erences. This does not arise out of the fact of pluralism, but is a condition of the world that has always existed, even if some denied it in the past and some do so today. Finally, everyone in a society deserves equal consideration whenever the society engages in collective decision-making. This does not mean that every decision will result in the satisfaction of everyone’s desires and interests, but decisions must always take those desires or interests into account somehow. Any democracy faces the problem of how to make collective decisions in the face of the fact of pluralism, the lack of an infallible arbiter of di¤erences, and the need to give citizens equal consideration. Empathy and DeWning Deliberation My argument is that democracy can deal with this problem by deWning democracy as deliberation that puts empathy at its heart, but this requires that we begin by deWning deliberation. As Chapter 2 made clear, deliberative theorists disagree on many points about what constitutes deliberation, but there are some general deWnitions with which most deliberative democrats would agree. John Gastil and Laura Black “advance a broad, yet Xexible deWnition of deliberation” in which people “carefully examine a problem and arrive at a well-reasoned solution after a period of inclusive, respectful consideration of diverse points of view” (Gastil and Black 2008, 2). Bessette empathy and democracy 159 deWnes deliberation similarly “as reasoning on the merits of public policy in which the participants seriously consider substantive information and arguments and seek to decide individually and to persuade each other as to what...