Sharing Freedom, Testing Deliberation

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Deliberation

Abstract

Much of the contemporary literature on deliberative democracy secures deliberation’s normative importance in its ability to publicly legitimise or justify political decisions. Relatedly, a significant part of the existing literature counts the “ideal” deliberative procedure as sufficient for compliance. This dominant view has been found wanting by both the normative and empirical scholarship on deliberation. Additionally, that part of the normative literature that has sought to challenge dominant accounts of deliberation is yet to be empirically tested. This article makes two interventions. First, by engaging key developments in African political philosophy (with particular focus on Kwasi Wiredu’s normative arguments), the article argues that what many of the arguments that aim to substantively challenge the dominant view of deliberation point to is a foundationally different conception about the nature of human freedom and, therefore, also about what deliberation’s procedures and outcomes can, and ought to be. The article motivates its own understanding of ‘relative freedom’ as the conceptual basis for rethinking deliberative procedure and its outcomes. Second, the paper utilises a field survey experiment, centred around the Bus Rapid Transit transportation system in Lagos, Nigeria to conduct a preliminary test of its arguments. The article concludes that we ought to think of deliberation as aiming, primarily, towards increasing the understanding that each person has of all others and therefore, also, of herself. Indeed, the paper’s main empirical findings support the argument that it is by this function of increasing relativised understanding, that deliberation may hold the potential to enable compliance to decisions of public policy. It is for this reason, also, that deliberation may be necessary, yet insufficient, to public justification.

Author

• Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí, University of Oxford