Deliberation as a reconstruction

7.1 conceptual background

I have argued that Kitcher’s ideal falls prey to the realist challenge if interpreted in a blueprint, compass or yardstick manner. One way to address this problem may be to modify the ideal, e.g. by adopting a less demanding version of the inclusion requirement.

Yet, this would amount to what I have called a reversion of the direction of fit, i.e. the ideal would be fitted to the world rather than the other way around. Before making such a concession, a supporter of Kitcher’s ideal will want to make sure that there is really no way to keep the more ambitious version of the ideal. As it turns out, however, there is indeed such a way: the reconstructive notion.

Reconstructive ideals differ from the other notions in that they are constitutive, i.e. they

“do not merely regulate, they also create the very possibility of certain activities” (Searle, 1995, p. 27). Whereas a failure to comply with a blueprint, a compass or a yardstick is just blameworthy, failing to comply with a reconstructive ideal sheds doubt on wheth-er we are actually pwheth-erforming the activity in question. Apart from Searle’s regulative/

constitutive distinction (see also Rawls, 1955), the reconstructive notion reaches back to Hegel, who held that the philosopher’s task is to articulate the implicit ethical order or Sittlichkeit of a given historical context (1807/2017). The idea that ethical orders reside, perhaps in an embryonic stage, in the fabric of our social world has later influenced Marx, Habermas, and recent critical theory (Jaeggi, 2018). The reconstructive notion takes up this tradition, as it does not prescribe norms from the outside, but expresses the implicit standards that constitute a practice. By “locat[ing] the normativity of social practices in the performance conditions of these practices themselves” (Jaeggi, 2018, p.

190), the notion makes it possible to “criticiz[e] the object in terms of a standard that lies in the object itself” (ibid., p. 181)⁶.

6 Rahel Jaeggi distinguishes two types of critique that match up with what I call the yardstick notion: a less ambitious internal critique that “seeks to reinstate the principles that make up the life of a community or to re-activate the real meaning of its ideals” (2018, p. 181), and a more ambitious immanent critique that “starts from […] problems and moments of crisis internal to a form of life” (ibid., p. 31) and then “transcends this starting point” (ibid.) by initiating “a transformation of forms of life” (ibid.). While I will not discuss this distinction here, I would argue that yardstick ideals can be used in both of these ways, depending on the specific ideal under con-sideration (e.g. my philosophy example seems to be more internal in Jaeggi’s sense, whereas the deliberative ideal seems to amount to a more immanent form of critique).

To better understand the reconstructive notion, note that the implicit norms of a practice need not be easily interpretable. For instance, the practice of philosophy involves certain standards of reasoning whose exact meaning is debatable; but this does not mean that they do not exist, or that they are irrelevant in practice. Another aspect is that, as such standards reside in the practice itself, the question of whether they are violated must be decided within the practice and cannot be determined by some external authority (the reconstructive notion differs from Searle’s chess example here). Furthermore, recon-structive ideals can be embryonic in the sense that they are implicit in a practice without being fully realized. Philosophers may, e.g., sometimes fail to be, say, critical or careful, but this neither refutes these norms, nor the fact that critical and careful reasoning is part of what it means to be a philosopher (this is another difference to Searle’s chess example).

Transferring this to Kitcher’s ideal, one may wonder what exactly is being reconstructed in a reconstructive notion of ideal deliberation. A promising answer to this question can be found in the early works of Jürgen Habermas (1979, 1984) and Karl-Otto Apel (1980). Habermas famously proposed a concept of communicative rationality, arguing that our every-day linguistic practice essentially consists in exchanging certain validity claims. For instance, by saying “please, shut the door” a speaker implicitly claims that shutting the door is in fact possible, that her demand is normatively acceptable, that she expresses an authentic wish, and that her speech act is actually comprehensible (see Habermas, 1984, p. 306). However, in a communicative or non-strategic context a hearer can always reject these validity claims, e.g. by arguing that the door is stuck. The speaker, on the other hand, can reject this rejection, say, by arguing that the door is not stuck at all. This can spark a process of giving and taking reasons, where with every new speech act “the speaker proffers a speech-act immanent obligation to provide justification”

(Habermas, 1979, p. 64). Of course, such an exchange of reasons will not always unfold, but this does not change the fact that, at least in a communicative context, we must be ready to provide reasons should they be demanded.

Apel (1980) has called these implicit obligations the “a priori of the unlimited communi-cation community” (ibid., p. 267). He held that the justificommuni-cations we give, or could give, for our linguistic and other behavior are not only directed towards our actual interloc-utors, but towards “an ideal communication community that would basically be capable of adequately understanding the meaning of [our] arguments and judging their truth”

(ibid., p. 280, orig. italics). This community of ideal deliberators is unrealistic in the sense that it does not actually exist; yet, it is realistic in a different sense, namely that it is implicitly present in our linguistic practices. As Apel puts it, “the ideal community is

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presupposed […] in the real one, namely, as a real possibility of the real society, although the person who engages in argument is aware that (in most cases) the real community, including himself, is far removed from being similar to the ideal community” (ibid., pp.

280-281, orig. italics).

7.2 the reconstructive notion and the realist challenge

Now, my proposition is to interpret the deliberative ideal in exactly the same way: as a set of implicit norms that we presuppose whenever we exchange validity claims in a communicative setting. Kitcher’s requirements can then be seen as the articulation of a speaker’s implicit claim that she could justify a speech act not only to a group of actual hearers, but to an ideal deliberative community that comprises all types of social per-spectives (inclusion), that judges proposals in a non-hierarchical way (equality), that gives everyone’s desires equal weight (impartiality), that understands the topic at hand (understanding) and that is motivated by intersubjective reasons (rationality). Vice versa, the speaker implicitly claims that she will assess any replies to her speech act in a way that complies with these requirements. Whether these implicit claims can be maintained, however, cannot be decided from the outside, but must be judged in the communication setting itself. A hearer can always reject a speech act, arguing that one or more of the im-plicit claims fails. Moreover, when a speaker constantly violates communicative norms, this will shed doubt on whether she actually does what she claims to do – engaging in the practice of giving and taking reasons.

But can the reconstructive notion not be refuted by the same arguments that troubled the other notions of Kitcher’s ideal? With regard to the argument from non-bindingness, it is true that any actual exchange of validity claims will be “far removed from being similar to the ideal community” (Apel, 1980, p. 281). Yet, in contrast to the blueprint notion, the reconstructive notion does not prescribe an ought, but only articulates it. If this is so, then the ethical order that is implicit in our communicative practices cannot be given up as an ideal, as it manifests itself whenever we give and take reasons. Vice versa, cases of serious violations of these norms do not refute the ideal, but merely illustrate that there are linguistic practices besides genuine communication (bargaining, exercising social power etc.). This reveals an interesting twist: although the reconstructive notion of Kitcher’s ideal is essentially unattainable, it cannot be refuted via ought-implies-can, simply because there cannot be an ought to give up on the ideal if we cannot do so.

Regarding the argument from unintended effects, I concede that the reconstructive no-tion of ideal deliberano-tion has a tendency towards ever more inclusion, just as the com-pass notion has. But it is not so clear that this implies a general preference for larger deliberative bodies. After all, we constantly exchange reasons in our every-day linguistic practices, and the implicit claim that these reasons would stand the scrutiny of an ideal community does not mean that this community, and all the social perspectives it com-prises, must be present here and now. It rather seems to suffice that we defend our claims against arguments from a different perspective once these arguments are brought up. For this to be possible, however, there must be opportunities for representatives of different social perspectives to enter the conversation. Consequently, there is always a caveat to the social composition of a deliberative body. Such a body must remain open towards outsiders, such that perspectives that have not been considered in the original choice of participants can still enter later in the process. If this is given, the inclusion requirement seems to be prima facie fulfilled.

With respect to the argument from irrelevance, the problems of the yardstick notion are much less pressing in the case of the reconstructive notion. While the reconstructive view of ideal deliberation does involve a counter-factual element – the assumption that a validity claim could be justified to a community of ideal deliberators if they would scru-tinize the claim – it does not involve the idea we need not engage in actual conversations.

On the contrary, the reconstructive notion is intimately linked to actual communicative practices. A reconstructive ideal does not, as a yardstick would, start from a norma-tive principle and then apply this principle to a practice; rather, it starts from a practice and asks whether the practice complies with its own constitutive norms. In order to be an effective means of social coordination, the reconstructive approach to deliberation is therefore be to engage in actual conversations, e.g. in the form of mid-scale citizen panels, and exchange the reasons that are relevant to judge a given topic. It will then be unnecessary to know in advance what the result of such a conversation would be, and whether it complies with the ideal’s requirements. Rather, we this judgement would be left to the deliberators themselves.

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