Christian F. Rostbøll

Autonomy, Respect, and Arrogance in the Danish Cartoon Controversy:

Autonomy is increasingly rejected as a fundamental principle by liberal political theorists because it is regarded as incompatible with respect for diversity. This article seeks, via an analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, to show that the relationship between autonomy and diversity is more complex than often posited. Particularly, it asks whether the autonomy defense of freedom of expression encourages disrespect for religious feelings. Autonomy leads to disrespect for diversity only when it is understood as a character ideal that must be promoted as an end in itself. If it by contrast is understood as something we should presume everyone possesses, it provides a strong basis for equal respect among people from diverse cultures. A Kantian conception of autonomy can justify the right to freedom of expression while it at the same time requires that we in the exercise of freedom of expression show respect for others as equals.

Preferences and Paternalism On Freedom and Deliberative Democracy

This article discusses the relationship between the ideal of autonomous preference formation and the danger of paternalism in deliberative democratic theory. It argues that the aim of autonomous preference formation can and should be decoupled from a justification of paternalistic state action aimed at reshaping citizens’ preferences. The problem of non autonomous preference formation is rooted in the communication structure in which each and every one forms her preferences and hence cannot be solved by some paternalistically judging on others’ behalf. The argument is based on a new formulation of the deliberative democratic ideal, which emphasizes and clarifies the multiple dimensions of freedom it incorporates.

Freedom of expression, deliberation, autonomy and respect

This paper elaborates on the deliberative democracy argument for freedom of expression in terms of its relationship to different dimensions of autonomy. It engages the objection that Enlightenment theories pose a threat to cultures that reject autonomy and argues that autonomy-based democracy is not only compatible with but necessary for respect for cultural diversity. On the basis of an intersubjective epistemology, it argues that people cannot know how to live on mutually respectful terms without engaging in public deliberation and developing some degree of personal autonomy. While freedom of expression is indispensable for deliberation and autonomy, this does not mean that people have no obligations regarding how they speak to each other. The moral insights provided by deliberation depend on the participants in the process treating one another with respect. The argument is related to the Danish cartoon controversy.

Dissent, criticism, and transformative political action in deliberative democracy

Many discussions of deliberative democracy ignore or misunderstand the purposes of the ideal speech situation in Habermas’ theory. These purposes are to show the possibility of dissent in actual communication and of supplying a normative standard of social criticism. I elaborate the significance of these purposes and show some of the shortcomings of deliberative theory that ignores them. However, the ideal speech situation fails to supply anything like a strategy for political action under conditions hostile to deliberation. I seek to fill this void by arguing for a limited consequentialism, according to which nondeliberative means are legitimate if and only if they further deliberative goals and do not unnecessarily violate the intrinsic values of public deliberation.

The use and abuse of ‘universal values’ in the Danish cartoon controversy

During the Danish cartoon controversy, appeals to universal liberal values were often made in ways that marginalized Muslims. An analysis of the controversy reveals that referring to ‘universal values’ can be exclusionary when dominant actors fail to distinguish their own culture’s embodiment of these values from the more abstract ideas. The article suggests that the solution to this problem is not to discard liberal principles but rather to see them in a more deliberative democratic way. This means that we should move from focusing on citizens merely as subjects of law and right holders to seeing them as co-authors of shared legal and moral norms. A main shortcoming of the way in which dominant actors in Denmark responded to the cartoons was exactly that they failed to see the Muslim minority as capable of participating in interpreting and giving shared norms. To avoid self-contradiction, liberal principles and constitutional norms should not be seen as incontestable aspects of democracy but rather as subject to recursive democratic justification and revision by everyone subject to them. Newcomers ought to be able to contribute their specific perspectives in this process of democratically reinterpreting and perfecting the understanding of universalistic norms, and thereby make them fit better to those to whom they apply, as well as rendering them theirs.

Kant, Freedom as Independence, and Democracy

While the influence of Kant’s practical philosophy on contemporary political theory has been profound, it has its source in Kant’s autonomy-based moral philosophy rather than in his freedom-based philosophy of Right. Kant scholars have increasingly turned their attention to Kant’s Rechtslehre, but they have largely ignored its potential contribution to discussions of democracy. However, Kant’s approach to political philosophy can supply unique insights to the latter. His notion that freedom and the public legal order are coconstitutive can be developed into a freedom argument for constitutional democracy. This freedom argument goes beyond freedom as moral autonomy and a libertarian idea of freedom as noninterference to a notion of freedom as a form of standing constituted by the public legal order. The trouble with other attempts to connect freedom and democracy is that they have operated with a moral ideal that is independent of a public legal order.

Non-domination and democratic legitimacy

While many regard equality as the moral foundation of democracy, republican theory grounds democracy in freedom as non-domination. The grounding of democracy in freedom has been criticized for relying on either an Aristotelian perfectionism or a Rousseauian equation of the people in their collective capacity and the people understood severally. The republican theory of freedom and democracy has the resources to meet these criticisms. But the most systematic elaboration of republicanism, that of Philip Pettit, achieves this by turning the relationship between freedom and democracy into an instrumental relationship in a manner open to objections. Instead, republicanism should offer a justification of democracy that also has a non-instrumental dimension. This revised republican freedom argument for democracy has advantages compared to the equality argument for democracy, including a better explanation of democratic procedures.

On Deliberative Democracy

Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 304 pp. In the last fifteen years a new theory of democracy has emerged on the academic scene, the theory of deliberative democracy. It has by now become one of the major positions in democratic theory. The central idea of deliberative democracy is that the basis of democratic legitimacy is the public deliberation of citizens. This idea should be seen in contrast to the idea that democratic legitimacy issues from the mere aggregation of preferences. According to the theory of deliberative democracy, the preferences of citizens cannot be seen as given, they are rather transformed in the political process, ideally in a public process of deliberation among free and equal citizens. The will of the people, thus, is not found in the private and self-regarding expression of preferences or interests (as on the aggregative model), rather citizens must justify their political claims to one another in public deliberation and form their common opinion and will

Why withdrawal from the European Union is undemocratic

The Lisbon Treaty from 2009 introduced the possibility for individual member states to withdraw from the European Union (EU) on the basis of a unilateral decision. In June 2016 the United Kingdom decided to leave the EU invoking article 50 of the treaty. But is withdrawal democratically legitimate? In fact, the all-affected principle suggests that it is undemocratic for subunits to leave larger political units when it adversely affects other citizens without including them in the decision. However, it is unclear what the currency of this affectedness is and, hence, why withdrawal would be undemocratic. We argue that it is the effect of withdrawal on the status of citizens as free and equal that is decisive and that explains why unilateral withdrawal of subunits from larger units is democratically illegitimate. Moreover, on the ‘all-affected status principle’ that we develop, even multilaterally agreed withdrawal is undemocratic because the latter diminishes the future ability of citizens to make decisions together regarding issues that affect their status as free and equal. On this basis, we conclude that it is undemocratic for a member state such as the United Kingdom to withdraw from the EU.

Democratic Respect and Compromise

Abstract Compromise has attained renewed interest among political theorists writing on pluralism and disagreement. It is controversial, however, whether compromise is a mere pragmatic necessity or if it has non-instrumental value. This article argues that the reasons for compromise are inherent in the democratic ideal. Under some conditions, compromise can give greater legitimacy to public policy beyond what is achieved by a mere majority decision, and not merely because of the consequences but because of the very fact that the decision was a compromise. The reason for this is the democratic respect displayed by the act of compromise. Democratic respect goes beyond both the norm of treating one’s fellow citizens as equals and of respecting them as members of the same community. It is a conception of respect, which requires that we treat fellow citizens as co-rulers. Only the latter conception of respect is both sufficient to explain the moral importance of democratic procedures, including compromise, and an inherently democratic ideal.