Deliberative Democracy, Knowledge & Intergenerational Justice

It is often argued that deliberative mini-publics can help foster other-regarding values and therefore take better decisions in respect intergenerational and environmental justice (Sagoff, 2008). Deliberation involves a sharing of perspectives and requires participates to convince others of their views, and so forces them to consider more than their narrow self-interest. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative argument for why deliberative mini-publics may produce better decisions in terms of other-regarding values. While not incompatible with previous accounts, this new argument is suggested to have advantages in the case of intergenerational justice. The new argument is both epistemic and comparative. It compares deliberative mini-publics in their ability to produce informed other-regarding decisions to the alternatives of elections and markets. Democratic elections and private markets have become predominant social mechanism in many societies, and both have been defended in term of their epistemic abilities. They have been argued to motivate individuals to acquire information (Downs, 1957; Mill, 1998), allow them to utilise their local knowledge of social problems (Anderson, 2006; Hayek, 1948), and allow them to engage in a process of experimentation and learning (Dewy, 1981; Kirzner, 1985). When it comes to other-regarding values, however, all these epistemic advantages appear significantly weakened. Individuals will likely not be motivated to acquire information, given the small effect of their voting and purchasing decisions on others, and they will likely not be able to use their local knowledge or learn through experimentation, given the separation/distance between themselves and those they aim to benefit. As a result, even if consumer and voters have other-regarding values, they will likely not make informed or effective decision in relation to them. This theoretical argument is then supported throughout the paper by empirical studies of voter and consumer knowledge. At the root of the problem facing elections and markets is their decentralisation of decision-making to a very large number of voters or consumers. Deliberative mini-publics, therefore, seem to have a comparative advantage as they involve a much smaller number of decision-makers selected via random sortition. By using random sortition to select a representative group of decision-makers, the paper argues that mini-publics increase the incentive of decision-makers to get informed, and decrease the costs of acquiring information. Comparatively speaking then, mini-publics are more likely to produce informed other-regarding decisions than either elections or markets. This new epistemic argument is not incompatible with previous ones and may even be mutual supporting. However, it does appear to have advantages in the case of intergenerational and environmental justice. Previous arguments suggested that listening to the perspectives of others and having to convince them with reasons, leads individuals to consider their co-deliberators interests. The fact that future generation cannot be present in deliberation, however, seems to undermine this advantage of deliberation. The new argument, alternatively, does not require future generations to be present in deliberation, so mini-publics would still have an epistemic advantage over their main alternatives in respect to intergenerational and environmental justice.