3. Dialogue Misconceived 

Up until this point I have been arguing that we should consider dialogue of some sort as a way of dealing with the problems posed to a society by moral-political disagreement among its members.  In this chapter I would like to look at two prominent contemporary versions of dialogue theory:  that proposed by Bruce Ackerman on the one hand and that proposed by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson on the other.  More attention will be paid specifically to the issue of conversational constraints within these two theories in later chapters, as I consider their proposed constraints in the process of searching for acceptable ones.  Now I would only like to examine their overall proposals and explain why I find them unsuitable for serving the purposes I want dialogue to fulfill before presenting my own alternative.

While Ackerman indicates that the "point" of his version of dialogue is to address the liberal "problem of public order," (Ackerman 1989, p. 8) that is, how people disagreeing morally can live together, I do not see how his version can even be a moderately successful way of addressing that problem.  I am inclined to think that this is because he pays a much greater amount of attention to some sources of moral disagreement rather than others.  For example, he seems to focus a great deal on distributive problems ("manna problems") and power struggles.  Now, surely there are issues of moral disagreement here in the sense that there are different views about what right thing to do is.  But to a large extent these matters of disagreement don't turn on a real difference in values or ranking of values, but rather a concern for self-interest—the fact that most citizens will have a tendency to defend a particular view in order to either advance their own position in terms of the distribution of goods or power, or to protect their stake in the current distribution and balance of power.  This is especially true of Ackerman's sample dialoguers in Social Justice in the Liberal State.  Ackerman's paradigm for a disagreement is a dispute between two overwhelmingly self-interested individuals trying to secure advancement or protection of their own distributive or power interests peacefully.   This seems to imply that for him that the purpose of dialogue is primarily to mediate struggles for goods and power, to force citizens to attempt to justify their own interests in a manner acceptable to others, or in accordance with principles and constraints accepted by all as having a legitimating function. 

Now perhaps in those sorts of cases, the constraints he recommends make sense.  Those constraints are Rationality, which requires that a power holder must respond to those who question the legitimacy of his power with reasons; Consistency, which requires that the power holder keep his reasons consistent in all his different attempts to justify his power; and Neutrality, which forbids the power holder to assert that he or his conception of the good is better than other citizens or their conceptions.  (Ackerman 1980)  All of these seem suitable enough for moderating a power struggle.  But does it really make sense to cast all of our moral disagreements as a power struggle?  I think not.  Certainly many of our disagreements have an element of power struggle in them, but I do not think power-talk adequately characterizes the nature of our disagreements.  Take pornography for example.  I suppose it could be viewed as a question about the legitimacy of the power of individuals to produce, distribute, and consume pornography.  But it seems that it is at least in part a question about the morality of pornography, that is, whether it is morally objectionable or morally permissible.  Perhaps one could cast the disagreement in rights-talk by making it a disagreement about the extent of the right to free expression, but I do not think even that suffices for a complete account of the disagreement.  The issue isn't simply about the conflict or balance between rights, but rather about what the content of those rights is, which seems to turn to a significant extent on the moral question of the acceptability or wrongness of pornography.   Whether or not it is a protected form of free expression depends to some degree on how bad it is.

In cases where we are talking about a conflict in values or our understanding of moral values, Ackerman's restraints make even less sense.  Of course rationality and consistency are to be valued in discussions about morality, but they do not need to be imposed as constraints.  In a conversation about moral disagreement, citizens will quite naturally fulfill Rationality, as the very nature of the conversation summons up moral reasons from each of the participants.  In other words, it is the sort of conversation in which one would not really think of suppressing the voice of the others in the conversation instead of reasoning.  Consistency as well seems almost trivial to fulfill in such a conversation.  That is not to say that we do not have deep inconsistencies within our systems of moral beliefs and between those moral beliefs and our actual practices, but rather that we will not be very likely to find ourselves engaging in repeated acts of self-contradiction as someone who was attempting to justify all her claims for power might.  Neutrality seems attractive at first glance—obviously it is not terribly productive in a dialogue for the participants to merely assert their own superiority and the superiority of their moral views—but it seems to me that it has problematic implications.  In particular, it seems that Neutrality might rule out reference to any moral statement which is not affirmed by everyone, which would make it impossible to even set out a disagreement, much less resolve it. 

In "Why Dialogue?", Ackerman gives an argument for a strong version of a "neutral" conversational constraint.  (Ackerman 1989)  His argument involves three steps.  First, he distinguishes dialogue about morality , the "personal pursuit of moral truth," from dialogue about politics which includes, among other things, resolution of moral disagreement.  (Ackerman 1989, p. 10)  He points out that while the former is a non-necessity, the latter is necessary, because talk is needed to figure out if coexistence is possible among those who morally disagree. 
His second step is to rule out various ways of talking which have been favored previously.  One is the picking out of a particular value as being supreme for all people.  (He mentions the Hobbesian value of self-preservation in this regard.)  Ackerman's problem with this view is that he doesn't think there is such a supreme "trumping" value which is universal for all people in all situations.   Specifically, the Hobbesian value of self-preservation is not one which is supreme, since for Ackerman and probably for most of us self-preservation isn't really the sort of consideration which wins out morally all the time.  Thus to demand that people frame their talk around a supreme value which they themselves do not hold supreme would require them to say false things about their own moral views, and this is plainly unacceptable.  (Ackerman 1989, p. 13)  Another way of talking ruled out is the utilitarian way in which all values are translated into some sort of utilitarian calculus, so that disagreements are handled very simply by comparing the utility of various alternatives.  Ackerman rejects this view because it requires everyone to defend their values in utilitarian terms (while many individuals reject utilitarianism itself) and it requires everyone to accept the particular translation of values into utility that the utilitarian theorist gives, and this again would demand that people say things contrary to their own moral views.  A third way of talking which Ackerman finds unacceptable is taking part in an "exercise in transcendence," such as the Rawlsian original position, because individuals disagree about which transcendent models if any are correct, and hence an affirmation of a particular model would require them to say false things about their own moral views.  (Ackerman 1989, p. 16)  So, in these three cases, Ackerman argues against making people play by conversational rules they don't agree with, and argues that these rules will be disagreed about because they are not appropriately neutral. We shouldn't pretend to be "of one mind on deeply contested matters."  (Ackerman 1989, p. 16)

Ackerman's third step is to propose his own alternative, which is a form of conversational restraint.  His alternative to forcing people to say things they disagree with is to demand that they not talk about their moral disagreements at all.  ("We should simply say nothing at all about this disagreement and put the moral ideals that divide us off the conversational agenda of the liberal state."—Ackerman 1989, p. 16)  Thus, all moral statements which are controversial may not be used in talking about politics.  Nonetheless, Ackerman claims that there will be a sizable body of uncontroversial normative premises accepted by all which may be used for the resolution of political conflicts  This view supposedly provides the citizens with a "way of reasonably responding to their continuing moral disagreement." (p. 19)  Ackerman defends this kind of restraint by comparing it to other forms of conversational role playing in which certain things are right to say in different roles and certain things are not. 
This particular view of conversational restraint is rather problematic, since it makes discussion of our moral disagreements nearly impossible.  Furthermore, it's difficult to see how a society could completely evade the moral issue and focus on the merely political issue instead in many cases of politically relevant moral disagreement.  To say that no moral disagreement is politically relevant is to ignore the problem of pressing moral disagreements completely.  There are certain moral issues which for one reason or another cannot be swept off the table, cannot be ignored, if we are to live together.  So, if our intention is to try to find a theory of dialogue to help us address these sorts of moral disagreements, Ackerman's model will be unhelpful.  As I will explain in detail later on, my primary concern with Ackerman's filtering out all controversial normative premises is not a worry that the number of premises meeting his standard will be zero, or that the premises which do meet his standard are insubstantial or uninteresting; rather, my worry is that the premises we end up with would be ultimately unhelpful in addressing our problem of moral disagreement.   Finding all the things we agree about is useful for a great many purposes, but resolving moral disagreement generally is not one of those purposes. 

At any rate, it is unclear exactly what Ackerman thinks his type of dialogue is useful for.  While at times he seems to apply it to issues of moral disagreement in general, at other times (and almost always in his examples) he applies it more to issues of legitimacy of power, distributive justice, and basic political principles instead.  These particular disagreements are special because as Ackerman portrays them, the two parties agree on enough so that their disagreement requires one of them to be inconsistent or mistaken about some factual matter, wrong by his own lights.  These are cases in which the superiority of a particular position can be readily demonstrated to someone who disagrees with it so that he will change his mind.  So they are superficial moral disagreements which are easily resolved, not the more troublesome sort of disagreements we are confronted with. 

One last concern with Ackerman's version of dialogue is that at times he seems to be working with a hypothetical dialogue, as he is in all his sample dialogues in Social Justice and the Liberal State.  He seems to be putting forward his own view and then justifying it by saying "This is how conversation would go on this topic: ..."  There is nothing wrong with this per se, but it does mean we give up one of the things that are especially attractive about dialogue theories—that they rely on actual dialogues between real disagreers rather than hypothetical ones. After all, the conclusions of hypothetical dialogues do not have much more binding force than the decisions made from a hypothetical transcendent position. This also makes it difficult to understand how Ackerman could claim that dialogue as he presents it is a way for allowing people who disagree to discover whether or not they can live together—it would seem that actual dialogue would be required to do that.⁴  Furthermore, Ackerman's sample dialogues, which he uses to justify each of his claims throughout  Social Justice and the Liberal State, are often unconvincing as representations of what a real debate about a particular point would look like; in fact, the dialogue often seems fixed in the favor of whoever is promoting the views that Ackerman wants to endorse.  Ackerman often seems to make the opponent of the dialoguer who says what he (Ackerman) wants to say make stupid conversational moves which no real person would ever make, e.g., blatantly silly violations of the Neutrality constraint, such as "I'm better than you," after which Ackerman's champion can declare victory.⁵

Another dialogue theory worth examining is that proposed by Gutmann and Thompson.  Their version of dialogue is clearly intended to deal with the sorts of problems I am concerned with.  They are concerned with dialogue in middle democracy; that is, dialogue in democracy as it is going on now, in the thick of things, as opposed to dialogue as a justification for the foundations of the liberal state.  Discussion and dialogue are thus clearly aimed towards current ongoing problems of moral disagreement, such as the disagreement over issues like abortion, universal health care, and affirmative action, rather than being aimed towards producing basic principles on which the state should be based.  It is true that such disagreements are political as well; nevertheless, I agree with Gutmann and Thompson's characterization of these disagreements and similar ones as being essentially moral.  (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 12)  After all, the relevant considerations in the disagreements are not so much related to what the state should do (from a practical standpoint), but rather what the state or other institution ought to do from a moral standpoint, what sorts of moral obligations it has to its citizens.

Gutmann and Thompson think that our current society suffers from a deliberative "deficit in theory and politics," i.e., we have so far neither made much progress towards developing theories of deliberation and its place in democratic society nor have we yet utilized deliberation to an extent anywhere near its potential in practice. (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 12)  They think it is a largely ignored and underestimated valuable tool for dealing with moral disagreement, and that we neglect it to our own detriment.  So they want to encourage argument on moral disagreements in public forums with the dual aims of reaching some sort of agreement or, if that is not possible in a particular case, (and they openly admit that deliberation as they describe it is not guaranteed to produce agreement on every issue) encouraging and maintaining mutual respect among those who disagree.  They think deliberation should occur not only in official governmental forums but in non-governmental forums as well—in almost any situation in which citizens would be confronted with these problems of disagreement.  So in that sense it is a strategy for all citizens in all situations where they must find ways to handle moral disagreement with their fellow citizens. 

It is worth noting that, although Gutmann and Thompson think deliberation is very important, they do not think it is the ultimate consideration; specifically, they do not think it takes priority over the values of liberty and opportunity.  These, they think, are primary:  they do not need to show that they can be justified by deliberation or that they are required for deliberation to take place in order to be legitimate.  (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 17)

They see moral conflict within a society as something that should be faced by all citizens as almost a community-wide activity, as a common project.  They criticize Rawls for mentioning the value of deliberation in passing yet deciding not to pursue an examination of it.  (Rawls 1971, pp. 234, 259)  Furthermore, they take Rawls and his followers to task for suggesting that the determinacy of justice goes only as far as solitary philosophical reflection allows.  (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 38) Solitary reflection, to be sure, is a necessary supplement to deliberation, but it is not a substitute for it, and we can develop more conclusive principles and moral reasons and arguments through deliberation.  We do not need to assume that the work of reasoning and argument is done when we can do no more on our own.  They reject the liberal assumption that whatever part of a moral conflict cannot be decided reasonably by a suitably neutral individual is not a proper issue for public policy to deal with, but instead should be left up to the individual to decide freely.  Under such an assumption the realm of the political and the realm of moral conflict become separated. 

It was noted above that Gutmann and Thompson do not require that their deliberators be able to satisfactorily resolve each and every instance of moral disagreement.  After a certain point there is no more that deliberation and dialogue can do without relying on principles and constraints which would be unjustifiable and unacceptable to at least one of the parties to a disagreement.  The temptation in theories of dialogue is always to tighten the constraints and further limit the sorts of things that can be said, in order to increase the possibility of the conversation ending decisively by limiting the available responses at every turn.  The problem with this is that in order for the deliberation to succeed in reducing the friction of moral conflicts, it has to operate under constraints which are more or less acceptable to all.  If A and B have a dialogue, and A apparently trounces B argumentatively primarily because B cannot say a great deal of what he wants to say and what he thinks relevant to the discussion, B's defeat at the end of the deliberation will not do much for reducing moral disagreement if B rejects the outcome of the deliberation because he rejects one or more of the constraints that were imposed on him. 

Nonetheless, Gutmann and Thompson do accept some constraints as legitimate.  They appear to give two different versions of what the constraints should look like:  an earlier one, given in their article "Moral Conflict and Political Consensus" (1990), and a later one, given in their book Democracy and Disagreement (1996). I shall describe them both here.

They start out in "Moral Conflict and Political Consensus" by arguing that liberals have assumed too many constraints, too many "principles of preclusion" for keeping issues out of politics.  Specifically they criticize the appeal to Lockean arguments for religious toleration as being supportive of these restrictive assumptions.  Those who make this appeal claim that part of the argument for religious toleration is a skeptical one, an argument which says that there is no way of knowing which religion (if any) is true, and therefore no religious party can impose its views on any other; by analogy, the argument would go from moral skepticism to the conclusion that no group can impose its morality on any other.  Gutmann and Thompson argue that the argument for religious toleration cannot be skeptical, because it would then force any religious citizen who wanted to accept it to give up the view that his religious beliefs are true.  Instead, both the religious and moral arguments should leave the possibility of knowable truth on those matters intact, while acknowledging that at the present time people disagree reasonably about them. 

Gutmann and Thompson also reject Nagel's view that the justification of political action must be from common, objective reasons, as such a standard would again keep too much out of politics; i.e., it would rule out not only racial discrimination but also the belief in human equality. (Gutmann and Thompson 1990, p. 127)  They want to rule out racial discrimination as something up for public deliberation, so:

To preclude racial discrimination from reaching the agenda, we need to show that it fails to satisfy the validity premise in the Lockean argument, suitably extended beyond the case of religious conflict.  We need an argument showing that the defense of racial discrimination is not a moral position at all. If it is not, then no one can claim that, like religious belief, it is a position about which reasonable citizens might morally disagree.  (Gutmann and Thompson 1990, p. 129)

In order to rule out things like a defense of racial discrimination, Gutmann and Thompson offer three criteria which truly moral positions must meet.  First, they must be general and from a disinterested perspective, not mere expressions of self-interest, i.e., from a moral perspective in the broader sense of the word.  They ought to be in the form of a moral position, or, as Gutmann and Thompson put it, "seemingly moral." (p. 129)  Second, premises and reasons offered which involve claims about empirical evidence and logical inference ought to be open to challenge by standard methods of inquiry.  Third, the premises involved in the argument shouldn't be "radically implausible". (p. 130) 

I am not quite sure what should be said about this view.  On the one hand, it seems like a sensible move to defend and preserve our intuitions that racial discrimination shouldn't be up for serious discussion.   On the other hand, I think their argument and their constraints are rather problematic.  Part of my concern is a perhaps overly "nitpicky" worry about their use of the word "moral". A religion which does not meet the Lockean standard for being a valid and tolerable religion by being inconsistent with reason⁶ does not lose its characteristic of being religious; it is just a religion which does not meet the standards for deserving tolerance.  A moral position which does not meet an analogously-Lockean standard for being a valid moral position is still moral, it seems to me; it just does not meet our standards for tolerance. 

A bigger concern is the problem of ruling out certain kinds of issues as unacceptable.  The three criteria seem somewhat contrived since Gutmann and Thompson picked a view that they did not want to end up on the deliberative agenda and then tried to pick out characteristics of that view which could be generalized to rule out other positions.  This is analogous to constructing the test for religious validity by picking a religion we do not like and then using some of its characteristics as grounds for declaring a religion invalid or intolerable. 

Why do they think racial discrimination should be off the agenda anyway?  Is it because everybody already knows it is wrong (or at least the- vast majority of people do)?  That does not seem right—in that case it would make sense to allow talk about it because such talk would not get anywhere. Is their concern that people will be convinced by the racists' arguments and views if discussion and deliberation on the matter proliferate?  Or do they just mean that such a position does not deserve the respect that would be accorded it even by giving it a hearing?  The last option of the three seems like a probable candidate.  In that case it just seems that their decision not to respect a particular view has to do merely with their thinking that view to be very, very bad, and it is not clear how that decision is to be justified to someone who does not agree.  This is simply moral disagreement in action.  Their rendition of the Lockean argument for religious toleration says little about how religions might be shown to be invalid.  To say that the view is unreasonable or implausible does not help much in justifying the refusal to allow deliberation on the view to one who possesses it—he most likely finds his own view both reasonable and plausible.  In a sense we have just raised the disagreement to another level—from a disagreement about whether or not we should allow racial discrimination (for example) to a disagreement about whether or not an endorsement of racial discrimination is a respectable or reasonable position.  This seems like a more serious disagreement, as we are likely to feel more friendly towards those who think our view is incorrect than towards those who think our view is unworthy of respect.  So the gap will be widened by these constraints, and Gutmann and Thompson ultimately leave us with no way to narrow that gap.

At any rate, this sort of standard seems troublesome since the motivation for refusing to deliberate something to be the belief that the view is worthless, which merely seems to indicate a huge amount of disagreement between those who hold the view and those who do not.  But this just means that any large disparity in worldview will look like an acceptable reason for one group to write the other's views off as unreasonable and as an unfit subject for discussion, even in cases where we would want to say that the minority with "crazy" views is right.  We could imagine a society in which the democratic and freedom-protecting principles we cherish are ludicrously out of kilter with the majority view.  I do not think we would want to justify that society's keeping these principles out of the discussion because from their perspective they seem unreasonable (but not rationally refuted.)  Does it not make more sense to argue that a group should be allowed to present its view in the conversation and let the success and plausibility of the view be determined by how it fares in the discussion?  Are any positions worth holding (such as the position against racial discrimination) such that they need to be protected from being deliberated about?  One would hope not.  We would like to think that the moral reasonableness of such a position would be borne out in discourse.

Now perhaps someone who wants to keep certain issues (like racial discrimination) out of the debate by setting up constraints wants this because they think we have better and more important things to do with our time than debating that issue.  Specifically, they might think there are issues which need to be deliberated about and discussed which are much more important.  That very well may be true, but that is just a matter of priorities, not of any inherent problems with the position.  If we had no other issues on the agenda to discuss and nothing better to do, however, what would our justification be for refusing to discuss the issue be?  Of course, our willingness to dialogue with others on this or any matter is affected in large part by our beliefs about whether or not they are participating in good faith.  If we think that we have given them adequate reason to abandon their view, and that they are holding on out of sheer stubbornness, self-interest, inherent wickedness, or willful ignorance (i.e., refusing to look at the facts of the matter) we are less likely to be willing to dialogue with them.  But the spirit of the desire for real mutual justification should encourage us to try to give a fair appraisal of the reasons those who disagree with us have for disagreeing—we should be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.  It seems to me that this rules out the forbidding of certain positions out of hand.  If the defenders of racial discrimination or any other currently abhorrent moral position are sincere, it is not clear that we do not owe them an explanation of some sort. 

Another problem with the constraints is that some of them seem clearly culture-relative.  The most obvious case of this is the last constraint, the requirement that a view or the premises used in supporting a view not be "radically implausible."  But even the second constraint, the requirement that premises and views which involve empirical evidence or logical inference be "in principle open to challenge by generally accepted methods of inquiry" might be problematic.  This assumes that the same methods of inquiry, the same way of establishing correctness of the claims, and the same epistemological standards are held by all parties to the disagreement.  Is this always the case?  Might not methods of inquiry vary from culture to culture?  It seems to me that they might.  This is not a large problem right now, since most of our moral disagreements occur between groups who share very similar established methods of empirical inquiry.  But in past eras it would have been a problem, and it certainly might become one again at some point.

The relativity of plausibility is a much bigger problem.  It is clear that a moral position is going to be plausible to its adherents.  It seems too much to ask for it to be plausible to everyone.  What does it mean for a moral position to be implausible to someone?  Is it just to say that that person disagrees with it so extremely that they don't see how it could be true?  If one is really confident about their own position, will not other positions seem implausible to them?  If that is really all there is to implausibility, then it doesn't seem that we are justified in keeping implausible views off the table.  Think about an individual who has revolutionary moral insights which the rest of society has not yet adopted (a very early abolitionist, a very early desegregationist, or a very early feminist—Wollstonecraft comes to mind in the last case.)  Such a person's views may be implausible to the rest of society.   But if they are able to find evidence for their view and develop ways to defend it, it seems to me that it might be suitable for fodder discussion even though many found their position implausible at first glance.  It is simply not true that plausibility of a position to others follows from having good evidence and good reasons for one's position—society can be deaf to facts and reason for rather long periods of time, and social understandings can be quite difficult to transform. 

Another reason for my concern with the plausibility constraint (and the three constraints in general) is that I am unable to make sense of one of Gutmann and Thompson's examples—their example of antigay discrimination:

Laws against homosexuality and other policies that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation resemble the case of racial discrimination.   The basis for such policies fail (sic) the test of a moral position...Insofar as the case for these discriminatory policies rests on some perception of homosexual sex as unnatural, the position violates the third requirement of a moral position.  Nor has a consistent argument been constructed on plausible premises to show that homosexual sex cannot be understood as part of the human condition.  (Gutmann and Thompson 1990, p. 133)

Perhaps citizens 100 years ago should have regarded discrimination against homosexuals as failing to meet the standards of a moral position at all, but citizens today have stronger grounds for taking this view.  Because of the nature of social practices and the relative lack of public debate about the subject, many citizens at an earlier time may not have had an adequate opportunity to explore the full implications of their arguments.  Furthermore, those who morally opposed discrimination could not themselves be so confident of their position, until they had tested their moral views over time in various circumstances and subjected them to the experience and evidence that is now more widely available.  They come to see that, after ample opportunity for argument, the defenders of discrimination offer little more than expressions of personal preference.  Even if there is nothing inherent in a moral view itself that renders it beyond the pale of moral discourse, it may be disqualified, as discrimination against homosexuals is coming to be disqualified, by our common recognition of the moral vacuity of the case for it.  (Gutmann and Thompson 1990, p. 134, italics mine)

Now I agree in principle with what the second excerpt says about the changing of moral perspectives.  But I think (as of the year 2000) it is problematic to say that "perception of homosexual sex as unnatural" is implausible ("...violates the third requirement of a moral position") without specifying to whom it is implausible, and it is problematic to speak of "our common recognition of the moral vacuity of the case for [antigay discrimination.]" without being a little clearer about whose "common" recognition we are speaking of.  I myself would agree with Gutmann and Thompson that the case for antigay discrimination is quite weak for most of the reasons they cite, although I am not sure if "moral vacuity" is the term I would use to describe it.  But, rightly or wrongly, the fact of the matter is that a great many citizens in this country do not find the notion that homosexual sex is unnatural to be implausible (although that may very well be because they have not thought about it carefully) and do not share "our common recognition" of the weakness of the case for discrimination against gays. For example, a Gallup poll conducted in February 1999 found that 43 percent of respondents thought that "homosexual relations between consenting adults" should be illegal.⁷  Now, if 43 percent actually thought that homosexual relations should be forbidden by law, it seems quite likely that a few more than that found some position of antigay discrimination somewhat plausible.  So it appears to be at least possible that approximately half the country lacks the "our common recognition" of the moral vacuity of antigay legislation and finds the related views and premises to be plausible enough. 

Gay rights, for better or worse, is an extremely hot area of disagreement right now.  So it seems somewhat bizarre to me that Gutmann and Thompson declare it to be a closed case which no longer has a place on the moral agenda.  It may seem that this issue should be something that we all agree on, but it is evident that it is not something we all agree on, and I am not quite sure what the point is in pretending otherwise.  Given that this is an especially volatile area of disagreement, it makes no sense to try to sweep the issue off the table, to "wish" it off the national political agenda.  Opponents of gay rights are hardly likely to be satisfied by the announcement that their position has been found to be morally vacuous, and hence unworthy of being voiced in discussion.  If deliberation is an attempt to douse the hotter fires of moral conflict with respect and reason, declaring one side of a controversial argument to be unrespectable seems like pouring gasoline on the flames. We can get away with it on topics such as racial discrimination, where the unrespectable opposition is such a tiny minority, but in areas of real controversy,⁸  it seems like the wrong thing to do.

In Democracy and Disagreement, Gutmann and Thompson offer a different sort of constraint:  reciprocity.  Reciprocity is defined as making one's political reasoning "mutually justifiable," it is the requirement that one must "offer reasons that can be accepted by others who are similarly motivated to find reasons that can be accepted by others." (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 53)  But there appear to be two problems here.  First of all, what does "can" mean, when we are talking about reasons and arguments which"can" be accepted?  After all, we cannot just talk about reasons and arguments which are actually accepted by all reasonable people, because if we are just talking about reasons which we all actually do accept, it does not seem that we could ever touch the issue of disagreement.  We could do a lot of talking about the matters we already agree on, but none at all about those we do not.  So it seems that we would need to broaden the range of reasons acceptable for inclusion in the discussion to also contain those reasons which we do not actually accept but somehow "could".   The reasons and arguments presented, even those we disagree with, would need to be accessible to us in some way, and it seems rather unclear to me what way this is.  How do we, looking at arguments and reasons which we do not as a matter of fact accept, distinguish between those we could accept and those we could not, those which are accessible to us and those which are not?

Furthermore, I find it difficult to conceive what these reasons and arguments could be, as it seems to be very tricky to come up with a way to set aside a group of moral reasons and arguments as being accessible to all reasonable people.  We might try to avoid or minimize the problem by demanding that all those involved must share the desire to engage in this kind of discussion, the motivation of wanting to find what's fair for all, thus eliminating those who are simply indifferent to what their fellow citizens' views and desires are.  But the problems keep coming. Are a utilitarian's moral reasons and arguments "accessible" to a Kantian?  How about vice versa?  How about for other major ethical theories?  If the answer is "no", then it seems like discussion would have to be limited to people who share a basic theoretical framework of some sort of how to go about deciding what is right and wrong, and this seems much too limiting, ruling a great many people out of participation.  But if the answer is "yes", in what sense are they accessible in a way that, say, a religious fundamentalist's would not be?  At some point in their attempts to give reasons for their respective views, each must make a controversial and problematic claim that is difficult to provide reasons for.  If you reject the principle of utility, then the utilitarian's arguments for his position based on that principle will have little bite for you.  Similarly, if you reject whatever doctrines the religious fundamentalist adheres to, his arguments for his position based on those doctrines will not go very far towards persuading you. 

So I am at a loss regarding how to understand what this accessibility requirement could look like.  We might grant that certain basic moral precepts which virtually everyone accepts for one reason or another (don't steal, don't kill, don't cause harm, etc.) might meet the requirement.  But it seems that these kinds of precepts don't take us very far into moral controversies, at least not without our pondering how they should be applied and what their scope should be, and then the question arises of whether or not those considerations about application and scope are agreed upon or accessible.

Gutmann and Thompson's example in which they demonstrate their view of reciprocity is the case of a group of Christian fundamentalists who wanted their children to be excused from reading certain books which they deemed hostile to their children's moral and spiritual development.  The fundamentalists lost the legal case, and Gutmann and Thompson defend the court's decision by arguing that the fundamentalists failed to meet the conditions of reciprocity, i.e., they failed to give reasons for their position which could be accepted by all. 

"The principle [of reciprocity] proposes a basis on which those who morally disagree can cooperate, and it can be appropriately criticized only by proposing an alternative basis, not simply by reaffirming the moral or religious claim which that constitutes the disagreement. The fundamentalists do not offer an alternative.  Moreover, they themselves need some form of principle of reciprocity even to make their own case."  (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 67)

But what if the fundamentalists did not reject the idea of reciprocity in principle?  What if the essence of their objection to the school situation was that the principles involved were not justified by reasons which they accepted, that reciprocity had not been fulfilled by the school?  It is one thing to say that since their views are drastically in conflict with those of the majority and appeal to unquestionable authority, they should not be putting those particular moral views forward with an aim to making them general social policy.  Gutmann and Thompson give the example of the fundamentalists' objection to the fact that students in a school were required to read a textbook which contained a passage from Anne Frank's diary which states that unorthodox belief in God might be better than no belief in God at all, among other things which the fundamentalists found antagonistic to the values they wanted their children to be taught. 

Now it certainly makes sense to me that it would have been completely inappropriate for the fundamentalists to try to get the book banned so that no students could read it; they should not impose their view on the majority without good reasons.  But it seems slightly less clear that their requests to have their own children exempted were equally without merit. In some sense, it seems that the school is imposing a particular moral view through its policies based on reasons which are not acceptable to the fundamentalists.  We might try to excuse that by arguing that the fundamentalists were not morally motivated, not really trying to find mutually acceptable and justifiable principles.  But what if that were not the problem at all--what if they had no objection to seeking mutually acceptable principles, but the problem was that the disagreement in worldview between the two groups was just so immense that no such principles relating to the topic in question existed.  After all, does not it seem possible that if the fundamentalists would be unable to present reasons for their views that would be acceptable to anyone outside their framework, much less everyone, that it would also be highly unlikely that those outside that framework would be equally or almost as unable to present reasons for their views that would be acceptable to the fundamentalist?  In other words, reciprocity might be a nice idea, but when that standard is not met, isn't the failure to meet it likely to be mutual?⁹

For these reasons, I find Gutmann and Thompson's later constraint of reciprocity to be as troublesome as the earlier requirements.  While I think Gutmann and Thompson are right in rejecting the "familiar liberal way of dealing with moral conflict," (that is, invoking a principle like neutrality which rules out state action on policies about which people can reasonably disagree), in favor of allowing "greater moral disagreement about policy" on the grounds that the liberal solution to problems of moral disagreement is "not sufficient to eliminate moral disagreement from politics," (Gutmann and Thompson 1990, p. 125) I think that they do not go far enough.  They too want to keep certain positions and views out of public discussion.  In some cases their ways of precluding moral positions from ending up on the political agenda are less satisfactory than the traditional liberal way. 

After all, neutrality is a solid, sensible principle which many would intuitively think desirable for all moral-political positions to conform to.  The real problem with it is that people disagree about what positions are neutral and how neutrality should be politically implemented.  Hence, the disagreements which are supposed to dissolve under a waving of the magic wand of neutrality do not.  Gutmann and Thompson's requirements, on the other hand, are generated in an ad hoc fashion—they first decide that there are certain views which they want ruled out of the conversation, and then come up with rules which would justify this exclusion.  These rules, especially the requirements of plausibility and reciprocity, seem rather problematic as I have argued above. 

Here it could be pointed out that even if Gutmann and Thompson are simply imposing limits on what dialogue is allowed to come up with, this might very well be justified in cases like racial discrimination or sexual orientation in which we know we are right.  After all, it is a common criticism of open dialogue, multiculturalism, and all sorts of openness to those with drastically different cultural and moral perspectives that some cultures (at least from our point of view) are just plain wrong or evil in certain respects, and that we should not be respecting of or open towards evil.  This I take to be the main thrust of one sort of feminist critique of multiculturalism, as exemplified in Okin's "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?"  (Okin 1999) Some cultures simply treat women badly, and practices which involve this mistreatment of women should not be coddled or protected in the name of diversity and multiculturalism.  We are willing to accept or tolerate alternative perspectives on some issues, but not on an issue like this.  By extrapolating this line of thought, one might think that views such as those should not even be up for discussion.

But it is not clear how an emphatic rejection of the correctness of certain positions, an emphatic disagreement with them, entails such a conclusion.  After all, for Gutmann and Thompson, the willingness to dialogue over moral disagreements is based not upon an appreciation of the merits of the other's position, but upon an attitude of mutual respect towards those with whom one disagrees.  The argument for dialogue and deliberation rather than some form of traditional liberalism or majority rule is an argument from the respect due to one's fellow citizens.  It seems rather problematic to say that we ought to respect our fellow citizens, and demonstrate that respect by treating our disagreement with them as real and legitimate, as something that ought to be addressed together in a spirit of accommodation with a desire to justify our views to one another, and then go on to say that that respect extends only so far, and some moral positions ought not to be respected.  What makes those disagreements different from any others?  Isn't this refusal to talk about certain positions a sort of the moral dogmatism which Gutmann and Thompson explicitly condemn:

Citizens who respect one another as moral agents are less inclined toward the moral dogmatism, and its accompanying attitude of arrogance, that is common among those who take moral opposition as a sign of ignorance or depravity. (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 80)

I fail to understand the distinction between the moral dogmatism described here and the moral dogmatism reflected in Gutmann and Thompson's insistence on keeping certain issues off the agenda.  Of course, our willingness to discuss differences will depend on our assessment of the motives of those who disagree with us, but it seems quite implausible to assume that in all these cases, the rightness of our position is so evident that no one could sincerely disagree with us unless their motives were bad.  At any rate, it is not at all clear how this move of declaring certain positions to be unrespectable and unworthy of discussion is going to be justified to their adherents, and it is even less clear how making this move helps with the problem of moral disagreement, as I have discussed above.  It is not clear to me how the opposition's "bad" view, if sincere, releases me from my obligation to respect them, converse with them, pursue mutually acceptable ways of coexistence with them, etc. 

Here of course the objection might be that I am nonchalantly opening a way for a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic mass social conversion.  But that does not seem very likely to me.  Are we so unsure of the strength of our own democratic convictions and our own moral positions that we cannot leave them open to disagreement by others?  Why should we think that racial discrimination, or any other abhorrent social evil, would succeed in a political conversation and win adherents among the citizens?  If we have so little faith in citizens' ability to participate responsibly and reasonably in the conversation and to carry out good deliberations on other ostensibly more difficult to decide matters, why would we not trust them with the no-brainers as well? 

In fact, I would argue that a refusal to talk about certain moral issues could be tragic.  Call it the tragedy of moral forgetfulness.  As Gutmann and Thompson rightly point out, the plausibility and defensibility of certain moral views within a culture varies over time. (Gutmann and Thompson 1990, p. 134)  Slavery was, once upon a time, defensible in some cultures; racial segregation and refusing to allow women to vote were, once upon a time, defensible in our culture, or at least more defensible than they are now.  Not too long ago, however, arguments were needed and were supplied in favor of abolitionism, desegregation, and women's suffrage.  I would argue that there is something dangerous in merely labeling certain positions, no matter how outrageous they seem to us, as being obviously wrong in a way that precludes our needing to think about them.  If this "good moral dogmatism" prevails for a while, we might eventually forget the arguments and the evidence which allowed us to defend to the now dogmatically and unquestionably correct view when it was still controversial.  If we "regress" morally, to the point where our old dogmatic moral beliefs are being threatened by some new tide of human indifference, intolerance, cruelty, hatred, or injustice (and surely there are historical precedents for this), we may find ourselves without the conceptual or argumentative resources to defend our position against views which previously seemed absurd but which have become all too appealing.  I do not mean to recommend that we spend all our energy and deliberation on re-fighting the same battles against certain moral evils over and over again.  But it certainly seems beneficial to at least take the time and the effort to remind ourselves of the ridiculousness of certain pernicious moral views by refuting them from our own perspective.

Gutmann and Thompson's theory of dialogue does allow the state to confront a lot of disagreements through dialogue and discussion among its citizens that under non-dialogic liberal theories and some dialogic theories such as Ackerman's would be ignored and swept off the table as being outside the scope of neutrality and hence unfit for serious political discussion or action.  Nonetheless, it seems to me that they do not go far enough, and I think the constraints which they use to control which views and issues actually get admitted are somewhat  problematic.  So I am not completely satisfied with the version of dialogue that they offer.  In the next chapters, I will attempt to come up with a form of dialogue which does not face the problems which trouble me about Ackerman's theory and Gutmann and Thompson's theory. 

5. See for example the dialogue on p. 38. (Ackerman 1980) [back]

6. Gutmann and Thompson suggest that the validity standard requires that the religious or moral position be something about which reasonable citizens can disagree.  (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, p. 127, 129) [back]

7. Oddly enough in the same poll 83 percent of respondenths that "homosexuals should have equal rights in terms of job opportunities." (www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr990301b.asp) [back]

8. It is a real controversy not so much because of the merits of either of the opposing positions but because of the numbers of people involved on each side. [back]

9. Note: I am not claiming that the fundamentalists were right or that they should have won their legal case. Considerations of church-state separation appear to point towards the opposite conclusion. (But see Stolzenberg (1993), which questions the court's treatment of the dilemma. All I am saying is that the notion of reciprocity gives an inadequate account of why the fundamentalists were wrong. [back]