“Human Rights Protection, Democratic Deliberation”
61
113-118; Mookherjee, 2009: 49-50;
Okin, 2005a: 80; Phillips,
2007: 170-179; Song, 2007: 9, 43-46, 69). It is revisability that
carries the most weight;
29
democratic deliberations cannot be
regarded as one-shot affairs, one-time experiments. What justifies
periodic negotiations in which the participants treat each other on
equal moral footing is the secure knowledge that the compromise
forged at the present can be revisited in the future. The possibility
of changing not only the outcome of compromise, when warranted
by new circumstances, but also the normative principles that govern
and produce the compromise is one of the strengths of deliberation.
By probing, uncovering, and broadening what we hold deeply, e.g.,
customary practices, traditional views and fundamental truth-claims,
democratic deliberation can lead to a revision and/or rejection of
these.
But there is a downside: the strength of deliberation hides its
weakness. Given the shadow of tomorrow, i.e., the knowledge that
a compromise today may very well be revisited in the future,
participants will have to take into account, which may include the
need to kowtow to, the views of the powers-that-be who are usually
conservative elders and very often they insist on preserving
traditional practices and time-honored institutions that benefit
them mostly, i.e., the status quo. Furthermore, democratic
deliberation involves conducting negotiations in good faith, which
in practice often include trials and errors, false starts and missteps,
and overcoming these. As a result, the final compromise tends to be
narrow in scope. In fact, decades of scholarship have showed that
democratic deliberation leaves the wider authority structures intact
because the primary interest of the participants lies in the process of
deliberation within
deliberative forums (Pateman, 1970: 13, 26,
42-44; 2012: 10). Hence, the purview is very often delimited.
Now, defenders of the existing approaches might argue that
29
The principles of non-domination and political equality have been shown to be
impractical. See, for example, the criticisms recently summed up by Hayward
(2011: 476-477).
