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The Wrath of Thrasymachus: Value Irrationality and the

Failures of Deliberative Democracy

by

Michael J. Thompson Dept. Political Science

William Paterson University

Raubinger Hall 300 Pompton Road

Wayne, NJ 07470 thompsonmi@wpunj.edu

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The Wrath of Thrasymachus: Value Irrationality and the Failures of Deliberative Democracy

Abstract: Deliberative democracy has become one of the most hegemonic theories of modern

democracy. I believe it is a theory that rests on assumptions about social epistemology and moral cognition that cannot be maintained and which has not been properly examined. In this paper, I present a critique of deliberative democratic theory by arguing that deliberative and discourse-

based theories of democracy suffer from what I term “deliberative failures” which are the result of cognitive distortions of the capacity of individuals to articulate reasonable claims. I call value

irrationality that condition where individuals express arguments and receive information bia sed by certain values and value-orientations which remain out of reach of conscious deliberation. The result is something I term “epistemological warping” that results when individuals are

unable to call into question the value-orientations that undergird our normative conceptions of the world and, on a deeper level, to distort our ability to grasp properly knowledge about the

world, ourselves, and others. I put forward an alternative direction for critical theorists to move, back to the questions of social structure and its ability to shape the value-orientations of individuals.

1. Introduction

Let’s begin with a fairly typical encounter: a dialogical exchange between two people

about a moral or political issue of some import. As it proceeds, the discussion becomes heated.

Different views are expressed, different “facts” marshaled as evidence for each step of the

respective arguments. Some arguments are accepted as valid, others rejected as ludicrous. As

the argument continues, the tension rises, the exchange of reasonable claims occasionally

dipping into ad hominem attack. Soon each grows tired with the other, leaving with the

impression of the other’s incorrect understanding of the world. This is a kind of political or

moral interaction that is almost paradigmatic whether in everyday life or in more formal

procedural settings. Although not exhaustive of the types of dialogical encounter that can be

experienced in political and moral affairs, it is a broadly common one, one that I would like to

use as means to introduce a particular critique of the theory of deliberative democracy—a

critique which will emphasize the problem that values, belief systems, and moral cognition and

concepts play in undermining the ability of discursive practices to come to what has been

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referred to as the “moral-transformative experience” intrinsic to the act of deliberation and

discourse. (Barber, 1984; Benhabib, 1986; Warren, 1993)

Although fictitious, this encounter raises an important question for those studying

questions of social epistemology and democratic theory. In what ways is possible for the theory

of deliberative democracy to be maintained in the face of real and serious distortions in the ways

individuals process, receive, and articulate arguments and informa tion? In this paper, I propose

the following thesis: that deliberative theories of democracy rest on a false understanding of the

nature of social epistemology, one that is ultimately fatal to its assumptions about the nature of

human reason and the potentiality of rational forms of democratic debate, deliberation, and

discourse. I maintain that this weakness stems from the inability of these theories to deal with

the problem of value systems or, more specifically, of value-orientations that are deeply

ingrained within the personality structure of individuals. These value-orientations are able to

shape, to bias, and to orient forms of cognition in such a way that the ways in which individuals

think about their world cannot always be transformed by deliberation or discourse. Quite to the

contrary, I contend that value-orientations are embedded at a deeper level of consciousness such

that they are, more often than not, beyond the grasp of typical conscious reasoning. This I call

“value irrationality” because the values become the building blocks for the premises of argument

that individuals will articulate and use to frame their world. pre-formed frames individuals

utilize to make sense of their world which they refuse, for various reasons, to expose to forms of

scrutiny—reflexive, public, or otherwise—and which have a distorting force on the premises

they use to deliberate as well as, in a more important way, the ways that they epistemically

process their world, legitimate it, invest it with a sense of meaning and cathexis, and filter it with

their own schemas and frames of moral, normative evaluation. Values are irrational when they

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are anchored subjectively and are submerged beneath the conscious awareness of the participants

of deliberative practices.

Of course, ancient Athenians were well aware of the problem of the irrational as a force

in politics. Central to their institutions of democratic governance was the mechanism of

deliberation and persuasion, but the problem of irrational debate was rampant. Indeed, in his

Republic, Plato immortalized the extreme of this problem in the character Thrasymachus who

famously abandons the introductory dialogue on justice in personal disgust rather than submit his

views to rational scrutiny and “dialectic.” Today this force is deeply embedded in the political

culture of modern democracies and it has become one of the central pillars of liberal democratic

theory. A central normative feature of this theory is the idea that citizens be held accountable to

the standards of public reason, that they are able to test their ideas and convictions about what

they see as valid, legitimate, correct, in the tribunal of public reason. The mechanism of

discourse, of deliberation is the central mechanism that ensures this normative commitment of

liberal democracy. This has meant that the very idea of the substance of democratic culture and

politics rests in publicly shared methods of inquiry that can be used to scrutinize the claims of

others as well as ourselves. The turn toward discourse as an essential and basic mechanism for

public reason has also been one of the great turns within late twentieth-century political theory.

But this idea fails to take seriously, in my view, the ways in which the epistemic

processes of individual actors is tied to the social world. It fails to consider the ways in which

the cognition of individuals can be affected by the existence of previously formed biases,

normative categories of evaluation, and personality orientations, themselves shaped by the social

nature of individual subjects. Although the deliberative turn in democratic theory is conceived

as a major innovation in securing democratic forms of legitimacy, of the construction of

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democratic forms of will- formation and public opinion, and the move toward a more educative,

reflexive form of civil society and modernity, my thesis is that it is unable to account for these

value-orientations, and therefore fails to conceive properly of the ways in which social

epistemology functions. Conceived as a mechanism allowing for the penetration of democratic,

open forms of social consciousness even as it is seen as grounded in the most basic practices of

human communication and discourse, it is unable, in the end, to deal with the problems of value

irrationality. It suggests that there exists structures of moral cognition which are shaped in such

a way as to repel the critical effects of deliberation and discursive practice that these theorists

hold up as transformative. Instead, I will argue that individuals hold so fast to their basic value

structure, more often than not and in a broad enough portion of society, that they will in fact be

immune to the theoretical effects of reasonable deliberation.

In place of the notion of deliberation as an exchange of assertorial statements and the

collective investigation of rational validity claims, deliberation between individuals affected by

what I call “epistemic warping” where the capacities of moral cognition of individuals—defined

as their ability to assess information in unbiased ways, to be open to the claims of others, as well

as the ability to articulate their own statements and arguments in ways that are reasonable—

disintegrates because of their inability to open their values and belief system to rational claims,

effecting the premises that undergird their deliberative practices. The problem is not that

individuals are somehow intrinsically irrational on their own, as postmodernists might claim, but

rather that there exist socially mediated and constructed value-orientations, cognitive schemas,

elements of the personality structure of individuals, and so on, that prevent the reflexive

mechanism prized by deliberative theorists from working properly, if at all. My claim is that

these pathologies of cognition are rooted in elements of the ways in which individuals are

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constituted; that prior to the communicative, discursive elements of personality constitution lie

the ways in which the social order itself conditions and shapes the values, value-orientations, and

attitudes most individuals use to make sense of their world; and that, as a further claim, these

value systems are not called into question by the processes of deliberation, what I call value

irrationality. Rather, agents bring these cognitive, discourse-shaping frames into the forum with

them without being conscious of it or its epistemological effects. Value-orientations shape,

structure, condition their evaluative as well as cognitive framing of the world and, in turn, their

ability to participate fully in deliberation itself. In the end, I argue that the avoidance or

ignorance of this phenomenon on the part of deliberative theorists is mortal to its proposition as a

progressive, rationalist theory of democracy.

2. The Rational Autonomy Orthodoxy

The central assumption that lies at the heart of deliberative and discourse-based theories

of democracy is that each individual is capable of accessing or of obtaining some degree of

rational self-scrutiny over their own set of preferences in the sense that they are able to justify,

with reasons, the ideas and preferences they have about their political worldviews. It also means

that they are able to assess the arguments and reasons of others and engage in a process of

reasoned discussion. In other words, they are expected to be able to revise their own conceptions

and preferences within the context of deliberation. The various strands of deliberative and

discursive theories of democracy share this assumption about political agents: that they are

capable of forming, knowing, and articulating their own endogenous preferences and (a)

articulating them through the employment of reason, as well as (b) revising their ideas and

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preferences based on better reasons derived from the discursive practices of public reason.1 The

attractiveness of this approach is based on the notion that discourse is able to bring people to

make some kind of sense of their preferences and worldviews without any form of external

coercion. 2 Discourse is a process that requires individuals to produce validity claims that have

the effect of rendering their arguments and preferences conscious and to produce them for public

forms of scrutiny. (cf. Brandom, 1998; Habermas, 2005) This is because there is a link theorized

between the practice of producing statements which are intended for public deliberation and

those that are not. Only by expanding the practice of the former can we expand the reflexive

nature of rational intersubjectivity. By introducing claims through a process of deliberation, we

exercise a rational capacity to transform the ideas and conceptions of others as well as of

ourselves.

This rational autonomy orthodoxy is the reliance precisely on this conception of the

human subject and its capacity to be able to enter into deliberative engagements, but also for

those deliberative engagements to be able to produce shared understandings of the social world

according to universalizable criteria of validity. Even more, it refers to the pragmatically

inspired understanding of deliberation as “consisting of self- rule by the public deliberation of

free and equal citizens,” (Bohman, 2004: 33) which has the aim of creating a “reflexive form of

1 This “rational autonomy orthodoxy,” as I am calling it here, is something shared by thinkers who have competing

views of role of public reason in democratic theory. Rawls, for instance, argues that rational autonomy “rests on

persons’ intellectual and moral powers. It is shown in their exercising their capacity to form, to revise, and to pursue

a conception of the good, and to deliberate in accordance with it.” (Rawls, 1993: 72) Habermas also shares a

conception of rational autonomy as an essential precondition for discourse by enabling individuals to orient

themselves toward universalistic frames of reference: “Universalistic action orientations reach beyond all existing

conventions and make it possible to gain some distance from the social roles that shape one’s background and

character.” (Habermas, 1987: 97) Both share the notion that individuals will be able to have expressive access to

their ideas of the good but also that they will be able to revise their conceptions through the use of public reason.

This is the core contention I want to critique in this paper.

2 Dryzek (2000) terms this “democratic authenticity” by which he means “the degree to which democratic control

is engaged through communication that encourages reflection upon preferences without coercion,” 8.

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inquiry and testing, deliberative democracy can be reconstructed as a means of inquiry for

creating and testing new ends.” (Bohman, 2004: 34) There is, then, both a moral and an

epistemological claim being made at once. On the one hand, deliberation is taken to advance a

critical conception of democracy since it is able to provide a non-coercive context within which

individuals are able to elaborate, form, and express their own preferences and conceptions of

civic life or ethical worldviews. But at the same time, this exchange of reasons forces us to

articulate reasons for our views that others will see as valid. On this view, a more rational

democratic order would allow for the open deliberation of citizens because it has the ability to

change our first-order preferences to another set which are reflexively constituted.3 The central

claim here is that deliberation is able to move individuals toward a form of self- reflection that

will allow them to call into question their own subjective desires, preferences, world-views, and

so on.4

This is achieved through the epistemological claim that there exist what Maeve Cooke

(2000) has called “normative conceptions of knowledge” that allow for a form of epistemic

validity based on deliberative practices. The key here is not only to construct an intersubjective,

anti- foundationalist understanding of ethical validity that can be accepted by the widest possible

3 Rostbøll (2005) therefore argues that: “Common deliberation, thus, achieves the sought-for qualitative difference

between acting on first-order desires and acting on reflexive judgment, because the latter alone is based on reasons

and knowledge gained intersubjectively.” Forst (2001) also argues for such an understanding of deliberative

democracy as “a political practice of argumentation and reason-giving among free and equal citizens, a practice in

which individual and collective perspectives and positions are subject to change through deliberation and in which

only those norms, rules or decisions which result from some form of reason-based agreement among the citizens are

accepted as legitimate.” 346

4 Rostbøll (2005) argues that “[d]eliberation triggers self-reflection not only regarding one’s first-order preferences

but also regarding one’s reflexive preferences. It does this because one must be willing to defend one’s opinions

and give reasons for them to others and because one must be willing to listen to the reasons others have for their

views. The deliberative process also imparts information about the world because this inevitably will be part of the

arguments given for different points of view.” 376. Dryzek (2000) similarly argues on this point: “[w]hile discourses

do indeed help to condition the way people think, individuals are not necessarily prisoners of the discourses that

have helped to create their identities. Instead, the essence of engagement and challenge across discourses is that

individuals can be brought to reflect upon the content of discourses in which they move.” 163.

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number of social participants; it is also to emphasize the centrality of what J. S. Mill (1966)

referred to as the “collision with error” that emerges when individuals deliberate freely. The

individual as well as the community is changed, so the argument goes, by the airing of

reasonable arguments for different, oftentimes conflicting positions of collective, political

importance. The social, public use of reason therefore is a crucial element to the ways in which

we work out our understandings of the world. Moral conflicts arise, these theorists argue, from

our incomplete understanding of different matters—deliberation is an educative process aimed at

providing “the most justifiable conception for dealing with moral disagreement in politics.”

(Gutmann and Thompson, 2004: 10) Epistemology needs to be seen as social, intersubjective in

order to qualify as a necessary and sufficient condition for the construction of moral validity

claims.5 This can be in the form of arguing that the act of deliberation intrinsically possesses

these features, or that the procedures and rules governing them ought to in some way be judged

by the ideal model of rational deliberation. 6 Individuals will learn from one another; they will

5 Gutmann and Thompson (2004) elaborate this view as follows: “[t]hrough the give-and-take of argument,

participants can learn from each other, come to recognize their individual and collective misapprehensions, and

develop new views and policies that can more successfully withstand critical scrutiny. When citizens bargain and

negotiate, they may learn how better to get what they want. But when they deliberate, they can expand their

knowledge, including both their self-understanding and their collective understanding of what will best serve their

fellow citizens.”12. Manin (1987) also adds to this that “[o]ne argues in order to try to persuade others. But one

tries only to persuade, that is, to produce or reinforce agreement to a proposition . . . Political deliberation and

argumentation certainly presuppose a relatively reasonable audience. They also require a certain degree of

instruction and culture on the part of the public. But they constitute processes of education and of training in

themselves. They broaden the viewpoints of citizens beyond the limited outlook of their private affairs. They spread

light.” 353-354. In this sense we see the basic foundation of the epistemic claim of deliberative theory: the

educative, reflexive nature of moral and political discursive practices and that are supposed to enable the subject’s

expansion beyond his traditional or conventional world-views.

6 As Estlund (2008) argues, “the ideal deliberative situation, even existing only in thought, serves as a template

against which to judge reality in order to identify and deal with deviations.” 199. This is because Estlund, too,

believes in the epistemic nature of deliberative proceduralism as a matter of legitimation or validity. If democracy is

to have any degree of legitimate authority, then it must be able to link “legitimacy and authority of a decision to its

procedural source and not its substantive correctness.” 116. Cohen (1999) argues, on the other hand, that such an

“ideal deliberative procedure” needs to serve as a “model characterization of free reasoning among individuals,

which can in turn serve as a model for arrangements of collective decision making that are to establish a framework

of free reasoning among equals.” 396. We are forced back once again on the assumption that such procedures or

practices are imbued with characteristics of epistemic rationality or at least reasonableness, an assumption I will

show in the next section that cannot realistically be held.

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become more reflexively in tune to their own preferences, but they will also be able “to root out

bad arguments and sectarianism.” (Dryzek, 2000: 169)

Only when individuals make arguments aimed at justification through deliberation can

we produce outcomes that are democratic in the sense that they are aimed at what all participants

are ideally able to understand. The process of deliberation is therefore seen to be able to have (a)

an educative effect on citizens through the kind of reasons articulated by the reflexivity of

deliberative practices; (b) to produce a criterion of validity which is achieved through the former

process allowing for a kind of self-understanding accomplished by the social, intersubjective

sharing of reasons. Habermas refers to this as a “discourse principle,” arguing that “just those

action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in

rational discourses.” (Habermas, 1996: 107) So, at the heart of the theory of deliberative

democracy lies the notion that its unique power lies in its reflexivity and as a means to achieving

a more democratic (i.e., inclusive) conception of validity for legal and moral norms. (Habermas,

1998) But this can only be achieved once we admit that such processes are intrinsically rational

or at least reasonable in the sense that individuals allow themselves to enter into a reflexive form

of self-understanding that will open them up to the possible transformation of their preferences

and world-views. (cf. Elster, 1998)

Although others have been critical of this approach (Bohman, 1997; Sanders, 1997;

Johnson, 1998; Reinstra and Hook, 2006), I am not convinced they have gone far enough in

analyzing the deeper structures of social epistemology that come into play during the process of

deliberative practice. More specifically, I think that there exists a significant blind spot in this

theory with respect to the antecedent conditions that individuals and groups bring to almost any

form of deliberative or discursive encounter. Specifically, the assumption of the rational

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autonomy orthodoxy cannot be maintained because of the condition of epistemic warping where

the value-orientations of individuals affect their structure of moral cognition to such an extent

that they (a) will not meet the criteria laid out for rational autonomy; and (b) that this, in turn,

leads to specific failures in deliberative practices and their ability to create socially accepted

validity claims. These “deliberative failures” are the effects of value-orientations on the moral

cognition of subjects and their inability to achieve a truly self- reflexive relation to themselves

and the values that shape their world-views. Contrary to more rationalist social epistemological

assumptions of deliberative theorists, I argue that many are unable to gain critical distance from

their own moral perspectives, that they also distort the utterances of others, and that a consequent

breakdown of effective discourse results. But first, I will need to defend the thesis of epistemic

warping before considering the nature of deliberative failures.

3. Value-Orientations and Epistemic Warping

If the basic problem with the theory of deliberative democracy lies in its foundation in the

assumption of a rationally or even reasonably open-minded subject who would be able and

willing to consider the views, arguments, moral propositions, of others, then we need to

understand how that irrationality is generated. My proposition is that despite its assumption that

it has overcome certain metaphysical forms of reasoning by moving from a subject-centered

form of reason to an intersubjective paradigm (cf. Habermas, 1993; 1996), deliberative theory

still relies on an under-socialized conception of social agents. Behind the deliberative capacities

of social participants lay structures of moral cognition—shaped and reinforced by certain forms

of socialization—which themselves shape and structure systems of moral concepts, normative

attitudes and world-views, frames of mind which all too often remain submerged beneath self-

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conscious awareness. To frame this critique, I need to discuss the nature of these structures of

moral cognition and show their impact on the normative views subjects hold.

Values are “evaluative beliefs that synthesize affective and cognitive elements to orient

people to the world in which they live.” (Marini, 2000: 2828) A value is a unique concept since

it serves as a background for making decisions about what is right and what is wrong, what is

beautiful and ugly, and what is acceptable from what is unacceptable, what is legitimate and

what is not, and so on. It structures certain categories that, in turn, shape the structure of the

ways we think through, evaluate, normatively frame the world. Values are the result of

socialization, the shaping of the cognitive and cathectic forces of the personality, and as a result

they “merge affect and concept.” (Williams, 1979: 16; cf. Schwartz, 1992; Hitlin and Piliavin,

2004) In this sense, they are deeply imbedded in our consciousness, and as a result we become

unaware of them—as a result, they often precede conscious reflection. Values are not easily

disembedded from an individual’s structure of moral cognition. Quite to the contrary, they are

deeply entwined with the individual’s reflexive conception of self as well as their conception of

external objects, in particular the values that “others” possess, the actions them perform, and so

on.

These values, when taken together, can orient our ways of thinking giving rise to value-

orientations, normative schemas that we actively use to frame our moral world. Antecedent to

our deliberative capacities and views, we are generally not aware of them and, as a result, they

can affect the ways in which moral concepts about the world are constructed in turn constituting

the premises we use in discourse. Value irrationality, on this view, can be defined as a condition

where an individual is unable to raise his value-orientations and normative concepts and

categories about the world to the level of rational self-reflection. As a result, there emerges a

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distorting effect of these value-orientations on the processes of moral cognition as well as the

epistemic capacities of processing information and articulating arguments, premises, and moral

claims. This becomes the crux of my argument: the extent to which these value-orientations are

addressed or exposed to scrutiny in deliberative contexts. Most of the time, this is not possible

since the roots of value-orientations are not easily brought to critical awareness and, even in such

cases where that might occur, there is no guarantee that it will lead to an acceptance of new

forms of information about the world rather than a retreat to entrenched world-views that are

more existentially comforting to the individual or group.7

The relation between value-orientations and actual discourse is a complex one. If we

think of value-orientations as affecting structures of moral cognition, then we can also see that

the mechanisms of moral cognition also shape our conceptions of the world. This is because our

normative concepts (such as what is right/wrong, acceptable/forbidden, and so on) in many ways

results from the value systems with which we are inculcated through the process of socialization.

But the value-orientations and structures of moral cognition occur at an unconscious level in the

sense that the subject is unaware of them. Read in this way, our conceptual thought about moral

preferences and what we think of as right and wrong, and so on, occurs at a higher level of

consciousness. The ways we evaluate the world according to the moral norms we utilize at a

level beneath everyday awareness therefore shape our conceptual grasp about the world. It is

from these concepts that we derive premises that we utilize in discourse (i.e., as utterances) that

become the very stuff of deliberation, of our discursive acts. I have summarized this schema of

7 This is also known as “biased assimilation” which serves as a subjective barrier to the acceptance of new

information, attitudes or beliefs. Individuals who hold strong views and opinions about political and social matters

tend to judge empirical evidence in a biased manner. (Lord, Ross, and Lepper, 1979).

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relations in figure 1 which represents a model of the relation between the level of moral

cognition and value-orientations and the conscious act of discourse.

value-

orientations

moral

cognition

concepts

premises discourse

L1

L2

L3

Figure 1: Model of value-orientations and their relation to discourse.

Now we can approach the question of value- irrationality with more sophistication. If we

assume that L1 provides us with a structure of thinking about the world (structures of moral

cognition) that is unconscious, then the higher levels of the model should be affected and shaped

by the styles of cognition utilized at L1. Lower levels on this model represent levels of relative

unawareness not easily accessible to conscious or rational thought, and many times caught up

with the personality structure and cathectic layer of the individual. On average, people are

unaware of the value-orientations and value systems that give shape to their world-views and

consequently tend to allow them to filter or frame incoming information about the world in

specific ways. (cf. Kuklinski and Quirk, 2000) This is because value-orientations, although

potentially pliable, are axiomatic in the process of forming knowledge about the world in both a

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passive and an active sense.8 Value-orientations are axial to the extent that we derive our

knowledge about normative issues as well as certain factual schemes from them; we utilize them

in a very basic, primary way to make sense of our world and give it meaning. Our structures of

moral cognition are shaped by them and we in turn use them to formulate certain moral concepts

about the world that we then use at a more conscious level to construct premises for our

arguments and validity claims. A person who has been brought up to respect discipline and

authority and who has absorbed these values into their way of thinking and acting (i.e., as value-

orientations) will conceptualize political dissent differently from someone who has been brought

up with different value-orientations to the importance of authority, and so on. They will assess

factual matters differently from those with different value-orientations, and they will therefore

produce different forms of knowledge about the world as a result. (cf. Kuklinski, Quirk, Jerit,

and Rich, 2001; Gaines, Kuklinski, Quirk, Peyton, and Verkuilen, 2007) The relation between

value-orientations and the epistemological processes of the individual are therefore, many times,

related.

In other words, our moral cognition generates conceptions of the world (L2 in my model

above) that we then use to articulate premises for discussion and debate. In short, what I think

this means is that our discursive acts are the product of this deep process of moral cognition and

normative concept-formation. The concepts one generates can also go a long way in reinforcing

the value-orientations that make one’s ego secure, so one becomes deeply invested in the specific

8 By axiomatic, I mean the notion that values form a kind of basic structure for the moral orientation and hence the

evaluative action of individuals. This is discussed by Feibleman (1954) in his analysis of what he calls a basic value

system: “cultures are systems of theories as to the nature of things, they consist in the more or less intuitive and

rational applications of axioms of an ontological nature in order to produce theorems which shall be illustrated in

well-defined personality, group and institutional structures and activities. If this hypothesis is correct, then the

common denominator of all manifestations of a culture is contained in the fact that they have all been deduced from

the same axiom-set.” 421-432. Of course, in pluralist societies, we can expect individuals to have different and

conflicting value systems whereas more homogenous and conventional societies will possess more unification

around a single basic value system.

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moral-conceptual schemas that one has constructed since it helps to navigate the world. In the

realm of politics, this becomes a particularly powerful mechanism since individuals may also

encounter problems of ego-threat in their confrontation with different world-views and

arguments that challenge or contradict their own moral-conceptual schemes sometimes leading

to forms of authoritarianism and intolerance. (cf. Feldman and Stenner, 1997; Stenner, 2005: 25-

36) Deliberation therefore occurs at the top-most, or most conscious level (L3 in my model

above) and therefore does not always, nor necessarily, access the lower levels of moral cognition

and value-orientation. Rather, my hypothesis is that these lower- level dimensions of the model

maintain an active process of shaping the higher levels where actual concept- formation occurs

and premises utilized in discourse are employed. In this sense, the value system one acquires

through the process of socialization deeply affects the nature of deliberation and discourse

because both the production as well as the reception of knowledge and information from other

sources will be framed by value-orientations and moral cognition. Indeed, if this hypothesis is

correct, that it will be necessary to investigate the social structures within which one is

individuated to construct a critical theory of society. I will return to this in the last section of the

paper.

From this model it becomes clear that discourse can fail to meet the outcomes that

deliberative theorists envision. When value-orientations remain implicit, they continue to

constrict the ability of an individual to become truly reflexive; there is a limitation to the extent

to which he will be able to truly consider the arguments of others and make arguments which are

truly oriented toward mutual understanding. Perhaps most important of all, it weakens one’s

ability to revise their conceptions of the world and the preferences they possess. This is due in

large part to the effects of epistemic warping: the ability of value-orientations to distort the

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nature of information, or moral concepts, or even of knowledge itself, by shaping moral

cognition in specific ways. The warping occurs when the individual cognizes information

received based on prior belief systems or normative value-orientations that distort the ability to

think through that information or the concepts being used, rationally (i.e., without subjective or

some other set of external qualifications or considerations).9 Value irrationality is therefore a

condition where one’s value-orientations remain unconscious, or where it is operative in shaping

moral cognition without the individual being consciously, or rationally aware of it. Individuals

remain unaware or are unable to appreciate the extent to which their values are structuring and

giving shape to the nature of their normative conceptions of the world, of their preferences, of

the forces that orient their evaluation of the social world. More than this, it also accounts for the

ways in which individual agents perceive the arguments and ideas of others, deeply affecting the

nature of deliberative engagement.

Value irrationality, or the condition of allowing value-orientations to consistently distort

knowledge, can have the effect of rendering individuals unable to deal properly with others

having different conceptions of the world than they do; this can lead to a particularly problematic

situation, that of “naïve realism,” wherein individuals see their own views as inherently correct,

and others’ as deviant from that point of correctness. (cf. Ichheiser, 1949; Robinson, Keltner,

Ward, and Ross, 1995) Even more, individuals may simply assess information they receive from

others with respect to the beliefs they already hold. (cf. McGuire, 1985) In such instances of

value irrationality actors may seek to connect with similar belief systems or world-views that

like-minded others possess and solidify around group lines, ultimately having a polarizing effect

9 See the discussion by Rokeach (1960: 31-70) who chooses to call this phenomenon “cognitive narrowing,”

which is when “people . . . selectively avoid contact with stimuli, people, events, books, etc., that threaten the

validity of their ideology or proselyte for competing ideologies.” 48.

18

on group dynamics and the power of certain ideologies in society. (Sunstein, 2000; 2002) In this

sense, value irrationalism has a pathological effect upon the intersubjective exchange of

information, more specifically of the exchange of arguments and reasons as theorized by

deliberative democratic theorists. This is because individuals tend to move toward political,

moral, and normative positions and views that are consonant with their own (Koehler, 1993)

pointing to the salience of epistemic warping. In this sense, the value-orientations of individuals

are much more stubborn and persistent than deliberative theorists seem willing to admit.10 Or,

perhaps more strongly put, they seem to exist in such a way that they are very difficult to

overcome through the means of deliberative practices. This is because value-orientations form

the normative contexts within which structures of moral cognition operate. These contexts

embrace both cognitive and evaluative processes in the sense that they are responsible for the

processing of information but they are also responsible for directing the attitudes of individuals.

(Larson, 1994)

4. Three Kinds of Deliberative Failure

If the value-orientations that individuals possess can be irrational in the sense that they

are unable to achieve a critical distance and awareness of them and their power to shape the ways

that they frame or shape their normative understanding of the world, ultimately having a

distorting effect upon individual consciousness and one’s moral-evaluative capacities, what

happens within the actual context of deliberation and discursive interaction? The second part of

my thesis is that value irrationality and epistemic warping lead to a deliberative failure: the

10 As Kahan (2007) has argued, “Real-world people tend to be anti-Bayesians: rather than update their prior beliefs

based on new information, they tend to evaluate the persuasiveness of new information based on its conformity to

their experience.” 121.

19

inability of discourse to overcome the perspectivalist orientations in which the individual is

cognitively as well as in some sense cathectically invested. The result is a breakdown of

deliberation: participants talk past one another, refuse to accept certain facts as valid, dismiss

arguments as absurd, and so on. The deliberative encounter therefore fails to produce an

exchange of reasons, and degenerates into a deliberative failure. This can also lead to forms of

what Cass Sunstein has called “group polarization” where “members of a deliberating group

move toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the members’ pre-deliberative

tendencies.” (Sunstein, 2002: 176; cf. Meyers, Bach, and Schreiber, 1974) But in other cases,

there simply emerges the problem of deliberative apathy where individuals wish not to enter in to

deliberative situations, where they are more content, or seek to avoid conflict of feelings of value

insecurity by not exposing their views to rational scrutiny or to hear the competing views of

others. These constitute different kinds of deliberative failure, failures that are rooted in the

specific ways in which value-orientations and structures of moral cognition are able to shape

discursive utterances.

Although the ideal subject is one who is able to open himself to a discursive encounter,

make a genuine effort to consider the arguments of others, and to revise his preferences based on

better arguments, the theory of deliberative failure argues that the structure of moral cognition

makes such a condition almost impossible for large segments of the population to attain. It is, in

short, something fatal to the structure of deliberative democratic theory as a whole. Indeed,

social psychologists have shown repeatedly that individuals are prone to bia sed assimilation of

information, overconfidence of their own correctness knowledge, to work with stereotypes to

formulate their understanding of the social world, be resistant to correction of their mistaken

knowledge, and so on. (cf. Kuklinski and Quirk, 2000) As I argued above, these result from the

20

process of epistemic warping, but the resulting deliberative failure can take several different

forms. Although not exhaustive, I see these as more common, basic forms of deliberative failure

encountered during political debate and discourse.

(i) Moral solipsism : when an individual is deeply invested in a particular world-view or

value-orientation or a set of them and either fears having to rationalize them or sees no need to

do so. Moral solipsism means tha t the individual does not participate in discursive encounters

and therefore remains outside of the domain of its transformative processes. This occurs because

of a kind of alienative withdrawal from the process of either exposing one’s value-orientations to

scrutiny or, in an other variation, from a fear of ego-threat stemming from their own exposure to

alternative world-views and value systems. Of course, many times this manifests itself as a fear,

indifference, rationalized withdrawal, or whatever. But the basic feature of this deliberative

failure is that deliberation is the very mechanism which is feared; it induces a withdrawal

because of the ways in which discourse itself forces one to articulate through conceptualization

and premise formation the utterances needed to build reasonable arguments in deliberative

exchanges. However, the moral solipsism predisposes one to avoid deliberative exchange

because of the extent of investment one might have in their own value system. Also, certain

value-orientations, such as those who tend to value individualism over pro-social and

cooperative behavior will be disinclined to participate in deliberative interchange. (cf. de Greu

and van Lange, 1995)

(ii) Cognitive distortion. This results from an inability of the subject to actually

rationalize the implicit values that orient his cognitive and evaluative capacities. Since values

are concepts that structure our evaluative powers, value-orientations can render the individual

unable to think through the conceptual schemes of others and their respective arguments without

21

processing it through his own value field. The result of this is that, in the course of discursive

acts, there is a cognitive misfit of argumentation and concepts rendering discourse unable to

achieve reasonable ends. Individuals run into cognitive distortion when they are unable to think

outside of the structure of values that they possess; when they are unable to move outside of the

space of their own style of thinking and consider the arguments, concepts, values of others. In

this sense, value irrationalism—or the unawareness of the ways value-orientations bias epistemic

claims—means that one person becomes unable to reach understanding with another because

they are unable to see where the other person is coming from or appreciate the arguments they

are making. They remain confused about the arguments, premises, actions, and so on, of others.

Although they may indeed try to do so, they are unable to de-bias their moral cognition and, as a

result, are unable to reach any genuine sense of mutual understanding.

(iii) Agonistic expressivism. Values also make up an existential element of the

individuals and their sense of ego- identity. When this occurs, agonistic expressivism can result.

This form of deliberative or discursive failure is at work when individuals seek to force, or

simply express their value-laden world-views without reference to other reasonable or rational

arguments. Although they do not seek to control the deliberative encounter, their investment in

certain moral concepts and world-views brings them to a point where they are unable to cognize

outside of this frame and, as a result, seek only to put forth and defend their moral preferences.

These individuals are uninterested in exposing their own internalized value systems to scrutiny,

as in moral solipsism, but are also invested in expressing their values in an attempt to protect

their world-views and their self-perceived legitimacy. Sometimes this can be a case of ego-

defense, as when an individual is simply unable to consider the other side of an argument and

instead persists with their own value schemes. Nevertheless, the result of this can be particularly

22

damaging to democratic politics because it has strong potential to lead to forms of in-group

conformity and group polarization, again rendering discursive and deliberative practices in a

state of failure. Agonistic expressivism occurs when the relation between value-orientations and

the formation of premises used in deliberation are narrow, simplistic, lacking any sense of

complexity in their assessment of information, a feature strongly associated with ideological

rigidity. (cf. Tetlock, 1984) In this sense, the value system the individual uses to make sense of

the world and to form discursive statements and premises direct and lack any kind of complex

differentiation. Individuals who possess this kind of epistemic warping will tend to be immune

to many forms of reflexive critique and instead of participating in deliberation will see their

world-views as intrinsically correct and therefore dominant over other views. What results is a

breakdown in the capacity of deliberative encounters to achieve a situation of mutual

understanding and, in some cases, even a hardening of opposite groups and belief systems.

Value irrationality can therefore lead to deliberative failure and to the breakdown of the

ability for social participants to reach mutual forms of consensus or of rational toleration of

certain validity claims. Even more, it raises the question of how social epistemology can be

distorted to produce as well as sustain certain non-rational forms of social cognition. Hence, the

formation of value attachments and value-orientations is important. This can emerge from the

socialization process where individuals are inculcated with certain value concepts, sometimes

within the nexus of a belief system, sometimes not, that they are not willing or perhaps even able

to call into question. The immediacy of these value concepts leads to a certain immunity to

many of the rational arguments put forth in deliberative praxis. What this means is that the

deliberative failures I have discussed above are caused not by some intrinsic flaw in rationality

itself, but rather its inability to penetrate into the depths of value-orientations and moral

23

cognition of the subject. The formation of this level of the personality is important for those who

advocate a critical theory of society because I believe their origins are contained in the structural

ways in which social relations constitute social subjects and their respective value systems. It is

this that leads in a most pervasive way to the ingraining of value-orientations and forms of moral

cognition and it should be seen as existing as prior to, and hence as weighing upon, the rational

forms of self-reflexive awareness that deliberative theorists emphasize.

5. Social Structure and the Value Constitution Thesis

My focus on forms of moral cognition to understand the ways that deliberative failures

can emerge in discursive practice is linked to a broader argument about the political nature of

consciousness itself. If my basic thesis is correct that value irrationality and epistemic warping

can lead to deliberative failures, then it suggests a further insight into the causes of value

irrationality and epistemic warping: namely that the value system that forms the basic grammar

or structural logic of our moral cognition is itself constituted by the relational nature of our social

context. In other words, the structural and functional characteristics of our social contexts and

institutions that shape our socialization and individuation have formative effects on the way we

come to value, evaluate, and understand moral problems and, hence, the political world as well.

This thesis, which I shall call here the value constitution thesis, argues that the values we come

to possess are, to a large extent, the result of the ways that we are constituted by our social

relations. The emphasis on social practices—such as communicative action, public reason,

discourse ethics, or whatever—that see the activity of generating utterances during a socially

discursive act as linked to a rational or reasonable process of generating validity claims, or

arguments to defend certain world-views rests does not take into consideration the value-

24

orientations that in fact shape or give content to the ways that individuals cognize and evaluate

their world. In my view, what is more central is the problem of the constitution of these value

systems: the ways the normative understandings we hold about the world and which serve as the

basis for our styles of moral cognition are generated and reinforced. I am not suggesting that

individuals are shaped in some determined, mechanistic sense—rather that their moral world-

views are grounded in deeply embedded value-orientations that themselves are formed by pre-

and even sometimes non-discursive processes. As a result, these value-orientations become

difficult to disembed during deliberative encounters, and we produce the problem of value

irrationality.

I think contemporary political theory places too much weight on the concerns of social

practices and epistemology at the expense of the structural- functional context of socialization

within which our values and ego-identities are formed. These values moor our cognitive

processing of the world in a strong way. As I argued above, I am not convinced that deliberative

theorists have taken this concern into account and I therefore see discourse as perhaps a

necessary component, but scarcely sufficient component of a critical democratic theory. In this

sense, I believe that any critical theory of society must return to the investigation of the ways

social context is able to shape the value-orientations and structures of moral cognition of its

members. Put another way, discursive theories alone are not only insufficient but potentially

damaging since deliberative failures may lead to certain forms of group polarization and other

alienative effects. If we accept to some extent, and I think we must, that value-orientations are a

powerful force in shaping political and moral consciousness, then I think that the fact that these

values and value-orientations are constituted by social-relational processes becomes key.

25

When it comes to our understanding of politics and moral or normative questions more

broadly, there are certain value systems that are more important than others. Values related to

issues of authority, legitimacy, ascriptive traits of others, self-expression, become very

determinative of the ways we frame the world and out understanding of it. The formation of

values and value-orientations in individuals can be seen as resulting from certain forms of

socialization, particularly in ego-formation and development as well as the ways different

institutional contexts form or reinforce certain value-orientations needed for their own operation.

The family, schools, economic institutions, and other formative institutions have the capacity to

shape and instill values, particularly toward very basic and broad normative evaluative categories

about the world. Attitudes toward equality, collective versus individualist orientations,

acceptance of authority, personalized versus universalistic standards, dominance or submission,

tendency toward conformity, and so on—all are value-orientations that are in many ways shaped

by the structure and nature social relationships within which we are formed and which continue

to reinforce our orientations and then normative conceptions about the world. (cf. Williams,

1969; Parsons, 1951) This constitutes a crucial way of understanding the limits of deliberative

theory since these value systems and orientations are constituted prior to deliberative encounters

and, as a result, distort the ability of participants to come to grasp with their own value-

orientations as well as those of others. Hence the problem of value- irrationality: the arguments I

may make, the way that I interpret information, the way I hear and interact with others within a

deliberative context are deeply affected by value-orientations embedded in the deeper layers of

my personality of which I may be (and many times most likely are) unaware.

One way for values to be inculcated in such a way is through vertical forms of

socialization—such as traditional family structures, rigid schooling systems, hierarchical

26

religious institutions, corporate or bureaucratic institutions, and so on—which rely on top-down

forms of normative behavior as a central operative condition. Success or inclusion in such

organizations and institutions relies upon the acceptance, more or less, on certain values which

grant them legitimacy—these forms of legitimacy become hardened over time and impact certain

world-views of the individual.11 Weber (1972) points out that the inculcation of value systems of

“authority,” for example, derive from the “routinization” (Veralltäglichung) of these relations

and systemic, institutional logics. When exposed to horizontal forms of socialization—such as

deliberation or formal/informal discursive practices—these solidified value categories need to be

brought into the open, rationalized, argued and validated. If they cannot be, they still linger on

as distortions in the moral conceptual scheme of the individual. Hence, the move from vertical

forms of socialization to horizontal ones can lead to a failure in the deliberative process since

individuals are in fact not seeking mutual understanding as much as an expressive defensiveness

against what they perceive as a threat to the ir world-views. This is only one way of

understanding one kind of value-orientation. Individuals that are prone to following authority, or

to going against it (Doty, Peterson, and Winter, 1991; Feldman, 2003; Duckett and Fischer,

2003); those that fear equality or who desire it (cf. Fromm, 1941; 1955; Lane, 1959); or any

number of basic values that orient our normative conception of the world can be seen to emerge

out of the context of socialization to which one is subjected. It is not meant by this that one is

permanently formed in this way, only that it will have a major role in the shaping of one’s moral

cognition.

11 Perhaps one of the more well known theories that comes close to the value constitution thesis is Lakoff (2002)

and his thesis of conservative/liberal ideologies in adulthood as grounded in different parenting styles. Lakoff

suggests that different parenting styles—the “strict father” model as opposed to the “nurturing parent” model—

create cognitive metaphors of morality that generate conservative and liberal world-views, respectfully. For an

empirical justification of this thesis, see Barker and Tinnick (2006).

27

On this view, then, an important factor in understanding the ways social participants

understand and generate meaning of their world is through the framing power of value systems

that they absorb from the structural and functional constraints and processes that are operative in

the process of socialization. This value constitution thesis also suggests that individual actors

can and often do develop certain value-orientations and structures and styles of moral cognition

that can affect their abilities to deliberate in a democratic way—i.e., in a way that would allow

them to live up to the expectations needed for the theories of deliberative democracy to work.

Social structure, by organizing the relational contexts between individuals, can have a deep

formative impact on the articulation of value-orientations. Hence, it becomes important to

consider the extent to which consciousness and social structure need to be considered in tandem

with one another, how individual reasoning possesses a strong social dimension. I believe this

should lead us to reconsider the aims of critical theory, to orient the focus of democratic theory

once again to the ways that a just social order can be established in socio-relational terms rather

than simply relying on the unrealistic aim of the moral-transformative experience of deliberative

democratic theory.

6. Conclusion

The argument I have elaborated in this paper is not meant to imply that deliberative

democracy is unable to serve an important function within democratic societies. Instead, it

implies that reliance on deliberation as a central mechanism of a democratic society needs to be

rethought within the context of modern social formations. If one is to accept the most basic

premise of my argument—namely that there are pathological elements in the ways that value-

orientations shape one’s moral cognition—then we are faced with a crucial problem that

28

deliberation cannot solve: the overcoming of an irrational attachment to certain basic values that

warp one’s epistemological and moral frames that, in turn, frustrate the transformative capacity

of discourse ethics. It can be seen, on this view, how deliberation can, under the conditions of

value irrationality, solidify social and group divisions rather than ameliorate them. If the express

purpose of communicative, deliberative action on the part of citizens is to provide a context for

mutual understanding, we should inquire into the limits of the capacities of individuals to be able

to allow the mechanisms theorized by proponents of deliberative democracy to actually work. I

think that the thesis I have put forward here constitutes a deep critique of that position in that it

raises a crucial problematic to the surface regarding the limitations of deliberation as a central

mechanism for fostering democratic will- formation and rational opinion-formation. We are

forced to consider once again, in my view, a critical theory of society as a critique of the social

order itself; to consider the ways in which the subjectivity of individuals is shaped by the context

of social relations within which they are shaped and formed.

The self- transformation through discourse advocated by many deliberative theorists

therefore seems to me to be a misleading or mistaken assumption of actual realities of

deliberation. This may seem to suggest that the more restrained approach to deliberation is

immune to this critique. For advocates of this type of deliberation, agents lack the capacity to

transcend their moral disagreements with others. As a result, we need to engage in what Bruce

Ackerman calls “conversational restraint” where when “we disagree about one or another

dimension of the moral truth, we should not search for some common value that will trump this

disagreement . . . [w]e 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: 16)

But this is also insufficient, in my view. First, there is no reason to assume that such

29

conversational restraint can be maintained given the ways that value irrationality can affect the

norms of discourse as well as the content of discursive claims. Indeed, the value irrationality

thesis seems to argue that individuals will be unable to restrain their values from perceiving

social reality in certain crucial ways. Second, it does seem that if we take the value constitution

thesis seriously there needs to be a way to deal with the manner in which value systems can be

shaped by unequal, unjust, or hierarchical social structures. Conversational restraint becomes a

means of preventing conflict, not solving the problems that lie at the heart of modern societies.

In truth, no matter what the ends of deliberation and dialogue may be, my thesis is that they will

be tainted by value irrationality.

Value irrationality therefore poses a serious problem not only for deliberative democratic

theory, but for the concept of the subject that it takes for granted. If we are unable easily to bring

our value-orientations to consciousness, there is no way for us to engage in any kind of reflexive

understanding of one’s own preferences and beliefs; there is no way to see how what we feel,

think, what we value, may in fact be the residue of values that we may even rationally find

abhorrent. The pathologies of rational reflection and self-understanding as well as the kind of

deliberative failures that they lead to suggests that the reliance on deliberation as a model for

democratic practice is a necessary by deeply insufficient one. In the end perhaps this is the

proper way to understand Thrasymachus’ wrath, his refusal to submit to the scrutinizing power

of “dialectic.” In his inability to overcome his own value irrationalism, perhaps Plato was trying

tell us something about the nature of human reason, or at least about a potential pathology in

human reason. With his point of view firmly entrenched and anchored in his own perspectivist

orientation, Thrasymachus is unable to enter into a self-reflexive, rational exchange of moral

concepts and reasons. Perhaps it is this that accounts for his rage: the inability to see others that

30

ultimately do not share our own views of the world as others with legitimate points of view that

need to be taken seriously. But even more, it becomes a rage against reason itself, against the

very kind of questioning that forces us to confront those values that give our personality its sense

of direction and security. This may be too much for deliberation alone to overcome.

31

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