Deliberative Justice and Collective Identity

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek W. M. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Identity Based

Drawing upon insights from virtue ethics, this essay develops a concept of collective identity specifically suited to deliberative democracy: a virtues-centered theory of deliberative justice. Viewing democratic legitimacy as a political phenomenon, we must account for more than the formal rules that must be satisfied according to deontological theories of deliberative democracy. I argue that common approaches to deliberative democracy are unable to account for the motivations of deliberation, or ensure that citizens have the cognitive skills to deliberate well. Next, I engage with critics of deliberative democracy who have moved toward broader and more humanistic concepts of deliberation but have stopped short of conceiving of justice as a virtue and, in their own way, neglected questions of collective identity. I reconstruct justice as a virtue from a deliberative perspective, combining virtue ethics’ emphasis on habituation with a weaker sense of collective identity that allows for value pluralism and disagreement, consistent with deliberative democracy. That is, deliberative democracy requires a shared and habituated civic culture of mutual understanding of differences. Finally, drawing from discourse on race in contemporary American politics, I conclude with brief illustrations of the need for a collective identity based on mutual understanding. Although deliberative democracy does not require a thick or intense sense of social solidarity, it does need citizens to share habits, inclinations, and capacities to engage in communication across their differences.

Becoming an Ex: Dynamics of Disengagement from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after 2011

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-231
Author(s):  
Mustafa Menshawy ◽  
Khalil Al-Anani
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Political Project ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This article explores the disengagement of members from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Following both the 2011 uprising and the 2013 coup, increasing disenchantment with the group’s ideology and political project have led many members to reconsider their commitment to, and membership in, the Brotherhood. While scholarship examining the Brotherhood’s processes of recruitment and forming of collective identity is burgeoning, few works have assessed members’ disengagement from the movement and abandonment of its ideology, or how former members make sense of their “ex” identity. Based on rich, original material and extensive interviews with former Brotherhood members in Egypt, Turkey, the UK, and Qatar, this article investigates how former members seek new meanings and identities. Adopting a processual and discursive perspective on disengagement from the Brotherhood, we identify disengagement as consisting of distinct ideological, political, and affective processes. These processes shape individuals’ strategies for exiting the Brotherhood and forming their new identities as ex-members.

scholarly journals Should Judges Make Climate Change Law?

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Burgers
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Sound Environment ◽  
Judicial Lawmaking ◽  
Near Future

AbstractWhat scholars referred to as a climate change litigation ‘explosion’ in 2015 has today become an established movement which is unlikely to stop in the near future: worldwide, over a thousand lawsuits have been launched regarding responsibility for the dangers of climate change. Since the beginning of this trend in transnational climate litigation scholars have warned that the separation of powers is threatened where judges interfere with the politically hot issue of climate change. This article uses Jürgen Habermas's political theory on deliberative democracy to reconstruct the tension between law and politics generated by these lawsuits. This reconstruction affords a better understanding of the implications of climate change litigation: while the role of the judiciary as such remains unchanged, the trend is likely to influence the democratic legitimacy of judicial lawmaking on climate change, as it indicates an increasing realization that a sound environment is a constitutional value and is therefore a prerequisite for democracy.

Defenders of Nature and the Comarca: Collective Identity and Frames in Panama

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Horton
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Multiple Frames ◽  
Indigenous Land

This article examines collective identities as both a resource and constraint in framing processes of social mobilization through a case study of Panama's Kuna Indians, one of Latin America's most effectively organized indigenous peoples. It highlights tensions between movement nurturance of distinct indigenous identity as intrinsically valuable and to a degree counterhegemonic and instrumental use of an environmental frame to advance indigenous land claims. This article also explores shifts in dominant discourse and institutional practices that provide both opportunities for identity-based movements as well as risks. One way identity groups address tensions between appropriation of externally generated frames for instrumental goals and the nurturing of distinct collective identities is to manage multiple frames aimed at distinct audiences with distinct content. errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

National Executives and Bureaucracies

2020 ◽  
pp. 503-525
Author(s):  
Matthias Ruffert
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Administrative Organization ◽  
Administrative Units ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Eu

This chapter starts from the ‘classical’ divide between the political and non-political and presents how national administrative organization is described and compared in its hierarchical and independent emanations. Both hierarchy and independence are conceived as ideal-types of the relationship between the political executive and bureaucracies and within bureaucracies. The chapter then shows how this ideal developed and is applied in some administrative jurisdictions, and how it carries elements of unitary thinking and centralization into these jurisdictions. It also addresses the legitimacy issues of independence, in particular with respect to democratic legitimacy and accountability. In its conclusions, the chapter tries to identify elements of comparison that may be helpful for the mutual understanding of administrative legal systems but also for building common administrative units such as in the EU.

Cosmopolitan law and time: Toward a theory of constitutionalism and solidarity in transition

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL P LINDEN-RETEK
Keyword(s):  
Legal Theory ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Mutual Engagement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cosmopolitan Law ◽  
Shared Commitment ◽  
The Right ◽  
Motivational Resources

AbstractThis article seeks to confront the contemporary condition in which cosmopolitan law – meant to resonate as something citizens across borders author and live together – instead is increasingly a source of detachment, confusion, and alienation. Taking the European Union’s twin crises of democratic legitimacy and social solidarity as its starting point, the article offers a critique of existing approaches to supranational constitutionalism that are insufficiently responsive to this disenchantment. The article’s purpose, in turn, is to present perspectives from philosophy and legal theory that might promisingly recast, in this new cosmopolitan frame, our thinking about law as a mode of social integration. Specifically, the article’s central claim is that time – as a seldom-examined, yet essential dimension of law – is closely linked to law’s cosmopolitan potential and, concurrently, to the motivational resources for cosmopolitan solidarity. It is through a sensitivity to time – our awareness of the past passing into the present in anticipation of a future – that citizens can meaningfully hold together cosmopolitan law’s dual, ostensibly divergent hopes: shared commitment and self-decentring plurality. Drawing on Seyla Benhabib’s ‘democratic iterations’ and its roots in the work of Jacques Derrida and Robert Cover, the article elaborates the following two concepts: ‘cosmopolitan promise-making’, a diachronic form of cosmopolitan political agency; and ‘cosmopolitan legal narrative’, a set of plural, evolving constitutional interpretations open to mutual engagement over time. These concepts, in temporalizing our understanding of political identity and constitutional law, together serve to underwrite a cosmopolitan legal order without also thinning solidarity’s social and democratic foundations. The article concludes with a critique of the contemporary role of European courts and a concrete vision for the cosmopolitan development of EU jurisprudence. Reinterpreting Article 4(2) TEU as the right to constitutional narrative, the article advances new modalities and normative aspirations for constitutional interpretation beyond the nation-state.

scholarly journals Terms of Engagement: Re-Defining Identity and Infertility On-line

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elzbieta Korolczuk
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Specific Element ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sick People ◽  
Digital Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
On Line ◽  
Identity Based

This article focuses on the identity work that takes place on the biggest Polish Internet forum for infertile people (www.nasz-bocian.pl). It is an example of a wider trend of “digital groupings created by and for those who struggle with the physical and emotional burden of a disease or disability, and through blogs, chats and forums contact others who have similar experiences, while staying anonymous. Participating in on-line discussions often leads to various forms of social engagement, both on-line and off-line. The sick, their family members, partners and friends cooperate in order to change the public discourse, as well as the regulation and financing of research and the treatment of certain diseases. Emergence and proliferation of such digital groupings raise questions such as: what ails these communities? How the collective identity is constructed on-line? This article examines “boundary work, which is a specific element of collective identity construction processes. The analysis concerns how the borders are established between the different sub-groups within the digital community, and how this process involves producing novel forms of identity based on a fragmented “socially legitimized childlessness. It focuses on a sub-forum” Conscious Childlessness and is based on qualitative analysis of the posts placed there. This sub-forum was established by users who do not necessarily share the dominant collective identity around which the social mobilization on infertility in Poland coalesces. They refuse to see themselves as sick people, or as patients, attempting to construct a new collective identity based on the idea of choice and the pursuit of happiness.

scholarly journals Contentious precarious generation in anti-austerity movements in Spain and Italy

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Andretta ◽  
Donatella Della Porta
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Organizational Network ◽  
Network Embeddedness ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Formal Network

This article focuses on the precarious generation protesting in Spain and Italy in times of crisis and austerity (2010-2012). Their many similarities notwithstanding, the two countries have experienced different types of mobilization against austerity measures. In Spain, a relatively autonomous mobilization –characterized by new collective actors and new forms of action– has made possible the building of a political actor, Podemos, able to seriously challenge the established political parties. In Italy, instead, the mobilization was dominated by established political actors, especially trade unions, did not produce innovative forms of action and has not been able to overcome (so far) the fragmentation of the social movement sector. In both countries, however, the anti-austerity protests have been characterized by a strong presence of what we call hear the “precarious generation”, particularly exposed to the economic crisis and the austerity measures. By relying on data from several surveys conducted in demonstrations on social, economic and labor issues in the two countries from 2010 to 2011, in this article we single out differences and the similarities in terms of presence, social composition, grievances and emotion, collective identity and network embeddedness of the precarious generation. Our findings show that the precarious generation was almost equally present in the selected demonstrations in the two countries, share similar socio-graphic features and similar types of grievance and emotions. Nonetheless, in Spain it seems to have built a more cohesive and radical collective identity based upon a more informal and internet based network integration while in Italy it seems embedded in a more traditional and formal network, which prevented the formation of a strong collective identity. Moreover, while in Spain the differences between the older and the precarious generation reveal that, both have a strong identity based on different networks; more formal the older and more related to informal and online instruments the latter; in Italy, the older generation has a much stronger collective identity based on a organizational network, while the precarious one is less but still integrated in organizational network. We conclude that the more autonomous civil society tradition in Spain, together with the particular political opportunities, under the pressure of a harsher economic crisis, may account for the differences we found.

Can Democracy be Deliberative & Participatory? The Democratic Case for Political Uses of Mini-Publics

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafont
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Political System ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Negative Conclusion ◽  
Political Decision Making

This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative mini-publics such as citizens' juries, Deliberative Polls, and citizens' assemblies. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative mini-publics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of mini-publics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawing from a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, I propose several uses of mini-publics that could enhance the democratic legitimacy of political decision-making in current societies.

Technology, Cognitive Enhancement, and Virtue Ethics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbro Fröding
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Cognitive Enhancement ◽  
Computer Training ◽  
Direct Stimulation ◽  
Moral Framework ◽  
Future Technology ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Electroencephalogram Eeg

This chapter explores how cognitive enhancement, by means of technology, in combination with a commitment to virtue ethics could improve our capacity for responsible decision making. Four examples of cognitive enhancement technologies are discussed: computer training, neurofeedback or electroencephalogram (EEG) biofeedback, transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS) and brain-computer interface (BCI). On describing and critically discussing the potential effects of these technologies it is argued that we ought to adopt a virtue ethical approach to this type of enhancement. Virtue ethics could, for example, provide a moral framework for the heightened cognitive skills to ensure that they are used virtuously and help us make responsible decisions about future technology. It will also be argued that cognitive enhancement and virtue ethics are, in many cases, complementary and indeed necessary for the good life. Plausibly, cultivating the virtues could improve quality of life both for the individual and the collective.

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