Reason and Emotion in Deliberative Democratic Theory

I pay special attention to Jürgen Habermas because he laid the theoretical foundations for deliberative democracy, but he has been accused of neglecting the emotions even more egregiously than other deliberative democrats do. For example, Young (Reference Young1985) claims that “There is no place in [Habermas’s] conception of linguistic interaction for the feeling that accompanies and motivates all utterances” (73). Similarly, Sanders (Reference Sanders1997) argues that “Unlike deliberation, the standard of testimony does not exclude positions if they are voiced in an immoderate or emotionally laden way” (372).

People often take this anti-emotion charge as a decisive blow. However, the accusation is demonstrably false. As Habermas puts it

The first point about suprapersonal standards is claiming that emotions function by interacting with reason as it is socially constituted. The second point is that economic conceptions of rationality, which take emotions as given, do not do justice to their role in judgment.

Now consider Habermas’s last, and most important, point. He has put this claim more succinctly in analogical form: “Emotion is to practical reason as sense perception is to scientific reason.”Footnote ² If we think about where science would be without recourse to sense perception, it becomes clear that it is decisively false to claim that Habermas’s theory makes no room for the emotions or even that they play a marginal role. Whatever one thinks of the ultimate adequacy of his formulation, it creates an enormous role for emotion in his moral psychology.Footnote ³

Even before Habermas, the proto-deliberative democrat, John Dewey, made a similar point: “A person must feel the qualities of acts as one feels with the hands the qualities of roughness and smoothness in objects, before he has an inducement to deliberate or material with which to deliberate . . . . This fact explains the element of truth in the theories which insist that in their root and essence moral judgments are emotional rather than intellectual” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1985 [1932], 269). Note that in addition to making the “materials with which to deliberate” argument akin to Habermas’s, Dewey adds emotions as “inducement[s] to deliberate.”

More recent deliberative theorists also weave emotions into their theoretical accounts. For example, Gutmann and Thompson (Reference Gutmann and Thompson1998) argue that emotional appeals are often required for effective deliberation: “Dispassionate argument that minimizes conflict is not always the best means of deliberation . . . . Matching reason to passion can often be [more effective]” (Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Nicholsen1990, 136). They view reciprocity and mutual respect as key features of deliberation. These two desiderata require perspective-taking and empathy, which are emotionally managed processes.

Krause (Reference Krause2011) makes a related point when she argues that empathy, contrary to its connotations of partiality, can actually improve deliberative impartiality by allowing us to access increasingly broader perspectives that we could otherwise not represent adequately to ourselves. In an underappreciated passage, Rawls makes a related point: “Justice as fairness is a theory of our moral sentiments as manifested by our considered judgments in reflective equilibrium” (1971, 104). In fact, we “cannot do away with the [moral sentiments] without at the same time dismantling the natural attitudes (428),” leading to the remarkable conclusion that “[T]he sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind” (476).Footnote ⁴

Given this litany of crucial roles that emotions play in deliberative theories, why is the contrary perception so widespread? First, the connection between deliberative theories and empirical studies of emotion in deliberation is remarkably underdeveloped. For example, the word “emotion” does not appear in a recent review article on experiments in democratic deliberation (Gastil Reference Gastil2018; though see Grönlund et al. Reference Grönlund, Herne and Setälä2017 and Morrell Reference Morrell2010). More fundamentally, the misconception about deliberative theory’s denigration of the emotions is understandable because deliberative theorists have not developed the implications of their views on the emotions with the same rigor of other key concepts. We are left to piece together the strands. In that spirit, I turn to articulating twelve distinct roles for the emotions in deliberation.

Roles for Emotion in Deliberative Theory

Recall that my definition of emotion has three components: (1) felt, (2) situational evaluations that (3) motivate action. The twelve roles outlined below represent different facets and combinations of these three basic components, but the roles are nevertheless functionally distinct enough to fruitfully treat them separately, especially for purposes of connecting empirical research to their theoretical articulation.

Role #1, Normative Relevance: Emotion is indispensable in helping us to even identify a situation as normatively relevant in the first place. We are all faced with an overwhelming buzz of impressions, not all of which can even receive brief attention, much less reflective concern. This idea harkens back to Kant’s discussion of “fine feeling” being a prerequisite for the empathic recognition of another’s need (Rumsey Reference Rumsey1989). For example, city dwellers may become inured to the suffering of the homeless by constant exposure. If we cease to be arrested by feelings of compassion, we may thereby cease to even see them as having a moral claim upon us. They become part of the mere background of urban life. As a corollary, this role also helps us determine the scope of deliberation by delimiting the realm of that which is morally relevant for a given purpose. Vetlesen (Reference Vetlesen1993) discusses the role of emotion in moral perception, concluding that the emotions are a precondition of moral performance.

Role #2, Motivation to Deliberate: The same emotions that help us identify normatively relevant situations also provide the motivation to engage in discourse about them. Theories of affective intelligence (e.g., Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen Reference Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen2000) show that anxiety, in particular, is crucial in motivating political deliberation. Our “surveillance system” monitors the environment for novel situations for which our settled habits of action appear inadequate. Feeling concern or anxiety, in turn, makes us more open to new information and persuasive appeals. For example, I may have had a stable party identification for years such that I did not really engage with the platforms of rival parties, but increasing anxiety about global climate change might eventually make me take the Green Party seriously.

Role #3, Inputs: Once deliberation has begun, our emotions provide the “normative data” so to speak. Deliberation proceeds by trying to translate emotional evaluations into explicit propositional form so that they can be critically evaluated. This is the sense in which Habermas claims that emotions are to morality as sense perceptions are to science. Johnson, Black, and Knobloch (Reference Johnson, Black and Knobloch2017) provide a vivid example from the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review on mandatory minimum sentences for repeat drunk drivers. One participant related a harrowing account of being hit by an impaired driver and its aftermath. The panelists set about to translate this and other emotionally laden stories into reasons for and against mandatory minimums. The authors conclude that the Citizens’ Initiative Review creates “important opportunities for advocates to give voice to the emotional underpinnings of certain policy decisions and for panelists to hear these concerns. But the structure, including its use of moderators and its goal orientation, ensures that panelists are not overwhelmed by such expressions and that they remain focused on developing comprehensive and well-reasoned statements with which members of the electorate can inform themselves” (2).

Role #4, Outputs: Emotion is also an output of this translation process in that a given translation will produce emotional reactions that serve as part of how we assess the adequacy of some proposed translation into the form of explicit moral propositions. As William James asks in The Sentiment of Rationality, how is someone

James’s description here anticipates the theory of affective intelligence’s (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen Reference Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen2000) notion of the “disposition system,” which regulates the way that we recognize new solutions to problems and lay down new habits when anxiety is replaced by enthusiasm.

Role #5, Unmediated Inputs: Emotions can also serve as untranslated inputs into deliberation. Recall that we defined reasons as propositions that can serve as premises in inferences that justify action. This role holds open the possibility that emotions may serve as premises that justify action without being rendered in propositional form. Williams (Reference Williams1981) famously argued that if someone has to think about saving their own spouse from drowning versus another, this person has probably had “one thought too many.” For some purposes, it may not be necessary to render familial love into propositional form, and there is significant evidence that a few basic emotions along these lines transfer across cultures (Ekman Reference Ekman, Dalgleish and Power1999). We might reasonably judge that some emotions can serve as valid bases for action just as emotions (i.e., independent of any propositional content).

Role #6, Background: We rely on various emotions to manage the background against which deliberation makes sense. Not all potentially controversial questions can be thematized simultaneously. We rely on the part of the life-world which has not been thematized in discourse as a set of implicit roles, expectations, and norms to provide the context against which meaningful deliberation can orient itself (Habermas Reference Habermas1987). Elements of the life-world are encoded and managed emotionally, for example, as habits that are regulated by the disposition system (Denzin Reference Denzin1985). I include under this role emotional cues about different aspects of the life-world that only become thematized in the course of deliberation. Such a process would at least partly be managed by the surveillance system. For example, we may be deliberating about some issue that does not overtly implicate gender. But in the course of discussion I may become anxious or indignant as a male member of the group repeatedly talks over the women in the group. Such feelings are a signal that the group needs to thematize heretofore backgrounded gender norms.

Role #7, Enabling Conditions: Reciprocity is at the core of most theories of deliberative democracy (Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson1998). Empathy and other emotions are thus enabling conditions for practical reason in that they are the basic means by which we can engage in reciprocal role-taking during deliberation (Morrell Reference Morrell2010). Rather than stripping ourselves of being situated and embodied subjects to reach a view from nowhere, deliberative theory enjoins us to do exactly the opposite—we empathically project ourselves into the perspective of the other. This moment of discourse bears an overlooked similarity to certain aspects of care ethics, and it is emotional engagement, rather than emotional detachment, that makes this possible (Slote Reference Slote2007). Take, for example, King’s (Reference King1963) Letter from Birmingham Jail where he writes, “Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race.” In a stroke of rhetorical and psychological genius, King actually empathizes (if ruefully) with the white moderates, but in a way designed to shame them into precisely the kind of empathic reciprocity that they currently lack.

Role #8, Cross Check: Once we have come to a preliminary conclusion in deliberation, emotion helps us to check the process: does the norm “feel right,” or are we anxious or annoyed or unhappy about the outcome? If it does not feel right, then we have a prima facie reason to think that we may have taken a misstep in the process or that deliberation was not conducted in a fair way. Rehg (Reference Rehg1994) felicitously describes this phenomenon in terms of emotions alerting us to “the limit of rational articulation,” at least for the time being. We temporarily withhold consent even though we cannot as of yet explain why. As a result, we might engage in a variation on reflective equilibrium in which we move back and forth between moral data, rational deliberation, and an affective assessment of the products of deliberation, trying to bring them into line with each other. Most of us have had the experience of feeling bullied into a hasty conclusion by an interlocutor who is better informed on a topic than we are. Only later do we realize why it was that we were right to resist.

Role #9, Analogs: Once we have found justified norms, our emotions serve as affective summaries of our relationship to the whole process. For example, the propensity to feel shame after violating some norm is the practical representation of accepting that norm. This role is the moral counterpart to “on-line” models of political cognition (Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh Reference Lodge, McGraw and Stroh1989). People integrate information and reasoning into a summary judgment that gets stored as an affective valence. We can easily activate and remember the summary judgment, but we either forget or background the process that led to it. Put differently, emotional valences stand in for explicitly rehearsing the cognitions that led to some earlier judgment.

Role #10, Application: Emotions facilitate context-sensitive application of norms. Recall that emotions are, in part, situational evaluations. The idea here is that if we have a set of previously justified norms, when we are faced with real life problems, we must determine which norms apply. Doing so requires responsiveness to a rich social context much of which must be grasped through emotional sensitivity (Engster Reference Engster2007). The problem is especially acute when norms appear to conflict. For example, an empathic jury might acquit a victim of domestic abuse of murder, even when the homicide itself is not in question (Russell and Melillo Reference Russell and Melillo2006).

Role #11, Motivation to Act: Emotions play an important motivational role to act on norms. Affective processes typically play a major role in motivating action (Scarantino Reference Scarantino2017). This fact is represented in my definition of emotions as felt, situational evaluations that motivate action. But the point here is not merely stipulative. Brader (Reference Brader2005), for example, shows that emotionally laden political advertising significantly increases political participation.

Role #12, Struggles for Recognition: Finally, emotion has an important role to play when deliberation fails.Footnote ⁵ If deliberation is either openly exclusionary or subtly power laden people or groups so disadvantaged can engage in what Habermas calls “struggles for recognition.” Within this general role, emotion can serve three subroles. First, it can serve as a signal to the excluded or oppressed groups that they have a claim (e.g., via feelings of indignation) rather than passively accepting some legitimating ideology (Iser Reference Iser and Cronin2009). For example, Jasper (Reference Jasper2011) notes that “indignation at one’s own government can be especially moving, as it involves a sense of betrayal . . . . Outrage over state repression, far from curtailing protest, can sometimes ignite it. One of the deepest satisfactions of collective action is a sense of confidence and agency, an end that in turn becomes a means to further action” (292). Second, emotionally charged protest can disrupt the status quo, grabbing people’s attention and signaling that institutionalized processes might be missing something. As the AIDS epidemic in the United States accelerated in the 1980s, policy makers largely ignored the crisis, prompting AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and other groups to engage in direct action that forced attention on the issue. Finally, emotion can serve as the means by which the oppressor gains access to the need for recognizing the oppressed (which is related to roles #1 and #7). For example, during the civil rights movement, images of peaceful marchers being attacked with fire hoses and police dogs jarred many northern moderates out of complacency.