Deliberation and interpretation

Classic deliberative theory

The alleged superiority of deliberative democracy to aggregative forms lies in its encouragement to individuals to take a collective view, a view of what is good for everyone not just a view of what is good for themselves. An aggregative account of democracy measures the legitimacy of outcomes on a popular vote suitably constrained by civil and political rights, but indifferent as to whether the interests expressed by the vote are general or particular. In contrast, deliberative institutions and procedures look to an account of the common good to which all those affected can agree and for the same reasons. ⁶ Such institutions and procedures ask individuals to justify their proposals, preferences and programs before all those affected and to come to an agreement with them on the basis of reasons and considerations they can accept. As Cohen put the point in 1996:

Within an idealized deliberative setting, it will not do simply to advance reasons that one takes to be true or compelling; such considerations may be rejected by others who are themselves reasonable. One must instead find reasons that are compelling to others, acknowledging those others as equals, aware that they have alternative reasonable commitments, and knowing something about the kinds of commitments that they are likely to have. ⁷

Yet, if developing our children’s capacities to function in the democracy we inhabit with them serves as a public reason, surely the protesting parents can also justify their objections in the terms of it. ¹¹ One of the capacities democratic citizens need to develop is that of learning to respect one another’s distinct ways of life. The protesting parents can therefore argue that excusing their children from reading lessons that interfere with their socialization into these ways of life teaches more about democracy than forcing them to leave their beliefs at the schoolhouse door. The parents can also agree to the capacities for democratic citizenship that Gutmann and Thompson cite. Nevertheless, they can argue that they have modeled these capacities for their children by justifying their actions in adducing the public considerations that led to them, by exhibiting capacities for critical thinking in rejecting the liberal secularism of the school board and by responding to the school board’s justifications and criticisms in demonstrating the liberal bias they assume. Hence, while Gutmann and Thompson assume that the appeal to public reasons and considerations resolves the issue, instead it simply raises the question of how we are to understand these public reasons and considerations.

Another example of the interpretive issues raised by deliberative democratic theory in its classic form pertains to the ongoing debate over abortion in the United States. Gutmann and Thompson think this debate is a moral one, pitting the right to life against the freedom of choice. ¹² In a deliberative setting, those on opposite sides of the abortion issue will give reasons for their position and listen to the reasons of others. In this case, deliberators may not succeed in coming to an agreement. Nevertheless, like Cohen, Gutmann and Thompson think that the process of deliberation will lead to results that will likely differ from those produced either by voting or by the sort of bitter combat that currently characterizes the debate. Indeed, they think the reference Mario Cuomo made to a ‘deep reverence for life’ in a speech at Notre Dame signals a commitment to seeking ‘a common perspective at a deeper level of morality … that could transcend moral differences at the level of policy’. ¹³

In characterizing the debate as a moral one, however, Gutmann and Thompson overlook what is perhaps its most important characteristic, namely that both sides in the debate can appeal to the same ‘deep reverence for life’ at the same ‘deeper level of morality’ while also offering equally plausible but different understandings of what each of these is. Nor do their differences pertain only to the question of the ‘life’ each side may have in mind: that of the mother versus that of the fetus. Rather, at least part of the debate involves diverging understandings of what human life itself is and how it elicits reverence. On one interpretation, human life is primarily a biological entity. As Ronald Dworkin suggests, the deep reverence to which it gives rise is a humble appreciation for the miracle it represents. ¹⁴ On this understanding, human biological life is a precious gift, a testament to the creativity of God, perhaps, or to the marvel of nature or natural evolution. In either case, human biological life is inviolable; it is a wonder to be cherished rather than a burden to be discarded. This judgment pertains even to abortions of fetuses that are the result of rape or possess genetic problems or diseases. No one ought to claim for himself or herself the power to decide whether another’s life has value for, on the understanding of human life as a precious natural or supernatural gift, all human life has value. It follows that abortion undermines a deep reverence for life and should not be legally accessible.

On another interpretation, the meanings of both human life and a deep reverence for it are quite different. Emily Rapp writes:

This week my son turned blue, and for 30 terrifying seconds, stopped breathing. Called an ‘apnea seizure’, this is one stage in the progression of Tay-Sachs, the genetic disease Ronan was born with and will die of, but not before he suffers from these and other kinds of seizures and is finally plunged into a completely vegetative state. Nearly two years old, he is already blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. I expect his death to happen this year, and this week’s seizure only highlighted the fact that it could happen at any moment – while I’m at work, at the hair salon, at the grocery store. I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me … This is one set of absolute truths.

Here’s another: If I had known Ronan had Tay-Sachs … I would have had an abortion. Without question and without regret … I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he’d never been born; no person should suffer in this way – daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain – with no hope for a cure. ¹⁵

Since a ‘deep reverence for life’ can sustain meanings relating both to biological life and to what we might call relational life, agreement on this ‘deeper level of morality’ will not justify one position on abortion over another. In this case, as in the case of the Hawkins county school dispute, recourse to public reasons and considerations instead highlights the different credible interpretations we can have of their content and meaning. ¹⁶

Rethinking deliberation

In a 2009 article Cohen offers a revision of his deliberative democratic theory that, whether intentionally or not, serves to avoid this outcome. To be sure, Cohen himself notes no changes to his account and continues to connect the justification of democratic decisions to a ‘free and reasoned assessment of alternatives by equals’. Nevertheless, the public reasons to which this free and reasoned assessment is tied are no longer considerations or ‘reasons that are persuasive’ to all. Instead, they are simply reasons ‘others can reasonably be expected to acknowledge as reasons’. ¹⁷ Nor is rational consensus the aim of deliberation or aggregating votes simply a last resort. Rather, Cohen writes, ‘[n]o matter how deliberative democracy gets, collective decisions will always be made through voting, under some form of majority rule’. ¹⁸

Cohen uses deliberation over the allocation of scarce medical resources as an example. Here deliberators can advance different reasons that they all nonetheless recognize as reasons. Some participants might think we should give priority to those who are the worst off and some to those who would most benefit. Some might advocate for helping the greatest number while others for ensuring that every person has a fair chance of receiving care. In Cohen’s 2009 view, democratic deliberation need not find any one of these considerations better than the others nor need deliberators coalesce around any one of them. Rather, democracy is deliberative as long as we trade reasons that are public in the sense that we can all accept their status as reasons. We then vote on which of these public reasons is to be decisive for the case at hand.

This account of public reasons circumvents the prospect that deliberators with different backgrounds and presuppositions can appeal to the same reasons while understanding them in different equally plausible ways because it denies that deliberators need to appeal to the same reasons at all. Public reasons justify claims and proposals not by aiming at a rational consensus but by showing the connection of proposals to reasons and considerations all deliberators can recognize as valid whether or not they agree on their being the best or most pertinent. Other deliberative democrats make a parallel move. Mansbridge and her co-authors, for example, claim that the aim of deliberation can comprise forms of agreement that remain non-coercive but are less stringent than ‘classic’ deliberative theory allows. Participants may, for instance, agree even though they possess different reasons for doing so or agree only on overlapping parts of different conceptions of the common good. ¹⁹

Yet these alternatives to a consensus based on shared public reasons raise questions about the point of deliberating. Why assume greater legitimation for policy decisions just because we exchange different public reasons and considerations that we all recognize as such? Why deliberate if we need not agree or can agree in some partial way? Under what we might call a non-minimalist conception of agreement based on public reasons and considerations, the recourse to such reasons and considerations encourages deliberators to exchange self-interested factors for ones aimed at the common good and it does so because deliberators need to convince others, because legitimation aims at ‘a free and reasoned agreement among equals’. When deliberators do not succeed in convincing others, this failure encourages them to change their preferences or to rethink their proposals and reasons in a further attempt at forging consensus. If, however, they need not even try to convince others or if they can maintain their own (sufficiently public) reasons for agreeing to a policy or decision why need they deliberate at all? Perhaps deliberation in this case has some symbolic value insofar as it offers individuals or groups the knowledge that their reasoning has public purchase and that they have at least been heard. Yet surely there are other ways of being heard – among them, voting. Does deliberation have more symbolic value than winning some proportion of the vote on the issue? What does this revised conception of deliberation add to the democratic process over and above the exercise of one’s own moral-political judgment and a tallying of views?

Cohen grants the relevance of such questions and offers three possible answers. He looks, first, to the value of impartial reasoning: ‘If justice is fixed by impartial reasoning in hypothetical situations in which agents aim to justify principles to others, then, arguably, we will only achieve justice if we make collective decisions using reasoning of a similar kind.’ ²⁰ Yet to what does impartial reasoning refer here? If it refers simply to reasoning that employs reasons or considerations others can acknowledge as reasons or considerations the question remains as to why we need deliberate about them. Why not just vote along one publicly recognizable line of reasoning or another in accordance with our own moral-political judgment? Only if impartial reasoning involves the aim of convincing others with reasons they can accept as persuasive need we actually talk to or deliberate with them. Cohen himself suggests this more substantive account of impartial reasoning in insisting that deliberative democracy appeals to ‘the common reason of equal citizens – democracy’s public reason’, ²¹ and in citing Habermas’ link between the justification of proposals and policies and ‘the force of the better argument’. ²² He thus toggles back from a minimalist conception of public reasons, one that conceives of them as reasons that others can simply recognize as possible reasons, to a non-minimalist conception that sees public reasons as reasons that are meant to convince others. In doing so, however, he again confronts the interpretive problem: we can convince others with reasons they nonetheless may interpret in a different but non-dismissible way.

Cohen’s second and third defenses of the point of deliberation are no less equivocal in their account of public reasons. The second defense insists that deliberation imposes desirable constraints on defensible proposals and can change preferences ‘or at least saliences’ ²³ while the third claims that in deliberating with others we signal respect for the idea that as democratic citizens we are all equal. Yet as long as our deliberation need appeal only to minimalist public reasons it is not clear how they can accomplish either task. How can deliberation impose desirable constraints or change saliences unless it is meant to persuade us that our pre-deliberative preferences or ideas of salience do not advance the common good? If democratic deliberation entails only that I be able to acknowledge that the considerations to which my opponents link their preferences or ideas of the proper saliences are publicly accessible ones, why need they change them? Suppose, for example, my opponents want to exempt their children from the reading exercises of the Hawkins county public schools and cite as their reasons their rights to follow their own faith and, within boundaries that exclude violence, to raise their children as they see fit. Since I can presumably accept these reasons as reasons it is unclear how deliberation over them can encourage my opponents to change their preferences or saliences. Likewise, as long as our deliberation need appeal only to minimalist public reasons, it is unclear how offering our reasons to others reflects an appreciation of their equality with us. The requirement that to whatever proposal I make I attach a reason from the common reservoir of public reasons might just as easily signal contempt for others as regard for their equality. Deliberation on this model asks only that I offer others the consolation of a reason they can recognize as a possible reason even if I am indifferent to the likelihood of its persuading them.

In sum, Cohen’s defenses of deliberation circumvent interpretive issues only at a cost. On the one hand, in trying to disconnect deliberation from the aim of consensus, he offers a minimalist conception of public reasons as reasons we can all recognize as reasons. This strategy has added the virtue of resolving the problem I have raised that we can appeal to the same reasons while differing in what we take them to mean. At the same time, the strategy also raises the question of why we should deliberate with others at all. On the other hand, in trying to show the value of deliberation, he reverts to the classic idea of public reasons and considerations as those that can convince others. Yet if the minimalist conception of public reasons raises the question of why we should deliberate at all, the more substantive conception returns us to our initial quandary. In diverse and pluralistic democracies, we can agree that the same reasons or considerations constitute the better argument but understand them in different, often equally plausible ways.

It might be thought that we could avoid this quandary by following a Scanlon-like path and appealing not to reasons we can all accept but to reasons we cannot reject. Indeed, this path may be the one Cohen suggests in claiming that deliberation in terms of public reasons and considerations sets ‘desirable constraints on defensible proposals’. In any case, this path is the one that Rainer Forst takes. I want to look at it briefly before turning to a more hermeneutic approach to deliberation because I think the problems with Forst’s analysis strengthen the case for this latter approach.

Non-rejectable reasons

Forst defines public reasons negatively, as ‘reasons that cannot be reciprocally and generally rejected’. ²⁴ By reciprocity he means: ‘In making a claim or presenting an argument no one may claim a right or resource he denies to others, whereby the formulation of the claim must itself be open to questioning.’ By generality he means: ‘All those subject to the norms in question must have equal chances to advance their claims and arguments.’ ²⁵ Hence, to say that a reason cannot be reciprocally and generally rejected is to say that it cannot be rejected without claiming a right or resource one denies others and/or without denying all those subject to the norm it legitimates equal chances to advance their claims and arguments. As an example Forst looks to the issue of civil marriages between same-sex partners: ‘Party A may … argue for a broader interpretation of equal rights, such as the right to same-sex marriage, while party B may violate reciprocity and generality by (a) denying others a right they themselves have and (b) defending this privilege with reasons that derive from a non-generalizable, say religious, ethical doctrine.’ ²⁶

To say that a reason does not violate reciprocity and generality is not to say it needs to persuade all those affected. Rather, reasons that do not violate reciprocity and generality may be set aside by individuals or groups who think that other non-rejectable reasons outweigh them in the particular instance at hand. Hence, as for Cohen and Mansbridge et al., for Forst a decision can be legitimate even if it is ‘neither accepted on the basis of the same reasons by everyone nor seen as the “best” solution by all’. ²⁷ Deliberation is a two-step process. We first deliberate in order to root out unsupportable reasons, ones that can be reasonably rejected; we then deliberate over non-rejectable reasons in order to determine their relative political priority. As Forst puts the point:

What is … minimally necessary for a deliberative process is that citizens understand and evaluate each others’ reasons in a rational, open-minded, fair way … They need not all be convinced by the same reasons, but they need to heed the criteria of reciprocity and generality and sort out unsupportable reasons … Thus one main function is the negative one of discursively discrediting certain claims and arguments. What then follows in terms of ordering reciprocally and generally admissible claims or reasons is more open to discussion, the resulting game of giving and asking for political reasons may entail various kinds of moves and results arrived at by way of fair deliberation. ²⁸

Some of us might reject this understanding of marriage. Nevertheless, we cannot do so simply by appealing to non-rejectable reasons. To dispute an understanding of what something is does not mean one’s showing that those who possess this understanding claim a right or resource they deny others. Nor is it a matter of denying others equal chances to advance their claims. Rather, if we want to dispute the way others understand particular meanings, we must engage with those understandings and judge whether they make sense according to relevant interpretive criteria. In other words, rather than deliberating over reasons, we must discuss our interpretive differences, distinguish between those that are plausible and those that are not, and figure what to do with interpretations that are equally defensible. I therefore want to conclude this article by exploring the idea of public interpretive discussions.

Interpretive discussions

Interpretive differences are an important feature of disciplines in the humanities. We want to understand Melville’s Moby-Dick, say, or the reign of Charles I. In order to do so, we read the novel and seek out commentaries on it, or we pore through archives and study secondary sources. Books, archival materials and secondary sources do not speak for themselves, however; we have to interpret them and we do so from different perspectives, with different interests and concerns. We may understand Moby-Dick in terms of other seafaring novels or from the perspective of an interest in 19^th-century life; we may understand the reign of Charles I from the perspective of an interest in the causes of the English Civil War or in terms of a concern with male relationships in the 17^th century. We are always situated in time and place when we try to understand. The focused interest in male relationships is not one we need attribute to the 17^th century itself. It may arise from a 21^st-century perspective made sensitive to variation and sexual rights, and we may therefore understand the 17^th century differently than the 17^th century understood itself. Moreover, even when we are interested in understanding the way the 17^th century understood itself we will necessarily do so through the lens of what interests us about the way it understood itself. The same holds for our understanding of Moby-Dick. Because we cannot but understand it from a vantage point informed by books, texts, reputations and events that came after it, we necessarily understand it differently than Melville or his contemporaries could have understood it. We are oriented by the new entanglements and the different questions that our personal, historical and cultural experiences and interests allow us to ask. The answers we receive represent the meaning of the text or of what we might call a text analogue such as an action, practice or event.

To this extent, as Hans-Georg Gadamer points out, our understanding of meaning is dialogic. ³⁰ We do not try to understand meanings primarily because we are interested in what texts, events, actions and other cultural productions have to say to themselves but rather because we are interested in what they have to say to us, given who, when and where we are. Furthermore, when we are interested in their self-understanding it is a self-understanding we grasp only as mediated by our questions and interests. What were the English of the 17^th century expecting from the event we now know as the Civil War? What does Moby-Dick say about Roland Barthes’ view of the death of authorship? ³¹ Gadamer also notes that although we may begin by asking questions of a text or text analogue and although these questions arise from our situation and perspective, the dialogue becomes one in which our texts and text analogues ask questions of us. They may surprise us in ways that require us to recognize and then reflect on our prior assumptions; they may also refuse to answer our questions in ways that encourage us to reflect on why or how we are asking them. Thus, while there can be no requirement that we read books or try to understand other historical and cultural productions, we necessarily engage in dialogue when we do so.

Moreover, even though we need not read books or try to understand historical or cultural productions, we are always engaged in the activity of understanding meaning, of figuring out what things are. For this reason, Gadamer, like Martin Heidegger, broadens the scope of hermeneutics beyond texts and text analogues and beyond explicit interpretive attempts to encompass an account of understanding as the way we cope with our world. To participate in and engage with our world is to understand how to do certain things. We understand what voting is and how to engage in it; we understand what schools are and what importance they possess or do not possess in the culture of which we are a part. We do not always focus on our activities of understanding. Yet because we are always immersed in them, we are also always in dialogue. We are always asking questions about what the material of our world is and we can sometimes be brought up short by the responses we hear.

Our explicit discussions of meaning with others widen this interpretive dialogue in which we are always engaged. We are in dialogue with our world and with others about our world; we discuss with them what our texts, practices and activities mean, what those of others mean, how others understand ours and how these various understandings compare with or relate to one another. We take the participants in these discussions to be resources for us. We assume that they can help us to achieve understandings of meaning that may make more sense to us than the ones we already hold and we hope they can help with meanings we do not understand at all. We assume that they can possess enlightening differences in perspective, interest and concern and we engage in dialogue in order to discover what these differences are. We ask questions of participants in interpretive discussions and we often learn to ask new questions from the answers we receive.

At the same time, we need not be uncritical about the interpretive resources others offer us. Rather, in interpretive discussions we ask participants to provide support for their interpretations. To be sure, we cannot look to public reasons or considerations to justify our understandings; indeed, we are often concerned precisely with what our public reasons and considerations mean. Additionally, in interpretive discussions we often value the particular insight equally or more than the general or consensus view. We want to know what a text or text analogue looks like from a specific vantage point other than our own and we want to compare our own insights with those of others. Nevertheless, we can also distinguish between insights and misunderstanding. Traditional hermeneutic theory measures the adequacy of an interpretation in terms of its capacity to integrate the parts and whole of a text or text analogue. Insight into the meaning of a text or text analogue shows the way the parts cohere to form a unified whole and the way that unified whole makes sense out of the parts. As Gadamer and Heidegger suggest, however, this demonstration does not arise out of formal or external maxims or principles of interpretation but rather out of the requirements of understanding itself. We cannot leap out of our understanding to compare it with the text or text analogue since we have access to the text or text analogue only through our understanding. If we are to confirm the plausibility of our understanding, then, we can do so only by comparing it with itself and hence with its own parts. To be sure, this internal criterion of understanding presumes that the text or text analogue actually composes a unified whole. Although this presumption is defeasible, it guides even deconstructive understandings that show the way in which a text or text analogue undermines or fails to live up to its own sense. For, we must project this sense in order to uncover the way the parts of the text or text analogue undermine it. To understand, then, just is to project coherence and to consider what needs revising, our understanding, our world, or our texts, when our understanding no longer allows their parts to cohere.

Nevertheless, coherence remains non-exclusionary. One coherent understanding of Moby-Dick does not exhaust the dimensions of its meaning nor does one account of the reign of Charles I. We offer what we take to be good and plausible interpretations of meaning and we defend them by referring to evidence in the material we are trying to understand. There are always different ways of understanding that with which we are concerned, however, different ways of coordinating parts and whole, different ways of understanding the parts, different parts to emphasize and different frameworks and contexts within which to understand. Additionally, because any evidence we cite must be interpreted as well, we never reach the end of the meaning our texts have or our world possesses.

Suppose we stress the interpretive dimensions of our public democratic discourse and emphasize the possible pluralism of coherent understandings of meaning – of the meaning of the reasons and considerations about which we deliberate and the meaning of the actions and practices at issue. In this case, we will acknowledge that we always understand reasons, considerations, actions and practices from particular perspectives, with particular interests and concerns that emerge from our particular personal, cultural and historical situations and experiences. We may understand human life within a biological or a relational context just as we may understand reverence for it in different terms as well. Such understandings will emerge from different horizons of understanding and take their direction from different questions and perspectives. Our understandings will be subject to interpretive criteria of coherence and allow for distinctions between interpretations that make sense of the phenomena and those that do not. Nevertheless, to the extent that we focus on the meanings reasons, principles, actions and activities have for us we can acknowledge the possibility that we will arrive at different, equally coherent, understandings.

Conceiving of deliberative democracy in these terms resolves two difficulties in deliberative democratic theory. First, if recent revisions of the theory risk undermining the rationale for engaging in deliberation at all, an interpretive approach recognizes that we are always already engaged in interpretive discussions and that, to this extent, they need no rationale. We are always trying to understand what the features of our world mean and we are therefore always already involved in dialogue with our world and with others about our world. Interpretive deliberation extends this dialogue to our political life in an explicit way, to the discussion of what our principles, reasonings and aspirations mean. Second, we need no longer limit these discussions to the exchange of different public reasons and considerations, to the certification of non-rejectable reasons, or to some other appeal to public reasons and considerations. Rather, we can consider the different ways we understand these public reasons and considerations. Deliberation about the distribution of medical care, for example, need not restrict itself to endorsing certain non-rejectable principles that ground distribution, say, in need or greater benefit. Nor need it restrict itself to hoping that those who ground it in need come to the same conclusions as those who ground it in greater benefit. Rather, interpretive discussion will primarily concern the meanings that medical care can plausibly have for us given the constellation of practices, expectations and histories that it involves. What understandings find support in this constellation and how can we distribute medical care in ways that do justice to those understandings? In trying to answer these questions we will compare different understandings and look for the support alternative interpretations may have in our history, in institutions such as Medicare and Medicaid, in federal investments in medical research, in the role of health insurance agencies and so on.

Interpretive discussions about marriage between same-sex partners will proceed in the same way, by asking what marriage is. Here we will not assume, as Forst does, that the refusal of many US states to extend civil marriage beyond different-sex partners is grounded in a rejection of non-rejectable reasons. Rather, we will engage in discussions about what civil marriage is and, in defense of our interpretations, we will again look at the constellation of practices, expectations and histories that it involves. We will look to tax law and federal statutes, for example, as well as to the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions such as Loving v. Virginia; we will also look at historical changes in conceptions of what marriage is – say from notions that link it to property, lineage and coverture to ideas that stress love and commitment instead and we will look to the sorts of practices around marriage that we currently possess. Similarly, in public discussions of abortion, we will not begin by pitting two moral principles against one another. Rather, we will ask what human life, reverence for human life and abortion may be and we will investigate the adequacy of alternative understandings within the context of our historical and current concepts and practices. Might human life be equally well understood in relational and biological terms? How might allowing for suffering and revering life cohere or not cohere with one another? To be sure, we may ultimately understand the contexts and evidence to which we look in different ways and we may even see different contexts as appropriate. If so, however, as long as our different interpretations allow us to make sense out of the phenomena in questions we can perhaps enhance our own understanding by trying to learn from that of others. Whereas deliberation allows us only either to confirm or to give up on the public character of our reasons and considerations, interpretive discussions allow us to explore larger ranges of meaning.

This move from democratic deliberation to interpretive discussion raises at least three issues, however. First, the purpose of democratic deliberation is to come to a justifiable decision, to settle on a specific policy or piece of legislation. Deliberative democrats may conceive of deliberation as the whole or simply a part of the democratic process, in which deliberation sets the direction for formal democratic procedures. Nevertheless, democratic deliberation is directed either at acting itself or encouraging a legislative action and, in either case, comes to an end with a decision or recommendation. Interpretive discussions, however, need neither end nor settle on any action. We never exhaust possible discussions of Moby-Dick or the reign of Charles I. Nor do any actions follow from our discussions; we need not decide which medications to prescribe Ahab or whether we should behead the king. Transferred to the domain of public political issues and concerns, interpretive discussions thus appear unsuited to democratic decision-making or, indeed, to any decision-making at all.

A second issue for interpretive discussion concerns its relation to the aim of consensus. Although democratic deliberation may have a vexed relation to this aim, interpretive discussions would appear to have no interest in it at all. Not only are disagreement and difference essential to the expansion of insight that interpretive discussions facilitate; to the extent that we learn to see that which we are discussing in new ways, the conclusion of an interpretive discussion may merely compound differences by revealing new elements of meaning with regard to which our understandings continue to diverge or differ even more radically than they did before the discussion. The long-term American debate over abortion is a case in point. Approached as an interpretive issue, it no longer includes only questions of what human life or reverence for it is but also questions of what abortion is – is it a decision to end a life or a form of birth control – as well as questions about what equality means – if women have obligations to support the lives of their fetuses and children, do men? If we outlaw abortion, will we also outlaw the birth control methods with which abortion, on one account, is aligned? If women are responsible for the lives of fetuses, must we also prosecute those who, for whatever reason, decide not to donate bone marrow to save their own dying children?

Still a third issue with moving democratic deliberation in an interpretive direction is that doing so appears to limit its normative scope. Surely if women have procreative rights, if medical care is a need, or if civil marriage includes same-sex couples these outcomes follow from principles that are universally valid and do not depend only on how particular people understand the particular cultures and histories of their particular communities. By suggesting otherwise, interpretive discussions move in a communitarian direction and entangle themselves in the familiar problem such a direction involves. To the extent that we rely on the interpretive context provided by the culture and history of a particular community, we may leave those whom that community has marginalized without recourse to the norms and principles that could provide a critical purchase on that marginalization and help improve their situation. In the United States, moreover, the marginalized have included the poor, women and sexual minorities – those with perhaps most at stake in issues concerning medical care, abortion and marriage between same-sex partners.

I think none of these issues undermines the role of interpretive discussions in a diverse and pluralistic democracy. To begin with the first issue, it is of course the case that interpretive discussion in the public sphere must come to at least a provisional close with a decision or recommendation for action. Shall we distribute medical care as a need or as a commodity? Shall we perform civil marriages for same-sex couples? What shall we do about legal access to abortion? Yet conceiving of these questions as interpretive questions makes two advances. First, where discussion reveals two or more understandings of meaning that are equally plausible, this outcome can lead us to recommend or accept a compromise. In this instance, we look to compromise not because our debate has made us bitter or exhausted and not because our debate comprises only competing particular interests with no room for a general good. Rather, we compromise because we acknowledge the equal plausibility of a range of different understandings. Indeed, we recognize that we have no monopoly on the positions from which understanding is possible and that our own position is as interpretive as the next. In the case of abortion, for example, acknowledging different possible and plausible understandings of life and reverence may encourage us to accept a compromise and we might conceive of Roe v. Wade as just such a compromise.

The second advance interpretive discussion makes comes into play where the discussion succeeds in clarifying the limits of one interpretation and the greater plausibility of another. In this case, the discussion and its conclusion safeguard mutual respect. Those with interpretive differences are not adversaries only one of whom can claim a grasp on public reasons. Rather, participants in interpretive discussions are joint interpreters who look forward to and appreciate the insights all bring to the discussion. Here George’s perspective on marriage can serve as an example. We can respect the vision of marriage as a two-in-one-flesh communion and we can value the unity and intimacy it reflects even if we conclude that this vision ultimately fails to cohere with the whole of the history, practices and laws of the United States of which civil marriage is a part. We may then see George’s vision as the province of particular religions without denying its worth.

An appreciation for the insights of others also provides a way of responding to the contrast between deliberative democracy’s and an interpretive discussion’s relation to the goal of consensus, more or less strictly construed. Interpretive discussions may have no interest in consensus and a great deal of interest in exploring alternative understandings. Yet precisely this interest allows for unrestricted discussions and an openness to new perspectives on meaning that can enhance our understanding of the matters at stake. In their discussion of deliberative democracy, Gutmann and Thompson also stress openness. ‘We should’, they say, ‘be seeking a balance between holding firm convictions and being prepared to change them if we encounter objections that on reflection we cannot answer.’ ³² Nevertheless, while openness remains an ungrounded prescription in their account, on an interpretive account openness follows from interpretation itself. We are concerned to understand what something is or means. But to the extent that we recognize that how we understand depends upon the questions we ask and the context from which those questions emerge, we also recognize the limits of our questions and contexts. For this very reason, we are open to the perspectives and understandings of others.

Rapp’s perspective on the issue of abortion is a case in point. This perspective opens up an alternative way of understanding not only a deep reverence for life but also the US debate over abortion itself. It indicates the limits of understanding this debate as one simply between the right to life and the freedom of choice. Indeed, given Rapp’s perspective, freedom of choice comes to seem a strange name for attitudes and decisions that emerge from so deep a place in our hearts and minds. Given one understanding of life’s meaning, aborting a severely sick fetus is less a choice or a decision than a commandment of love. In general, once we conceive and pursue the debate over abortion as an interpretive discussion we open ourselves up to such a profound range of ways of understanding and revering human life that we cannot but be enriched, enlarged and, consequently, even somewhat grateful for the debate.

How might we respond to the issue that however we grow in understanding or resolve our various debates, an interpretive approach limits the universality of the decision? Suppose the most plausible interpretation of US marital law in the context of its history, practices and traditions actually excludes marriage between same-sex partners? Will universal normative principles not still condemn such a result? Can we really leave the future of marriage, abortion, or health care to the contingencies of culture and history and the interpretations culture and history make possible? Can we do so particularly where culture and history are oppressive and discriminatory? I think the answers to the first and second issues provide a response to these questions as well. On the one hand, we can ask what the alternative to the contingencies of culture and history is meant to be. For even universal principles do not interpret themselves. A universal right to health care, for example, does not tell us what to count as health care nor do general procreative rights solve the question of whether abortion is murder. On the other hand, we can depend upon interpretive diversity always to open up new, plausible ways to understand. We look to those who must watch a beloved son die to teach us more of what a deep reverence for life means. We look to those who love those whom culture and history tell them they ought not to love to reveal new forms of intimate relationship worthy of legal protection. To be sure, in these cases we rely on the courage of the marginalized to offer their interpretations. Yet interpretive discussion is surely in no more dependent a position in this regard than is deliberative democracy. Neither democratic deliberation nor interpretive discussion can ensure participation or demand that the marginalized speak. Nonetheless, at the base of interpretive discussion is a recognition of the interpretive status of one’s own understanding, a recognition that involves acknowledging its limits and, consequently, a desire to go beyond them by seeking out the understandings of others.

In the end, the interest in overcoming our interpretive limits encourages us to think differently about the potential endlessness of interpretive discussion. Discussions of some issues may seem more important at certain times than at others; compromises may appear and then seem inadequate as, perhaps, one allowing for civil unions. Indeed, permitting civil marriages between both different-sex and same-sex partners may in fact lead, as opponents of the latter fear, to interpretive discussions of marriage that consider its meaning in a modern world and its extension to other sorts of intimate relationship. Yet, given the potential for interpretive discussions to educate and expand us, the ongoing nature of these discussions may be a characteristic that we ought to relish rather than dismiss.