Deep Pluralism Research Articles

Surrendering Noble Lies Where We Buried the Bodies: Formative Civic Education for Embodied Citizenship

AbstractTo enact democracy, which is to live in communication with difference, requires a formative process that involves an education of the whole person for and through civic life. Drawing on Charles Mills's theory of Herrenvolk ethics and Jonathan Lear's analysis of psychosocial lapses that ail us, Sheron Fraser‐Burgess and Chris Higgins pursue a critical, historiographical, and psychosocial reading of our failures to live up to this aspiration, offering (1) a critique of our tendency to saddle ourselves with a false choice between a homogenizing unity and a differentiated but fractured republic; (2) a demonstration of why we must eschew a thin universalism of principles and confront difference as embodied; (3) an argument from the ethics of risk against the urge to reify and compartmentalize difference; and (4) an evocation of how deep pluralism itself might serve as a unifying creed. Civic education is not a matter of informing but of forming and cultivating vision and values. In pursuing the credal deep pluralism that is required to do justice to the prospects and perils of our democracy‐in‐the‐making, the task of the formative educator may be more difficult; but by embracing this creed, teachers may inspire their students to do the same.

China-Iran strategic partnership and the future of US hegemony in the Persian Gulf Region

ABSTRACT International power is under profound transition, marked by a move towards deep pluralism in the international system whereby a range of middle powers have begun to stake a greater claim to regional power. This shift is escalating the power struggle between the United States and China. Both Beijing and Tehran share a strategic plan to undermine US global hegemony, and both have encountered tensions, sanctions, and pressures originating from Washington. A relatively strong and independent Iran in the Persian Gulf would help China not only to ensure its interests in the region, but also to guarantee its energy security and embed its footprint in the Middle East. Consequently, in the age of relative decline of United States’ power, and the rise of regional powers, the Sino-Iranian strategic partnership is changing the Middle East’s security architecture. Iran’s look East and China’s march West strategic visions will meet in the Persian Gulf region. As such, this article seeks to explore such confluence, and its implications.

Pluralism and a Spirituality of the (Im)possible

The relationship between pluralism and spirituality is explored in the context of a specific understanding of humanism, developed by the political philosopher William Connolly. He uses the term ‘entangled humanism’ to express his ecological view on how humans relate to other forms of being, stressing the need for an attitude of partnership and care in the face of ecological crisis. To realize this non-anthropocentric form of humanism, we need our creativity and imagination, and a spiritual affinity characterized by openness and a commitment to shared goals. According to Connolly, we need a deep pluralism in which people are ready to defend their creed in public while realizing a productive ethos of political engagement with others of different convictions. We need to find one another in imaginative ideas and creative actions with regard to problems that confront us all and that are so urgent as to force us to collective action. According to Connolly, in working together, a connecting spiritual affinity can emerge. This view is elaborated upon with the help of John Dewey’s notions of moral imagination and religious trust, understood here as key elements of an entangled humanism. The article closes by describing a spirituality of the (im)possible that can be a source of inspiration for an entangled humanism that really makes a difference in our complex but rich world.

Reading Ellison through Herder: Language, Integration, and Democracy

This article contributes to recent work treating Ralph Ellison as a major democratic theorist by reading his political thought through a heretofore overlooked, and apparently remote, interpretive lens: the linguistic and cultural theories of Johann Gottfried von Herder. Ellison’s controversial endorsement of an integrationist vision of American nationhood was, I show, rooted in an underlying theory of language whose premises were essentially Herderian. Yet Ellison also creatively expanded on those ideas, notably through his concept of the “democratic vernacular,” which analyzed the relationship between language, culture, and politics to explain how democracy and integration might progress in the United States, despite the racism of its political system and amid the deep pluralism of its culture. By reworking Herderian themes for radically diverse contexts, Ellison’s thought furnishes resources to democratic theorists confronting a range of urgent normative issues related to cultural diversity.

In Search of an Adequate Response to Pluralism: A Critical Analysis of Liberalism in Philosophy of Education

AbstractNearly everyone recognizes the fact of deep pluralism: it is hard to deny that contemporary America is characterized by widespread diversity of beliefs, practices, and values. We disagree, not on this reality, but on the way we should respond to the pluralism around us. In this paper, Emily G. Wenneborg discusses one of the most common responses to pluralism in contemporary philosophy of education: autonomy‐based liberalism. She praises liberalism for its attempt to navigate certain tensions that accompany its approach to pluralism. At the same time, she raises several critiques of liberalism as a response to pluralism, particularly with regard to religious communities and belief systems. She suggests that trust provides a better framework than autonomy for educating in and for deep pluralism.

The Relevance of Deep Pluralism for China’s Foreign Policy

Abstract Deep pluralism describes a global society in which power, wealth, and cultural and political authority are distributed diffusely within a system that has high interaction capacity and is strongly interdependent. This concept has empirical and normative value for understanding China’s foreign policy. Empirically, it enables us to see that China has been a key driver of deep pluralism in its modern history. Normatively, it points to the importance of the contestation between consensual and contested forms of deep pluralism and the critical role China can play in this contestation. China is now facing choices between those motivated by raison d’etat (narrow self-interest) and raison de système (system-wide responsibility incorporating enlightened self-interest). For its professed goals of international peace and development, it is imperative that China promote a consensual form of deep pluralism in the spirit of raison de système. In the Asian region, where its regional policy is entangled with its US policy, this would require it to ameliorate contested deep pluralism in its policies towards the USA while adopting a consistent strategy of reassurance towards its neighbours.

Gendering Citizenship and Decolonizing Justice in 1960s Ghana: Revisiting the Struggle for Family Law Reform

Abstract This article revisits the debates over family law reform in the years surrounding the independence of Ghana from British colonial rule. It builds upon social historical studies of marriage and child-rearing, and puts these into dialogue with the scholarship on legal pluralism, in order to examine the postcolonial implications of gendered legal struggles over social reproduction that arose during the colonial era. Drawing on key court cases, the report of a commission of inquiry, parliamentary debates, and the papers of a voluntary association, the article explores how different groups of women established their authority to speak on these issues, and why they were able to legitimate some reforms but not others. Whilst historians have pointed to the constraints that single-party socialism imposed on feminist mobilization in Ghana, this article explores further the ‘form, scale and scope’ of women’s agency. In the context of republican attempts to tackle colonial legacies of ‘deep legal pluralism’, and a programme of socialist development, women reformers framed their arguments in terms of a balance between the preservation of ‘custom’ and ‘advancement’ to modernity, and claimed their authority as mothers. By working creatively with the contradictions arising between legal, political, and sociological discourses, women parliamentarians secured a child maintenance law in 1965, even though earlier attempts to reform the marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws had ended in failure.

“As So Many Dead Corpses”: Religious Tolerance from Beyond the Grave

“As So Many Dead Corpses”: Religious Tolerance from Beyond the Grave Alison Conway The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic sent me, along with thousands of other readers, to a plague narrative for answers—in my case, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. It’s a novel that I have always loved and that I taught several times in the early years of my career. One reason I liked to teach the novel was the opportunity it afforded for introducing students to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, a work I studied in graduate school, shortly after its publication. Scarry’s description of pain’s ability to unmake the world illuminated the trauma at the heart of Defoe’s novel and the narrative’s effort to both represent and overcome it. Returning to the novel in 2021, the Journal’s account of pain seems more complicated, in part because I am thinking about it alongside the question of religious tolerance in our own pandemic moment. This time it was Lars Tønder’s Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics that I turned to after re-reading the novel, a work that, unlike Scarry’s, has not been widely taken up by literary critics thinking about pain. For Tønder, a new materialist, pain serves as a starting point for imagining a sensorial mode of tolerance. “How can pain,” he asks, “become part of a desire to belong to a world of deep pluralism?” 1 This question resonates in a moment that contains so much pain—of ongoing loss, grief, and frustration—and is marked by deep political divisions, including those fostered, most aggressively in the United States, by Christian conservatives who refuse public health mandates and the COVID-19 vaccine. The director of the Public Religion Research Institute, Natalie Jackson, reports that a June 2021 poll showed that “white evangelical Republicans were considerably less likely to say they were vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated as soon as possible (53 percent) than Republicans who were not white evangelicals.”2 It seems urgent not to let the views of this group, and others like them, reinforce a sense, among their opponents, that secularism is the guarantor of [End Page 47] collective well-being and that religious feeling stands in the way of progress. As Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and others have pointed out, this idea of an Enlightenment-based secular imperative has reinforced Islamaphobia in the West and been used to justify imperial projects and the persecution of religious minorities around the globe.3 Re-reading early modern texts allows us to think past, or beyond, this religious/secular divide, complicating our historical understanding of religious tolerance and its evolution. Tønder notes how contemporary democratic theory “has screened off many of tolerance’s remainders, making the history of tolerance seem more linear and progressive than it historically has been” (20). Teresa Bejan argues that “the real advantage of consulting the past lies in opening ourselves to the ways in which it challenges our own commitments and assumptions, especially about what it means to be ‘civil’ or ‘tolerant’ today.”4 Defoe proves a particularly fruitful source for investigating literary criticism’s association of secularism with the rise of the novel, and my reading of the Journal confirms what Nancy Armstrong, and others, have observed regarding Defoe’s ability “to write from both sides of the divide between early modern and modern cultures.”5 The Journal, I argue, represents religious tolerance in ways that are markedly different from its representation in Defoe’s other novels, which draw on liberal constructions informed by John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration.6 As David Alvarez and others have observed, Defoe’s commercial interests encourage the export of a generalized Protestantism harnessed to the imperatives of imperialism in the Robinson Crusoe trilogy.7 Protestant norms that are never identified as such masquerade as an ethics of toleration respectful of religious difference. What looks like tolerance of Roman Catholics, for example, turns out to be a transformation of Catholicism into a species of Protestantism. Practices that do not align with Protestant epistemology must be violently expurgated. Anchoring this new global regime is the...

A Complex Ultimate Reality: The Metaphysics of the Four Yogas

This essay will pose and seek to answer the following question: If, as Swami Vivekananda claims, the four yogas are independent and equally effective paths to God-realization and liberation from the cycle of rebirth, then what must reality be like? What ontology is implied by the claim that the four yogas are all equally effective paths to the supreme goal of religious life? What metaphysical conditions would enable this pluralistic assertion to be true? Swami Vivekananda’s worldview is frequently identified with Advaita Vedānta. We shall see that Vivekananda’s teaching is certainly Advaitic in what could be called a broad sense. As Anantanand Rambachan and others, however, have pointed out, it would be incorrect to identify Swami Vivekananda’s teachings in any rigid or dogmatic sense with the classical Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara; this is because Vivekananda’s teaching departs from that of Śaṅkara in some significant ways, not least in his assertion of the independent salvific efficacy of the four yogas. This essay will argue that Swami Vivekananda’s pluralism, based on the concept of the four yogas, is far more akin to the deep religious pluralism that is advocated by contemporary philosophers of religion in the Whiteheadian tradition of process thought like David Ray Griffin and John Cobb, the classical Jain doctrines of relativity (anekāntavāda, nayavāda, and syādvāda), and, most especially, the Vijñāna Vedānta of Vivekananda’s guru, Sri Ramakrishna, than any of these approaches is to the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara. Advaita Vedānta, in Vivekananda’s pluralistic worldview, becomes one valid conceptual matrix among many that bear the ability to support an efficacious path to liberation. This essay is intended not as an historical reconstruction of Vivekananda’s thought, so much as a constructive philosophical contribution to the ongoing scholarly conversations about both religious (and, more broadly, worldview) pluralism and the religious and philosophical legacies of both Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. The former conversation has arrived at something of an impasse (as recounted by Kenneth Rose), while the latter conversation has recently been revived, thanks to the work of Swami Medhananda (formerly Ayon Maharaj) and Arpita Mitra.

The substance of procedures

In Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont identifies proceduralist or ‘deep pluralist’ conceptions of democracy alongside epistemic and lottocratic approaches as shortcuts that avoid the more challenging but, in her view, preferable path of engaging with and attempting to sway competing views, values and beliefs of fellow citizens. I argue that with the wholesale dismissal of proceduralist accounts of democracy Lafont herself takes two shortcuts: The first concerns the characterization of deep pluralism as unable to explain substantive disagreement after a decision is settled, and the second undervalues proceduralism’s ability to evaluate and criticize the substance of the political decision-making process. While her critique is fitting for minimalist conceptions of proceduralism, a theory of normative proceduralism shares many objectives with Lafont’s vision of a participatory deliberative democracy. Integrating those approaches instead of dismissing proceduralism outright would render her project appealing to theorists who would not otherwise consider themselves deliberative democrats.

Against Anti-Democratic Shortcuts: A Few Replies to Critics

In this essay I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts. In particular, I address some implications of my critique of deep pluralism; distinguish between three senses of ‘blind deference’: political, reflective, and informational; draw a critical parallelism between the populist conception of representation as ‘embodiment’ and the conception of ‘citizen-representatives’ often ascribed to participants in deliberative minipublics; defend the democratic attractiveness of participatory uses over empowered uses of deliberative minipublics; clarify why accepting public reason constraints does not imply limiting deliberation to questions about constitutional rights; and argue that overcoming a state-centric conception of democracy does not require replacing the ‘all subjected’ principle with the ‘all affected’ principle.

The Possibility of Democratic Participation

Cristina Lafont has written a searching and thought-provoking philosophical work on the nature of deliberation in modern democracy. Much of the book is a critique of recent efforts to ground the activity of deliberation in democracy in the light of two sobering and challenging obstacles to the implementation of deliberative democracy in modern society. One challenge arises from the observation of the pluralism of opinion and value in modern democracy. Good faith disagreement on principles and values is wide ranging in modern societies and seems to undermine most kinds of consensus aside from the most abstract agreement. A second challenge arises from the division of labor in society and stems from the observation that citizens are often quite ignorant of politics in modern society. They often seem to base their decisions on slim grounds. In what follows, I cannot pretend to do justice to this rich and engrossing book. I will discuss the central concepts of self-government and blind deference first and point to a difficulty that I think lies at the heart of Lafont’s approach. I will then discuss her arguments against deep pluralism and suggest how I think they miss the target and how I think one ought to reply fully to pluralism. I will also take up her arguments against lottocracy, which I think are good ones. But I will argue that they are not sufficient to demonstrate why we should not be lottocrats. I will then conclude with some remarks about what is necessary to respond to the problems lottocracy is meant to respond to.

Deliberate Heritage

Cultural heritage is often seen as a tool for managing social change, as a mirror that society holds up to itself to make sense of change. In this paper I examine how heritage also mobilizes social change, framing cultural heritage as a persuasive tool in a public sphere of competing interests and claims. Rather than taking the circulation of heritage in the public sphere—across media outlets, social media, and expert networks—as epiphenomenal to its value, I suggest deliberation composes a critical function of cultural heritage, especially under social conditions of deep pluralism, divisive politics, and mass democracy that mark our contemporary era. The public discussions about Confederate commemorations that erupted following the events in Charlottesville in 2017 demonstrate the contests over meaning and proposed actions that reveal the persuasive character of heritage.

Interactive justice, pluralism and oppression

ABSTRACTIn Interactive Justice, Ceva claims that in circumstances of intractable value conflict justice requires the application of the ‘adversary argumentation principle’ (AAP), which mandates that each side of the conflict should be heard. I raise two qualms about AAP. The first concerns its effects on deep pluralism within a liberal society. The second concerns its unfair treatment of oppressed minorities.Abbreviation AAP: Adversary Argumentation Principle

A multidimensional account of democratic legitimacy: how to make robust decisions in a non-idealized deliberative context

This paper analyses the possibility of granting legitimacy to democratic decision-making procedures in a context of deep pluralism. We defend a multidimensional account according to which a legitimate system needs to grant, on the one hand, that citizens should be included on an equal footing and acknowledged as reflexive political agents rather than mere beneficiaries of policies, and, on the other hand, that their decisions have an epistemic quality. While Estlund’s account of imperfect epistemic proceduralism might seem to embody a dualistic conception of democratic legitimacy, we point out that it is not able to recognize citizens as reflexive political agents and is grounded in an idealized model of the circumstances of deliberation. To overcome these ambiguities, we develop an account of democratic legitimacy according to which disagreement is the proper expression of citizens’ reflexive agency and the attribution of epistemic authority does not stem from a major expertise or specific ability, but it comes through the public confrontation among disagreeing agents. Consequently, the epistemic value of deliberation should be derived from the reasons-giving process rather than from the reference to the alleged quality of its outcomes. In this way, we demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional perspective of legitimacy, yet abstain from introducing any outcome-oriented criterion. Finally, we argue that this account of legitimacy is well suited for modeling deliberative democracy as a decision-making procedure that respects the agency of every citizen and grants her opportunity to influence public choices.

Deep Pluralism and Intentional Course Design: Diversity From the Ground Up

Diversity is becoming a watchword in philosophy. Increasingly, philosophers are working to diversify their syllabi, their journals, their textbooks, and their conferences. Admirable as this movement is, this approach to diversity can often be rather mechanistic in character – a mere totting-up of the number of women or members of under-represented groups on programmes and in tables of contents. Drawing on my work reconstructing and teaching a very diverse history of philosophy canon, I argue that a student-centred, inquiry-based pedagogy can help both learners and teachers move from mechanistic surface-diversity to a rich, deep pluralism. This deep pluralism can inform and enrich both our pedagogy and our philosophical methodology. My argument has six steps. I Part 1, I explain why diversity and inclusiveness ought to be among our goals as teachers, researchers, and philosophers. In Part 2, I outline some approaches to improving diversity in the discipline. I contrast surface and deep approaches to diversity, and make a case for the latter. In Part 3, I describe what I call intentional course design – pedagogical design that builds diversity in from the ground up. I offer practical examples of intentionally designed courses in Part 4. In Part 5, I discuss individual and institutional limitations to intentional design and deep pedagogy. In Part 6, I conclude by extending the lessons of the foregoing sections to our scholarship and our discipline(s).

Measuring the Drapes in Secret: Why New Approaches to Money and Politics Can Address Biased Access and Influence During Presidential Transitions

Abstract Conventional research strategies to explore the relationship between money and politics have found little evidence of rampant political corruption. Newer perspectives on money and politics, however, suggest that deep political inequalities and biased pluralism may threaten democratic institutions. The presidential transition phase offers a case study in how an unregulated political process may result in unequal policy outcomes. This case suggests that new regulations might improve political equality and justify the development of a new legal theory focused on the relationship between money and politics.

Pluralist Responses to Pluralist Realities in the United States

In the U.S. the Madisonian model remains a relative success story in terms of managing deep pluralism. It’s important to look closely at what have been the sources of American flexibility in handling cases where theological/moral differences may be irreconcilable and accommodations costly, yet workable solutions have still been found. In particular, the example of the conservative Mennonite tradition is illustrative of what religions and political regimes may need to “give” to make robust pluralism work.

Metaphysics, Deep Pluralism, and Paradoxes of Informal Logic

The paper argues that metaphysical thought, or thought in whose context our general framework of sense is under scrutiny, involves, legitimates, and requires a variety of informal analogues of the ‘true contradictions’ supported in some paraconsistent formal logics. These are what we can call informal ‘legitimate logical inadequacies’. These paradoxical logical structures also occur in deeply pluralist contexts, where more than one, conflicting general framework for sense is relevant. The paper argues further that these legitimate logical inadequacies are real or inherent in sense itself rather than conventional, shows how they can feature in argumentative practice in these metaphysical and pluralist contexts, and discusses some of their implications for metaphysical truth and for philosophical inquiry and disagreement.

Rethinking Moderation in a Pragmatist Frame

This paper addresses moderation in the context of an immoderate populist politics and claims that social integration requires inculcation in the values of a dominant culture, especially by those perceived as originating from outside the political community. The paper argues, instead, for a deep pluralism and for the idea of multiculturalism as friendship and the means of securing moderation in public debate. In making these arguments, it draws upon the pragmatist approach of John Dewey and the significance of his idea of a ‘public’ and on the work of Danielle Allen and her idea of political friendship. The paper concludes with the argument that political friendship requires motivation and that this will be secured by an orientation toward social justice.