Normative controversies in the literature

With regard to the substantive aspect of deliberative justification, the main controversy has to do with the question of whether in good deliberation only references to the common good are appropriate or whether self-interest also has a legitimate place. As Jane Mansbridge et al. summarize the literature, “deliberative democracy has traditionally been defined in opposition to self-interest.” Jürgen Habermas represents this traditional view in a classical way when he postulates the necessity of “overcoming” one’s “egocentric viewpoint.” Habermas, however, does not completely exclude the articulation of self-interest, but it must always be justified from a larger point of view. Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin demand that the good citizen should not ask “What’s good for me?” but “What’s good for the country?” The two theorists see a fundamental difference between a consumer in the market and a citizen in politics. As they put it: “When entering a marketplace, it is generally acceptable for the consumer to limit herself to a single question when choosing amongst competing products – and that is ‘Which product do I find most pleasing?’” But, according to the two theorists,

Ackermann and Fishkin acknowledge that “there may be many occasions when what is good for the country is also good for me personally. But the good citizen recognizes, as the good consumer does not, that this convergence is by no means preordained, and that the task of citizenship is to rise above self-interest and take seriously the nature of the common good.” But how can we know what the common good is? Here, Ian O’Flynn presents a nuanced position. For him, the common good or public interest “is fundamentally a moral idea, one that is principally concerned with the proper conduct of political life in general and the proper ways of making collectively binding decisions in particular.”