Normative controversies in the literature

Jürgen Habermas has insisted throughout his career that good deliberation should be public and transparent. He still very much emphasizes this point in a recent publication where he demands “publicity and transparency for the deliberative process.” He justifies the logic of publicity in claiming that this is a necessary condition to “generate legitimacy.” This Habermasian view was for a long time shared by virtually all deliberative theorists, and many of them still stress the importance of publicity and transparency as a key element of the deliberative model. Claudia Landwehr, for example, argues:

Although Landwehr adheres to the logic of publicity, she acknowledges that in practice publicity may be relative. Her point is that even if doors are not fully open but only ajar, the logic of publicity should still apply in the sense that reasons should be “generalizable and transferable.”