INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 1 it was argued that autonomy requires democratic decision-making. However, it was also suggested that we could not assume citizens are autonomous and, therefore, the right conditions to ensure autonomous preferences enter collective decisions need to be provided. Furthermore, the model of decision-making used will, to a large extent, determine these conditions and there are various forms of decision-making that claim to be democratic. The claim here is that they are not all as democratic as each other, nor as effective at cultivating the autonomy of participants as each other. It is my contention that deliberative democracy, as a form of decision-making, especially promotes the aspects of democracy that cultivate autonomy, as it is the model most likely to meet the conditions of collective decision-making, required to cultivate autonomy, outlined in the previous chapter. This chapter will demonstrate how deliberative democracy will enhance the autonomy of the participants by comparing it to purely aggregative models of decision-making. In Chapter 1, having established autonomy as the normative core of democracy and then outlined the conditions for making autonomous collective decisions, we concluded with the argument that individual decisions must be conceived differently to collective decisions. In collective decisions our choices will affect others and, therefore, must be justified to others in order to respect their agency and autonomy. Individual decisions require rational deliberation to form intentions and, consequently, collective decisions require collective deliberation to form collective intentions.