claims about civil or uncivil speech always requires reference to other democratic norms
or principles and post hoc. It is also post hoc in the sense that the justification of such
incivility is precisely the creation of new forms of communication in which the legitimate
normative expectations of participants are better sustained and conditions for good
deliberation better realized.
Committing the deliberative framework to specific rankings of values and
principles has the danger not only of making deliberation irrelevant, but also of
intolerance. Some citizens may lay this charge against the claim made by Gutmann and
Thompson that religious reasons are per se “nonpublic” and “nonreciprocal.” When
considering the legitimacy of any such challenge, the deliberative interpretation of
democratic norms as enabling conditions for resolving conflicts needs to be given priority
over the liberal interpretation of norms as constraints and presuppositions. As the
membership of the polity grows more diverse, an important democratic feature of public
deliberation will be the internal critique of the very normative framework that made
deliberation possible in the first place. If this sort of revision is not possible, then
deliberative democracy loses its capacity to accommodate pluralism and collapses into
either a comprehensive or a political liberalism.
Besides this general argument for a pluralist form of democratic justification, I
next consider now a dynamic process of reflective equilibrium might be reconstructed as
the appropriate method of moral learning that allows the admission of new perspectives
on the deliberative regime of toleration and civility. I then consider an important
objection to it. How might a form of justification work that accommodates pluralism, yet
also guided by normative standards? The appropriate form of justification under the
Convention