Saying “if you don’t listen to reason, you will pay a high price” is not a joke: it is sometimes necessary to resort to destabilization, threats, and open conflict as answers to people who won’t reason in good faith.

Couldn’t this have been written by any tyrant in history? Well, allowing for translations into modern English.

His analogy with mathematics is wrong. Mathematics is independent of our motivations in a way that political decision-making is not. Politicial decision-making is based on beliefs about the consequences of policies, mathematics is based on proofs. If you believe that someone will hurt you if they decide that you aren’t reasoning in good faith your decision-making process is going to be biased in a way that caffine can’t bias mathematical reasoning. Decisions about, say, how many resources to spend on health care versus the environment are fundamentally different to mathematical logic.

Maybe I don’t understand his goal. Is he attempting to merely describe power relationships in the context of deliberation? That can certainly be done.

If he is saying merely that some sort of commitment to the process is necessary, he is probably right in a way that Habermas et al. would certainly understand.

But it sounds (and again this may be overreading) that he might want to do somthing about it. Forclose exit possibilities for example (make politicians put their children in inner city public schools perhaps?)

At the point where you try to reweight the power dynamics, you have to be pretty sure that you are correct, which means that you aren’t likely to be actually engaging in the deliberative process. At that point you are engaging in an exercise of power, not an exercise of deliberation. In order to be sure you are right enough to do that, you either need to have a revelation from some sort of ideology or you need to have already engaged in the deliberative process.

Not sure I follow this. You might simply be willing to run a greater risk of arriving at the wrong answer for the sake of encouraging those who normally haven’t the confidence to speak.

And there’s another objection: in matters of policy, “right” or “wrong” often don’t apply in any useful sense. Rather, it’s a matter of accommodating preferences. A very significant example: deciding who should bear what kind and degree of various financial, environmental, occupational, or health-related risks.

Inequalities in power are stipulated away, but I’m not totally convinced that it is for the sake of presenting an idealized model of deliberation. It is because if you want to start tinkering with the procedural methods based on inequalities in power, you are going to have to pre-decide who is right in the argument. You can’t just tilt the scales against those with more power, you have to only do it (or at least largely do it) when they have more power AND are wrong on the merits. But to decide who is right on the merits, you need to engage in a reasoned deliberation without weighting procedures by power level.