The Media Failures Surrounding the England Riots

On Wednesday 17/8 Scoop Independent News ran a piece I wrote about the dramatic but uninformative coverage of the riots in London and elsewhere in England earlier this month. Since it has now gone to pasture in their archives, I'm posting the piece here as well, making use of the occasion to embed a bunch of links to stories where appropriate, and make a small correction.

In the aftermath of the riots in London and elsewhere in the UK a little over a week ago we have been subjected to no end of bellyaching, hand-wringing, and a torrent of misguided comment and analysis. The news coverage has all-too-often failed its audience. The BBC has had to apologise twice in the past week for ill-conceived broadcasts, first for its offensive interview where a news anchor thought it necessary to accuse a black broadcaster in his seventies of condoning and participating in the riots, and then for a radio feature which asked "Is there a problem with young black men?" The problematic reporting has spilt over into New Zealand, as can be seen in a wire-story run in the New Zealand Herald which pointed to Operation Trident as a success story in reducing tensions between police and the communities involves – the same police operation during which the shooting and killing of Mark Duggan took place, and which sparked the riots.


As for the analyses offered, the views on display have been depressingly predictable. Many on the left were quick to point out the possible effects of widespread disillusionment with the system. They cite the wildly different fortunes of the working poor and the unemployed, compared to the glittering fortunes of their neighbours in the financial districts, as well as the bad and worsening employment situation alongside the weighty cuts to social services. Be this as it may, the characters in this story aren’t really the ones participating in the riots, who came from a wide range of demographics and most of whom certainly had nothing more in mind than having a riot. The loudest voices of the right have seen no use for such compassion and want all involved pilloried, each commentator having their own list of whom they would see vengeance visited on. In perhaps the most confused example, Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail has given a long and single-minded account of why this is all the fault of feminists. One wonders why, if the cause for the riots has to do with feminist influence on the Labour government, the riots happened well into David Cameron’s very masculine administration, and after they started to form the social services in their mould. The most common line of explanation, also taken by the UK government, is that this is an outburst of criminality. This is a classic and unfortunate example of trying to pass off the statement of the problem as an explanation, and we are left no wiser. These responses, and most of the other pieces foisted on the public, read like they were written some time ago and stored in a file for the right occasion. Or perhaps they are simply ramblings off of the top of a correspondent’s head. In neither case is there a link drawn between the stories they have to tell, nor the events they are supposed to be commenting on. We in New Zealand have fared no better, as Paul Holmes has in the Herald wondered whether the rioters should have been shot in the street. This casual bloodthirstiness is voiced in a sentence tossed off carelessly at the end, after paragraphs of first detailing a book about Winston Churchill he was reading, then admitting he had no idea why any of this happened (or, we might add, what the architecture of Churchill’s home has to do with it).

This type of media failing can benefit nobody, as confusion is responded to with more confusion, in a display which wavers between self-absorbed grandstanding and gawking uselessness. In aiming for a better treatment of events, any worthwhile discussion of the riots would have to acknowledge that there is no single body of people who count as the rioters. There are going to be different groups of people with different aims, motivations, and actions, each needing to be treated in their own right. Different commentators have told different stories which might work for some of these groups, but we have not been treated to a comprehensive and satisfactory overview. There are going to be the looters and arsonists, the criminal element who have attracted all of the attention. An appropriate response to their involvement would need to account not only for what allowed such a reaction to get going, but also how it was allowed to continue – the lack of compassion or restraint needs to be addressed, as well as the feeling of impunity with which many of them displayed. There are also those who joined with the riots but not with the looting and arson, who may very well have acted out of a frustration at a system they might conclude takes little account of them, except as a nuisance. These protests might have lead to the heated atmosphere which the looters opportunistically made use of, but by no means must we take these groups to be the same – one can easily be disaffected without being a thug. Any account of what motivated these groups must also explain why the riots had such a wide uptake across England, quickly spreading to other disaffected communities not linked by the Mark Duggan shooting. Also something to take account of is why the anti-government protestors, who have been at the forefront of other recent show-offs with police, were nowhere to be found. There are also going to be the members of the affected communities who protested against systematic police mistreatment, a longstanding and difficult problem. Since 1990 in the UK there have been over 1400 deaths after contact with the police, and not a single conviction for murder or manslaughter for any of them (New Zealand fares better, with proportionally far less deaths and more convictions of police wrongdoing, though only for lesser offences than murder or manslaughter). To put this into perspective, whereas about a 1000 people have been charged in the aftermath of the riots, a crowd of somewhere between 2000 and 5000 in Birmingham have come together in solidarity after the violence. These vigils for peace have received scarcely any mention. And these people, who would be the same ones who were hiding in their homes during the fires and looting, will also be the people the police will spread-eagle against the walls of Hackney and Tottenham in the crackdown to follow. This selective attention, ignoring the everyday troubles of those at the centre of the issues in favour of the spectacle of the looters, tarring everybody with the same brush, is a deep failure of our understanding of the issues. The resentment that will follow can only make matters worse. We owe it to those caught up in these troubles to make a measured response, or risk having the same thing happen again and again.

Limited conventionalism and the law

For the past few years I've had an on-going research project of trying to use the framework David Lewis developed for analysing conventions in the interesting meta-ethical case where whatever basic principles we might have (for this purpose it doesn't matter what they are - one problem at a time!) don't give us enough guidance and we end up with equally attractive but mutually exclusive options and no principled way to choose between them. By now I've polished my approach down quite a bit, so here is a short sketch of it I've written today applied to a few examples from the literature and a sketch to how it might account for at least some instances of the origins and authority of the law.

Limited Conventionalism and the Law

Introduction

In this essay I introduce my ‘limited conventionalism’ as a naturalistic model for the derivation of moral obligations. Limited conventionalism is the application of David Lewis’s analysis of conventions applied to the ethical case where our moral code fails to give us clear guidance. The problem is that almost any moral standard, and all of those putatively derived from natural facts about human beings, lack the detail to specify unique best responses to every situation, but instead leave us with a set of equally attractive but mutually exclusive options and no way to choose between them. Limited conventionalism is the claim that in such cases we can establish a convention recommending one of these best candidates over the others, that we would be justified in doing what the convention recommends and morally unjustified in not following it. Those features of human beings on which naturalists hope to construct an account of ethics would, on limited conventionalism, be the criteria by which the best candidates get picked out would be. In this manner we are able, I argue, to derive an adequate moral system from purely naturalistic grounds.

As an illustration of this point, I apply my model to the ‘pluralistic relativism’ of David Wong, whereby there are natural constraints on the type of society in which humans could flourish, but that these limitations radically underdetermine the type of moral code people can follow, leaving room for incompatible but equally good moral codes specific to a society. I also sketch out how limited conventionalism would do with other approaches, like the more thoroughgoing anti-realism of John Mackie or more modest views where what conventions offer aren’t new principles but only responses to particular problem situations.

Lewisian Conventions and Limited Conventionalism

A convention is a structure of expectations about a recurring co-ordination problem such that people in such-and-such situations do this rather than that. Because you have justified expectations of how others will act, and they of you, you can reason towards mutually satisfactory ends. The set of best candidates come from comparing the preferences of everybody in the situation and choosing the alternatives where everybody can do no better if all other parties act as expected. For instance, in the prisoner’s dilemma the two prisoner’s both confessing or both staying silent are the two best candidates, while one confessing and the other not isn’t, and if two of us are trying to arrange a meeting, us both being at some particular place is a best candidate while one of us being at one place and the other somewhere else isn’t. For a convention to arise, these best candidates need to be more attractive to those involved than having the co-ordination problem continue. An interesting feature about Lewisian conventions, which carries over to limited conventionalism, is that if you end up choosing one of the best candidate options, it makes no difference how that choice is made. What matters is that it is common knowledge which course of action gets recommended. Two other pertinent features of Lewisian conventions is that none can arise which aren’t mutually beneficial, and once a convention exists, you are obligated to follow it.

To apply Lewisian conventions to the moral underdetermination case, we first arrange the available options based on how well they conform to some shared moral standard. Then we separate off a class of best candidate options which perform no worse than any other options in light of that shared standard. The convention then gets established to recommend one of these candidates rather than the others. Once again, the manner in which one gets chosen doesn’t matter, as long as it is one of the best candidates and the recommendation becomes common knowledge. Thus, limited conventionalism is a way to extend the set of shared moral obligations within a community.

Drawing up a convention is thus a two stage process: first at least some of the best candidate options are identified, and then (through whatever method) one of them is chosen and that choice is made common knowledge. This leads to an epistemic structure which allows individuals to navigate the underdetermination problem case: given that the chosen option is so as a matter of common knowledge, everybody expects everybody else to follow it, everybody knows that everybody has that expectation and that they are also expected to conform, and so on. Following the conventional option is thus something which can be done as a matter of course, thus avoiding the uncertainty which threatens underdetermination problem cases.

Why we are obligated to follow these conventions

The normative force of these moral conventions come from the fact that they are benign in light of the existing obligations, no individual can have a moral reason to go against the convention, and by going against the convention you would undermine other people’s depending on your co-operation in order to reason towards their desired ends. Conventions are benign respective to the existing moral standard because the candidates among which get chosen are themselves the most attractive in light of that that standard. This means that we can’t arrive at a convention which goes against our existing moral standard. Furthermore, nothing moral is to be gained by disregarding the convention, because no other option can appear more attractive respective to the moral standard. Finally, since the conventions are common knowledge, every party has the well-established expectation that everybody else will conform to the convention, and reason accordingly. To go against the convention would be to undermine others’ ability to reason to their desired ends, dumping everybody back in the less preferable, pre-convention co-ordination problem. In this respect the harm to others is very much like that which follows from lying, and not conforming is similarly unjustified, whatever the content of the convention (if it is a genuine Lewisian convention).

Applying limited conventionalism to examples in the literature

A position in the literature favourable to such an analysis is David Wong’s pluralistic relativism. Wong holds that there are certain natural constraints on the type of societies we could live in, with concomitant constraints on moral standards. However, these constraints radically underdetermine the content of morality. To model Wong’s relativism as an example of limited conventionalism, take the shared moral standard of some community to track those natural constraints. There are now a range of best candidate options corresponding to all the moral codes which fit within those constraints. The choice of any such a code counts as a Lewisian convention. Considering the case where there are many societies each facing the same underdetermination problem, which Wong plausibly argues is the actual case, the possibility of different codes being chosen by different societies cements the possibility of relativism. Notice that it is possible that single convention could establish an entire moral code in one go, but that it is far more likely that the code is constructed piecemeal, each new obligation derived conventionally limiting the ones that follow.

We can model more radical theories like J.L. Mackie’s and others wherein all moral obligations are conventionally determined by considering the case where there are no pre-existing moral obligations. Then the set of best candidates would be all the possible candidates. We could establish a moral code by choosing a starting point on some indeterminate standard of salience, most likely something basic and immediately useful like a limitation on killing, and then choose a best candidate limited by that one obligation, and then one by the set of two conventionally established obligations, and so on. We can also account for less thoroughgoing conventionality by considering the case not where we use conventions to choose new general principles, but rather responses to particular co-ordination problems. An example might be the choice between an adversarial or inquisitorial court system. It is in this weaker application, addressing examples of underdetermination case-by-case, that I believe conventions might be the most prevalent and useful.

Conventional Law

We can perhaps extend limited conventionalism informatively to cover some instances of law-making. Examples of underdetermination abound in legal scenarios, and there exists a range of mechanism to try and cut down their scope, like guidance for judging the intent of legislation when the letter of the law allows ambiguities. Nonetheless, it seems clear that there are vast arrays of cases where there is genuine uncertainty about what the appropriate judgement would be, whether it be a verdict, a judgement on some point of law, or passing sentence. Given the weighty reasons we have to the law be applied consistently, legal judgements have a dimension wherein they are co-ordination problems. The system of widely publicising court judgements and ensuring that practicioners of law are expected to know of relevant precedents does as much to establish common knowledge as could be in any such technical and contingent domain. As discussed above, given the shared interest in avoiding co-ordination problems (here, manifest in the inconsistent application of the law) and the fact that only conventions could prevent them (since any effort at co-ordination would necessitate the strcture of expectations which constitutes a Lewisian convention) the laws would have the necessary normative force to not be dead letters, as long as all the preconditions are met (especially that the option chosen is genuinely one of the best candidates and thus as consistent with the principles as any other). Correspondingly, in at least some significant cases, the law could be conventional in the Lewisian sense, and thus be examples of limited conventionalism in my sense.

Conclusion

Limited conventionalism provides a robust and informative model for the forming of moral obligations. Many significant applications of the model can be made to positions in the literature and in actual life. This mechanism carries the necessary normative weight to give us the reasonable expectation

Robert Paul Wolff replies re: the prisonder's dilemma.

A couple of days ago I posted a criticism of Robert Paul Wolff's dismissal of the prisoner's dilemma . Wolff has now posted a reply on his blog (quoting the version of my post I had emailed to him). He is pressing the fact that game theory is only properly-speaking a study of decision under certainty, while the problem I identify (which is hardly original on my part!) is to do with decision theory, etc, regarding  decisions under uncertainty. He thinks I'm not really addressing decision theory head-on, and in turn I think he's not really addressing the concern head-on (as I have said in my response there). That's how philosophy works: round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. But every iteration hopefully we know more than at the beginning: I certainly find exchanges like my current one with Prof. Wolff to be very helpful.

What to make of the prisoner's dilemma

About a year ago, when I was making my first serious inroads into the technical underbelly of my field, following my utilitarian opponents into a futurist landscape of backwards Es and upside-down As, Robert Paul Wolff (who seems to be entirely incapable of stopping writing, bless his soul) ran a tutorial on formal methods in political philosophy which I found very useful, especially its introduction to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem concerning social choice theory. (The tutorial is archived along with his autobiography, which I heartily recommend, and some other bits and pieces here.) However, I thought that Wolff was rather harsh on the prospects of the prisoner's dilemma as a topic for serious philosophy, largely because the suppositions behind the case are harshly disconnected from the conditions of the actual world. Contrary to Wolff's harsh evaluation, I think there is something to be said for the prisoner's dilemma as an analytic tool. Heaven knows a lot of people make ridiculous claims regarding it (for instance, I was told once that it shows that ethics is impossible), but there are at least two reasons to take it seriously, if only as an analytical device. The prisoner's dilemma might be a good tool for cutting to the heart of various hypotheses, even if we agree with what Wolff has said about its limitations (as we should).

If I may remind the reader of what the prisoner's dilemma (hereafter, PD), I'll quote the description from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry:

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I'll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I'll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.”

We can represent the options in a little pay-off matrix, mapping out all the possibilities:

	Cinque stays silent	Cinque confesses
Tanya stays silent	Tanya is jailed very briefly / Cinque is jailed very briefly	Tanya is jailed for a long time / Cinque goes free
Tanya confesses	Tanya goes free / Cinque is jailed for a long time /	Tanya is is jailed for a short time/ Cinque is jailed for a short time

Each of the pair can see that, whatever the other does, they get less time in jail if they confess and hang the other prisoner out to dry. But, that would lead both of them confessing, leading to a situation that is worse for both than if they had stayed silent. That is the prisoner's dilemma.

Wolff complains that discussing the PD in terms of this story distorts our understanding of the picture, because there are a number of assumptions about how players in such a game would act which maps very badly indeed with how actual people in real situations act. For instance, it is very hard indeed to imagine someone only caring about how little time they spend in jail, with no regard for the other's welfare, and any other concern. Wolff's point is well-taken, but I want to say that even if we accept what he says, we can mine some interesting results from using this scenario as an analytic tool: in particular, in seeing what it tells us about the types of reasoning decision-theorists and the like would like us to do (Perhaps I am better disposed towards the PD than Wolff is because I didn't need to wade through the thousand-odd journal articles written on this subject in the 60s and 70s, when nobody could shut up about this thing). To that end, it is useful to consider the in its most general and useful form the PD as game described by the following pay-off matrix (one agent choosing a row, the other choosing a column, like Tanya and Cinque had above) where the options are either to co-operate with the other agent (staying silent, in the prisoner's case) or defecting (confessing to the crime and selling the other prisoner up the river):

	Co-operate	Defect
Co-operate	Good / Good	Worst / Best
Defect	Best / Worst	Bad / Bad

Any situation which has a pay-off matrix like this in it can be analysed in terms of the prisoner's dilemma.

Having done the throat-clearing, let me now present the two reasons why I think we should pay attention to the PD. The second is far and away the most important, but the first helps to lead us there.

The first reason is that there are simply so many theoretically interesting cases which can be modelled as some variation of the PD, that is, where situations arise with the payout matrix I described above. There are traveller's dilemmas, the centipede game, the ultimatum game, etc. I'll leave it up to the reader to investigate these cases, and their link to the PD, on their own. But note that understanding any situation which can be modelled in this way is going to necessitate understanding the implications of the PD (which includes, as Wolff stresses, knowing what it doesn't entail).

Secondly, the most important reason to look at the PD (which I was surprised to see get no mention at all in the tutorial) is that it gives a very embarrassing and problematic result for the mass of people who believe that decision theory, etc., provide the gold standard for human reasoning. That is, the PD shows that utility maximisation doesn't lead to Pareto-optimal situations (which was a bit of a surprise, since under similar suppositions the free market, which is driven entirely by utility-maximisation, does lead to Pareto-optimal distributions of resources – a bit more on that later in this paragraph). Utility maximisation is the procedure whereby at each point you need to make a procedure you take whatever course of action has the best prospects for getting you what you want (after taking into consideration all the likely future effects of your actions), and Pareto-optimality is the idea that one situation is preferable to another if every person involved finds the first one to be at least as good as the latter. In non-wonk terms, the PD demonstrates that if everybody tries at every step to take the action with consequences they'd most prefer, they are quite likely to end up in a situation they find less preferable than one they would have reached had they acted differently. It in fact does even more, in that the situation of the two prisoners if both defect is worse for both of them, whereas it's Pareto-suboptimal if only one person reaches a situation they don't prefer. This is embarrassing and problematic to the decision theorist, because Pareto-optimality is a very low bar indeed. There are a range of terrible situations that are Pareto-optimal – for instance, a fiefdom with its range of landlords and impoverished serfs is a Pareto-optimal distribution of land, since to give any land to a serf you need to take it away from a landlord, which means that changing the distribution of land would always be against the preferences of at least one person. If utility-maximisation can't even ensure reaching situations with that low level of goodness, then the decision theorist has reason to worry.

It's this feature of the PD which gives force to the tragedy of the commons (as Garrett Hardin described it in 1968, though only later was this analysed as a PD). Each member of a community who tends sheep and has access to the common pasture always has the incentive to put one more sheep in the field: though this lowers the total productivity of the commons through being overloaded, the individual's gains of having the extra sheep outweigh the marginal loss to each sheep. But if everybody follows this incentive (as utility-maximisation demands) then the commons will soon be exhausted and every farmer will be worse off in the end. The lesson to be learn here isn't that co-operation in such situations is impossible (as some people bizarrely claim, showing off a staggering confusion about the structure of human purposive action) but that utility-maximisation – the hard-nosed pragmatism which makes the prisoner defect every time – is untenable as a general guide to action. In scenarios with PD pay-offs (and the insights of the countless writers on this topic indicate just how many there might be) utility-maximisation turns out to lead us by the nose to our downfall. And that is what we should learn from the prisoner's dilemma.

Today's Entry in the Annals of Unresponsive Academic Journals

I received the following sardonic comment on one of the philosophic mailing lists I'm subscribed to which caters to the academic community:

List members,

Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of one of my papers being submitted to the Journal of Global Ethics. As I have not received any feedback on the content of my paper as yet, I have been prompted to mark the occasion with a lunchtime discussion of the question:

'What are the responsibilities of editors in relation to peer review?'

Findings will be fed back to the lead editor of the journal in question.

I hope that some of you will be able to join us.

Year-long waits for responses regarding articles submitted for review are, unfortunately, not unheard of, though normally they're from more prestigious journals who perhaps feel more like they could afford to string authors along. What I'm saying is that the Journal of Global Ethics isn't quite the Journal of Philosophy. It's not like JPhil have an excuse, it's more that you wouldn't expect the same thoughtless neglect from a journal without the same air of exclusivity.

Today that post received this reply:

List members,

A propos of the delay in responding to a submitted manuscript as remarked by colleague from Newcastle, on 9th September 2010 I sent a bank draft to the Journal of Global Ethics in response to their prompting for me to renew my subscriptons, and I received no acknowledgement of receipt of the bank draft up through seven months later in April 2011.  Meanwhile I have not received any of the issues of the journal in 2010 for the period of the paid-for renewal, so I couldn't send manuscripts for peer-review on the current topics in the first instance.

Can anyone give me contact numbers or addresses for people currently responsible for JGE's admin and management, to see what can I can do?  In this part of the world 70 dollars plus the cost of the bank draft, 25 dollars, is a great deal of money. Such negligence is ironic given the title of the journal, eh what?

That list member is posting from the University of Ghana. Global Ethics, indeed.


UPDATE: One of the ex-editors of the journal has stepped in and done her best to address the issues named above, which is commendable both because it isn't her job anymore and also because she actually is on vacation. As encouraging as that is, I note that she is the one doing what she can to raise the journal's name out of the mud, and not any of the current editors.

Langton - Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts

As I occasionally do, I'll use this blog as a place to keep a store something I wrote for a conversation somewhere else: in this case (as with the Swanton piece I did last year) it's a summary of a favourite paper of mine: Rae Langton - 'Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts'.

Langton sets out to to defend a claim by MacKinnon's that pornography constitutes a harm to women, in particular that it represents acts of subordination and thereby is an act of subordination. MacKinnon says lots of other things as well, but that is the only claim Langton is engaging with here. The problem with MacKinnon's claim is that something isn't automatically an act of subordination merely in virtue of portraying subordination (which is a fair point). Langton sets out to see whether portrayals could also constitute harms to women, and she comes up with two ways in which it could.

The first, more familiar, way is that, if pornography were to be an authoritative voice in sexual matters, then it would spread and validate an image of sexual relations wherein women are demeaned and degraded. Langton doesn't try to prove that pornography doesn't have such authority -- she admits that it is often taken not to by wider society -- but she suggests that in certain audiences, especially among adolescent men, it very well might. If that were the case, that would mean that people in that audience would follow the example that pornography sets them, with harmful effects.

The second, very original, analysis of how pornography might constitute a harm to women Langton presents is that an environment infused with pornography is one wherein certain speech acts would be unperformable. In such an environment, if a woman would attempt, amongst other things, certain refusals or protests, she couldn't make herself be understood as doing so. The outward signs of refusals and protests (Langton's examples) are understood in such an environment as part of the role women play in normal sexual activity ('when she says no she means yes' is the most familiar example of this thought), so while a women could say exactly the things which would count as a refusal or protest normally, they couldn't count as such in that environment. This is the most important contribution of the paper.

I especially admire how carefully Langton lays out the scope of her analysis: the first part succeeds if pornography is authoritative in its portrayals of sex (at least among some audiences), the second part succeeds if pornographic portrayals of sex don't allow scope for women to do certain things, like refuse advances or sincerely protest them (and be taken seriously). It is worth quoting Langton on what here analysis is supposed to establish (from right near the end of here essay):
The claims that pornography subordinates and silences women make perfect  sense; they are not sleight of hand, not philosophically indefensible, not confused. Moreover, if pornographic speech is indeed authoritative, the claims may well be true. The premise about pornography's authority is an empirical one. If you think it is false, you  will disagree with the conclusion about the truth of the claims, but not, I hope, with the conclusion about their coherence.

The difference democratic challenge: why the communicative challenge fails

Today we move onto the meaty part of this project, where I lay out my case against what I have called the communicative challenge. That interpretation of what the difference democratic complaint is claims that the problem with deliberative democracy is that it neglects the different ways different cultures advance and discuss claims. Because the deliberative process is the product of one culture rather than another, this official culture is benefited to the disadvantage of all the unofficial cultures that might be part of the society. The problem with this claim is that, ultimately, the manner in which claims are discussed is just window-dressing, as I endeavour to show.

I take the follow quote from Iris Marion Young to state the communicative challenge: “Understanding the role of rhetoric in political communication is important precisely because the meaning of a discourse, its pragmatic operation in a situation of communicative interaction, depends as much on its rhetorical as its assertoric aspects.” This would mean that we are missing something of importance if we take deliberations to just be the weighing of reasons that are given in the forms of assertions or propositions. But this can't be right. The 'communicative interaction' at issue here is collectively coming to a decision, and the 'pragmatic operation' here must be something that brings the participants towards an agreement on what the right course of action is. The pragmatic operation must be something which picks our right rather than wrong courses of action, if it is to have any pragmatic value at all. But rhetoric is incapable of pointing out anything at all, if it is going to be understood as communication which isn't assertoric. There is nothing which is signified by an utterance's rhetoric. Because it performs no signification, it can't point anybody in any direction, never mind the right one. Thus, it can't play the role Young is claiming for it here.

Here is an argument to the effect that rhetoric and non-assertoric features of communication feature beside the substantive parts of deliberation, rather than playing a part in it. Let us suppose that there is some communicative act C which displays rhetorical feature R, and that C presents significant and important reason that needs to be considered in the deliberation. Is C's importance dependent on R? That is, would C be any less weighty if R was different? The answer is no. There is a dilemma here: either R has to the power to make some C more important than it would be otherwise; or C's importance is independent of R. You can't take the first option, because then R itself would confer importance in its own right: some C would be more weighty just for displaying R. This is wrong, because there are constraints on when some R can count as a good feature: even if some R is appropriate in one context, that same rhetorical aspect might confer no importance at all in another. For instance, Young points to the case of Carol Mosley Braun's impassioned address to the US senate urging her colleagues not to renew the patent on, and therefore endorse, the Confederate flag insignia. Young claims that Mosley's “extreme and even disruptive speech contributed positively to a deliberative process by motivating officials to discuss an important issue.” But, of course, those exact same rhetorical features which ignited a debate could have been used to draw attention to any topic. And it is clear that Mosley's actions wouldn't attract the praise it has if she had done if she has protested similarly against, say, the continued acknowledgement of a day to commemorate Martin Luther King Jnr. My point is that there are constraints on when such rhetorical features are appropriate, and they are appropriate or not in light of the substantive claims that they are attached to. But it is the content and status of the substantive claims, of the assertoric (propositional) content of C, in virtue of which some rhetorical feature R is appropriate or not. The dependency works the wrong way round for R to be an importance-conferring feature of C: for some C, the importance of R is dependent on the importance of that C. Thus, in the dilemma, we must take the second option: C's importance is independent of R. Thus, while rhetoric might accompany deliberation, the deliberation carries the weight and importance it has independently of that rhetoric.

My claim is that the rhetoric with which a point is advanced plays no part in whether that point is something we need to take seriously. Rhetoric paradigmatically plays a role in what we as a matter of fact do pay attention to, but, as I argue, it has no power to determine what we should pay attention to. It simple isn't a substantive enough part of communication to do so. Nor can Young and other difference democrats claim that rhetoric still carries weight in accompanying assertoric claims, for the following reasons. Young rightly goes to great pains to stress that rhetoric can't replace argumentation, and points out that the predominant views on how communication work allows a space for non-assertoric communication in all speech acts. But we can divvy up quite neatly the relevant work that the speech acts do, as my argument above has: whether a piece of rhetoric is worthy of attention or not is based upon the importance of the assertoric claims that it accompanies. Rhetoric might accompany all statements, but, for our purposes at least, as a passenger rather than a driver. There is a practical goal which our political deliberation works towards, surveying the range of possible courses of action and choosing the right rather than wrong ones, and rhetoric can only play an incidental part in that task.

I believe that trying to find a substantive deliberative role for non-assertoric communication in political deliberation rests on a confusion. It is true and worth noting that actual presentation of a position inside a deliberation is going to come in a package with rhetoric – as Young and others have stressed, 'dispassionate' is a rhetorical mode as well. But it is not true that the rhetoric in some way constitutes the argument. I am not targeting just the very strong claim that all (political) communication is strategic, where all the force the statement of a position might have is supposed to be rhetorical. I am pointing towards the weaker claim that the argument isn't whole without the rhetoric. The argument I gave earlier targets just this second claim, and criticises it for placing an independent value to the rhetoric of a statement which simply isn't there. Non-assertoric features of communication piggyback on the assertoric significance of the issues they are attached to. The clear and level-headed statement of assertions and propositions which so many deliberative democrats take as their paradigm comes with rhetorical, non-assertoric aspects, but those aspects also piggyback on the significance of the claims they accompany, just like all rhetoric does.

Young makes a further claim about the role of the non-assertoric aspects of communication: “Rhetoric always accompanies argument, by situating the argument for a particular audience and giving it embodied style and tone.” I deny that either of these aspects is as substantive as Young claims. Firstly, while messages might indeed be catered to their audiences, they are still meaningful and significant for people outside of the audiences, because the propositional content of statements respect no in-group/out-group boundaries. If the claim is that those outside of the target audience somehow can't make sense of the communication, then counterexamples abound: the fact that we not only can make sense of but also take great interest in the private correspondents of people we have never met, though they never intended to say those things to us; the fact that a book like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was squarely aimed at a certain audience (well-off young men of ancient Athens) and is awash with idiosyncrasies of its time, but still garners prime attention in our current debates on its issues; people from one group being chilled to hear the  members on another group among each other inciting violence against them; and so on. There simply is no deeper significance to whom a statement is directed: it still means what it means. The same goes for how those points are stated: by now I hope to have convincingly shown that the importance of our deliberation is not hostage to how we phrase it. Again, I conclude, it isn't the idiom that is at issue, but rather what the things we say mean.

I have done my best to show during political deliberation there is a point that is being worked to, and that only the assertoric content of the discussion on that point can play a substantial part in determining its weight. Rhetoric is unable to affect the importance of an issue, because it doesn't have any substance of it own, instead, rhetoric can at best come attached to matters of substance. What this amounts to is saying that the difference democratic challenge is not a verbal issue: if it is going to be deserving of our attention, that challenge must turn out to be squarely addressing substantive political states of affairs. To provide an account of how that would go, we need to evaluate the representative, as opposed to the communicative, challenge to deliberative democracy.