Beyond Dichotomies: Empathy and Listening in Deliberative Democracy

In Beyond Empathy and Inclusion: The Challenge of Listening in Deliberative Democracy, Mary F. Scudder defends a listening-based approach to deliberative democracy. On this account, democratic legitimacy requires that citizens listen to each other’s deliberative contributions to give them fair consideration. She opposes this listening-based approach to a recent “empathic turn” in deliberative democratic theory, which emphasizes the importance of imaginative perspective-taking in democratic deliberation. Scudder develops an incisive critique of relying on empathy in democratic deliberation. According to her argument, our capacity to empathize is severely limited, and empathy cannot replace, but only distort listening. This argument suggests that we should listen rather than empathize in democratic deliberation. In this paper, we challenge the implicit assumption that empathy and listening must be regarded as mutually exclusive alternatives. We argue that empathy still has an important place within a listening-centric approach to democracy because empathy can improve listening broadly understood, according to its own inherent aim of ensuring fair consideration. Specifically, we identify three constructive roles that empathy can play in facilitating democratic listening: it can help us to understand what someone has said, see where someone is coming from, and promote mutual understanding. We argue that recognizing these constructive roles for empathy in democratic deliberation is compatible with acknowledging empathy’s limits and accepting that we should sometimes prefer listening without empathy. Ceasing to conceive of empathy and listening as mutually exclusive options opens up new questions and we close by discussing some potential directions of future study.