Democratic Understanding

Jaclyn Rekis (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

This session will be part of ‘Truth, Democracy, and Misinformation’, the 20206 Symposium of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics.

The AAAPE exists to promote awareness of applied ethics and foster relationships between practitioners and academics.

The event will be held on online. The event is free for members and ticketed for non-members. More information, including the full program, schedule, and registration is available at: https://events.humanitix.com/aapae-misinformation-workshop

Abstract:

This paper is about the value of understanding to democratic politics. It seems obvious that there is something of value to understanding one another in politics. The wheels of our discussions would be oiled, and decisions would be easier and, likely, more just—perhaps citizens would be disposed to compromise more, or make decisions with their fellow citizens’ interests in mind— if citizens were more willing and able to understand where their fellow citizens were coming from.

But then, of course, things are more complicated, even with something that seems so obviously valuable as understanding. One problem, which has received attention as of late, is that it doesn’t always seem valuable—for others, or for us— to understand, particularly with empathy, those who hold views that we think abhorrent, for doing so may give credence to such views.

However, there is yet another problem, one which has been severely overlooked by theorists writing on understanding and democracy (see, e.g., Hannon 2025; Lepoutre 2023, 2026; Prescott- Couch 2025a, 2025b; see, relatedly, Goodin 2000; Morell 2010; Scudder 2020). The problem is that, even if we accept that there is something valuable about understanding others in deliberative democracies, particularly as a key source of the very justification of democracy, democracies are made up of millions of people who are limited by time and resources and distance. In these circumstances, we should reasonably ask: who should citizens be expected to understand? How should one decide, among the millions that make up a modern democratic polity, who one ought to spend one’s time and energy trying to understand? I outline a non-ideal approach to political understanding, and suggest that, far from being an unattainable ideal that throws into question the justification of democratic rule, citizens already possess existing, but different, forms and degrees of understanding of their fellow citizens, with particularly informed understandings of those they know personally.

Alas, even with this more realistic approach to understanding and democracy, one might reasonably ask: How does our actual, if limited and even deficient, understanding of certain others scale up to the level of democratic politics writ large? (For more on the ‘scaling up problem’ of deliberative democracy, see Tanasoca 2020). To address this question, I first argue that there is particular democratic value in understanding others who understand us, where such reciprocal processes change us, and so change what is available to be understood in the process. Second, I argue there is democratic value in our understanding others who understand others (i.e. those who we don’t know directly). This enables us to have a limited understanding of, as well as informed deference towards, those whom we may never know directly. Third, I argue that this meso-level analysis of how we actually understand others scales up through a daisy-chain model of overlapping connections. Ultimately, this ‘scaling up’ justifies democracy even amidst the ways in which ordinary citizens fail to live up to ideal of reciprocal understanding.

About the Author:

Jaclyn Rekis is a postdoctoral fellow with David Enoch’s ‘Liberalism Rekindled’ Project out of the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Jaclyn specialises in political philosophy, particularly at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, and religion. Her work is mainly concerned with why citizens, and persons more generally, ought to better understand one another, and how they should do so. Jaclyn has recently been interested in how ordinary and flawed human practices can be good for democracy and liberalism.