Education for deliberative democracy through the long-term view

Abstract

This article argues that conceptualization through the long-term view strengthens the case for education for deliberative democracy. This is due to two key factors. First, education for deliberative democracy has novel potential in helping curb the negative effects of political polarization, which, when analyzed through longtermism, can be identified as an important existential risk factor. Second, education for deliberative democracy enables societies to defuse the threat of a value lock-in, and in doing so to keep their cognitive space open to enable increased flexibility in dealing with new challenges that will arise in the future. Consequently, this article further argues that education for deliberative democracy as an education initiative can be normatively justified but acknowledges that there are still theoretical and practical hurdles to overcome, and thus calls for more research into developing a mature, pedagogically sound program of education for deliberative democracy.

Introduction

In 2019, humanity got a stark reminder in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic that the globally interconnected and interdependent nature of the contemporary world makes us more vulnerable to risks that could be categorized as catastrophic or even existential in nature. Many of these risks are stemming from issues that require global solutions and therefore will not be solved without strong international cooperation. At the same time, it has also been argued that liberal democracies are in crisis due to deepening political polarization that leads to growing distrust and overall erosion of respect between different groups of people living within the same societies (Dryzek et al., 2019; Talisse, 2021).

These factors combine into a highly worrying scenario about humanity’s future trajectory: a case can be made that the weakening of democracies is at the same time hindering our collective ability to reach long-term goals, which cannot be achieved without the constant commitment of politicians from one government to the next. Polarization can lead to political stalemates and legislative deadlocks or to the next government trying to overturn its predecessor’s policies at every turn (McCoy et al., 2018). This could – and has already been witnessed to – lead to nations seesawing between taking part in global efforts and curtailing them in the name of perceived national interest. The weakening of trust and respect between different groups of people can amplify the problem, as taking part in politics could increasingly come to mean opposing those perceived as ‘others’ instead of trying to find the best route toward a common future by engaging with political equals.

In tandem with these developments, a new ethical view called longtermism (MacAskill, 2022b) has been presented as a potential lens through which to organize both individual lives and collective efforts. The longtermists’ stance is that future humans matter morally in the same way as currently living humans do, and since the former will (barring any sudden existential catastrophes) come to outnumber the latter in vast numbers, it would be wise to direct our attention to ensuring both that those potential humans will one day come into existence and that their lives will be as good as we possibly can make them. This is usually taken to imply advocating policies that help to safeguard against potential existential threats – such as pandemic outbreaks and asteroid impacts – as well as heavily investing in initiatives and technologies that could help benefit humanity in the very long run. However, it has also been argued that the long-term view can be used to disregard the happiness and needs of those currently alive or even neglect horrible suffering brought upon them if it can be seen as paving the way for some far-off golden future.

In this article I will argue that conceptualization through the long-term view strengthens the case for education for deliberative democracy (EDD). This is chiefly due to two factors: the potential of EDD to help defuse political polarization – which can be construed as an important existential risk factor – and its ability to arguably avoid the worst effects of a value lock-in (Ord, 2020), keeping the cognitive space open and enabling increased flexibility in dealing with new challenges that will arise in the future. I will also argue that a weak longtermist stance does not need to be associated with any alarming future trajectories and can therefore be a used as a valuable part of an ethical framework for aligning the demands of the present with the needs of the future. Consequently, this article further argues that EDD as an education initiative can be normatively justified, but acknowledges that there are still theoretical and practical hurdles to overcome and thus calls for further research toward its realization. In combining the topics of EDD and longtermism, this article is intended to contribute to both discussions from a novel angle.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. I am first going to provide a short overview of both EDD and longtermism. During the latter, I will also briefly touch upon the relationship of deliberative democratic theory and intergenerational justice. I will then proceed to present evidence on how political polarization is undermining global efforts in thwarting climate change and make a note of how these same processes could also hamper humanity’s ability to combat other existential risks. Next, l will apply the long-term view to the case of EDD, during which I will also describe the problem of a potential value lock-in in detail and analyze how it strengthens the case for EDD. Finally, I will discuss some possible objections.

Education for Deliberative Democracy (EDD)

Deliberative democracy is a normative model of democracy that holds that the legitimacy of democratic decisions hinges on fair and equal deliberation between the decisionmakers (Habermas, 1996). In this context, deliberation means a reasonable discussion on common concerns that meets certain normative presuppositions, such as equal opportunity to participate in the discussion, everyone having access to information concerning what is being decided, and everyone being open to changing their opinion if presented with a better argument (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004). Consequently, for example, if there is no ample opportunity to discuss common concerns, the discussion is for one reason or another unable to meet the standards of deliberation, or the decisionmakers only vote based on their individual preferences even after the discussion, the decision that is made is not legitimate from the deliberative point of view. Importantly, deliberative democracy is not about citizens reasoning together about common issues just for the sheer sport of it, but about wielding collective power by first recognizing other citizens as your equals and then forging mutually binding decisions through employing reciprocally acceptable reasons (Cohen, 2007).

There are different models of deliberative democracy that hold different stances on the elements of the theory. Questions include, for example, to what standards deliberation should be held to (Bächtiger et al., 2018), what kind of communication can be identified as deliberation (Polletta and Gardner, 2018), is it sufficient if only the elected representatives of the people deliberate among themselves (Brown, 2018), and should deliberation always aim for a strict consensus or will a compromise or perhaps a vote at the end of the deliberation sometimes suffice (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004). What all deliberative models have in common, however, is a belief in the power of reason-giving (Chambers, 2018; Gutmann and Thompson, 2004).This is the idea that when people are made to respect one another by justifying their viewpoints through mutually acceptable reasons and then listen to other people do the same, this creates understanding and diffuses differences. It is thought to also lead to decisions that are better in the sense that they take into account the many viewpoints of contemporary pluralistic societies better than voting-centric aggregative models of democracy, which take democracy primarily to be an instrument to negotiate between various competing individual interests and preferences of the citizens. At the same time, when compared with the same more minimalist conceptions of democracy, deliberative democracy is often stated to be an especially demanding model, requiring of citizens much more than the ability to weigh at the ballot box which political candidate would likely further their private interests most effectively (Bohman, 2004).

Deliberative democracy has been put to test through empirical experiments as well as implemented in practice with promising results, indicating that deliberative models can have a depolarizing effect (Dryzek et al., 2019; Esterling et al., 2021; Fishkin, 2009; Fishkin et al., 2021; Grönlund et al., 2015; Strandberg et al., 2019). However, there is also evidence to the contrary, as it has been reported that participating in group deliberation (understood in a broad sense) can cause the participants to adopt more extreme versions of their positions as well (Sunstein, 2000). These contradictory results are explained by Didier Caluwaerts and colleagues in a multidisciplinary review of the evidence as follows: ‘we generally find depolarizing effects when group discussions adhere to a deliberative democracy framework, and more frequent polarization effects when they do not’ (Caluwaerts et al., 2023: 2). Hence, it seems like deliberative democracy can deliver on its promise only in controlled and facilitated environments – which the societies at large are not. I will return to this point later on.

Even with these caveats, deliberative democratic theory has also sparked interest in the field of education, as applying the theory in the context of general education could have novel potential to aid in the crisis of liberal democracies and to foster values such as equality, inclusivity, and respect in society (McAvoy and Hess, 2013). EDD (Samuelsson, 2016) is, thus far, a fragmented field of efforts that could perhaps be best likened to combining the theory of deliberative democracy with the subject of democratic education. Generally, democratic education is meant to provide students with competencies that will later aid them in becoming knowledgeable and active participants in political life. To be sure, students in an EDD class would similarly learn about how the political system works. However, as the core of deliberative democracy is built around public deliberation focused on giving mutually acceptable reasons, EDD should also focus on activities aimed at providing the students skills and virtues that aid in this. Examples of these are critical thinking, contextual knowledge, understanding and appreciating other people’s viewpoints, and practical judgment (Gutmann, 1999).

While my goal in this article is not to lay out a concrete practical pedagogical program of EDD, multiple authors have argued that learning deliberative practices is best accomplished by participating in deliberative situations as opposed to studying the theory from books (Englund, 2006; Samuelsson, 2016; Samuelsson and Bøyum, 2015). This means that students learn through discussing differing views, possibly learning to formulate arguments for either side, while practicing being respectful to opposing views and actively listening to their side, all the while trying to reach a consensus (or, if such is not to be found, perhaps a compromise). In addition, any activities that enhance students’ capabilities for empathy, communication, critical thinking, and related skills are especially beneficial for high-quality deliberation. While this list is not exhaustive, it should make it clear that as these are all capabilities that we would want students to learn anyway, EDD does not have to be viewed as a radical realigning of educational goals. Indeed, critical thinking, for example, has often been presented as ‘a central ideal of educational endeavor’ (Siegel, 1980: 1).

Still, this should not be taken to imply that implementing EDD in practice would be a simple task. There is still further research required to reach a mature, pedagogically sound program of EDD, and the theory itself will have to be developed forward to take into consideration the evidence pointing to real people seldom behaving like deliberative democratic theory expects them to, and instead being vulnerable to a range of biases (Hannon and de Ridder, 2021) that can prevent them from being moved simply by the force of the better argument. In addition, while deliberative democracy does place discussion on a very high pedestal, it has also been argued that learning just through dialogical teaching methods is an unrealistic proposal (Kauppi and Drerup, 2021). A further potential practical issue is that curricular realignments do not take place in a vacuum, but in complex social environments with varying political contexts which might prove to be less than amicable to the idea of EDD. I will elaborate on this point in more detail later when I present some possible objections. Despite these reservations, the principal aspects and aims of EDD remain commendable and in principle applicable for pedagogical use.

Longtermism

Before moving properly to the topic of longtermism, I will briefly illuminate some aspects of the relationship of intergenerational justice and deliberative democratic theory to properly set the stage. As already stated, within the deliberative tradition, the normative presuppositions that are to be met so that a deliberative situation can be deemed to be of sufficient quality vary from one model to the next. The demand for the deliberation to be inclusive is, however, one of the more standard requirements (Bächtiger et al., 2018; Habermas, 1996). Broadly speaking, within ideal deliberative democracy, anyone who is affected to some degree by the decision being deliberated on has the right to have their voice heard in the deliberation (Elster, 1998). This is a very demanding requirement in itself. Contemporary societies encompass millions of people and some decisions being deliberated on could, at least to some degree, come to impact the lives of everyone living in them. Yet some authors have gone even further and argued that even if everyone alive today was successfully brought within the deliberative circle, there would still be a very large group of people left disenfranchised – namely the future generations. Contemporary actions categorically affect the future, yet the people of the future appear to have no chance to have their voices heard in the proceedings due to the simple fact that they do not yet exist. This has been argued to be a particularly thorny issue for deliberative democracy, as the all-affected principle seems to suggest that the inability to include future deliberators would render many or even most contemporary deliberations normatively illegitimate by the theory’s own (idealized) standards (Ekeli, 2005).

For decades, there has been a vivid debate centered on what this non-existence of future generations implies for intergenerational justice (Caney, 2018), or indeed what to make of the fact that both the existence of future people and their identities are contingent on the currently existing people’s actions (Parfit, 1987). The length of this article will, unfortunately, not allow me to go into this debate in length. Thus, it suffices to say that while some authors have argued that anyone who does not exist also cannot have rights that could be harmed (Beckerman and Pasek, 2001) – and this presumably would include being wronged by being excluded from deliberation concerning matters that will one day touch upon a person’s life – others support the perhaps more intuitive view that ignoring the hypothetical interests of the posterity is morally dubious and have proposed solutions on how the future generations could be represented in contemporary settings (Ekeli, 2005; Karnein, 2016). I will be coming back to this issue later on when I discuss the case of a potential value lock-in.

A recent offshoot of the lengthy and multifaceted discussion on intergenerational justice is longtermism, an ethical stance that aims at taking the interests of the future seriously. The core tenet of longtermism is simply that, normatively speaking, future human lives matter (MacAskill, 2022b). This is hardly a radical claim, as it would probably be quite unproblematic to argue that the ethos of ‘we should leave a better world for our children’ is quite common around the world, and even the UN’s famous Brundtland Report defines sustainable development as ‘meeting the needs of the present whilst ensuring future generations can meet their own needs’ (Brundtland, 1987). Among others, this definition is still used today by the European Union. ¹ Where the long-term view differs from common morality is that its scope is longer than what people perhaps usually imagine when talking about future generations. The point is not that the grandchildren of the current generations should be able to enjoy a life of peace and prosperity but that the untold billions of humans that will potentially come to exist within the next thousands of years should be able to do so. In addition to this, longtermists do not mean merely that we should also think about the possible wishes of future generations when we make decisions today. They instead argue that, strictly speaking, their lives are as important as the life of anyone alive today. This shifts the perspective quite drastically and is also the source of many of the worries of the opponents of longtermism. Viewed from an utilitarian perspective, ² if the end-goal is the well-being of all humans regardless of whether they are currently alive or only potential lives situated in the far future, and those potential lives (should they ever come to exist) dwarf the billions alive today, it could be argued that we are getting quite close to the age-old conundrum: would you sacrifice the (relatively) few to save the many?

Humanity, should it choose to do so, could collectively do much to heighten the chances of the far-off future generations, eventually both coming to existence and having lives worth living. An argument could be made that pouring most of the world’s collective resources into, for example, promoting readiness for combatting existential threats and developing space technology for eventually settling other planets or the space itself could all potentially pave the way for a safer tomorrow for continued human existence at an accelerated rate. At the same time, it would probably cause widespread human suffering on the planet today, and the brunt of it would be inflicted on those who are already worse-off and not able to provide for themselves without the support networks that could come to be largely dismantled to pay for the new programs aimed toward safeguarding human existence. Some commentators, like Émile Torres (2021), have taken an even more extreme view and argued that longtermism enables taking a nonchalant attitude toward horrible events that kill millions if the said deaths can be argued not to have changed humanity’s future trajectory for the worse from a cosmic viewpoint.

However, most longtermist authors themselves do not suggest sacrificing those currently alive for the sake of those potentially to-come (MacAskill, 2022a). Instead, they often try to counter these worries by pointing out that many policy implications stemming from the long-term view could equally benefit the current generations as well as future humans. As an example, investing in pandemic readiness or promoting nuclear disarmament helps safeguard both the humans today and the continuation of the species, as does research into new energy sources or medical interventions.

There are also two different identifiable longtermist stances, commonly called strong longtermism and weak longtermism. Whereas strong longtermism (Greaves et al., 2021) views benefiting the long-term trajectory of humanity as the most normatively important factor in any ethical consideration, weak longtermism holds it as just one of the most important factors. The latter allows for aligning contemporary demands with the needs of the future, implying policies that require taking the very long-term consequences of political decisions into account with much more weight than is currently given them, and favoring potentially costly long-term solutions instead of options that are economically more preferably in the short-term. Thus, it becomes apparent that while strong longtermism can be seen as quite a radical thought with potentially problematic consequences, weak longtermism is actually, by and large, a stance with comparatively modest implications as they are largely dependent on other values and principles that are used in conjunction with it to direct action.

Next, I will take a closer look at the third major component of the argument: political polarization, and more specifically the way in which it is hampering our collective efforts in reducing existential risks.

Political polarization as an existential risk factor

As is evident from the previous section, longtermism is highly interested in the curbing of existential risks, which are perhaps best described as ‘a risk that threatens the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential’ (Ord, 2020: 64). This means risks that, should they be realized, would either cause the extinction of humanity or create a set of unrecoverable circumstances under which it is impossible for humans to flourish or to live worthwhile lives. Examples of such risks often include asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, nuclear weapons, and pandemics (Farquhar et al., 2017).

Climate change is widely considered to be the gravest danger that humanity is currently facing and it is also often called an existential threat both in literary sources and by politicians (e.g. Cartier, 2023; Kumar et al., 2021). However, understood in the terms of longtermism, the bar for something to be counted among existential risks is set very high, and it is unclear if climate change should be counted as such. While we cannot rule out the possibility that some thus far not properly understood climate mechanism could indeed cause the whole planet to become completely unsuitable for human habitation, ³ the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (2023) on climate change does not suggest that this is going to take place. What it does project, however, is a plethora of terrifying things waiting in our collective future: extreme weather, rising sea levels, displaced populations, destroyed ecosystems, increasing disease, droughts, and famine.

Does this uncertainty mean that those chiefly interested in curbing existential risks should focus their efforts elsewhere? I do not think so. Even if we were solely interested in the very long-term survival of humanity, convinced that climate change alone could not cause human extinction, and otherwise quite unmoved by the massive scale of misery and destruction climate change could cause, we would still have weighty reasons to do everything in our power to negate its effects. This is due to climate change acting as an existential risk factor (Ord, 2020), which means that should humanity fail in tackling the issue of climate change in a timely manner, the effects of this failure would increase the likelihood of humanity experiencing another kind of an existential catastrophe in the future.

As potentially entire cultures of people ⁴ could become displaced due to rising sea levels and other extreme conditions, humanity could come to face a refugee crisis on a scale never witnessed before. This alone would cause widespread political and social unrest, to put it mildly. Combine this with losses to ecosystems, decrease in agricultural productivity, as well as water scarcity, and we could have a potent cocktail of global strife and upheaval. In such a scenario, many other existential risks become much more dire. For example, arising conflicts could heighten the threat of nuclear weapons and other means of purposeful mass destruction. Also, as climate change can make conditions more favorable for infectious diseases, it could lead to new and deadlier pandemics. It is safe to say that societies already in turmoil would find responding to these threats effectively much more difficult.

As already stated, political polarization can lead to legislative deadlocks and political seesawing, hindering societies’ capabilities to pursue long-term goals (McCoy et al., 2018). Effective long-term cooperation is of paramount importance to defusing the threat of many existential risks, as well as to the implementation of an effective global climate policy. However, there is also a growing body of empirical evidence that suggests that political polarization and partisan identities related to it are specifically affecting our collective efforts in combatting climate change, especially in countries that have high levels of carbon dioxide emissions (e.g. Jang and Hart, 2015; Tranter and Booth, 2015; Whitmarsh, 2011). While inside climate science uncertainty has decreased and scientific consensus strengthened over the years, public views on the matter have become increasingly divided based on political ideologies and partisan antipathy. This is especially clear in the United States where in 2010 only 30.2% of those identifying as Conservatives expressed belief in the effects of global warming, compared with 73.8% of Liberals at the time – a divide which had doubled in size within just 10 years (McCright and Dunlap, 2011). This trend in partisan polarization has continued since (Dunlap et al., 2016; Popovich, 2020), which in turn has had a negative influence on the implementation of effective, science-based climate policies (Doell et al., 2021; Dunlap et al., 2016). To quote Patrick Egan and Megan Mullin (2024):

Republican opposition has been the largest obstacle to the establishment of meaningful and enduring policy to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions. Although efforts to build a cross-party coalition in Congress once held promise, the hope for bipartisan legislative action faded as polarization took hold and climate denialism became more entrenched in the GOP. (p. 31)

Likewise, based on a broad review of literary evidence, Jennifer Cole et al. (2023) have pointed to political polarization as one of the most important psychological barriers in the way of effective climate action. Although the lion’s share of the relevant research is centered around the United States where polarization is arguably at its all-time worst, there is also more limited evidence of its effects in the European context. These studies point at political affiliation as the single largest demographic correlate of belief in climate change (Hornsey et al., 2016) as well as document increasing political polarization, anti-environmentalist attitudes, and a left–right ideological divide in regard to climate change beliefs in northwestern Europe (Fisher et al., 2022; Lönnqvist et al., 2020; McCright et al., 2016). While the reasons behind climate change denial and opposition to policies aimed toward its mitigation are complex as well as context sensitive and therefore cannot be reduced to any single underlying cause, this body of evidence strongly suggests that political polarization is playing a meaningful part in frustrating the efforts to effectively combat climate change, at least in the context of the Western world. From the viewpoint of longtermism (due to climate change having been identified as an existential risk factor) this increased opposition means that political polarization is contributing to increased existential risks, which in turn marks political polarization itself as an existential risk factor.

Furthermore, it has been argued that political polarization can play a key part in the eroding of democracy and it being replaced by authoritarian regimes (Arbatli and Rosenberg, 2021; Somer and McCoy, 2018). According to the V-Dem Institute’s democracy report (2022), the number of autocracies in the world is increasing (at the expense of liberal democracies) and ‘polarization and autocratization form a mutually reinforcing, vicious cycle’ (V-Dem, 2022: 30). As authoritarianism has been linked to both general anti-science attitudes and specifically distrust in climate science (Azevedo and Jost, 2021), fighting polarization could be important not only for the effective functioning of the political system but also from the wider point of view of continued human progress. Should political polarization enable new authoritarian regimes to come to power, and should those regimes display the same ideological tendencies as citizens exhibiting authoritarian views today, they could not only refuse to listen to the findings of scientific organizations, ⁵ but to actively seek to make their work harder by denying them funding or trying to enforce research aims that fit the regime’s ideology. From the viewpoint of longtermism, this stagnation of scientific research could increase existential risks as well as deny humanity the timely access to many new discoveries that could benefit it in the very long run.

What makes all of this even more troubling is the recent research on affective polarization. A subcategory of political polarization, affective polarization occurs when different political groups within society experience strong, long-term negative emotions toward other groups that do not share their viewpoint, and inversely feel very positive about people they view as being ‘on the same side’ of public issues with them (McWilliams, 2021). With time, such a situation can cause people to develop social identities tied to their political affiliation. People are then compelled to defend these identities from threats, leading to motivated reasoning: the tendency to hold on to beliefs tied to a social identity even in the face of persuasive evidence against those beliefs. Thus, especially in highly polarized settings, what sort of policies a person endorses or opposes becomes more about supporting one’s in-group or opposing the out-group than about the actual contents of the proposal (Sunstein, 2018). This has some thorny implications for fostering belief in climate change. For example, it means that while advocating for more science education as a response to climate change denialism is certainly a reasonable approach, it is doubtful if it can solve the issue by itself if people later on tend toward forming their beliefs more based on their partisan identities than scientific evidence. While there are multiple plausible strategies to countering this problem (Leiviskä, 2023), I propose that one noteworthy approach is to support the increase in science literacy with simultaneous interventions aimed at tempering the effects of polarization.

EDD through the long-term view

As touched upon earlier, while deliberative democracy might have empirical merit unmatched by most of the competing theories, it also faces stark challenges. Some of the weightiest objections to it stem from problems related to feasibility. The main crux of the issue is that, in practice, deliberative democratic initiatives can be very hard to implement effectively in the wider society. When deployed in the context of deliberative forums or mini-publics, deliberative democratic models seem to be able to foster respect and understanding and through doing so diffuse political polarization. However, this kind of controlled environments that ensure everyone is informed about the issues at hand and come equipped with professional moderators for enabling respectful conversation simply do not exist in the society at large. Consequently, citizens might be too ignorant to take part in deliberation (Talisse, 2004) and even if this was not the case, they simply might not have the motivation to participate in deliberative discussions or even have interest in politics in general (Posner, 2003). Indeed, as stated before, under unfavorable circumstances deliberation might even strengthen polarization (Caluwaerts et al., 2023). So, for deliberative democracy to function outside of limited environments that have been constructed to be very favorable to it, critics have argued that deliberative democracy would need at least already existing widescale participation and trust between citizens to work (Parvin, 2015). As political polarization – which erodes trust between different groups – is precisely the issue that deliberative democracy is hoped to help rectify, the argument seems circular. For the solution to the problem to be widely deployed in society, it would require the very circumstances that we are trying to bring about to already exist.

Implemented effectively, EDD could help surmount these difficulties by laying the groundwork for a new generation of citizens who are better prepared for public deliberation of the kind that fosters participation and trust, weakening the obstacles in the way of implementing more deliberative mechanisms in the society. While adding EDD to the curriculum would obviously not make every student an expert in deliberation, ⁶ it would mean a significant increase in people who are better equipped for it, which in turn could lead to an easier time of implementing further deliberative elements in the society and to deliberative practices spreading further through interactions among the citizens (Samuelsson, 2016).

To avoid naïve optimism about the possibilities of EDD and education in general, it should be made clear that I am not suggesting that classrooms are somehow completely divorced from the sociopolitical reality of the surrounding society. Neither are students immune to its effects: partisan identities and political polarization can and do affect children already at a young age (Lay et al., 2023). Despite this, classrooms are controlled environments in the sense that the societies at large are not, making the prospect of fostering deliberative practices within them feasible. This in turn could counteract the effects of polarization already present, as has been observed to happen when deliberation is able to adhere closely to the theoretical framework of the theory (Caluwaerts et al., 2023). And while children are not immune to the effects of political polarization, neither are they affected by it to the same degree as adults, as partisanship and negative affect increase with age (Lay et al., 2023). Thus, EDD would have the benefit of reaching future citizens before they are fully immersed in the polarized political climate of the society, which could prove valuable in fostering their capabilities to remain depolarized after they have graduated from general education. As Paula McAvoy and Diana Hess (2013) have argued, teaching students how to deliberate together on politically polarizing subjects in classrooms is a method for counteracting the harmful tendencies of the surrounding political culture.

If we take the (weak) long-term viewpoint seriously, then mitigating political polarization – which can be identified as an existential risk factor – can be counted among the key issues of the world today. This alone means we have a weighty reason to consider developing EDD further so it could be deployed to aid in this task. Yet there is still one more factor in favor of EDD to examine: its potential to enable societies to keep their cognitive space open for increased flexibility for when they will face unforeseen new challenges in the future. To better explain this possibility, I will give a brief overview of the problem of a value lock-in. Toby Ord (2020) has discussed a scenario where there comes into existence a moral theory or an ideology that at least a large part of the society identifies with. This group of people could come to feel very strongly that their view is the best option for the whole society, and hence also worth preserving for future generations. With the help of emerging technologies ⁷ and societal conditioning, they could be successful, and their views could thus become locked in. Ord argues that this could lead to a world that due to intellectual stagnation will forever, for example, fail to recognize some forms injustice or harm caused due to the enshrined theory or ideology being unable to take this into consideration.

While the scenario just described could perhaps still sound like a setting for a dystopian science fiction novel, it is, nevertheless, important from two different points of view. First, if we take the enormous scope of the future seriously, we must also take into consideration the potential of technological and intellectual developments that currently seem unlikely. Many of the things we today take for granted would be unthinkable for people just a handful of generations before. With the fast speed of technological development, it is difficult to predict with certainty what direction societies will take within the next decade, much less the next century. Second, the scenario is also interesting purely as a thought experiment: if we knew a value lock-in was going to happen no matter what, which values or theories should we promote to be transferred forward into the distant future?

I argue that deliberative democratic theory passes the test of the value lock-in better than most other theories due to it being able to remain open for future revisions. It has been argued that deliberative democratic theory can regard its own principles, both substantive and procedural, not as unchangeable, but provisional and open to deliberation in the same way as other issues (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004). As new information comes to light, be it priorly unrecognized injustices, new empirical findings or other developments, the theory can be used to correct itself by employing its own tools. This in turn means that if deliberative democratic principles would through successfully implemented education initiatives become very popular in society and then become locked-in, this is unlikely to lead to intellectual stagnation or the inability to recognize new moral insights. Consequently, the perspective of longtermism also lends credibility to the view that even if we might not know that deliberative democracy is the very best approach possible, it is arguably one of the least harmful out of those available for promotion through general education, should we take seriously the idea of what we teach today echoing forward into the far future. In this instance, it is precisely the difficulty of accurately predicting the future that lends weight to the argument for EDD instead of counting against it.

By accepting the limits of our own understanding through embracing value plurality, and encouraging deliberation also on its own principles, deliberative democracy can be argued to defuse the threat of value lock-in by remaining open for revisions in the future when the need for such arises. Also, should a value lock-in still occur, if the said values are ones fostering plurality, respect, and cooperation, it would probably, nevertheless, set a much more desirable future trajectory for most people than a selection that would emphasize the hegemony of one value-set. This view is lent further credibility by the priorly examined difficulties related to the inclusion of future generations in contemporary deliberation. While not solving the issue completely, the idea of continuous deliberation allows for future generations to join the deliberation when they are able to do so (i.e. when they come to exist) without having their options unduly restricted by prior deliberative decisions, lessening the threat of intergenerational domination. The same is also true of safeguarding against existential risks and autocratization, both of which would severely limit the options of future generations. While it is also a worthwhile endeavor to work on developing further strategies on how the interests of posterity could better be included in present-day deliberation, the difficulty of accurately predicting the future means that protecting the openness of the deliberative space will still be a key issue for addressing concerns of intergenerational justice. Due to unforeseen developments and the limits of knowledge, those currently alive are bound to fail in recognizing the interests of future generations from time to time, especially when it comes to people temporarily very removed from them. Therefore, it is vital that such shortcomings can be rectified later to the greatest attainable extent.

In summary, the argument presented in this article is as follows: political polarization exacerbates many issues that might have serious negative repercussions on the long-term trajectory of human civilization. These repercussions, in addition to their other potential negative impacts on the development of the civilization and the general suffering they could cause, carry with them increased extinction risks. According to (weak) longtermism, curbing extinction risks is one of the most important things we can endeavor to do. There is evidence that deliberative democratic theory has the potential to combat political polarization, but it has also been argued to be impossible to implement in the contemporary societal conditions in an effective way. Thus, EDD initiatives should be developed and – if successful – implemented within general education to help foster deliberative competency and with it more favorable deliberative conditions in the society. In addition to combatting the potential negative long-term consequences of political polarization, the theory’s systemic openness enables humanity to ‘keep their options open’ for the future generations and to avoid the worst effects of a potential value lock-in.

With all that said, it must be clarified that the objective of this article is not to suggest that adding EDD to the curriculum is a one-and-done solution to the myriad issues plaguing democracies of today, but rather only a piece of the puzzle. Major problems such as economic inequality and general political short-termism are issues which, while plausibly addressable through political deliberation, will also require more targeted interventions. Instead, the argument is intended to point out that if we take the weight of the future, the threat of polarization, and the potential of deliberative democratic theory seriously and wish to support its integration into the society, EDD implemented in the context of general education is likely the most effective method for fostering deliberative capabilities on a larger scale. However, as the theory (and the practice) must still be developed further to consider the challenges presented to it, I end this section with a call for more research rather than a call for action.

Possible objections

Varied objections have been raised against the deliberative democratic theory during the past decades. Due to restricted space, I will not be able to detail most of them here and will instead focus on objections that could be specifically raised against the argument presented in this article.

First off, an argument could be made that the aim of general education should not be to shape people into something the society requires, but rather to provide skills, virtues, and capabilities that enable the learner to make their own judgments about the world and through doing so become personally autonomous. In the case of EDD, I would argue, both aims can be satisfied. The capabilities required for high-quality deliberation – critical thinking, empathy, the ability to formulate arguments, and so on – are not only skills useful for participating in activities inside a deliberative democratic framework. They are also skills generally required for making carefully weighted judgments about the world (Gutmann, 1995). Therefore, it is not as if we are advocating that everybody must study to become a rocket engineer regardless of their personal interests because the human civilization needs to expand into space. Rather, we are arguing for teaching skills that will probably benefit the society, but also enable the student to better judge for themselves and in an autonomous manner what they deem is good or worthwhile. This is why the problem of a value lock-in casts EDD in such a favorable light: by enabling deliberation also on the theory’s own principles, it defuses the risk of students becoming indoctrinated into a system of values that then could not be called into question should the need to do so arise in the future.

Second, I have so far mostly been discussing EDD without a national context on a very generalized level. However, it is clear that in reality the local political (and pedagogical) context would play a key part in getting any EDD initiative off the ground. One substantial worry is that EDD could be seen as a partisan project, aimed at instilling values in students that would prime them to accept the worldview associated with one political party over another. In the United States, for example, Republican politicians have recently been on the offensive against educational materials they deem related to ‘woke ideology’, blocking courses and defunding initiatives (Cineas, 2023). In such a political context, should EDD come to be identified as a partisan initiative, it could lead to a political backlash and make garnering support for its implementation much less feasible. In addition, this could also cause teachers to be wary of teaching EDD due to the potential for adverse responses, similar to how some teachers felt pressured in their pedagogical choices in the wake of the 2016 presidential election (Dunn et al., 2019).

While this is a very real worry, it is also not at all clear that EDD would be viewed as a partisan project. While deliberative democratic theory does implicitly subscribe to some fundamental liberal democratic values, such as the equality of all participants, it is, in the end, more of a proceduralist approach. Rather than aiming to foster various substantive values and norms that could more easily come under attack as being, for example, ‘too liberal’, the main emphasis of the theory is placed on critical thinking and reciprocity. These are both educational aims which should plausibly be acceptable to a wide range of different political views. Viewed this way, EDD is actually quite a measured and diplomatic approach to the often-volatile political climate of today. Of course, it could still be that a political actor would think that teaching critical thinking to students would not be in the best interest of their agenda and try to portray EDD in a dubious light anyway. However, such a challenge is always possible when it comes to any worthwhile cause, not just EDD, and it would be generally ill-advised to let the fear of controversy deter us from such causes before we even get started.

Third, a commonly voiced criticism of the deliberative democratic tradition has to do with inclusion. While this is a large and nuanced topic and as such the length and focus of this article will not allow me to do justice to its complexities, I will still endeavor to provide an adequate picture of it here as it can be seen as an especially salient question when it comes to matters of education. Authors such as Iris Marion Young (2000) have argued that due to the emphasis deliberative models place on rational argumentation – a mode of expression often not as readily available to marginalized groups as it is to white middle-class men – such models can, in practice, lead to further exclusion despite their best intentions. Sure, marginalized people are included in the proceedings, but if they cannot or will not express themselves in the way that is expected, their words will not be given the weight they are due. Given the aims of deliberative democratic theory and its supposed advantages over aggregative models of democracy, this poses a serious problem.

My answer here is twofold. First off, and as Young (2000: 57) also suggested in the first place, the theory can and should be developed forward to better consider a wider range of expressions. Such research is already taking place: André Bächtiger and colleagues reflect that ‘second generation’ deliberative theorists have evolved the theory’s focus from solely rational argumentation to also encompass emotional expressions and different forms of communication (Bächtiger et al., 2018). Second, while I do concur that rational argumentation has traditionally been a form of communication favored by the privileged groups of society, this is not due to something inherent in the mode of communication or the social groups themselves but rather a result of longstanding structural injustice and inequal power dynamics. The point of EDD as an education initiative is to make deliberative capabilities more commonplace in the society in general, ⁸ tempering the influence of such forces. By widening the deliberative space to accommodate more inclusive modes of expression and by bolstering deliberative competency through EDD, the issue can be tackled from multiple directions at the same time. Is this enough to eliminate all deliberative injustices that marginalized groups face? Probably not. Meira Levinson (2003) is correct in pointing out that it is very difficult and oftentimes painful to teach those belonging to privileged groups to genuinely ‘hear’ marginalized views. At the same time, an unfair onus is also placed on the marginalized to painstakingly learn the ‘language of power’ that oftentimes comes more naturally to the privileged simply through their lived experience (Levinson, 2003: 35–37). The responsibility lies with deliberative democrats to rigorously develop the theory and practice of deliberation toward greater inclusivity. The open-ended nature of deliberation is once again of assistance here.

A further obvious problem related to all future-facing arguments has already been featured in this article, and it is the difficulty of predicting the future. Forecasting the effects of global phenomena is a complex and arduous task even under the most optimal circumstances. The longer the temporal distance, the harder it is to believably anticipate with any accuracy what effects actions might have. This is all certainly very true, and I will not try to suggest that a believable argument could be made for there being foolproof way to guarantee that implementing EDD could not have some unintended and undesired consequences – or at least not the desirable consequences expressed in this article. However, the fact that it is very hard to make informed judgments about the consequences of our actions in the long run does not free us from the responsibility to try to do just that. The argument presented in this article is on one hand built upon, there being an empirical basis for it. On the other hand, it is equally based on the idea that given the limited nature of our knowledge concerning future, the possible path dependencies created by the implementation of EDD are arguably of the kind that do not lock humanity into a certain trajectory without inbuilt means of adjusting the course later on. At the same time, we can already with quite high certainty tell that should we fail in tackling our problems with political polarization and climate change, the forecast for our collective future looks very bleak. In this case, the devil we know is not the better option.

Finally, it could also be argued that perhaps a benevolent authoritarian regime would actually be the best possible system of governance when it comes to staving off existential threats. Unlike liberal democracies, an authoritarian regime could arguably cut through much of the red tape and party politicking, more efficiently doing what needs to be done to protect humanity without feeling the need to avoid strong measures to evade voter backlash come next election cycle. This may well be true, but standard problems related to enlightened despotism still apply here, such as the epistemic issue of knowing which people we should hand over the reins of government to. How do we know which people are at the same time benevolent, competent, and so uncorruptible that after receiving their mandate they will not later use it to further selfish goals?

Some might argue that it does not matter if the regime in power is selfish and corrupted if they just keep humanity safe from existential threats. However, as we are not solely interested in just the long-term survival of the species but also in humans having worthwhile lives, benevolent authoritarianism becomes even more of a gamble. Personal autonomy – the capacity to decide for oneself how to live their life – is arguably one of the cornerstones of having a personally meaningful existence. Under the political rule of even a benevolent authoritarian regime, citizens lose a very meaningful piece of that autonomy by signing away their future right to decide who wields the most important political power in their society. If we respect people as moral equals who should have a say in how their lives are ordained, then liberal democracies are – at least for now – perhaps uniquely equipped to convey this respect (Wilson, 2021). This argument against benevolent authoritarianism is strengthened by the notion that future authoritarian regimes, empowered by emerging surveillance technologies, might be more stable than in the past – meaning that those political rights, once signed away, could be very hard to get back (Caplan, 2008).

Conclusion

In this article I have argued that the viewpoint of longtermism grants credibility to the justification of EDD as an educational initiative. This is due to its novel potential to help curb existential risks stemming from political polarization, as well as due to its ability to enable humanity to keep its cognitive space open in anticipation of unforeseen future developments. The latter feature also serves as a precaution against intergenerational domination by allowing future generations to join the continuous deliberation without having their options unduly restricted by prior deliberative decisions. While the theory will have to be developed further both pedagogically and to take into account the empirical and practical challenges presented to it, EDD still presents the most plausible avenue for fostering deliberative capabilities in the society on a wide scale. Thus, if we take the threat posed by polarization and the very long-term perspective of what we teach today echoing far into the future seriously, then we have ample reason to continue research toward the realization of EDD.