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reason are equivalent to unreasonable and uncivil forms of pluralism. By contrast I want
to suggest that the burdens of judgment, along with a more general recognition of the
incompleteness and perspectivism of human knowing and judging, should not prompt us
to fashion a deracinated mode of discourse – one that would “only appeal to presently
accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense,”
61
or as
Habermas claims, “compel participants to transcend the social and historical context of
their particular form of life and particular community.”
62
Rather, these conditions of
political judgment should prompt us to first cultivate forms of civic and moral
attentiveness that can help us reap the fullest possible rewards from our mutual
interactions with others, even when (or especially when) our democratic entanglements
are themselves the outgrowth of deeper moral disagreements. To the extent that an ethos
of democratic humility can be effectively cultivated among a diverse array of citizens and
leaders, we might find that our civic lives and what we are willing to label just and
reasonable will be enriched not by the orchestrations of public reason and the rule-bound
pursuit of consensus, but by forms of political expression, moderated by and received in
humility, that enables citizens to integrate their full identities, beliefs, and sexualities with
their civic office. Why should this be so, and why should this be considered desirable?
With humility in place we can make a virtue of our limitations and political
burdens by cultivating a disposition that inclines us to actively attend to the voices and
experiences of others. As other scholars have acknowledged, the fact of
incommensurable value pluralism alone cannot make one “alive” to the plurality of
values, or to the contingency and potential revisability of one’s own commitments.
63
What I am claiming is that this possibility can only be adequately realized when a prior
Convention