35
economic inequalities and mass demobilization, those who hold decision-making power
should be understood to possess a strong positive duty to actively attend to others that
they would otherwise not see or hear.
75
Finally, an ethos of democratic humility may improve policy-making by
facilitating the necessary re-visitation and renegotiation of past judgments and current
policies. Democratic humility provides a heightened awareness of contingency, not in
the strong epistemological sense that all of our declarative statements are without
foundation, but rather in the spirit of an open, prospective alertness to the ways in which
our ever changing social and political interdependencies require the constant
renegotiation of our practices. Our ability and willingness to return to previous
judgments (and previously held convictions) can be facilitated and rendered less painful
by the acknowledgment, at the outset, that any decision is, under the dual conditions of
democratic humility (incompleteness and the burdens of judgment) a necessary but also
temporary settlement, never a closure. In this regard, democratic humility can take the
form of claiming active responsibility for the ways in which our actions are always
bound-up within webs of human relationships and modes of being that can never be fully
accounted for or anticipated in our collective decisions. With the aid of democratic
humility, neither our actions nor our convictions need be prisons.
76
And, when phronesis
and foresight fail us, as they are bound to, humility may help us to acknowledge those
circumstances when we should grant or seek forgiveness.
Convention