To walk the walk: Why we need to make things personal in public deliberation

Critical reflection and awareness-raising are nowadays part of many people's everyday lives: At workplaces and organizations, in relationships, in the media, and best-selling books, people are increasingly discussing what it means to treat each other as equals, how not to be racist, and the many ways that we still exclude or marginalize people based, for example, on gender, ethnicity, abilities, age, class, sexuality, or religious views. These conversations are not easy to have. They often proceed on a very general level, without naming names, without getting upset, and without confrontation. We are accustomed to discussing in this way: What matters is not the personal story but the general patterns; not our experiences and how we feel about them, but the objective facts and arguments; not our failures to live up to ideals and beliefs, but what some abstract “we” still need to work on. Not making it personal is supposed to ensure that everyone can feel comfortable to speak and be heard regardless of their personal history and how they live.

In democratic theory, this understanding of collective reflection as a “rational discussion” has been a central part of how scholars approach the realm of public deliberation. In Habermas’ famous phrase, participants in deliberation are supposed to respond only to the force of the better argument instead of giving importance to the status and power of the person speaking (Habermas, 1975, 1984). While a critical component in early work on deliberation, this view has now been criticized by countless scholars (see Curato et al., 2019; Holdo, 2020b). Feminist and critical theorists, not the least, have argued that this idea obscures how, in the real situations in which deliberation takes place, people's views and ways of expressing themselves are always embodied—that is, always shaped by their particular locations and experiences (Hayward, 2004; Holdo, 2015; Olson, 2011; Young, 1996, 2000).

Today, many deliberative theorists acknowledge that our ways of communicating—including both speaking and listening, both expressing something and considering it—in part reflect culture and social hierarchies. This is typically seen as an argument for a more inclusive approach to the type of expressions that should be accepted in deliberation. Thus, deliberative scholars have come to embrace emotions, testimony, greetings, rhetoric, and storytelling as additions to the earlier ideal of rational discussion (see Bächtiger et al, 2018; Elstub, 2010).

The criticism against the early ideals of deliberative theory can, to a certain extent, be seen as a critique of a norm of disembodied objectivity: that we ought to listen and respond to what is being said while disregarding who is saying it. Emotions, testimony, and storytelling are all modes of expression that bear witness to who we are and what we have been through. In this paper, we seek to further challenge the norm of disembodied objectivity by exploring the implication of this critique for deliberative theory—which we suggest is that we need to make deliberation personal in a more radical way than deliberative theorists currently acknowledge. We argue that people should make things personal by holding each other personally accountable to a norm of embodied sincerity. In everyday language, this means, in part, to practice what one preaches. Embodied sincerity refers to speaking the views and experiences one embodies: to do what you say and say what you do. Whether, for example, a person acts in antiracist ways is critical for assessing antiracist views and whether a self-professed feminist actually takes feminist action is critical for how we understand the practical importance of their claims. Without this connection between discourse and practice, or speech and action, deliberation easily turns into a game of words—it is enough to know what views and terms others see as acceptable or progressive. But if deliberation is to serve emancipatory political action, and if deliberative theory is to stay true to its roots in critical theory, it needs to be oriented not just toward advancing rhetoric but also toward transformative social change.

Personal accountability, we argue, ought to be an essential part of any process of deliberation because it performs three critical functions: it helps assess a person's commitment to what they say, it helps understand and assess the experiences that inform a person's views, and it helps generate critical self-reflection by bringing discourse to bear on concrete practices.

Next, we discuss previous critiques of the conventional idea of rational argumentation in deliberations. These suggest that we need to embrace narrative, emotions, and identities as constitutive of deliberative processes. Our view is that these arguments seek to broaden the modes of political communication, rather than emphasizing the relationship between words and action. We then outline what we mean by personal accountability and explain what difference the shift to the ethics of personal accountability makes for how we act toward one another in conversations and how we evaluate knowledge—both our own and that of others. In the fourth section, we address several possible objections. The most important of these, we suggest, is that the consequences of acting on our beliefs and of sharing what personal experiences inform our views are not equal but vary depending on our positions in power structures. For this reason, we respond, the ethics of walking the walk needs to be seen as a situated ethics, not as an unqualified imperative. What our argument implies is not that all people should act the same or be held accountable the same way, but that all people ought to be challenged to reflect on whether they do act on their beliefs, and whether the way that they have come to believe something to be true reflects ethical and epistemological commitments to inclusion and equality, to an extent they can justify to themselves and others. Thus, we do not defend moral perfectionism or purity. Rather, as we stress in our concluding discussion, practicing the norm of embodied sincerity involves understanding whether, under the conditions we act, we might have, and ought to have, acted differently, and if and how we could act differently in the future. As a form of critical reflection, it allows people to move beyond sophisticated discussions to actions that challenge social injustices.

According to deliberative democratic theory, political decisions should be the product of fair discussions and be guided by a reciprocal give-and-take of reasons and a willingness to change one's opinion (Dahlberg, 2004). When public deliberation succeeds, it is thought to neutralize power imbalances that give some people better chances than others to influence decisions and discussions. In a good deliberative conversation, people consider arguments on their own merits. They yield only to “the forceless force of the better argument” (Habermas, 1975, p. 108). In theory, such deliberation would help expose structural injustices and support individuals’ emancipation (Hammond, 2019; Rostbøll, 2008).

During the last decades, deliberative democratic theory has moved, through several “generations” of theorists from idealistic propositions to practical exploration and empirical research (Elstub, 2010; Elstub et al., 2016). As part of this development, newer generations of theorists have tried to accommodate a worrisome criticism: that the original ideal of deliberative reason-giving obscures exclusions and inequalities. Critics have, for example, argued that deliberative theory maintains structural injustices by privileging universality over particularity and impartiality over partiality (Williams, 2000; Young, 1996, 2000). Further, some have argued that people's practical understanding and expectations of what it means to give reasons and be convincing often privilege styles of speaking that are articulate, ordered, and dispassionate over ways of speaking that are emotional, passionate, and personal (Sanders, 1997; Young, 2000, pp. 36–51). This, critics suggest, reproduces and legitimizes practices of discrimination and exclusion of marginalized social groups that are often viewed as being emotional rather than rational and as expressing subjective feelings instead of objectively valid arguments (see also Hayward, 2004; Olson, 2011).

To make deliberation more inclusive and equal, various theorists have sought to push the boundaries of what counts as reason-giving. Most notably, Iris Marion Young (2000, chapter 2) has introduced greeting, rhetoric, and narrative as enriching accounts of public discussion and deliberation. More recent contributions to this discussion have sought to demonstrate a need to broaden the concept of public deliberation to include forms of communication that may be seen as nonpublic or as not fitting the label “deliberation.” For example, several theorists have reasoned that deliberative democrats should accept and even embrace protest and other confrontational tactics as part of public deliberation in an unequal society (Curato, 2021; Fung, 2005; Holdo, 2020a; Young, 2001). More recently, scholars have emphasized nonverbal forms of expression as a way to express reasons. For example, Toby Rollo (2017) has highlighted enactive protest, exit, and silence as contributions to public debate, and Mendonça et al. (2020) have argued that visuals and sounds play important roles in public argumentative exchanges.

In addition to suggesting practices that widen the concept of reason-giving in deliberation, scholars have also taken an interest in strategies that can reveal how people's social location shape their claims and renegotiate the influence of marginalized participants and perspectives. According to Azmanova (2012, pp. 218–219), the relation between a social position and a normative position needs to be thematized in public deliberation to disclose the structural sources of injustice that are encoded within all claims that participants advance. She asserts that this can be done by giving “reasons for having reasons,” that is, by explaining how one has come to an opinion and for what reason one formed it.¹

We endorse the previous critiques suggesting that we need to recognize alternative modes of reasoning and take into account participants’ social locations and situated motives. However, these contributions have not connected what participants in deliberation say—their claims, objections, and proclamations—to how they live their lives, that is, whether what they say corresponds to what they do. In this paper, we explore whether such a link can help guide collective critical reflection and hold participants accountable for what they say. Compared with previous research, we take a radical step toward making deliberation more personal. Thus, we also challenge in a more fundamental way the norm of disembodied objectivity—a norm that frames deliberation as being about “public” rather than “private” issues, “rational” arguments rather than “emotional” ones, and “objectively valid” points of view that are disconnected from personal experiences. These moves turn conversations away from the ways that personal struggles, shortcomings, and blind spots affect our concrete actions in everyday life as well as in our more specific engagements, and inhibit deliberation that can emancipate through accountability, recognition, and actions that confront injustices.

The question of disembodied objectivity has long been discussed by feminist epistemologists, especially in relation to scientific research. These scholars emphasize that dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification have disadvantaged women and other subordinated groups by excluding them from inquiry, denying them epistemic authority, and producing knowledge that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. These failures are traced to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, and objectivity, which, for example, insist that objective knowledge is ascertained through a “view from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1995). Contrary to such beliefs, but without abandoning the concept of objectivity, feminist epistemologists emphasize that what is known reflects the situation and perspective of the knower. Reflecting on that situation and perspective, they suggest, ought to be part of the process of learning (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1992).

Feminist epistemologists argue that situated knowers are responsible knowers: they take responsibility for what they know and how they claim to know what they know (Haraway, 1988). Patricia Hill Collins (2000) calls this an “ethic of personal accountability” (p. 284). According to her, Black feminist epistemology expects people to be personally accountable for their knowledge claims. This means that they are accountable not only for the validity of what they say but also for the personal convictions and actions that underlie or influence their positions. In line with this idea, assessments of knowledge claims must include an evaluation of an individual's character, values, and ethics. Knowledge claims from individuals who are ethically committed to their ideas carry more weight than claims from those who maintain a distance between what they say and how they live.

To demonstrate her point, Collins shares an experience from an undergraduate class session where Black female students refused to accept a prominent Black male scholar's analysis of Black feminism without some indication of his personal ethics. The students were especially interested in details of the scholar's life, such as his relationship with Black women and his social class background. According to Collins (2000), “they used this information to assess whether he really cared about his topic, and invoked this ethic of caring in advancing their knowledge claims about his work” (p. 285).

We suggest that theorists of deliberation should consider the implications that the ethic of personal accountability has for practices of deliberation, especially regarding the norms of sincerity and objectivity. Sincerity is usually understood by theorists of deliberation as a demand to mean what we say and say what we mean (Habermas, 2001, p. 34). By contrast, an ethic of personal accountability appears to require embodied sincerity—that we do what we say and say what we do. It thus connects the spoken word to the body and action. In other words, it helps expose not just the reasonableness of people's arguments but also people's integrity in acting on them (Nili, 2018). Rather than evaluating arguments based on their rational, universal justification, as suggested by the conventional (disembodied) norm of objectivity, embodied sincerity suggests that we assess what people say against the background of relevant aspects of their actions and ways of life: you may talk the talk, but do you walk the walk?

What difference does this shift mean for how we should act toward one another in conversations? We suggest that it affects both the kind of support a normative claim requires, as Collins herself argues, and, by implication, the importance we give to including different relevant experiences in the process of forming our views. Thus, as Collins suggests, the one who makes a normative claim needs to support it by explaining what this claim means for the speaker's way of living their lives. In addition, we suggest that it also means that speakers must pay attention to, learn from, and be held accountable to, how their claims relate to the lived experiences of others. We will explain these implications one at a time.

Collins illustrates the limits of the norm of disembodied objectivity by using the case with the students who confront the male scholar on his credibility in light of his biography and how he currently lives his life. The value of this move is that it changes what kind of merits one needs to obtain to be taken seriously. It is no longer sufficient to acquire rhetorical skills, socially appropriate language, or abstract “objective” knowledge. The important thing is not merely what he claims to believe but also whether and how he acts on that conviction. This idea contradicts the reasoning of many theorists, who think a good understanding of a problem and the ethical standing of different solutions are something valuable on their own, but it squares well with more practical thinking about social change, including antiracist thinking (Kendi, 2019) and ideas of critical reflection in practice (Holdo, 2023). To know something only in theory, in this view, is not to know enough. By contrast, to know something in practice is to be able to reflect critically. What personal experiences have shaped the knowledge of this male scholar? If he claims to advance feminism, how do his feminist assumptions and intentions affect his personal life? What do they require from his way of life, and does he live up to it? What consequences may discrepancies between talk and action have? How, for example, do they affect the struggle for Black women's emancipation?

There is an additional implication of this view of particular importance for public deliberation. Making things personal means questioning not only what experiences you had that informed your views but also if and how you considered the experiences of relevant others. Whose views are being silenced in this conversation and should be included? To take Collins’ example again, if you claim to support the rights of Black women, how did the experiences and views of Black women affect your understanding of how to do so? The idea of holding each other accountable for having considered experiences other than our own, and especially the experiences of people who are subject to epistemic injustices, is not exactly Collins’ point. But exploring this path is, we think, consistent with Collins’ argument for decentering political thought and critiquing Eurocentric and male-dominated discourse. It is also consistent with Collins’ emphasis on dialogue as essential for knowledge production. Collins contrasts Black feminist practices of learning through the sharing of experiences, through dialogue, to the idea of knowledge production as a process in which people separate “objective” knowledge from personal experience, or “subtract the personality of an individual from his or her ideas because they see personality as biasing those ideas” (Collins, 2000, p. 283). Thus, knowledge requires connection with others, based on the recognition of the validity and relevance of others’ experiences. Extending this idea slightly, we suggest that knowledge that is not based on dialogue with other people whose experiences should be relevant—because they are affected by the issues under discussion or because they have engaged with them—should not have equal weight as knowledge that is. This implication is important for how we extend Collins’ ethic of accountability to theorizing public deliberation.

Our argument has similarities with how feminist critics have shown that deliberative theorists have helped mask injustices by defending a norm of impartiality. Feminist critics of the impartiality principle have suggested that urging oppressed groups to put their partial interests aside risks trapping them in the very structures they seek to dismantle (Phillips, 1995; Williams, 2000; Young, 2000). While this debate concerns whether arguments need to speak to everyone's immediate experiences and interests, our concern is of a different kind: We are not concerned with the question of social difference and group representation in deliberation, but how arguments relate to deliberators' ways of life. We claim that arguing and judging must become more personal if deliberation is to serve social justice—as opposed to merely helping improve people's abilities to converse about things that they may care very little about in practice. Thus, while being concerned with a different issue than impartiality, our view shares with feminist critics of impartiality the questioning of norms that undermine objections to the domination of privileged groups.

By pointing toward an alternative standard for evaluating knowledge claims and normative claims, the ethic of personal accountability helps us articulate an ideal of embodied sincerity that disrupts the reproduction of biased and oppressive practices of knowledge production and illuminates the status quo–promoting disconnections between speech and action that such practices allow. For subordinate or dissenting groups, embodied sincerity helps hold privileged people accountable and detect ways of talking that may obstruct their emancipation. For the privileged, too, however, it offers a different kind of conversation, in which they are encouraged to reflect more deeply on how they participate in practices of domination. The latter is as important as the former since it is not always obvious what would be required of us to feel confident that we, and others, act in ways that correspond to the ethical convictions we claim to hold. Making our way of life part of exchanges of knowledge and views provides us with better possibilities to figure this out. It helps us to collectively reflect on and identify experiences and actions that matter for practicing what we preach.

While an ethic of personal accountability encourages reflection on discrepancies between views and actions, it is not sufficient to merely acknowledge that they exist. Consider an organizer of a debate or a roundtable discussion who, full of regret, states that the panel unfortunately only consists of men. Such action, we would suggest, remains an empty gesture—or a “nonperformative,” to use Ahmed's term, a speech act that “works” by allowing someone to not do what they claim to intend (Ahmed, 2006). In contrast to such nonperformatives, the norm of embodied sincerity tracks if and how normative positions are transformed into social actions. Thus, to comply with the norm, it is not enough to merely declare an intention or observe a failure to do so. Instead, the norm requires that participants take responsibility—and hold each other accountable—for actually walking the walk. In the case of the all-male roundtable discussion, embodied deliberation with the organizer and roundtable participants would raise questions such as: why did the organizer not make sure to recruit women? Why did they not reflect more on what it means to create roundtables that are relevant and inclusive to people of different gender identities? What would it mean to practice what they preach in this situation? And if the male participants in the roundtable agree with the norm of gender parity, should they not have made their participation conditional on a mixed panel?

In sum, the ethic of personal accountability means a shift toward holding each participant in a conversation accountable by demanding to know how a person's views resonate with their way of life. It also means a shift toward the aim of personal change through self-reflection on how we can get better at practicing what we preach. In these different ways, the ethic of personal accountability pushes deliberation in an emancipatory direction.

The norm of disembodied objectivity has been so established in public discourse and the literature on public deliberation that it may seem rash to suggest replacing it with a different norm. Are we, perhaps, throwing out the baby with the bathwater by giving up disembodied objectivity for embodied sincerity? Let us consider four specific problems on which the ethic of personal accountability forces us to take a stand.

Our embodied histories always play a crucial part in public deliberation, whether participants recognize this or not. Our aim in this paper has been to argue that rather than seeking ways to reduce their role, we should make the personal a more explicit part of our conversations. But what does deliberation look like when it gives appropriate room not just to our arguments but also to our personal lives?

In this different mode of deliberation, we apply the ethic of personal accountability. This means holding each other accountable to a norm of embodied sincerity: that we not only talk the talk but also walk the walk. This addresses a common problem of public deliberation: No matter how the terms of discourse change, injustices continue to be reproduced through concrete social practices.

The norm of embodied sincerity serves the emancipatory project with which deliberative theory was, at the outset, inseparable (Dryzek, 2000; Hammond, 2019; Khoban, 2019; Rostbøll, 2008). It provides all participants with the possibility to judge the sincerity of other speakers. Do they act according to their stated views? On what experiences and other sources of knowledge do they base their views? The ethic of personal accountability invites us to reflect on our own experiences and how they inform our views, and how we need to change to practice what we say we believe.

We gave four examples of problems that bring the conflict between the two ideals, embodied sincerity and disembodied objectivity, to the fore. Further scholarship might explore the conditions under which these problems can be handled with care or avoided, and in which contexts they may make it harmful to act on an ethics of personal accountability. We have responded to each of these potential objections by showing why they do not in themselves undermine the argument for making things personal. However, the consequences of this alternative norm will depend on the specific conditions under which it is acted upon. Thus, while we argue in support of making things personal as a desirable part of public deliberation, we recognize that the values associated with it will be realized only if practiced responsibly and under conditions of trust that will not be realized overnight or in an institutional vacuum. For us, this means much more work is needed to carefully consider how deliberation can be practiced in the service of social justice.

The idea of embodied sincerity can create discomfort. It means questioning other participants’ sincerity and confronting them about the ways they fail to practice what they preach. It also means questioning biases in how we listen to others and challenging ourselves to engage collectively with our different experiences and the lessons we can learn from them. Thus, even if it seems uncomfortable, it is precisely by bringing views and knowledge claims to bear on concrete actions that deliberation can spark social change. Too often, we allow each other to talk the talk while failing to walk the walk. That is how we reproduce social injustices, how we let each other do violence to others, while we congratulate ourselves and others for knowing all the right words, marching all the right marches, and tweeting all the right tweets.