Procedural Justice in Young’s Inclusive Deliberative Democracy

In her book Inclusion and Democracy, Iris Marion Young offers a defense of a certain conception of deliberative democracy. What makes her conception of deliberative democracy distinctive is the prominent role played in it by the idea of inclusion: according to Young, most conceptions of deliberative democracy are not adequately attentive to the need for political institutions to be set up in such a way as to “encourage the particular perspectives of relatively marginalized or disadvantaged social groups to receive specific expression” (p. 8). Such inclusiveness in political institutions, Young maintains, is a requirement of justice, just as deliberative democracy itself is. Indeed in her view, the most just political institutions are institutions of inclusive deliberative democracy (to which I shall refer as IIDDs). My aim in this paper is to explore a contradiction that arises in Young’s account of the justice of IIDDs and to weigh the relative merits of two ways in which this contradiction can be resolved. Young’s account of the justice of IIDDs presupposes a particular conception of justice that Young briefly sketches. This conception of justice rests on two other values: self-development and self-determination. Explaining the first of these, Young writes the following: