In a democracy where people hold many conflicting views, how do we each honor our own values while making decisions together? Grappling with that question in Tuesday’s forum address, Harvard professor Danielle Allen encouraged her audience to meet this challenge by becoming “confident pluralists.”
“The result of collective decision-making can never line up perfectly with what any of us contributes, in the first instance, to the decision-making process,” Allen said. “We find ourselves … trying to achieve outcomes that we can broadly live with, knowing that sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose, but in shaping the parameters of the conversation, we are shaping the world that we live in together. That’s the reward of participating in democracy.”
A “confident pluralist,” a term used among legal scholars, must reflect deeply on what matters to him or her, an empowering process that creates a foundation for human flourishing. But in addition to developing confidence in their beliefs, confident pluralists are also committed to others’ right to form their own beliefs.
“When people are free to dig deep and think about what matters to them, you will get many different pictures of the good emerging. When one is confident in that project of empowerment,” Allen said, “one is also welcoming a commitment to pluralism — that can seem counterintuitive, but it means that one wants others also to be on their own journey about understanding what matters to them.”
Allen explained how her family history made her passionate about the importance of confident pluralism for a healthy democracy. Allen comes from a long line of civic-minded ancestors, her grandfather having helped found a chapter of the NAACP and her great-grandparents having fought for women’s suffrage. One year when she was a child, Allen’s Republican father and left-leaning aunt were both running for office, and she witnessed their heated debates at the dinner table.
Allen noticed that despite their starkly differing views, her father and aunt shared a common purpose, the empowerment of individuals, families and communities. She also observed that while they couldn’t disagree more about policy, they never lost respect for each other.
“It was the ideas they were going at, not each other as human beings,” she said. “It was clear that they always had each other’s back, that they never broke the bonds of love. They held sacred the dignity of the human being in front of them.”
In her remaining remarks, Allen outlined five steps for being a confident pluralist.
First, confident pluralists do the hard work of determining what they care about.
“It requires the work of philosophy, it requires theology, it requires literature to dig into the question of what matters to human beings, and why,” she said. “How should I live? How should we live? Those questions need to be regular parts of our lives.”
Second, confident pluralism demands a commitment to negotiation through institutions, rather than through violence and disorder.
Third, confident pluralists embrace compromise.
To distinguish positive compromises from flawed compromises, Allen analyzed two compromises embedded in the language of the Declaration of Independence. She showed how the Declaration’s religious language was inclusive of all the colonists, while the document’s treatment of slavery disregarded the point of view of African people.
“A confident pluralist is somebody who, in the public forum of decision-making, is ready to compromise with others,” Allen said. “But when making those compromises, a confident pluralist wants to make sure that everybody who might be affected by the decision has a voice in the process.”
Fourth, a confident pluralist listens to others and mirrors back their viewpoints, asking if they have understood before engaging in debate.
Relatedly, Allen’s final point was that a confident pluralist, like her father and aunt, always protects human dignity, even in disagreement.
Allen explained that as a professor, she often receives negative, inflammatory and offensive messages, including from strangers. Noticing that these messages were damaging the way she related to the world, Allen determined to face hostility with dignity. She discovered that when she set the example, others changed their attitudes.
“I decided that every time I received a negative message, I would meet it with the most open, welcoming, warm spirit I possibly could. I would not let my own human dignity be held hostage. And then the most surprising thing happened. When I started responding to people that way, nine times out of 10 they turned back into their best selves.”
Allen closed her remarks by imploring her audience to overcome the tendency to lean into toxic discourse and instead to engage with others “always with love and generosity.”
