Capable deliberators: towards inclusion of minority minds in discourse practices

ABSTRACT It is widely assumed that severe mental disabilities prevent relevant deliberative capacities from developing or persisting. Accordingly, excluding many people with mental disabilities from discourse practices seems justified. Against this common assumption I wish to show that the general exclusion is not justified and amounts to a form of epistemic injustice, as theorised by Miranda Fricker. The received norm of capable deliberators is connected to a specific model of deliberation. I introduce an alternative model of deliberation, which I dub the joint effort model. According to this model, people with minority minds (as I call them) add valuable cognitive diversity to the process of deliberation, which is a relevant element of epistemic improvement. In this part of the argument I rely on empirically informed theoretical work by Hélène Landemore. I scrutinise the minimal requirements of capable deliberators from the perspective of a joint effort model of deliberation, and I highlight specific beneficial contributions people with minority minds can make to discourse practices. I will argue that people with minority minds can be presumptively deemed capable deliberators and that therefore their general exclusion is unjustified.

The main aim of this paper is to stir up some common assumptions regarding the exclusion of people with mental disabilities from deliberative practices.It is widely assumed that at least severe forms of mental disabilities prevent the relevant deliberative capacities from developing or persisting.Accordingly, generally excluding many people with mental disabilities from discourse practices seems justified.Against this common assumption I wish to show that the exclusion often amounts to forms of injustices, especially in political contexts where deliberation regularly leads to decisions about sanctioned social norms.
If the exclusion is unjustified, it amounts to a political form of injustice, because every person has a right to be part of democratic processes leading to political decisions, which everyone affected is subjected to.It also involves a form of epistemic injustice, as theorised by Miranda Fricker, because people are excluded in their capacity as a knower.In addition to being unjust I will also show that there are relevant epistemic benefits to be expected if we aim at the inclusion of unusual points of view by minority minds.The latter element of my argument is additional in the sense that it supplements the considerations about political and epistemic injustice with an instrumental consideration regarding the usefulness of including minority minds in discourse practices. 1I will argue that the received norm of capable deliberatorswhich is usually left unexplained in the relevant literature -relies on an overly intellectual model of deliberation, which has long been challenged.Nonintellectual modes of contribution to public deliberation have been acknowledged by numerous philosophers, such as Iris Marion Young.
After some preliminaries in section 1, I start my argument in section 2 by introducing a model of deliberative practices, which I dub the joint effort model.According to this model, people with minority minds add valuable cognitive diversity to the process of deliberation, which is a relevant element of epistemic improvement. 2This model combines the two mentioned strands of the argument for inclusion, one based on social equality and one based on epistemic justice.In this part of the paper I rely on empirically informed theoretical work by Hélène Landemore.Section 3 opposes the common intellectual model of deliberation.I aim to undermine some of the normative assumptions of this model and also to show that many people with minority minds would actually need to be included in discourse practices, even on the basis of this model.In section 4, I scrutinise the minimal requirements of capable deliberators from the perspective of a joint effort model of deliberation.I will argue that people with minority minds can be deemed capable deliberators in many contexts of collective deliberation, because the minimal requirement is nothing more than avoiding anti-deliberative conduct.In the final section 5, I discuss some of the expected epistemic contributions that people with minority minds can offer to joint deliberation, (somewhat paradoxically) due to specific types of ignorance.In conclusion, a sweeping exclusion of people with minority minds from discourse practices is unjust and epistemically harmful.

Conceptual preliminaries and context
From a medical perspective we might conceive of people with mental disabilities quite generally as having defective minds.But this would clearly be a biased view within the context of our discussion.We should avoid being primed to think of people with mental disabilities or illness as deficient in any relevant respect.In this paper, I accordingly avoid the labels mental disability and mental illness.I prefer to use the term minority minds or people with minority minds. 3The reason is that I want to de-medicalise the perspective on relevant people for our context -discourse practices and deliberative capacities.
That does not mean that I generally support a social model of disease and disability.It is simply a strategy used for the purposes of this paper to 'normalise' the relevant conditions.People with minority minds differ from majority minds, who are commonly perceived as medically normal people, in their deliberative capacities and styles.However, they are not deliberatively defective simply in virtue of a medical impairment.Whether they are deliberatively incapacitated depends on the norm of a capable deliberator within a model of deliberation, not directly on medical facts.In other words, we start from a presumption of deliberative capacity of every person.
There might of course be reasons to exclude certain groups from specific contexts of deliberation, for instance, there might be convincing reasons to exclude children from political deliberation.However, that cannot be done merely on grounds of unrelated features, especially age.Age or medical impairment can only be a marker of deliberative incapacity, not itself constitute sufficient evidence.
I also understand the term discourse practice very broadly.I will mainly focus on political deliberation, which regularly involves decisions that lead to sanctioned norms.These contexts will be particularly pertinent to the issue of social equality and the potential political injustice that can come with the exclusion of people with minority minds from deliberation.However, I will occasionally use examples from non-political contexts as well.Discourse practices, for instance, in relation to medical contexts, might not lead to political injustice, but they can involve forms of epistemic injustice.Because of my broad interpretation of discourse practices, the relevant norms regarding the exclusion of people with minority minds would need to be specified for different contexts.For the purposes of this paper, however, I will merely put forward the more general claim that in many discourse practices there is actually a higher level of exclusion than can be justified.
As I will explain later in more detail, participation in public deliberation is not restricted to written and verbal statements or to particular institutional settings.Many types of expression can be an element of a collective deliberation, depending on the circumstances. 4Consider, for instance, an example described by Stacy Clifford in one of the very few academic contributions to the debate on deliberative democracy and disability 5 : Sue Swenson, a disability rights activist, and her son, Charlie, who had several disabilities, attended a meeting of the UN during the drafting period of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.Charlie's mere bodily presence, including non-verbal grunts, communicated his particular perspective to other participants.'Sue was convinced by the UN experience that Charlie's presence was in fact necessary.Alone, Sue could convey neither the extent of Charlie's disability nor the interdependency of their needs.By his body, grunts and surrounded by his support team, Charlie expressed a wide array of needs that the delegation had formally neglected' (Clifford, 2012, p. 221).
This example already challenges the common assumption that people with minority minds can justifiably be excluded from political discourse practices (see also, Warren, 2015, pp. 173ff.).Admittedly, whether they are capable deliberators is a different matter that requires more argument than emphasising the occasional positive effects of their presence.I will return to this topic later in the paper.
In reality, many people with minority minds are not participants of institutionalised discourse practices, especially as regards political matters.They are rarely members of parliament (though specific types of minority minds are commonly represented, for instance, people with bipolar disorders); they are usually not themselves representatives of interest groups; and they are, most disturbingly, in many countries not even enfranchised.
The lack of active voting rights for some people with minority minds is particularly disturbing, because it implies that many citizens are prevented from deciding on their political representation.In Germany for example, as well as many other European countries, it is still a common practice to link enfranchisement to legal capacity.Citizens who are under guardianship to manage all their affairs and hence not fully legally autonomous automatically lose their basic electoral rights (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014).Yet even if one holds fairly uninformed views about the cognitive impact of mental medical impairments and accordingly underestimates relevant people's abilities, the exclusion of citizens from a basic democratic right seems very hard to justify. 6It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the disenfranchisement of many people with minority minds has recently raised some concern (Deutsche Welle [DW], 2018), especially as it seems to be in violation of the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 7 Many people will find the practice of disenfranchisement of a large group of people with minority minds acceptable, because they assume that mental medical impairments undermine the relevant capabilities required for participating in discourse practices and political elections.In other words, people may assume that there are incapable deliberators and that people with (severe) mental disabilities belong to this group.As mentioned, I want to challenge the latter assumption by challenging the received norm of capable deliberators.This norm is also put forward in some philosophical models of deliberation; hence I will challenge the relevant assumptions in political philosophy and ethics. 8

The joint effort model of deliberation
The main change in perspective when overcoming an overly intellectual model of deliberation is to give up (what can be called) the combative metaphor of applying individual intellectual force -the better argumenton others.This is not how deliberation has to work, especially as regards political issues.Instead, deliberation is a genuinely joint effort; hence we need to collectivise the model of deliberation.To be sure, the joint effort model is also competitive in a particular sense.After all, different ideas compete for endorsement and majorities in society.But it is not individual deliberators that compete; accordingly, not all deliberators need to intellectually fully grasp arguments within the deliberative process.
Collectivist theories of deliberation are not unheard of in political theory.For instance, there are models that account for distributed deliberation in larger systems (Mansbridge et al., 2012;Parkinson, 2012).Individual deliberators might only make a fractional contribution within a larger system that leads to certain outcomes.Surely within the systems model there is no sophisticated deliberative skill required, so the norm of a capable deliberator is less demanding than in an intellectual model, which we will discuss in the next section.Accordingly, the exclusion of people with minority minds raises concerns of justice from the perspective of a joint effort model of deliberation.
However, one problem with this systems version of a collective model is that there is apparently no real joint effort involved, but mainly an aggregation of beliefs.As David Owen and Graham Smith put it, there is no deliberation in a 'we, together' mode within a systems model, but more a 'we, all' mode (Owen & Smith, 2015, p. 219).One might even want to query whether distributed deliberation is deliberation in the full sense of the word.After all, it is mainly concerned with the accumulation of individual perspectives.Here, the well-known contrast between 'counters' and 'talkers' in models of democratic decision-making is pertinent. 9The point I want to make is not, however, that counting votes or collating fractional contributions into a deliberative system has no significant function in deliberation at all, but only that it is not sufficient for joint deliberation.
There is an alternative collectivised model of deliberation, which I will accordingly call joint effort model.This model is not based on distributed but united deliberation.Still, in contrast to the traditional model, it is here acknowledged that deliberation does not aim at identifying the best individual argument or the most competent deliberator.It is, rather, about enhancing collective epistemic competence.Collective epistemic competence is not simply the sum of individual competence, but importantly it can also be a function of the 'cognitive diversity of the group' (Landemore, 2013, p. 90).
We may add that such epistemic enhancement is not merely due to the cognitive diversity, but also to other modes of diversity as well, especially evaluative diversity (Vermeule, 2012, p. 348).
Consequently, I wish to argue that in the joint effort model of deliberation people with minority minds can be fully participating deliberators, because not all individual deliberators need to have roughly the same deliberative skills, as in the competitive intellectual model.It is not required to participate in an intellectually demanding style.Indeed, 'according to the developed strand of deliberative democracy virtually everybody is considered being fit for deliberation' (Raisio et al., 2014, p. 81).Intelligence, for instance, within the model suggested here, can be diachronically and synchronically distributed (Landemore, 2012, p. 254).Contributions of minority minds add to the cognitive diversity of the group and thereby potentially enhance the epistemic quality of deliberation.It is important not to reduce the participation of people with minority minds to a kind of exotic 'disabled speech' contribution (Clifford, 2012) or to a special expertise, of what it's like to be disabled (Dohmen, 2016, pp. 685f.), but to appreciate a genuine participation of people with minority minds in a joint effort of deliberation.
As mentioned, the joint effort model is less concerned with individual deliberative capacities, but rather with the combined deliberative capacity of a group of people (Landemore, 2012, p. 256; see also, Goodin & Lau, 2011).Just as a sports team might have certain qualities that are not reduceable to individual skills of players, a group can have epistemic capacities that are not due to individual deliberative skills.In explaining a related idea, David Estlund uses the well-known story of blind people exploring an elephant.Individually they only have access to body parts and hence will never individually figure out what type of animal they study (Estlund, 2008, pp. 233f.).But once they communicate about their perspective, they make epistemic progress.This, again, speaks against mere aggregative models of deliberation, but it does not undermine the suggested relaxation of the norm of required individual deliberative skills.
Hélène Landemore has developed a related model, which she calls 'democratic reason'.As briefly mentioned before, she stresses that cognitive diversity is actually an important asset of deliberative groups.Her thinking is empirically informed, especially by research that points out epistemically compromising mechanisms due to perspectival uniformity.
I conjecture that all things being equal otherwise, deliberation among moreinclusive groups is likely to produce better results than deliberation among lessinclusive groups, even if those less-inclusive groups include smarter people.In other words, it is epistemically better to have a larger group of average but cognitively diverse people than a smaller group of very smart but homogeneously thinking individuals (Landemore, 2013, p. 90).
An important mechanism of Landemore's model is -what can be called -the 'economisation' of individual levels of epistemic competence.The more inclusive deliberation is, the better the results.This is, for instance, because the pool of ideas and information is greater, and because it is more likely to weed out bad arguments (Landemore, 2012, pp. 255ff.).Landemore uses the illustration of a jury deliberation, as depicted in the famous movie Twelve Angry Men, where joint deliberation changes the outcome dramatically from a simple aggregation of individual viewpoints.
Admittedly, Landemore is concerned with specific types of deliberation, namely problem solving, which usually allows for an epistemic ideal state to be potentially achieved, for instance, to establish the innocence or guilt of a defendant.In other words, the empirical findings regarding the value of cognitive diversity apply to situations where there exists a standard of correctness.This is not necessarily the case with many normative issues.Still, Landemore insists that 'the logic of deliberation in such settings should translate to deliberation among representatives and to complex questions in which the standard of correctness is much harder to make sense of' (Landemore, 2013, p. 98; see also, Goodin & Spiekermann, 2018, p. 11f.;Knight et al., 2016, p. 146). 10She also stresses that the epistemic benefits of cognitive diversity rely on social circumstances that enable diversity (Landemore, 2012, p. 284).This aspect makes clear that there are political preconditions of inclusion that need to be guaranteed to allow the idea of democratic reason to work.
Within the context of my paper Landemore's theory is of obvious significance.It helps us to establish the epistemic value of mental diversity as opposed to individual intellectual capacity.It also supports the focus on the joint nature of deliberation.To be sure, Landemore does not say much about the threshold of justified inclusion in discourse practices.Deliberative collectives should be more cognitively diverse and individual deliberators do not need to be awfully smart, but what are the minimal capacities to be required?Can her ideas really be used to argue for the inclusion of most people with minority minds in normative discourse practices?My conjecture is that it can.
It might be worth stressing that I cannot establish a general fittingness of the joint effort model and the benefits for including minority minds in all contexts of deliberation.Still, since my argument is targeted against the sweeping exclusion of minority minds and in favour of a presumption of deliberative capacity, it is sufficient to establish the epistemic benefits in some contexts.I have mentioned one of these earlier in the paper, the UN convention where Charlie Swenson participated.It seems that public hearings are always fitting contexts to reap the benefits of the joint model of deliberation.
I believe the fact that deliberation can be conceived as a joint effort undermines the usual distinction between contribution and participation in deliberation.Participation is secured via membership in a deliberative collective.In addition, acknowledgement of non-intellectual elements of deliberation allows a wide array of participation of people with minority minds.For instance, when people with dementia nonverbally express discomfort with a particular practice in a nursing home and help to adjust to the most comfortable technique this can be deemed a form of engagement in a joint effort to deliberate about the best practice of caring.This example indicates that within a joint effort model of deliberation contexts of deliberation involve all spheres of society, including what is usually called the private sphere.Deliberation is not restricted to institutionalised public debates.
André Bächtiger and his co-authors have speculated about a so-called type II mode of deliberation, with type I being the ideal model of reason-giving, exemplified in Jürgen Habermas's theory.This account of deliberation is also helpful to mention in support of the model of joint deliberation.The authors focus on the means of deliberation and mention alternative forms, such as story-telling and rhetoric.Alternative forms of communication, Bächtiger et al. claim, might qualify as 'good enough' deliberation (Bächtiger et al., 2010, p. 35).But they also helpfully point out a problem with type II deliberation: If we accept just any contribution as a deliberative input, we might end up with a model that is too permissive; deliberation would not be different from any other interpersonal exchange.The authors are especially concerned about coercive and manipulative interactions, which might undermine the spirit of deliberation, so to speak (see also, Dryzek, 2002).In a later section I will accordingly focus on the minimal requirements of participation in deliberative practices.These will lead us to a minimal account of capable deliberators.
Bächtiger and his co-authors allude to ways of integrating type I deliberation with type II deliberation.For instance, they speculate about different sequences of deliberation (Bächtiger et al., 2010, pp. 55f.).Alternative forms of communication could then mainly be seen as 'authentic' contributions, whereas rational argumentation takes place at a later stage.I am wary of such a suggestion, since in our context of discussion it might lead to the problem of token contributions by people with minority minds without their full participation in deliberation.In fairness, the authors leave open the main question regarding the boundaries of deliberation in their concluding section: '[T]he crucial question remains: how much rational discourse and how much procedural legitimacy should deliberative democracy require?Or, conversely, how much and in what ways should alternative forms of communication be incorporated into the theory?' (Bächtiger et al., 2010, p. 59) This quote expresses the fact that the most successful and most inclusive account of deliberation is still up for grabs.My main concern is not alternative means of deliberation as such but an alternative model of deliberation, including an alternative norm of individual deliberative capacity.In this section I have aimed at laying the foundation of a more inclusive idea of capable deliberators, based on a joint effort model of deliberation.On account of this model, the general exclusion of minority minds is epistemically disadvantageous.

People with minority minds: intellectually incapable deliberators?
When people refer to discourse practices, they might think of some kind of interactive, communicative process, similar to parliamentary debates.According to this picture, in a deliberative process, arguments are brought forward, exchanged and assessed; particular positions or points of view are developed and defended.However, specifically political deliberation is not only concerned with exchange of arguments; it involves other means of engagement as well.Someone might be won over, for instance, by a certain mood that is transferred in a speech, or by stories about particular people and their experiences.People may also make political statements in the form of rallies, flashmobs or graffiti (Dryzek, 2002, pp. 1, 167).It has accordingly been argued by numerous political philosophers that instruments of deliberative practices are not restricted to language use.
If we accept a wide range of practices as legitimate means of deliberative contributions within a joint political justificatory discourse, we can start relaxing the required capacities of deliberators.One important feature of some models of justification, which I have called intellectual, is that they usually require a certain level of endorsement by all participants individually.On the one hand this implies that unjustified exclusion from deliberation about normative social issues is indeed an injustice, because everyone affected who can deny consent ought to be included.On the other hand, such exclusion might actually regularly be justified, after all, because every single person is supposed to be able to think the matter through and to understand the arguments weighed in favour or against a specific normative idea.This is obviously quite demanding, despite the fact that relevant intellectual models of deliberation are minimalist in the sense of establishing minimal requirements of reasoning capacity. 11 A seminal statement of the idea in relation to deliberative capacities can be found in an influential paper by Joshua Cohen: 'The members [of a democratic association] recognize one another as having deliberative capacities, i.e. the capacities required for entering into a public exchange of reasons and for acting on the result of such public reasoning' (Cohen, 1997, p. 346).Such a comparatively demanding idea of deliberators is still widespread in ethics and political philosophy. 12Its prevalence perhaps has to do with the fact that most academics who discuss models of justification, deliberation and discourse practices tend to be philosophers.Philosophers of course are educated in the belief that justification is about setting out convincing arguments that establish one point of view to be right about a certain issue.This is a very competitive scenario, where individual great minds try to knock down opposing arguments (Jaggar & Tobin, 2013, p. 399).It looks like deliberation, at least in some versions of the intellectual model, is conceived as a practice that only fairly intellectual people can fathom.
Despite what has been said in this section regarding the value of nonintellectual contributions to deliberation, it might therefore still appear adequate to presume a demanding ideal of capable deliberators, at least as regards the contexts of justification of social norms.After all, justification apparently requires full understanding of the relevant issues by the participants; everyone should be able to consent to a suggested policy after deliberation.Merely making a contribution to political deliberation, as in the mentioned example of Charlie Swenson, therefore does not seem to be sufficient for fully participating in relevant processes. 13We will return to the norm of capable deliberators, but first we should scrutinise whether people with minority minds meet the commonly assumed norm just described.
People with minority minds are usually denied the capacities of contributing to, or participating in, deliberative processes.But the first point to note is that most people, including political philosophers, often know fairly little about real people with minority minds.The very term mental disability, which is obviously more common than the alternative notion of minority minds, seems to imply a clear negative answer to our question whether people with minority minds are capable to deliberate, in the sense described so far.After all, most people would assume that mental disability by definition means that affected people are defective in thinking, quite generally.Indeed, it is still rather common to stereotypically deem people with mental disabilities as 'eternal children' (cf., Kalman et al., 2016) or as inherently irrational (cf., Arneil, 2009).Yet surely this is wrong.
There are two mistakes involved here.One is an underestimation of the real capacities of people with minority minds; the other is a lack of appreciation of disabling structures in most societies.A number of mental medical impairments affect people only sporadically, not permanently.A good example in this respect is schizophrenia.In an early paper, Habermas mentioned pathological speech disturbances 'among psychotics' as forms of 'systematically distorted communication' (Habermas, 1970, p. 205).However, the commonly cited symptoms of delusion or hallucination are only present in episodes of psychosis.Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder, which often allows, with adequate social and medical support, a life that most people would call normal.Most people who suffer from schizophrenia are clearly capable deliberators, and many famous politicians have been affected by this illness.They are not 'psychotics' -a notion that implies the medical disorder to be a permanent mental trait of people.Other mental medical impairments are very specific in their impact on people's capacities.For instance, some forms of autism spectrum disorder affect social capacities, such as mindreading and understanding others.But there is no such thing as a general incapacity involved in mental medical impairments.Accordingly, we should not generally put in doubt the deliberative capacities of people with minority minds on the basis of medical diagnoses, but rather presume their deliberative capacity, scrutinise the underlying norm and examine the actual capacities of real people in relation to this norm.
The second mistake is to take a purely medical perspective on mental disabilities and to focus merely on the impairments without thinking of the possible compensation of mental deficits (cf., Nussbaum, 2010, p. 88f;Stubblefield, 2013).The latter point is, of course, one of the main complaints put forward by the so-called social model of disability against a medical model.We do not need to get involved in this debate. 14It suffices to point out that many medical impairments do not necessarily result in disability of the affected person -though it might lead to environmentally caused disablement.This is a long-established fact with physical impairments, such as paraplegia or blindness.Accordingly, we have ramps at buildings and publications in braille and many other forms of social adaption.But the notion of making, say, websites and documents barrier-free in terms of using easily comprehensible language or designing public spaces to accommodate specific anxieties, is only starting to gain momentum.Another pertinent example of the common underestimation of the deliberative potential of people with mental disabilities is the perception of people with Down's Syndrome as incapable of basic communicative skills, especially reading and writing.The fact that there are now numerous published authors with Down's Syndrome defies this common misperception. 15 By conceptualising deliberation and its aim of justification as epistemic practices that enhance theoretical and practical knowledge, we can recognise the exclusion of people with minority minds as potential cases of epistemic injustice.Miranda Fricker, who has done ground-breaking philosophical work on the notion of epistemic injustice, said that it involves to be 'wronged in one's capacity as a knower' (Fricker, 2007, p. 44).Fricker's model refers to wrongs performed by people; wrongs that are further described as stemming from epistemic vices, mainly to do with what she calls 'identity prejudice' (Fricker, 2007; see also, Kalman et al., 2016).In terms of what has been said so far in this section, such wrongs are relevant when discussing the common misperception of the real capacities and potentials of people with minority minds.
Some scholars, who have used Fricker's model of epistemic injustice to lament the exclusion of people with disabilities from social practices, point out specific contributions the latter can make to the advancement of knowledge, for instance, when identifying the best possible medical treatment.After all, people affected by medical conditions usually know best what helps them to feel better.Since curing a medical condition is simply not possible in many cases of disability, medical improvement is often not the best therapeutic option.Accordingly, there seems to be a sort of privileged perspective of people with minority minds that is excluded if their voices are not heard (Scrutton, 2017).We might want to call such aspects expertise by acquaintance.
In addition, some philosophers, for instance, Havi Carel and Ian Kidd, argue that there is a lived experience of disability, or, in other words, something what it's like to be disabled, which people with minority bodies or minds can contribute to deliberation (Kidd & Carel, 2017).Although I do not want to disagree with this point of view, I believe it is too limited in grasping the main element of epistemic injustice involved.According to the argument by other philosophers just explained, people with minority minds mainly make contributions to epistemic advancement as informers, via knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge what it's like, not as participants in deliberation. 16Their role is reduced to putting forward a disabled point of view.In other words, this critique does not object to the common intellectual norm of capable deliberators. 17 In order to argue against such a norm on account of epistemic injustice, we need to expand Fricker's virtue-based model with a structural component, which allows us to see engrained norms as causes of epistemic injustice. 18 Several philosophers have stressed that Fricker's model of epistemic injustice is too limited: There exist not only epistemic vices, but there are also structural problems, which lead to forms of epistemic injustice.In fairness, Fricker does consider structural identity prejudices (Fricker, 2007, ch. 6), but her account still seems to be too much connected to wrongs instead of structural mechanisms, which as such do not involve wrongdoing of agents.Be that as it may, for the purpose of adding a structural element to the idea of epistemic injustice we can rely on other philosophers, for instance, Iris Marion Young and Elizabeth Anderson, who have paved the way accordingly (Anderson, 2012;Young, 2000). 19I believe their ideas can be aligned with Fricker's impetus (Dotson, 2012;Li, 2016).
It is helpful to diagnose the general exclusion of people with minority minds from joint discourse practices as forms of epistemic injustice, because it makes clear that this exclusion is not only a moral rights violation but is also undermining epistemic advancement.As will later be seen in more detail, epistemic exclusion is not simply bad for people with minority minds -they suffer an epistemic injustice -but also for deliberative societies, because knowledge is excluded from discourse practices.Valuable contributions -not just in the sense of a minority perspective -are left out of discourse.This mainly harms society, because epistemic advancement is stunted.
The general exclusion of minority minds from joint discourse practices has further negative moral consequences.The particular wrong, over and above epistemic injustice, can be described in the traditional language of political equality: The scope of justification of social norms is unduly restricted, because a group of people is arbitrarily excluded from a process of normative authorisation.To be unjustly excluded from deliberation in a justificatory discourse adds a further element of harm for people with minority minds, which is not fully captured by the rights violation of epistemic exclusion as such.Wrongful exclusion from justification implies that people with minority minds are coercively subjected to sanctioned norms.These restrictions are coercive for them because they have not been involved in the process of normative justification. 20 Surely my argument so far hinges on how the norm of a capable deliberator is conceived.To those who believe in an intellectual model of deliberation many, if not all, people with minority minds are simply not fit for purpose, so to speak.Hence these defenders of the intellectual model would disagree with my diagnosis of epistemic injustice and the resulting harm of being subjected to coercion.Indeed, so far my argument has not established more than the need for caution when excluding people with minority minds from discourse practices on account of deliberative incapacity.Still, the exclusion of people with minority minds must not simply be assumed without stating more explicitly the alleged norm of a capable deliberator.It is not enough to assume generic capacities such as rationality, reasonability, literacy or a 'sound mind'.I argue that many people with minority minds actually or at least potentially -with a little help from society -fulfil these requirements.Exactly what these requirements are will be discussed in the following section.
My argument has led to a presumption of deliberative capacity for all people, including people with minority minds.I have not rejected the intellectual model of capable deliberators as such, but rather presented an alternative model of deliberation.Perhaps a version of the intellectual model of capable deliberators can, after all, be combined with a joint effort model of deliberation.Indeed, as will be seen, some modes and contexts of deliberation might call for capacities that are specified more in line with the intellectualist account.However, if my argument so far has been successful, I have established that a sweeping exclusion of minority minds from political deliberation is wrong and indeed involves political and epistemic injustice.In the previous section 2 I have additionally argued that minority minds can epistemically benefit deliberation, which makes their exclusion instrumentally bad.

What are relevant deliberative capacities?
Traditional understanding of deliberative capacities, especially as regards justificatory discourse, has been intellectually demanding.John Rawls, for instance, talks about two moral powers, the capacity to form and revise a theory of the good and a sense of justice.Others have put forward other criteria of capable deliberators, such as full age, 'sound mind' and literacy (cf.Elster, 2013, p. 147).As explained, more recent contributions to the theory of deliberative democracy have emphasised the value and eligibility of nonintellectual contributions to public deliberation.However, there is some ambiguity as to whether practices such as telling stories should count as fullfledged forms of deliberation or merely as input to proper deliberation.In a previous section, I have aimed to go a step further in propagating a different model of deliberation, which regularly allows minority minds full participation in relevant discourse practices -not just provision of non-intellectual input that others intellectually deliberate about.I will now focus at identifying the minimal deliberative capacities that are implied in such an alternative model.
I mainly refer to deliberative capacities, but also mention what can be called deliberative performance.Some people may have the required capacities but do not perform them -again, this might happen because of another incapacity or as a matter of choice.A person might be unable to control antideliberative urges, another person might instead not want to engage their deliberative capacities.Although the difference is significant in respect to more permanent exclusion from discourse practices, as opposed to temporary bans, I ignore the distinction for the purposes of this paper.After all, I discuss the capacities of people with minority minds, who have usually been permanently excluded from deliberation, on ground of incapacity, not poor performance.
I suggest the way forward is to formulate the relevant requirements in a negative, that is, a minimalist, fashion.This move is comparable to identifying health as absence of disease instead of providing a positive list of criteria.If we cannot settle on the criteria of health and we want to avoid proposing an unattainable ideal, then we can still aim at an agreement about disease, i.e. the absence of health.The same idea is here suggested to settle for minimal deliberative capacities.
Since the model I have defended interprets deliberation as a joint practice, it actually seems unlikely to identify any specific individual capacities that are necessary for deliberators to have in general, that is, in every context of deliberation.In some contexts, the quality of deliberation is partly determined by the level of diversity within the group.All this does not seem to restrict the required capacities of capable deliberators in any way.Surely, there may be specific contexts of deliberation that require a more restrictive conception of minimal deliberative capacities, for instance, a debate on the tax rate within a country.But the idea of deliberation as such would only allow for a very inclusive, minimal standard of deliberative capacity.
I nevertheless believe there is one important requirement for any deliberator.In fact, it is a feature that has been mentioned by numerous theorists who worry about too broad an account of deliberation.They point out that deliberation requires mutual respect, a 'deliberative stance' (Owen & Smith, 2015, pp. 228ff.)or 'deliberative answerability' (Westlund, 2009).For instance, hate speech should not be accepted as a legitimate form of deliberation.Accordingly, people who do not want to or cannot take a deliberative stance seem to be justifiably excluded from discourse practices.I regard a minimal deliberative stance a necessary condition of being a capable deliberator in a joint effort model.Whether it is sufficient as well depends on the context of deliberative practice.I have argued before that there are some contexts where the minimal norm of a capable deliberator is also sufficient, for instance, a public hearing or a political rally.
To demand from deliberators that they take a deliberative stance, however, seems to push us back to a fairly demanding model, because it apparently requires an understanding of the general purpose of deliberation, as well as an acknowledgement of the moral worth of other people's perspectives, perhaps even an acknowledgement what shared reasons are.What would that mean, for instance, for people with severe forms of autism spectrum disorder, who have problems with basic social capacities, such as taking the perspective of someone else?
No deliberator should act in an anti-deliberative way (or be incapable of avoiding such performance) -this requirement bans deliberative wrongs, such as hate speech, but allows lack of positive respect.In other words, only people who do not or cannot avoid disrespectful behaviour to others are excluded from the group of deliberators; not those who struggle to show full respect. 21The reason for (at least temporary) exclusion, according to this account, is not the lack of specific capacities per se, but the fact that it might result in unacceptable disturbances of the joint effort of deliberation.Hence people with majority minds who consistently act in an anti-deliberative waywho are, for instance, unabashedly racist, sexist, or the like -can be justifiably excluded, as well as people with minority minds who cannot help but act in an anti-deliberative way.As briefly mentioned earlier, the exact nature of discourse engagements that can justifiably be excluded will depend on the context of deliberation.For instance, a town meeting differs from deliberation in a pub, at a political rally or in parliament.Whether there are real people with minority minds who are generally incapable of avoiding an anti-deliberative stance is mainly an empirical question.
To be minimally respectful is of course a highly abstract and contested capacity.I cannot put forward a universally accepted definition of the term.As regards different groups of people with minority minds it will therefore be left undecided who should be generally excluded from discourse practices.There are, for instance, certain personality disorders which make it very hard for afflicted people to appreciate the basic normative significance of other people and their evaluative stance.Perhaps people with psychopathic or narcissistic personality disorder are hence incapable deliberators.But be that as it may, from what has been said in this paper it should be sufficient to establish the case for seeing most, if not all, people with minority minds as capable deliberators.
I have only discussed the general minimal requirements of participation in any discourse practice.Occasionally I have mentioned that contexts might differ and might require more intellectually demanding capacities or specific expert knowledge.Different contexts of discourse practices would have to be distinguished and relevant deliberative norms to be justified.This is a task I cannot pursue in this paper.To make my point, I only need to undermine the unspecified exclusion of people with minority minds.

What people with minority minds can contribute to joint discourse practices
I have argued that people with minority minds can add to the epistemic quality of discourse practices by adding to the cognitive diversity of the group of deliberators.So far, we have not really discussed this claim in any detail.There might also be lingering doubts whether at least one type of discourse practice under consideration, which lead to normative political decisions, really allows for the argument from cognitive diversity to work.After all, if there is a best possible solution, perhaps short of truth, but still epistemically optimal, then perhaps asking experts might still be best way forward.
Indeed, in expert deliberation bias towards cognitive excellence and level of education might be adequate (Anderson, 2012, p. 169).However, the idea of justification, especially when understood as a public form of justification, adds something to the usual epistemic mechanisms of advancing expert knowledge.The aim of deliberation in this context is not the best possible explanation of a problem, say, of a high unemployment rate, or the best possible solution of practical problems, for instance, a technical fix.
Justification rather aims at widespread endorsement of a normative idea by people.This provides a moral reason as to why such discourse practices are supposed to be as inclusive as possible.
In addition, there are epistemic reasons for maximally inclusive deliberation in political discourse practices.What are the specific contributions to epistemic advancement that people with minority minds can make?I will suggest that their contributions can be based, perhaps paradoxically, on specific types of ignorance.These types of ignorance are evidenced in a disregard for common norms. 22Again, it might be worth stressing that I do not claim that these contributions are always forthcoming or beneficial in all contexts of deliberation.But if there are occasional epistemic benefits to be gained, then a sweeping exclusion is epistemically bad and potentially epistemically unjust.When it comes to contexts of justification, exclusion of minority minds will also be politically unjust.
The first type of ignorance concerns norms of normality.These norms are, for instance, prevalent in medicine, but also in other areas.We commonly expect people to have made particular experiences; or to appear in a certain way.People with minority minds are often ignorant in this respect.If they have specific anxieties, they might react to certain circumstances in an unexpected way; if they have problems memorising, they might be unable to navigate their environment.In a word, people with minority minds might lack common experiences, or indeed might have made very special kind of experiences.This often results in an uncommon standpoint.Within a framework of deliberation, uncommon standpoints are important to be included to avoid decisions which are simply based on norms of normal expectations.
The second type of ignorance relates to social norms.We expect people to behave or to react in certain ways, say to be cautious when talking to strangers or to keep a distance to other people.However, people with minority minds, for instance, people with Down's Syndrome, regularly defy such norms and etiquettes.In doing that, they implicitly put in doubt the justification of such norms.It is not a good reason to follow social norms only because most people follow it or because something is conventionally done.Accordingly, 'disturbing' behaviour can lead an interrogation of the reasons for social norms.It does not seem to me that such potentially disrespectful behaviour, in this non-moral sense of the word, amounts to what I have earlier called anti-deliberative conduct.But it is true, of course, that ignorance of social norms might potentially go along with morally disrespectful and hence anti-deliberative conduct.In such a case, the epistemic value of participation of people with minority minds in joint deliberation would vanish.
The third type of ignorance has to do with epistemic norms.We commonly draw conclusions in a particular way; we believe in mechanisms of reasonable argumentation; and we draw up rules of logic.Some people with minority minds think differently.They might see regularities where others see random patterns; they might draw conclusions on the basis of apparently arbitrary data; or they might be steered in their judgment by allegedly irrelevant emotions.However, by ignoring epistemic norms or by thinking in an unusual fashion, people with minority minds regularly undermine common patterns of epistemic failures, such as biases and groupthink.In consequence, methods and mechanisms of deliberation themselves are likely to be scrutinised more thoroughly, if people with minority minds are included.
This list is open for additions.Yet, it should provide sufficient grounds for my claim that minority minds can add to the cognitive diversity of a deliberative collective and thereby enhance the quality of deliberation. 23 There is hence an instrumental epistemic reason, in addition to the already discussed reasons of justice, to include people with minority minds in discourse practices.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have argued that people with minority minds should be presumptively conceived of as capable deliberators.To generally exclude them from discourse practices amounts to a form of epistemic injustice and often to political injustice.It also instrumentally harms society, because valuable perspectives are ignored.Instead of endorsing a demanding intellectual model of deliberation we should consider a joint effort model, which puts a premium on diversity.Whether people who are incapable of taking even the minimal stance of avoiding anti-deliberative participation really exist is mainly an empirical question.
The theory I have developed in this paper would lead to the need of considerable institutional reforms, if put in practice.For instance, provision of information in discourse practices would need to be adapted to the specific requirements of minority minds.Facilitated representation and alternative modes of communication would become more common.Perhaps the most important reform would be the introduction of a presumption of deliberative capacity itself.Exclusion of any person with minority minds would have to be justified on account of the specified requirements of the relevant discourse practice and sufficient proof would have to be provided that any lack of sufficient performance is not due to structural disadvantages.Obviously, I do not believe that these reforms will happen within the near future.But we have witnessed similar improvements, especially as regards the legal and agential status of people with minority minds in modern psychiatry.So perhaps the time is ripe to put political theory to practice as well?Notes 1.The overall structure of my argument -pointing out both injustices and an instrumental harm to society caused by exclusion of a group of people -is similar to John Stuart Mill's argument in The Subjection of Women.2. The relevant part of my paper shares the aim of feminist standpoint theory, which highlights the epistemic advantages of groups who are socially disadvantaged by structures of systemic inequality.A seminal overview is provided by Alison Wylie (2012;see also, Knight, 2015).3. I borrow the phrase from Elizabeth Barnes who introduced the term minority bodies in relation to physical disability (Barnes, 2016).4. I appreciate there are important attempts in the literature to clarify the very notion of deliberation (Bächtiger & Parkinson, 2019, pp. 19ff.).However, my argument does not rely on a claim that all contributions to collective discourse practices are themselves instances of deliberation.Bächtiger and Parkinson similarly allow for 'deliberative acts' (Bächtiger & Parkinson, 2019, p. 20) that are not themselves acts of deliberation.The latter necessarily involve reasongiving and listening, according to these authors. 5.The recently published Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (Bächtiger et al., 2018) does not mention disability.6. See also the important debate on voting rights of children in relation to the enfranchisement of people with cognitive disability (López-Guerra, 2012; Mráz, 2020).7.In February 2019, the German Federal Constitutional Court found the current German electoral law to be unconstitutional (DW: Deutsche Welle, 2019).8.A similar, albeit separate, strategy is to see human and non-human animals on a scale of capacities.This can lead to a normative upgrading of animals instead of downgrading some humans.Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka put forward such an argument with a focus on political representation (Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011).Donaldson and Kymlicka have recently applied their thinking specifically to people with cognitive disabilities (CD).Although my paper does not contribute to the debate on animal rights or citizenship, their ideas are related in that they focus on norms underlying political realities: 'The question is not (or not only) how we can enable people with CD to participate in the practices that society has already deemed "essential functions of citizenship".We must also ask how people with CD can participate in creating norms of citizenship' (Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2016, p. 236.).9.There are important contributions to the theory of deliberative democracy, which undermine the stark contrast between 'counting' votes and 'talking'.
Obviously, these methods can be combined.See, for instance, Goodin's 'first talk, then vote' approach (Goodin, 2008, pp. 108ff.).10.Thomas Christiano and Sameer Bajaj are more critical of the transfer of the argument in favour of cognitive diversity to normative concerns (Christiano & Bajaj, 2016, p. 388).11.Psychologists have pointed out that the common model of deliberation is unrealistic, because real people do not actually deliberate in the way assumed (Rosenberg, 2007;see also, Bächtiger et al., 2010, p. 39, for references).I have some sympathy with such an objection but will not pursue it here.It should be said that the evidence only has critical bite if the model of deliberation is supposed to be a description of reality.Many ideal theorists simply reject the findings as pertinent to their idealised model of deliberation.My strategy is not to show how bad common real people do in comparison to the ideal of an intellectual deliberator, but to undermine the very ideal.In other words, I am not concerned with showing that the received ideal of a capable deliberator is unrealistic, but that it can lead to theoretically and practically harmful results.12.A helpful critique of the common model of a 'super-deliberator' can be found in Bächtiger and Parkinson (2019, p. 76 f). 13.I am not opposed to a related advocate model of deliberation, which some authors defend, especially for people with severe cognitive impairments.Yet, I aim to show that such a model will be overcome in a joint deliberation model, where the role of an 'informant' as opposed to a 'deliberator' vanishes.In contrast, Eva Feder Kittay states: 'Many with significant mental disability cannot ever hope to be independent or capable of participating in rational deliberation.Those who speak do so in a language not recognized -and even demeaned -by those who speak in the language of the public sphere.Without a claim to cognitive parity, even those who can speak are not recognized as authors or agents in their own right; that is, their voice is given no authority.Those who cannot speak must depend on others to speak for them.Perhaps there is no more disabling disablement.To be heard, to be recognized, to have her needs and wants reckoned along with those of others, the mentally disabled individual requires an advocate -a role that has voice at its center' (Kittay, 2019, p. 7, emphasis in original).Afsoun Afsahi (2020) additionally discusses 'enclave deliberations', yet this idea does not sit well with my purpose of establishing a joint model of deliberation, because it seems to potentially lead to -what might be pejoratively called -'discourse ghettos' for people with minority minds.14.It might be helpful to make explicit that I do not challenge the medical model of mental disability.I wish to make the point that the medical perspective as such is not relevant for the context of my paper.15.For instance, the German art magazine Ohrenkuss is exclusively authored by people with Down's Syndrome (https://ohrenkuss.de/projekt).Other authors include Marcus Sikora, who published the children's book Black Day: The Monster Rock Band in 2015.16.For this terminology of an informational versus a participant perspective, see, Hookway (2010).Knight (2015, p. 108) introduces the idea of a 'politics of translation' to redress misrecognition of minority minds.17.The same point applies to those otherwise important accounts that stress the possibility of assisted or dependant agency (Francis & Silvers, 2007).18.My argument is similar to Amandine Catala's account of meta-epistemic injustice in relation to people with minority minds (Catala, 2020).19.For an interesting expansion of Fricker's theory from the perspective of disability studies, see, Tremain (2017).20.Jeremy Waldron (1999, pp. 232ff.), for instance, calls political participation (following William Cobbett) 'the right of rights'.Christina Lafont, in her recent book, puts a strong emphasis on the connection between exclusion from actual deliberative processes and coercion, and she accordingly argues for a genuinely democratic aim of public deliberation.She does not, however discuss the problem of deliberative capacities of people who ought to be included (Lafont, 2019, pp. 161ff.).
21. See, Simplican (2015), for an important acknowledgement of violence by people with disabilities.Simplican develops a model of 'complex dependency' and argues against 'romanticizing care'.22. Cynthia Townley offers an interesting argument defending the epistemic value of ignorance in some circumstances (Townley, 2011).23.In discussions of this paper, I have occasionally been challenged to provide more real-life examples of successful participation of people with minority minds in discourse practices.I am not impressed by this suggestion, because it puts the onus on the wrong line of argument -exclusion, not inclusion, needs to be justified -and because the very dearth of such examples rather supports my argument.