Amalia Amaya Navarro - Group Disagreement and Virtuous Deliberation in Law

On 28/04/2022, Prof. Amalia Amaya Navarro will present her paper 'Group Disagreement and Virtuous Deliberation in Law'. The seminar will start at 17:00 (UK time) and take place in the Massey Room, Balliol College.

Abstract

This paper examines group disagreement in law from a virtue perspective. More specifically, it claims that that the possession and exercise of deliberative virtues on the part of members of collegiate legal decision-making bodies helps tackle disagreement in an epistemically valuable way by mitigating a number of deliberative biases that thwart group deliberation. First, I will explain some phenomena that distort group deliberation and the way in which they interfere with groups reaching epistemically valuable agreement. Second, I will give an account of deliberative virtues and show how they can help mitigate these deliberative distortions thereby enabling groups to converge on attitudes that are properly responsive to the reasons available within the group. Last, I will consider some objections that may be raised against the view that deliberative virtues may be helpful for addressing the problems concerning group disagreement, namely, the objection from feasibility, which states that the proposal to address group disagreement through the deployment of virtue is unrealistic and devoid of practical implications; the objection from independence, i.e., the objection that individual virtue may lead to vice, rather than virtue, at group level; and the objection from consciousness, according to which deliberative distortions are unreflective and cannot be corrected through reflective mechanisms, such as virtue-based measures. I will conclude by arguing that even though these objections may be met, virtue remedies to group disagreement face important limits, which point towards interesting connections between the epistemology of group disagreement and political epistemology.