Democrazia deliberativa, invecchiamento e disabilità

The topic of this article is the democratic inclusion of individuals with severe cognitive disabilities and elderly persons experiencing a marked decline in cognitive abilities. We do not assume the thesis that cognitive decline in old age can be conceptually reduced to a condition of cognitive disability. We claim that both situations present certain analogous problems from the standpoint of justice. For this reason, it is useful to address them together in the present discussion. The fundamental problem is that exclusion from democratic processes is harmful in itself, as it relegates the status of excluded individuals to a lower level of citizenship. Moreover, it undermines the safeguards for the protection of their rights and interests. The problem of exclusion is particularly evident in theories that require the fulfilment of demanding intellectual processes during the democratic process, as is the case in deliberative democracy theories. An example is the demanding model of deliberative democracy found in social contract theories, such as that of John Rawls, which serves as the background for the present discussion. We argue that there are no decisive reasons why a theory of democracy based on social contract theories should exclude from democratic decision-making those individuals who do not possess high cognitive abilities. On the contrary, their presence and expressive resources constitute valuable sources of knowledge in the deliberative phase, while fairness requires some form of their participation in the decision-making phase. In this latter phase, their presence may be accompanied by guardians who express their will on their behalf.