Ethics and the Community of Inquiry gets to the heart of democratic education and how best to achieve it. The book radically reshapes our understanding of education by offering a framework from which to integrate curriculum, teaching and learning and to place deliberative democracy at the centre of education reform. It makes a significant contribution to current debates on educational theory and practice, in particular to pedagogical and professional practice, and ethics education.

In this paper, the authors argue for two main claims: first, that the epistemic results of group deliberation can be superior to those of individual inquiry; and, second, that successful deliberative groups depend on individuals exhibiting deliberative virtues. The development of these group-deliberative virtues, the authors argue, is important not only for epistemic purposes but political purposes, as democracies require the virtuous deliberation of their citizens. Deliberative virtues contribute to the deliberative synergy of the (...) group, not only in terms of improving the quality of the group's present decisions, but also improving the background conditions for continued group deliberation. The authors sketch a preliminary schedule of these group-deliberative virtues modelled on Aristotle's conception of virtue as the mean between two extreme vices. The virtues discussed in this article include deliberative wit, friendliness, empathy, charity, temperance, courage, sincerity, and humility. (shrink)

It is often assumed that democracies can make good use of the epistemic benefi ts of diversity among their citizenry, but difficult to show why this is the case. In a deliberative democracy, epistemically relevant diversity has three aspects: the diversity of opinions, values, and perspectives. Deliberative democrats generally argue for an epistemic form of Rawls' difference principle: that good deliberative practice ought to maximize deliberative inputs, whatever they are, so as to benefi t all deliberators, (...) including the least eff ective. The proper maximandum of such a principle is not the pool of reasons, but rather the availability of perspectives. Th is sort of diversity makes robustness across different perspectives the proper epistemic aim of deliberative processes. Robustness also offers a measure of success for those democratic practices of inquiry based on the deliberation of all citizens. (shrink)

Aristotle claims in the Metaphysics that in order to be resourceful in first philosophic inquiry it is useful to go through perplexity well. In this essay, the author argues that that perplexity plays a parallel role in Aristotle’s account of practical, deliberative inquiry in the Nicomachean Ethics. He does so by offering an interpretation of the relation between Aristotle’s account of akratic ignorance in Nicomachean Ethics 7 and his emphasis on the necessity of going through perplexity when (...) inquiring into akrasia. Along the way, the author tries to shed some additional light on Aristotle’s conception of endoxa, his account of the so-called practical syllogism, and the distinction between ethical virtue simply and “authoritative” virtue. But the intention throughout the essay is to examine the role that perplexity about the phenomena of ethical life plays in Aristotle’s account of the kind of thoughtfulness required for excellence of character. (shrink)

The notion of a community of inquiry has been treated by many of its proponents as being an exemplar of democracy in action. We argue that the assumptions underlying this view present some practical and theoretical difficulties, particularly in relation to distribution of power among the members of a community of inquiry. We identify two presuppositions in relation to distribution of power that require attention in developing an educational model that is committed to deliberative democracy: (1) openness (...) to inquiry and readiness to reason, and (2) mutual respect of students and teachers towards one another. Our contention is that these presuppositions, presented as preconditions necessary to the creation of a community of inquiry, are not without ideological commitments and dependent upon the ability of participants to share power. Using group dynamic theories and the ideas of Hannah Arendt, we argue that behaviours commonly interpreted as obstacles to dialogue or reflective inquiry could provide opportunities for growth. (shrink)

Ideals of democratic participation and rational self-government have long informed modern political theory. As a recent elaboration of these ideals, the concept of deliberative democracy is based on the principle that legitimate democracy issues from the public deliberation of citizens. This remarkably fruitful concept has spawned investigations along a number of lines. Areas of inquiry include the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity (...) for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements.The anthology opens with four key essays--by Jon Elster, Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and John Rawls--that helped establish the current inquiry into deliberative models of democracy. The nine essays that follow represent the latest efforts of leading democratic theorists to tackle various problems of deliberative democracy. All the contributions address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens. Although the authors approach the topic of deliberation from different perspectives, they all aim to provide a theoretical basis for a more robust democratic practice.Contributors : James Bohman, Thomas Christiano, Joshua Cohen, Jon Elster, David Estlund, Gerald F. Gaus, Jürgen Habermas, James Johnson, Jack Knight, Frank I. Michelman, John Rawls, Henry S. Richardson, Iris Marion Young. (shrink)

In this article a dialectical model for practical reasoning within a community, based on the Generic/Actual Argument Model (GAAM) is advanced and its application to deliberative dialogue discussed. The GAAM, offers a dynamic template for structuring knowledge within a domain of discourse that is connected to and regulated by a community. The paper demonstrates how the community accepted generic argument structure acts to normatively influence both admissible reasoning and the progression of dialectical reasoning between participants. It is further demonstrated (...) that these types of deliberation dialogues supported by the GAAM comply with criteria for normative principles for deliberation, specifically, Alexy’s rules for discourse ethics and Hitchcock’s Principles of Rational Mutual Inquiry. The connection of reasoning to the community in a documented and transparent structure assists in providing best justified reasons, principles of deliberation and ethical discourse which are important advantages for reasoning communities. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between public philosophy and deliberative democracy, both at a broad philosophical level and more granularly at the forms of deliberative practice that political theorists and philosophers have embraced and tried to foster. Deliberative democracy theory promises to create a culture of robust public inquiry, scrutiny, and judgment to which the more formal sectors of the public sphere, namely legislatures, must respond. Deliberators consider various points of view, work through costs and consequences, (...) work through what must be given up, and develop a public will on which public policies can rest. Beyond the classroom, some philosophers and social theorists have applied the cognitivist aspect of critical thinking to assess the value of more public deliberations, arguing that the outcomes of deliberation are valuable to the extent that they track the truth. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between popular sovereignty, populism, and deliberative democracy. My main thesis is that populisms resurrect the polemical dimension of popular sovereignty by turning “the people” against the “powerbloc” or the “elite”, and that it is crucial thatthis terrain not be ceded to authoritarian distortions of this basic contestatory grammar. Furthermore, I contend that populist forms of politics are compatible with a procedural and deliberative conception of democracy. Ifirst engage with the assumption that populism and (...) a procedural model of democracy are incompatible, demonstrating that this assumption relies on a conservative bias which tiesthe exercising of communicative power to a “duty of civility”. I then engage with radical-democratic reconstructions of the procedural notion of popular sovereignty which emphasize the unleashing and diversification of peoplehood in communication circuits and the mutual permeability of constitutional politics, parliamentary legislation, and the public sphere. Thirdly, I conclude that populisms are an essential part of communicative power in modern democracies and part of its dialectical structure. (shrink)

Communism may be dead, but a quasi?Marxist critique of liberal democracy survives in the writings of a number of thinkers ? most notably, David Miller and John Dryzek ? who deplore the self?centered apathy of their fellow citizens and defend the radical ideal of deliberative democracy. Inspired mainly by Rousseau and Habermas, this emergent school of thought argues for a more participatory system where the public interest takes precedence over private interest, and where rational argument replaces cynical manipulation. The (...) paper questions whether the deliberative model can cope with the incalculable complexity of modern society. Deliberative democracy, it is contended, rests on doubtful metaphysical assumptions, a blinkered approach to empirical evidence, and a common misapprehension about the nature of political argument. (shrink)

Imagine you are the CEO of a hospital [. . .]. Decisions are constantly being made in your organization about how to spend the organization's money. The amount of money available to spend is never adequate to pay for everything you wish you could spend it on, therefore you must set spending priorities. There are two questions you need to be able to answer . . . How should we set priorities in this organization? How do we know when we (...) are doing it well? When people seek to achieve good public policy, the result will tend to be good public policy. In a collective choice process, public‐spirited individual participants produce good public policy by deliberating—talking with each other, listening to each other's arguments, and being willing to learn and change their minds based on such dialogue. –Steven Kelman (1992: 181) Public policy scholars agree that those persons (or agencies) vested with the authority to establish health care priorities should elicit public input before making rationing decisions. The two most common approaches are (i) consultation and (ii) deliberation. Though deliberation has obvious advantages over consultation, it falters in the face of the objection that ordinary citizens lack the cognitive resources for the extended, rigorous inquiry required of them in undertaking the priority‐setting task. To overcome this objection, I propose that deliberative forums for health care rationing should be designed so that they imitate the natural pattern of human experience. The experience of deliberation should encompass both prolonged periods of less‐demanding cognitive activity, in which citizens passively receive information, and briefer periods of more‐demanding cognitive activity, in which they engage in active problem‐solving. In arguing for this thesis, I rely on two theoretical sources and one practical case study, in the following order: (i) John Dewey's metaphysics of experience, (ii) cognitive science research on schemas and frames, and (iii) the Health Care Council in São Paulo, Brazil. (shrink)

Recent discussion in democratic theory has seen a revival of interest in pragmatism. Drawing on the work of C. S. Peirce, Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse have argued that a form of deliberative democracy is justified as the means for citizens to assure themselves of the truth of their beliefs. In this article, I suggest that the Peircean account of deliberative democracy is conceived too narrowly. It takes its force from seeing citizens as intellectual inquirers, something that I (...) argue is both problematic in itself and relies on a controversial understanding of truth and inquiry. The article goes on to propose reasons for favouring a Deweyan rather than a Peircean account of democracy, one in which deliberation is seen not simply as a matter of arriving at the truth, but as part of a broader view of human flourishing. (shrink)

Recent empirical research results in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences on the “adaptive unconscious” show that conscious control and deliberative awareness are not all-pervasive aspects of our everyday dealings with one another. Moral philosophers and other scientists have used these insights to put our moral agency to the test. The results of these tests are intriguing: apparently we are not always (or ever?) the moral agents we take ourselves to be. This paper argues in favor of a refinement of (...) our common perception of moral agency that can accommodate these results; however, it also argues against the suggestion that this refined concept is the result of a radical new understanding of our everyday moral practices. (shrink)

How does public discussion contribute to the reasonableness with which power is exercised in a democracy? Contemporary answers to this question (such as formulated by Rawls or Habermas), are often based upon two interconnected preconceptions. These are, 1. the idea that the value of public discussion lies primarily in the fact that citizens can reach a reasonable consensus through argumentation and discussion and, 2. the belief that the exercise of power is legitimate only if it is determined by a reasonable (...) consensus among citizens. In this sense, 'reasonable consensus among citizens' eliminates, under ideal conditions, the 'autonomy' of the exercise of power. However, these ideals of democracy appear to conflict with certain aspects of democratic society; aspects, moreover, which we tend to value quite highly. I therefore advance an alternative account of the reasonableness of power in democratic societies; one which acknowledges both the characteristically unlimited scope of public discussion in democratic society and the fact that such discussion rarely or perhaps even never ends in a general consensus. In order to elucidate the democratic character of society we must explain the relationship between discussion and power in such a way that we understand both the need for discussion and the necessity of an autonomous exercise of power. (shrink)

This paper considers the legislative debates in Australia that led to the passage of the Research Involving Human Embryos Act (Cth 2002) and the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act (Cth 2002). In the first part of the paper, we discuss the debate surrounding the legislation with particular emphasis on the ways in which demands for public consultation, public debate and the education of Australians about the potential ethical and scientific impact of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) research were deployed, and (...) the explicit and implicit framing of the scope of public consultation. We then ask whether, given the calls for public consultations, debate and understanding, current work in democratic theory could be helpful in analysing the process of policy-making in these areas. In particular, we canvass the literature relating to aggregative and deliberative models of democracy for processes that support the legitimacy of policy. We identify features of the debate that reflect the appeal of deliberative approaches as well as some of the possible hurdles or limitations to developing deliberative democratic approaches to policy in ethically contentious areas. (shrink)

One of the most significant obstacles to inquiry and deliberation is citizenship education. There are few mechanisms for the development of citizens’ democratic character within most societies, and greater opportunities need to be made to ensure our democracies are epistemically justifiable. The character and quality of citizens’ interactions are a crucial aspect for any democracy; their engagement make a significant difference between a deliberative society and an electoral oligarchy. I contend that through demarchic procedures, citizens are subject to (...) collective learning process in virtue of being part of communal decision-making and in so doing can develop their capacities for deliberation with practice over time. Demarchic bodies can be utilised as communities of inquiry. By viewing democracy as both a learning process and a decision-making mechanism, the quality of deliberation and participation can improve over time as well. (shrink)

The notion of a community of inquiry has been treated by many of its proponents as being an exemplar of democracy in action. We argue that the assumptions underlying this view present some practical and theoretical difficulties, particularly in relation to distribution of power among the members of a community of inquiry. We identify two presuppositions in relation to distribution of power that require attention in developing an educational model that is committed to deliberative democracy: (1) openness (...) to inquiry and readiness to reason, and (2) mutual respect of students and teachers towards one another. Our contention is that these presuppositions, presented as preconditions necessary to the creation of a community of inquiry, are not without ideological commitments and dependent upon the ability of participants to share power. Using group dynamic theories and the ideas of Hannah Arendt, we argue that behaviours commonly interpreted as obstacles to dialogue or reflective inquiry could provide opportunities for growth. (shrink)

According to Val Plumwood (1995), liberal-democracy is an authoritarian political system that protects privilege but fails to protect nature. A major obstacle, she says, is radical inequality, which has become increasingly far-reaching under liberal-democracy; an indicator of ‘the capacity of its privileged groups to distribute social goods upwards and to create rigidities which hinder the democratic correctiveness of social institutions’ (p. 134). This cautionary tale has repercussions for education, especially civics and citizenship education. To address this, we explore the potential (...) of what Gerard Delanty calls ‘cultural citizenship’ as an alternative to the disciplinary citizenship that permeates Western liberal discourse. Cultural citizenship emphasises citizenship as communication and continual learning processes, rejecting the idea of citizenship as a fixed set of cultural ideals, norms or values defined and enforced by liberal society’s legal, political and cultural institutions, including education and ‘citizenship training’. However, we contend that a critical first step, essential to democratic correctiveness, is to clear away obstacles created by the privileging of a dominant epistemic position. We conclude that Plumwood’s philosophy alongside John Dewey’s work on democracy and education provide a theoretical framework for effective democratic inquiry aimed towards interconnective, deliberative practice and corrective methodology for epistemic accountability. (shrink)

As a field, ethics is driven by the desire to help guide human life and human activities. Yet, what are the standards or guideposts indicating that a given policy or practice change actually contributes meaningfully to such desires and aspirations? In other words, how do we know if we have achieved meaningful ethical outcomes and enactment processes? Unfortunately, there are many examples of ethically oriented actions that were well intentioned but carried out in a way that undermined some of the (...) values they intended on promoting or led to unexpected undesirable outcomes. In this paper, building on an account of ethics as a pragmatist pursuit of deliberative wisdom, I identify and discuss four procedural guideposts which can help evaluate if a process of inquiry is an ethical one oriented toward human flourishing. First, situational awareness and continuity designates the need to keep in sight the nature of the situation at stake to ensure that the enactment process does not derail from a cardinal human flourishing orientation. Second, a meaningful ethical enactment should distribute opportunities for participation such that it is not only one’s autonomy (e.g., the ethicist) that is developed and exercised but that positive relationships are also fostered through the growth of others. Third, enactments must strive for more than simple avoidance of encroachment of wrongs but aim for the promotion of praiseworthy practices that pursue what is envisioned as being the better and most compelling vision. Fourth, an ethics process should be conducive of personal growth and mutual learning. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to show that it is not the case that positive duties can be derived from Kant’s so-called universalizability tests. I begin by explaining in detail what I mean by this and distinguishing it from a few things that I am not doing in this paper. After that, I confront the idea of a maxim contradictory, a concept that is advanced by many com- mentators in the attempt to derive positive duties from the universalizability tests. (...) I ex- plain what a maxim contradictory is and how the concept is used to derive positive duties. Then I argue that the notion of a maxim contradictory presupposes an objectionable form of maxim realism. I move from there to the idea of a maxim contrary and the deliberative field. These two ideas are used in tandem by commentators who do not appeal to maxim contradictories. I explain how these concepts are used to derive positive duties and then I argue that there is a systematic error in the derivations that enables one to see that they cannot work. (shrink)

Philosophical food ethics or deliberative inquiry into the moral norms for production, distribution and consumption of food is contrasted with food ethics as an international social movement aimed at reforming the global food system. The latter yields an activist orientation that can become embroiled in self-defeating impotency when the complexity and internal contradictions of the food system are more fully appreciated. However, recent work in intersectionality offers resources that are useful to both philosophical and activist food ethics. For (...) activists, intersectionality provides a way to preserve and strengthen the meaningfulness of protest and resistance, even in the face of complexity and uncertain outcomes. For philosophers, intersectionality chastens the tendency to regard moral problems as inherently solvable, and provides a way use tensions inherent in food system reform as a source of ethical insight. (shrink)

The self is a historical and cultural phenomenon in the sense of a dialectically evolving narrative construct about who we are, what our borders and limits and capacities are, what is pathology, and what is normality, and so on. These ontological and epistemological narratives are usually linked to grand explanatory narratives like science and religion, and are intimately linked to cosmological pictures. The “intersubject” is an emergent form of subjectivity in our time which reconstructs its borders to include the other, (...) and which understands itself as always building and being built through a combination of internal and external dialogue. The shift from monological to dialogical discourse is both a product and a producer of the intersubject, and is in turn made possible by a shift—underway for the last one hundred years or so—in the human information environment. The major educational innovation which reconstructs theory and practice for the intersubject—community of philosophical inquiry (CPI)—assumes, following field and systems theory, that any group gathered together is an interactive system. It also assumes that the fundamental forms of growth and development both of the individual and of the collective take place through a process of communal deliberative inquiry into meaning, resulting in the reconstruction of beliefs, values, and discourses on both an individual and a collective level. CPI is a process in which subject and object are both active and passive, shaping and being shaped, determining and determined, in and through their transaction. It assumes that its interlocutors are in a relation of both mutual and self-interrogation. As the phenomenon of the intersubject gains credence in human culture, philosophy is gaining power as an educational idea in the elementary and high school classroom. Communal philosophical dialogue is the discursive space where the subject’s fundamental assumptions about self, world, knowledge, belief, beauty, right action and normative ideals enter a dialectical process of confrontation, mediation, and reconstruction. (shrink)

The studies by Trickey and Topping, which provide empirical support that philosophy produces cognitive gains and social benefits, have been used to advocate the view that philosophy deserves a place in the curriculum. Arguably, the existing curriculum, built around well-established core subjects, already provides what philosophy is said to do, and, therefore, there is no case to be made for expanding it to include philosophy. However, if we take citizenship education seriously, then the development of active and informed citizens requires (...) an emphasis on citizen preparation, but significantly more than the existing curriculum can provide, namely, the acquisition of knowledge and skills to improve students’ social and intellectual capacities and dispositions as future citizens. To this end, I argue for a model of democratic education that emphasises philosophy functioning educationally, whereby students have an integral role to play in shaping democracy through engaging in philosophy as collaborative inquiry that integrates pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. I contend that only philosophy can promote democracy, insofar as philosophical inquiry is an exemplar of the kind of deliberative inquiry required for informed and active democratic citizenship. In this way, philosophy can make a fundamental and much needed contribution to education. (shrink)

The ideas contained in this paper were first formulated as part of a chapter in my doctoral dissertation, which was completed in 1997. Some years later I added to my initial thoughts, scribbled some notes, and presented them at the 12th Annual Philosophy in Schools Conference, held in Brisbane in 2002. This presentation surfaced as a paper in Critical & Creative Thinking: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy in Schools (Burgh 2003a). Soon thereafter I revised the paper (Burgh 2003b) and it (...) appeared in abridged form in the Asia-Pacific Philosophy Education Network for Democracy (APPEND) Philosophy Series, Volume 4: Philosophy, Democracy and Education, edited by Philip Cam. It was once again revised, but also expanded, and appeared in Chapter 5 of Ethics and the community of inquiry: Education for deliberative democracy, a collaborative authorship with Terri Field and Mark Freakley (2006). Some sections have been further revised and appear in other publications (Burgh 2009, 2010; Burgh & Yorshansky 2011). These revisions would suggest that my thoughts on these matters are constantly changing. To some degree this is true, but each time the changes have built on previous ideas rather than new ideas replacing old ones. I welcomed the invitation to revise the original paper, which includes sections not included in later versions. However, with almost 11 years passing since the original publication, I found myself deleting sections and replacing others. Subsequently, this paper is a culmination of all the revisions and incorporates ideas from each. (shrink)

In South Africa, the notion of an African Philosophy of Education emerged with the advent of post-apartheid education and the call for an educational philosophy that would reflect this renewal, a focus on Africa and its cultures, identities and values, and the new imperatives for education in a postcolonial and post-apartheid era. The idea of an African Philosophy of Education has been much debated in South Africa. Not only its content and purpose but also its very possibility have been, and (...) continue to be, the subject of understandably passionate exchanges. In this paper, after discussing some of the constitutive features of African Philosophy of Education, we indicate aspects with which we are sympathetic. Our central question is whether African Philosophy of Education is the revisioned, ‘typically African’ philosophy of education that it is claimed to be. We argue that it has revealed certain tendencies that are remarkably similar to characteristics of Fundamental Pedagogics, the repressive doctrine complicit in apartheid education that it claims to replace. More substantially still, African Philosophy of Education, by labeling itself uniquely and distinctly ‘African’, runs the risk of insulating itself not only from interaction with the wider world but also from any critical interrogation. (shrink)

An inquiry into the rhetorical aspects of history may seem paradoxical, given that historical discourse is not typically included among those types which, since Aristotle, have been understood to be governed by rhetoric; these types being the deliberative council, the tribunal and the commemorative assembly. It was to these specific audiences that the three kinds of discourse—the deliberative, judiciary, and panegyric—were addressed. However, are the boundaries of the historian's audience sufficiently delineated in order to allow us to (...) identify it as a specific addressee? This first objection, which regards the very legitimacy of the subject of these remarks, can be met by noting a common trait that links history to the above-mentioned three types of discourse; that is, competition between opposed discourses requiring a choice. In each case the aim is to structure a debate that calls for a clear-cut decision. Yet a major problem of the discipline of history is that it allows both for widely varying descriptions of the same series of events, and sanctions the use of a variety of equally acceptable rules or preferences for interpreting a given slice of the past. (shrink)

The article assumes that Lipman’s paradigm of ‘Philosophy for Children’ as a ‘Community of Inquiry’ is very useful in extending the range of philosophical practices and the benefits of philosophical community reflection to collective life as such. In particular, it examines the possible contribution of philosophy to the practical and ethical dynamics which, nowadays, seem to characterise many deliberative public contexts. Lipman’s idea of CI is an interesting interpretative key for such contexts. As a result, the article highlights (...) the possibility of understanding a CI essentially in terms of an ethics of responsibility. (shrink)

L’idéal démocratique est accusé d’être irréaliste. Le gouvernement du peuple par le peuple et pour le peuple serait une chimère dans les sociétés contemporaines. Il faudrait lui préférer les visées plus modestes associées à l’élection : un droit de vote égal et la satisfaction du plus grand nombre. La démocratie ne se laisse pourtant pas réduire à la compétition électorale. Les acteurs et les institutions politiques qui s’en réclament invoquent non seulement un marché, où rivalisent des intérêts privés, mais un (...) forum, où s’affrontent des visions adverses de la justice. Ils attendent de la délibération collective qu’elle serve l’autonomie politique et le bien commun, mais savent aussi qu’elle peut les menacer, lorsque la liberté, l’égalité ou la publicité lui font défaut. Cette enquête philosophique interroge la pertinence de l’idéal démocratique pour des sociétés complexes, dotées d’institutions représentatives et soumises à la communication de masse. Elle montre à quelles conditions cet idéal peut aujourd’hui orienter la critique et l’action. Les citoyens peuvent encore aspirer à se gouverner eux-mêmes, donc à délibérer en égaux. -/- The democratic ideal is accused of being unrealistic. Government of the people by the people and for the people would be a chimera in contemporary societies. The more modest aims associated with election should be preferred: equal suffrage and the satisfaction of the greatest number. But democracy cannot be reduced to electoral competition. The political actors and institutions that claim it invoke not only a market, where private interests compete, but also a forum, where opposing visions of justice confront each other. They expect collective deliberation to serve political autonomy and the common good, but they also know that it can threaten them when it lacks freedom, equality or publicity. This philosophical inquiry questions the relevance of the democratic ideal for complex societies with representative institutions and subject to mass communication. It shows under what conditions a deliberative understanding of this ideal can today orient criticism and action. Citizens can still aspire to govern themselves, hence to deliberate as equals. (shrink)

Normative judgments are typically subject to emotional reasons that cannot be justified by reference to facts alone. As a result, practical disputes sometimes go unsettled in ways that support James Lenman's view of moral inquiry as politics. An important consequence is that reasonableness is often preferable to truth as a criterion of good practical judgment. Although the role of emotions suggests metaethical expressivism as preferable to realism for analysing practical reasoning, reasonableness transforms expressivism from a form of noncognitivism into (...) a theory that recognizes cognitively rich forms of approval and disapproval. Defensible normative intuitions have good justifying reasons even when these reasons permit faultless differences of political opinion and ethical practice. Despite implying deep normative pluralism, however, a cognitivist form of expressivism explains how deliberative agents can construct and maintain reasonable moral communities. (shrink)

Is it generally rational to defer to official stories? On the affirmative view exemplified by Neil Levy, grounds for scepticism cannot outweigh the epistemic authority of the experts presumed to generate them. Yet sociological studies of how expertise is mediated into official communications reveal the epistemic potential of citizens’ collaboratives. These may include, or advocate hearing, dissident experts. Such groups’ epistemic position is arguably analogous to that of the ‘other institutions of civil society’ that Levy sees as underwriting the authority (...) of official stories. An added advantage is that they are able to adhere to deliberative methods of inquiry. By contrast, an official story presupposes that deliberations have concluded, and what remains is to promote the agreed story. This is achieved by strategic communication, which can involve extensive coordination by organisations committed primarily to persuasion rather than truth-seeking. Sometimes it includes blocking dissidents’ deliberative challenges. A case study highlights how even an organisation of indisputable epistemic authority can be politically influenced to block the testimony of its own scientific experts, while uncritical support for its official story is maintained by other institutions of civil society. Hence, an appropriate attitude towards official stories is critical receptiveness rather than automatic deference. (shrink)

In response to those who see rational deliberation as a source of epistemic norms and a model for well-functioning scientific inquiry, Solomon cites evidence that aggregative techniques often yield better results; deliberative processes are vulnerable to biasing mechanisms that impoverish the epistemic resources on which group judgments are based. I argue that aggregative techniques are similarly vulnerable and illustrate this in terms of the impact of gender schemas on both individual and collective judgment. A consistently externalist and socially (...) naturalized approach calls for symmetrical treatment of these strategies for capitalizing on what groups know. (shrink)

I argue that Aristotle’s unmodern conception of politics can only be understood by first understanding his distinctive picture of human agency and the excellence of political wisdom. I therefore undertake to consider three related puzzles: why at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics [NE] is the human good said to be the same for a city and for an individual, such that the NE’s inquiry is political? why later on in the NE is political wisdom said to be the (...) same state of soul as practical wisdom? why in the Politics does Aristotle identify practical wisdom as the peculiar excellence of rulers when deliberation was said to be the common work of all citizens insofar as they are genuinely citizens? While these puzzles have individually received treatment in the literature, they have seldom been treated together. Taken independently, the passages in question can seem to express a more familiar conception of politics. In particular, each of the sameness claims made in and has too easily been assimilated to a more modern conception of the relation of ethics to politics and thereby domesticated. As I hope to show, in Aristotle is not simply asserting that the human good in a city supervenes on the good as achieved by its inhabitants ; and in he is not claiming only that political wisdom is a species of practical wisdom, but is rather asserting a more thoroughgoing identity between various types of deliberative excellence that are conventionally distinguished and assigned different names. Working through these passages will provide a sufficient basis for tackling, the question about the respective excellences of rulers and citizens. I will show that, despite his restriction of the exercise of practical wisdom to rulers, Aristotle imagines that non-ruling citizens will also exercise their political agency and thereby require a distinct rational excellence. More precisely, for Aristotle, there are two forms of political agency, deliberation on behalf of one’s community, which is perfected by practical-political wisdom, and the comprehension exercised by citizens on the basis of the view of life preserved by their character-virtues. Understood this way, the division of labor between rulers and citizens does not generate two spheres of activity, political and private, which could have unrelated excellences or concern distinct goods. (shrink)

I examine ramifications of the widespread view that scientific objectivity gives us a permission to trust scientific knowledge claims. According to a widely accepted account of trust and trustworthiness, trust in scientific knowledge claims involves both reliance on the claims and trust in scientists who present the claims, and trustworthiness depends on expertise, honesty, and social responsibility. Given this account, scientific objectivity turns out to be a hybrid concept with both an epistemic and a moral-political dimension. The epistemic dimension tells (...) us when scientific knowledge claims are reliable, and the moral-political dimension tells us when we can trust scientists to be socially responsible. While the former dimension has received a fair amount of attention, the latter is in need of analysis. I examine what it means for scientists to be socially responsible, that is, to follow “sound” moral and social values in different stages of scientific inquiry. Social responsibility is especially important when scientists function as experts in society. Members of the public and policymakers do not want to rely on scientific research shaped by moral and social values they have good reasons to reject. Moreover, social responsibility is important in social research in which moral and social values can legitimately play many roles. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different answers to the question of how social scientists can identify appropriate moral and social values to inform their research. I argue that procedural accounts of social responsibility, such as well-ordered science and deliberative polling, have limitations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article aims to enhance understanding of employee anonymous online dissent (EAOD), a controversial phenomenon in contemporary digital environments. We conceptualise and scrutinise EAOD as a communicative and interactional process among four key actors: dissenting employees, online outlet administrators, audiences, and targeted organisations. This multi-actor, dialectical process encompasses actor-related tensions that may generate unethical consequences if single voices are not brought out and confronted. Appropriating a Habermasian ethical and discursive lens, we examine and disentangle three particular challenges emerging from the (...) EAOD process: lack of accountability and potential opportunism; equal participation and resolution of actor-related tensions; and organisational participation and internalisation of dissent. We show that EAOD can initiate plural dialogue that helps co-construct and balance different voices within an informal and noninstitutionalised context for interaction and public deliberation. We conclude our inquiry by offering reflections on practical implications and a research agenda for further investigation. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea (...) suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it. (shrink)

The model of clinical ethics consultation (CEC) defended in the ASBH Core Competencies report has gained significant traction among scholars and healthcare providers. On this model, the aim of CEC is to facilitate deliberative reflection and thereby resolve conflicts and clarify value uncertainty by invoking and pursuing a process of consensus building. It is central to the model that the facilitated consensus falls within a range of allowable options, defined by societal values: prevailing legal requirements, widely endorsed organizational policies, (...) and professional standards of practice and codes of conduct. Moreover, the model stipulates that ethics consultants must refrain from giving substantive recommendations regarding how parties to a moral disagreement in the clinic should evaluate their options. We argue that this model of CEC is incomplete, because it wrongly assumes that what counts as the proper set of allowable options among which the parties are to deliberate will itself always be clearly discernible. We illustrate this problem with a recent case on which one of us consulted—a neonate born with trisomy 18 (T18). We try to show that law, policy, and standards of practice reveal no clear answer to the question posed by the case: namely, whether forgoing gastrostomy tube feedings for a baby with T18 is allowable. We suggest there may be other kinds of cases in which it may simply be unsettled whether a given choice falls within the set of allowable options within which consensus is to be facilitated. What should an ethicist do when confronting such unsettled cases? We agree with the facilitation model that an ethicist should remain neutral among the allowable options, when it is clear what the allowable options are. But, in unsettled cases, the role of a consultant should be expanded to include a process of moral inquiry into what the allowable options should be. We end by raising the issue of whether this means an ethicist should share his or her own conclusions or views about the allowability of a given clinical option. (shrink)

This article reports research in three Nottingham schools, concerned with (1) 'The school as fertile ground: how the ethos of a school enables everyone in it to benefit from the presence of artists in class'; (2) 'Children on the edge: how the arts reach those children who otherwise exclude themselves from class activities, for any reason' and (3) 'Children's voices and choices: how even very young children can learn to express their wishes, and then have them realised through arts projects'. (...) The research methodology was rooted in two modes of inquiry, philosophical investigation and action research. The article draws on this research to argue that arts-based work in school has helped disadvantaged and/or disaffected children to engage in activities (both arts-based and others), and to be able to lay the groundwork for exercising voice and agency as they did so. If social justice is to flourish there is a need for particular kinds of public spaces and a need to create conditions such that children can learn to participate in those spaces, whether or not they are comfortable with the usual settings for 'rational argument' or 'deliberative democracy'. It is suggested that arts-based education, in some forms, is one good way of creating these conditions. (shrink)

In this paper, I make a novel case for an expansive approach to engineering ethics education, one that regards micro-ethics and macro-ethics as essentially complementary. Although others have voiced support for including macro-ethical reflection within engineering ethics education, I advance a stronger claim, arguing that isolating engineering ethics from macro-level issues risks rendering even micro-ethical inquiry morally meaningless. I divide my proposal into four parts. First, I clarify the distinction between micro-ethics and macro-ethics as I am construing it, defending (...) my characterization against a potential worry. Second, I consider but reject some arguments for a restrictive approach, one that excludes macro-ethical reflection from engineering ethics education. Third, I offer my central argument for an expansive approach. Finally, I suggest that macro-ethics education can learn something valuable from micro-ethics pedagogy. On my proposal, students consider both micro- and macro-ethical problems from the deliberative perspective, situating micro-ethical problems within a broader social framework but also situating macro-ethical problems within an engaged, practical framework. By emphasizing the value of the deliberative perspective, my proposal contributes to a growing call to broaden the scope of engineering ethics education while maintaining its practical relevance. (shrink)

This PhD thesis provides an extended evaluation of evolutionary debunking arguments in meta-ethics. Such arguments attempt to show that evolutionary theory, together with a commitment to robust moral objectivity, lead to moral scepticism: the implausible view that we lack moral knowledge or that our moral beliefs are never justified (e.g. Joyce 2006, Street 2005, Kahane 2011). To establish that, these arguments rely on certain epistemic principles. But most of the epistemic principles appealed to in the literature on evolutionary debunking arguments (...) are imprecise, confused or simply implausible. My PhD aims to rectify that. Informed by debates in cutting-edge contemporary epistemology, Chapter 1 distinguishes three general, independently motivated principles that, combined with evolution, seem to render knowledge of robustly objective moral facts problematic. These epistemic principles state that (i.) our getting facts often right in a given domain requires explanation – and if we cannot provide one, our beliefs about that domain are unjustified; (ii.) higher-order evidence of error undermines justification; and (iii.) for our beliefs to be justified, our having them must be best explained by the facts they are about. Chapters 2-4 develop and critically assess evolutionary debunking arguments based on those principles, showing that only the one inspired by (iii.) succeeds. Chapter 2 investigates the argument that evolution makes explaining why we get moral facts often right impossible. I argue that Justin Clarke-Doane’s recent response (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017) works, yet neglects an issue about epistemic luck that spells trouble for robust moral objectivity. Chapter 3 discusses the argument that evolution provides higher-order evidence of error regarding belief in robustly objective moral facts. I show that such an argument falls prey to Katia Vavova’s (2014) self-defeat objection, even if evolutionary debunkers tweak their background view on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence. Chapter 4 develops the argument that evolution, rather than robustly objective moral facts, best explains why we hold our moral beliefs. I offer a systematic, comprehensive defence of that argument against Andreas Mogensen’s (2015) charge of explanatory levels confusion, Terrence Cuneo’s (2007) companion in guilt strategy, and David Enoch’s (2012, 2016) appeal to deliberative indispensability. Chapter 5 brings everything together. It investigates whether robust moral objectivity survives the worry about epistemic luck raised in Chapter 2 and the explanatory challenge developed in Chapter 4. Making progress, however, requires a better idea of how we form true, justified beliefs about and acquire knowledge of robustly objective moral facts. Since it offers the most popular and best-developed epistemology of robustly objective morality, my inquiry in Chapter 5 focuses on contemporary moral intuitionism: the view that moral intuitions can be the source of basic moral knowledge. I argue that its success is mixed. While moral intuitionism has the conceptual tools to tackle the problem of epistemic luck from Chapter 2, it cannot insulate knowledge of robustly objective moral facts against the sceptical worry raised by the evolutionary debunking argument developed in Chapter 4. Thus, evolutionary theory, together with a commitment to robust moral objectivity, does lead to a form of unacceptable moral scepticism. (shrink)

This paper argues that social and political problems currently addressed by local governments through new forms of digital participation can be considered wicked problems, because they cannot be tackled through factual information alone. Addressing such problems means connecting diverse citizens’ values to empirically based and logically based arguments. The paper addresses the question of which role citizens’ personal narratives and emotions play in digital participation and how narratives and emotions articulate personal and social values. This line of inquiry is (...) illustrated by two examples of digital participation on the local and regional level of democracy. The examples show that citizens’ narratives and emotional expressions articulate diverse values and value conflicts. Finally, the paper develops some preliminary ideas about how online argument mapping tools could be combined with value mapping. (shrink)

John Dewey relates ethics in general with the mode of inquiry. Against the mainstream ethics and moral theories, Dewey reconstructed morality in light of empirical science, providing the necessary steps of pragmatic ethical investigations. In this study, I have revisited Dewey’s ethical inquiry and recent developments of the methods of pragmatist bioethics. Using this approach in ethics, I have examined the development of reproductive technologies and genetics, precisely the moral dilemma of gestational surrogacy at the level of a (...) public issue that needs social policy. In the final part, I have suggested the significance of Dewey’s emphasis on education, deliberative democracy, and institutions and agents’ role as the basis to solve bioethical issues arising in different societal contexts. (shrink)

This essay develops the foundations of a Thomistic ethics of inquiry by proposing an account of 'consilium' (or practical deliberation) that is essentially social. This account in turn has three important implications. First, the moral knowledge available to us prior to the workings of 'consilium' is too vague to ground anything approaching substantive moral conclusions (the content of 'synderesis' is significantly limited). Second, if the apprehension of all but the very highest moral truths depends on a series of (...) class='Hi'>deliberative relationships, the nature and development of those relationships must be a central task of Thomistic ethics. Third, the workings of 'consilium' itself, pointing us toward a particular kind of moral community, can ground the nature and content of Thomistic ethics as an ethics of inquiry. (shrink)

Emerging parallel to long-standing, academic and policy inquiries on personal responsibility for health is the empirical assessment of lay persons’ views. Yet, previous studies rarely explored personal responsibility for health among lay persons as dynamic societal values. We sought to explore lay persons’ views on personal responsibility for health using the Fairness Dialogues, a method for lay persons to deliberate equity issues in health and health care through a small group dialogue using a hypothetical scenario. We conducted two 2-h Fairness (...) Dialogues sessions (n = 15 in total) in Nova Scotia, Canada. We analyzed data using thematic analysis. Our analysis showed that personal choice played an important role in participants’ thinking about health. Underlying the concept of personal choice was considerations of freedom and societal debt. In participants’ minds, personal and social responsibilities co-existed and they were unwilling to determine health care priority based on personal responsibility. The Fairness Dialogues is a promising deliberative method to explore lay persons’ views as dynamic values to be developed through group dialogues as opposed to static, already-formed values waiting to be elicited. (shrink)

In this essay, I defend a view I call “Robust Realism” about normativity. According to this view, there are irreducibly, perfectly objective, normative truths, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct. My argument in support of Robust Realism is modeled after arguments from explanatory indispensability common in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics. I argue that irreducibly normative truths, though not explanatorily indispensable, are nevertheless deliberatively indispensable, and that this kind (...) of indispensability is just as respectable as the more familiar explanatory kind. Deliberative indispensability, I argue, justifies belief in normative facts, just like the explanatory indispensability of, say, theoretical entities like electrons justifies belief in electrons. In the introduction I characterize the view I will be arguing for and sketch the main argument of this essay. In chapter 1 I draw the analogy between explanatory and deliberative indispensability, and argue that there is no non-question-begging reason to take the former but not the latter seriously. Here I also present the master-argument of the thesis, and clarify the argumentative work that needs to be done by each of the following chapters. In chapter 2 I address the worries of the antirealist who is willing to reject arguments from explanatory indispensability as well. In other words, in this chapter I try to justify the move from indispensability (of whatever kind) to belief. In chapter 3 I develop an account of deliberation that supports the premises about deliberation needed for my master-argument to go through. In chapter 4 I reject some alternative views, showing that none of them can allow for sincere deliberation. In this chapter, in other words, I support the indispensability premise: I argue that it really is impossible to deliberate sincerely without believing in irreducibly normative truths.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions in (...) Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

The new generations of bioenhancement technologies and traditional Virtue Theory both try to make a meaningful connection between the improvement of human states and characteristics on one hand, and attainment to the good life, on the other. Considering the main elements of virtuousness in Farabi’s thought—namely rational inquiry and deliberative insights, alongside volitional discipline within various social contexts, one can conclude that although the trajectories of enhancement technologies—be they in the field of genetic engineering, neurostimulation technologies, or pharmacology—do (...) not in themselves satisfy the constitutive determinants of virtuousness, they function as having both mediative and amplificative/reductive roles in a life which is dedicated to the pursuit of happiness in the light of the cultivation of virtue. (shrink)