I made a presentation today at the Society

for Values in Higher Education’s conference at a beautiful rural retreat

in northwestern Connecticut. This was my outline:

Deliberation is a hot topic in philosophy, law, and political

science, generating shelves of books and articles. I believe that there

are three reasons for this:

1. Until the 1960s, many scholars assumed that politics was mostly a

   struggle among groups with fixed interests. Often, groups’ goals were

   assumed to be selfish, although the really important point was that

   they were inflexible. Therefore, discussion, argument, and reason-giving

   were inconsequential. This was the Marxist view, but it was also the

   view of "pluralists" and "realists" in political

   science, many of whom were quite conservative. So it a broad ideological

   spectrum agreed that rhetoric was politically insignificant. Politics

   meant the deployment of power in competitive situations.

Then the power of argument, persuasion, and rhetoric was rediscovered.

But rhetoric is not always a good thing; people can be persuaded to

hate others against their self-interests. Conceivably, a society of

rational individuals who maximized their own interests would not be

racist, since racism is irrational. People are persuaded to be

racists.

If persuasion is politically significant, but often harmful, then we

clearly need to figure out how to improve it. "Improved talk"

is a rough definition of "deliberation."

2. Until the 1960’s, the positivist distinction between facts and values

   held sway in English-speaking countries. Facts were testable and debatable;

   values were just subjective matters of opinion. There was no debating

   morality.

   Then, around 1970, moral philosophy was revived, demonstrating that

   there can be powerful, rational arguments for moral conclusions. However,

   almost all contemporary political philosophers are democrats. They

   do not believe that philosophers can decide what is right by sitting

   in their studies and applying philosophical methods. This approach

   would be undemocratic; it would also be foolish, since good decisions

   require the input of many people with different backgrounds, values,

   and experiences.

   A belief in rational moral argument plus a belief in democratic

   participation yields a commitment to deliberation.

3. "Civil society"—an old term—suddenly became hugely

   influential in the 1980s and 1990s, for various reasons. Definitions

   of "civil society" vary, but a core idea is that societies

   form "public opinion" in nongovernmental groups such as clubs,

   civic associations, newspapers, and political parties. This means that

   no public opinion can form at all where civil society has been suppressed

   or destroyed (e.g., in Iraq?). It also means that democracy depends

   upon having a good institutional base for civil society. Thus there

   has been a lot of research into what institutions support good discussions

   and valuable public opinion.

These three trends have led to a lot of research on two types of deliberation:

1. Deliberation in formal, decision-making bodies such as legislatures,

   official juries, and appeals courts. The research mostly asks: "Do

   good arguments count in these fora?" and "How could we make

   them count more?"

2. Society-wide deliberations occuring in civil society and the media,

   e.g., America’s discussion of gender-roles since the mid-1800s.

Meanwhile, there have been many interesting experiments that involve

actual citizen deliberations at modest scales outside of the government.

Many of the groups that promote such experiments are now gathered into

the

. Their work is influenced by the intellectual trends described above,

but it also continues an American tradition going back to the Chautauqua

Movement, the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, etc.

These experiments have not been much studied. We need to ask: What is

the point of convening a group of citizens to discuss a public issue,

if the group is not a legislature or some other decision-making body?

What outcomes should we hope for from such experiments? Are they intrinsically

valuable, or only valuable as part of a movement that somehow "goes

to scale" or changes official institutions? What are the best ways

to structure citizens’ deliberations? And what makes them successful?