{"id":12956,"date":"2013-12-13T08:03:54","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T13:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=12956"},"modified":"2013-12-13T08:03:54","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T13:03:54","slug":"a-technique-for-measuring-a-good-deliberation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=12956","title":{"rendered":"a technique for measuring the quality of deliberation"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Ann Arbor, MI) I’ve proposed <\/a>that we can map an individual\u2019s thinking about moral and political issues as a set of beliefs and connections. For instance, if a person says that she favors abortion rights because she is committed to individual freedom, she is linking two nodes in a mental map. Because her overall epistemic framework is a network, it will have formal properties, such as density and centrality.<\/p>\n

When two or more individuals interact on moral or political issues (talking and\/or working together), their respective network maps will come into contact and change. The community formed by people who so interact can be viewed as a larger network of beliefs and connections that also has formal properties.<\/p>\n

Certain network structures are better than others for deliberation and interaction. If you are a good deliberator, you enrich other people\u2019s network maps and learn from theirs; you are not rigid. In the context of a liberal democracy, you must be able to \u201croute around\u201d your own faith commitments. You don\u2019t have to drop them, but you must be able to make an argument that doesn\u2019t depend on them. Likewise, your various ideas should be connected rather than isolated, so that you can give reasons for each of your beliefs.<\/p>\n

We should be able to observe a moral network map evolve as one person interacts with others, and we should be able to rate individuals and conversations for moral excellence (by asking independent observers to assess them) and then see whether what we posit as the formal criteria of good moral networks are actually found in the best deliberators.<\/p>\n

For example, Bloggingheads TV organized a discussion<\/a> between columnists Bryce\u00a0Covert (liberal) and Ramesh\u00a0Ponnuru (conservative) on the topic of why women are paid less than men and what to do about it. I assert that this is a good discussion because I think it is, but also because in a study<\/a> led by my colleague Felicia Sullivan, this video and several others were shown to representative samples of Americans. Most viewers liked this particular discussion, and they tended to move toward less ideologically consistent views after they watched it–evidence that it had complicated their opinions.<\/p>\n

In the slide show below, I begin to diagram the discussion<\/a> as two interlocked networks of ideas.<\/p>\n

[slideonline id=6828]<\/p>\n

I didn’t finish mapping the discussion, but I got far enough to conclude that we should be looking for:<\/p>\n