Dennis Thompson - founding Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Professor of Public Policy and Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy in the Government Department at Harvard University - and Amy Guttmann - President of and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania - conclude their introductory series. (See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)
The fourth [and final] purpose of deliberation is to help correct the mistakes that citizens, professionals and officials inevitably make when they take collective actions. This is a response to the last source of disagreement, the incomplete understanding that characterizes almost all of moral conflicts.
In a well constituted deliberative forum, through the give-and-take of argument, participants can learn from each other, come to recognize their individual and collective misapprehensions, and develop new views and policies that can more successfully withstand critical scrutiny.
When citizens bargain and negotiate, they may learn how better to get what they want. But when they deliberate, they can expand their knowledge, including their self-understanding as well as their collective understanding of what will best serve their fellow citizens.
Some of us (and perhaps all of us sometimes) believe that we already know what constitutes the best resolution of a moral conflict without deliberating with our fellow citizens. Assuming that we know what the right resolution is before we hear from others who will also be affected by our decisions is not only arrogant but also unjustified in light of the complexity of issues and interests at stake.
If we refuse to give deliberation a chance, we forsake not only the possibility of arriving at a genuine moral compromise but we also give up the most defensible ground we could have for maintaining an uncompromising position: that we have tested our views against those of others.
As a little boy tugging on the coattails of Thomas Jefferson once asked (in a New Yorker cartoon): "If you take those truths to be self-evident, then why do you keep on harping on them so much?" The answer from a deliberative perspective is that such claims deserve their status as self-evident truths for the purposes of collective action only if they can withstand challenge in a public forum. Jefferson himself argued for open deliberative forums, indeed even periodic constitutional conventions, in which citizens could contest conventional wisdom.
An implication of taking the problem of incomplete understanding seriously is that the work of any bioethics committee, commission or board should always be regarded as provisional. Deliberative forums reach conclusions, but the conclusions should always be open to challenge in a subsequent forum. Deliberation continues through stages, as leaders present their proposals, citizens respond, leaders revise, citizens react, and the stages recur. This is what we call the reiteration of deliberation.
If the principles of deliberative democracy were to be more fully realized in the practices of bioethics forums, the decisions the participants reach would be more morally legitimate, public-spirited, mutually respectful, and self-correcting.
Deliberation-friendly forums could help reduce our deliberative deficit. By making democracy more deliberative, we stand a better chance of resolving some of our moral disagreements, and living with those that will inevitably persist, on terms that all can accept.
