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 - continue their introductory series. (See part 1, part 2, part 3)
The third purpose of deliberation, to promote mutually respectful decision making, responds to an often neglected source of moral disagreement - incompatible moral values. Even utterly altruistic individuals trying to decide on the morally best standards for governing a society of abundance would not be able to reconcile some moral conflicts beyond a reasonable doubt. They would still confront, for example, the problem of abortion, which pits life against liberty. No less tractable would be other moral issues such as the question of how to balance privacy against security.
Deliberation cannot of course make incompatible values compatible, but it can help participants recognize the moral merit in their opponents' claims to the extent that they have it. It can do so by helping to clarify what is at stake in a moral disagreement, encouraging deliberators to sort out self-interested claims from public-spirited ones, and to recognize those public-spirited claims that should have greater weight. Conflicts that do not involve such deep disagreement can then be easily addressed and may turn out to be more resolvable than they at first appeared to be. Some may be the result of misunderstanding or lack of information, and some may be appropriately settled by bargaining, negotiation, and compromise. In this way, deliberation helps put moral principle and moral compromise-as well as bargaining-in its place.
In the face of incompatible values, deliberative democracy calls for what we call an economy of moral disagreement. In justifying policies on moral grounds, citizens should seek the rationale that minimizes rejection of the position they oppose. By economizing on their disagreements in this way, citizens manifest mutual respect as they continue to disagree about morally important issues on which they need to reach collective decisions.
The economy of moral disagreement is not a utopian ideal. It could be seen at work in, for example, two bodies that considered the issue of fetal tissue research - the Warnock Commission in England and the Fetal Tissue Research Commission in the United States. To the extent that they recognized and respected incompatible values, commissioners helped realize the potential for mutual respect among citizens. A bioethics commission or committee may decide to focus on issues on which it can reach some reasonable consensus rather than on issues that are more likely to produce polarization. Or if it cannot avoid highly contentious issues, it should seek to help members understand the perspectives of their opponents. The quality of a commission's analysis-how well it recognizes the competing values at stake-will be at least as important as the conclusion it reaches.
But even if deliberation is possible, is it always desirable?
Some might object that by raising the moral stakes, deliberative democracy turns what might otherwise have been mundane disputes into conflicts of grand moral principle, and thereby encourages no-holds-barred opposition and political intransigence. These are real risks. Moral sensitivity may sometimes make necessary political compromises more difficult.
But the absence of moral reasoning also makes unjustifiable compromises more common. If a disagreement about a change in eligibility for health care turns only on the question of costs, nothing is gained by invoking principles of justice and benevolence. But when a dispute raises serious moral issues-the exclusion of certain groups such as immigrants, for example-then it is not likely to be resolved satisfactorily by avoiding arguments about justice.
