The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy--the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact. Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In Why Deliberative Democracy?, they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, Democracy and Disagreement.What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and (...) Thompson illuminate the theory and practice of justifying public policies in contemporary democracies. They not only develop their theory of deliberative democracy in new directions but also apply it to new practical problems. They discuss bioethics, health care, truth commissions, educational policy, and decisions to declare war. In "What Deliberative Democracy Means," which opens this collection of essays, they provide the most accessible exposition of deliberative democracy to date. They show how deliberative democracy should play an important role even in the debates about military intervention abroad.Why Deliberative Democracy? contributes to our understanding of how democratic citizens and their representatives can make justifiable decisions for their society in the face of the fundamental disagreements that are inevitable in diverse societies. Gutmann and Thompson provide a balanced and fair-minded approach that will benefit anyone intent on giving reason and reciprocity a more prominent place in politics than power and special interests. (shrink)

Advocates of ?deliberative democracy? want citizens to actively participate in serious dialogue over political issues, not merely go to the polls every few years. Unfortunately, these ideals don't take into account widespread political ignorance and irrationality. Most voters neither attain the level of knowledge needed to make deliberative democracy work, nor do they rationally evaluate the political information they do possess. The vast size and complexity of modern government make it unlikely that most citizens can ever reach the levels of (...) knowledge and rationality required by deliberative democracy, even if they were better informed than they are at present. (shrink)

Karl Popper's methodology highlights our scientific ignorance: hence the need to institutionalize open‐mindedness through controlled experiments that may falsify our fallible theories about the world. In his endorsement of “piecemeal social engineering,” Popper assumes that the social‐democratic state and its citizens are capable of detecting social problems, and of assessing the results of policies aimed at solving them, through a process of experimentation analogous to that of natural science. But we are not only scientifically but politically ignorant: ignorant of the (...) facts that underpin political debate, which are brought to our attention by theories that, as Max Weber emphasized, can be tested only through counterfactual thought experiments. Public‐opinion and political‐psychology research suggest that human beings are far too unaware, illogical, and doctrinaire to conduct the rigorous theorizing that would be necessary to make piecemeal social engineering work. F.A. Hayek realized that the public could not engage, specifically, in piecemeal economic regulation but failed to draw the conclusion that this was due to a specific type of political ignorance: ignorance of economic theory. (shrink)

A distinctive feature of modern capitalist societies is the tendency of the market to take over the production, maintenance, and distribution of goods that were previously produced, maintained, and distributed by nonmarket means. Yet, there is a wide range of disagreement regarding the proper extent of the market in providing many goods. Labor has been treated as a commodity since the advent of capitalism, but not without significant and continuing challenges to this arrangement. Other goods whose production for and distribution (...) on the market are currently the subject of dispute include sexual intercourse, human blood, and human body parts such as kidneys. How can we determine which goods are properly subjects of market transactions and which are not? The purpose of this article is to propose a theory of what makes economic goods differ from other kinds of goods, which can help to answer this question. (shrink)

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...) small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life. Key Words: altruism; cooperation; cross-cultural research; experimental economics; game theory; ultimatum game; public goods game; self-interest. (shrink)

Recently the demand for rectification of past injustices has become an increasingly important issue. Each of the last three decades has witnessed democratization processes in the Mediterranean basin, Latin America, in Central and Eastern Europe and in Africa where debates have arisen over rectification of past wrongs which naturally include the unjust expropriation of property. Most recently, moreover, the idea of land restitution to indigenous people, particularly in Australia, Canada and Zimbabwe, has become a prominent, if not always equanimous, part (...) of those countries' domestic political agendas. The difficulties associated with satisfying such demands have been discussed with particular regard to the framing of new post-Communist constitutions in eastern and central Europe by, among others, Jon Elster and Claus Offe. Yet, not only in the field of public policy has the issue of rectification become important. Perhaps because of these developments, there has been a resurgence of interest in rectification in political philosophy as is shown by a forthcoming collection of essays on the subject edited by Elster. (shrink)

In “Popper, Weber, and Hayek,” I claimed that the economic and political world governed by social democracy is too complex to offer hope for rational social‐democratic policy making. I extrapolated this conclusion from the claim, made by Austrian‐school economists in the 1920s and 30s, that central economic planning would face insurmountable “knowledge problems.” Israel Kirzner's Reply indicates the need to keep the Austrians’ cognitivist argument conceptually distinct from more familiar incentives arguments, which can tacitly reintroduce the assumption of omniscience against (...) which the Austrian economists rebelled. Callahan's Reply illustrates the need to keep in mind the hypothetical, conditional nature of economic arguments. Notturno's Reply changes the subject by asserting the intrinsic value of social‐democratic participation, regardless of its outcomes—even while, like Talisse's Reply, ignoring the evidence that public ignorance and elite dogmatism probably can't be mitigated by more information or by appeals to be open minded. And Hill focuses on the very real imperfections of market and other private‐sphere decision making, without weighing the shortcomings of the political alternatives. Markets and other private‐sphere decision arenas don't have to be perfect for them to improve upon public‐sector processes. In the latter, cognitive demands tend to be much greater, because of the divergence of modern social problems from the conditions that would have faced the hunter‐gatherers whose cognitive apparatus we have inherited. (shrink)

Defends a theory of social justice for education from within an egalitarian version of liberalism. The theory involves a strong commitment to educational equality, and to the idea that children's rights include a right to personal autonomy. The book argues that school reform must always be evaluated from the perspective of social justice and applies the theory, in particular, to school choice proposals. It looks at the parental choice schemes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in England and Wales, and argues that (...) they fall short of the requirements of justice, but that not all such schemes must do so. It elaborates an abstract voucher scheme that would combine choice with justice, and offers ways by which actual choice‐based reform can be modified to meet the requirements of justice. (shrink)

David Brady argues that low European poverty rates are a result of the welfare state. His finding relies on a relative measure of poverty, according to which the threshold for being poor differs across countries. Using the American poverty threshold as a fixed measure, though, Western Europe has a poverty rate of 18 percent, higher than that of the United States. Moreover, Brady's thesis that welfare-state spending explains cross-country differences in inequality does not take account of the problem of reverse (...) causality. Historically, welfare states developed in homogeneous nations that started out with higher levels of social capital and lower inequality. Scandinavia, for example, had unusually low poverty rates a century ago, and even today Americans with Scandinavian ancestry exhibit a poverty rate no higher than that in Scandinavia. Since poverty, social capital, population homogeneity, and the size of the welfare state relate in multiple ways to each other, we cannot rely on cross-country correlations to isolate the causal effect of the welfare state on poverty rates. (shrink)

David Brady argues that low European poverty rates are a result of the welfare state. His finding relies on a relative measure of poverty, according to which the threshold for being poor differs across countries. Using the American poverty threshold as a fixed measure, though, Western Europe has a poverty rate of 18 percent, higher than that of the United States. Moreover, Brady's thesis that welfare-state spending explains cross-country differences in inequality does not take account of the problem of reverse (...) causality. Historically, welfare states developed in homogeneous nations that started out with higher levels of social capital and lower inequality. Scandinavia, for example, had unusually low poverty rates a century ago, and even today Americans with Scandinavian ancestry exhibit a poverty rate no higher than that in Scandinavia. Since poverty, social capital, population homogeneity, and the size of the welfare state relate in multiple ways to each other, we cannot rely on cross-country correlations to isolate the causal effect of the welfare state on poverty rates. (shrink)