Evaluating Public Deliberation: Including the Audience Perspective

I argue that in evaluating public deliberation, the basic criterion should be how deliberating citizens’ need for usable input is met, rather than how the debaters embody Habermasian consensus-oriented ideals, and I question assessment of “deliberative quality” on that basis, such as the “Discourse Quality Index.” Studies of public deliberation should instead build on an Aristotelian notion of deliberation, on Rawls’s idea of “reasonable disagreement” and on the deliberating audience’s needs. To explore these, we need real-time studies of audience reception of public deliberation. I place the studies I call for in a typology of studies, present a study with novel methodological features and discuss its implications for criteria for public deliberation.

Scholastic Approaches to Reasonable Disagreement

The scholastic controversy on probable opinions in the seventeenth century was one of the most extensive and acrimonious debates of the early modern era. Historiography has treated it as a quarrel over moral casuistry, but this underestimates its import. The scholastic preoccupation with the ‘use of opinions’ should be understood as a search for a general framework for dealing with reasonable disagreement between competent evaluators of truth claims (not only moral ones). In the early modern era, scholastic analyses as well as regulations concerning the prudent and legitimate use of opinions acquired an unprecedented scope and depth. For the first time in European intellectual history, detailed theories of reasonable disagreement emerged, based on explicit characterizations of competing probable opinions as reasonably tenable.

Charles Larmore: a questão do desacordo razoável

The present text deals with Charles Larmore's theory, more precisely, of the relations between the conceptions of reasonable disagreement, pluralism and liberalism. Such a theory has as its characteristics rational intuitionism, contextualism and defends a realistic position of morality.