Exorcising the positivist ghost in the priority-setting machine: NICE and the demise of the ‘social value judgement’

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the UK's primary health care priority-setting body, has traditionally described its decisions as being informed by ‘social value judgements’ about how resources should be allocated across society. This paper traces the intellectual history of this term and suggests that, in NICE's adoption of the idea of the ‘social value judgement’, we are hearing the echoes of welfare economics at a particular stage of its development, when logical positivism provided the basis for thinking about public policy choice. As such, it is argued that the term offers an overly simplistic conceptualisation of NICE's normative approach and contributes to a situation in which NICE finds itself without the necessary language fully and accurately to articulate its basis for decision-making. It is suggested that the notion of practical public reasoning, based on reflection about coherent principles of action, might provide a better characterisation of the enterprise in which NICE is, or hopes to be, engaged.

The Field and Study of Deliberative Democracy in Australia

Australia is recognized globally as an important hub for the study and practice of deliberative democracy. Both a normative and practical project, the field of deliberative democracy aims to improve the quality and inclusivity of public reasoning in collective decision-making. This chapter explores deliberative democracy in Australia from two angles. First, it discusses how a nation typically characterized by its adversarial and more majoritarian democratic system has become a significant international hotspot for scholars and practitioners of deliberative democracy. Second, the chapter examines how deliberative democracy has been applied as a lens to empirically study aspects of Australian politics. There is, the author argues, much more work for deliberative democrats to undertake in the Australian context, particularly in assessing and strengthening the deliberative capacity of the nation’s key political institutions.

Publicness and human development

Publicness is far from being a consecrated concept in the human development or capability literature. Instead, it is common to find references to other expressions about ‘public’ such as ‘public reason’ or ‘public reasoning’, ‘public values’, and ‘public goods’. It is important to examine the key concept of ‘public reason’ in Rawls and how it has been discussed by Sen and Nussbaum. However, a concrete concern of this chapter is how to think more broadly in terms of publicness from a human development perspective. In order to make this discussion more concrete, the chapter considers the context of BRICS in terms of the provision of public goods, defining three different levels of publicness. By doing so, it dialogues with what Nussbaum called ‘the institutional side of political emotions’ in societies that have been going through key economic and societal transformations. The public sphere of human development is easier to theorize than to see reflected in concrete indicators.

Hoffnung

Hope. A Philosophical Outlook The »Concept of Hope« has been established as a central idea in Philosophy not earlier than in the Philosophy of Enlightenment by Kant. In Kant’s Philosophy, the concept of hope is describing a constitutive dimension of »Reason« in its »practical use« which is mediating Political Philosophy with Kant’s Philosophy of Religion. As we can see Kant is following much more the biblical tradition on hope than the former understanding of hope as a virtue in Philosophy. From the insight of Kant, Philosophy today is able to learn about the fundamental importance of the concept of hope for a contemporary theory of public reasoning.

Socio-Economic Progress with Poor Governance: How are Amartya Sen’s Thoughts Relevant for Contemporary Bangladesh?

The overriding concerns of Amartya Sen’s writings are about how to promote public action towards achieving an equitable and just society, which particularly addresses the needs of the underprivileged. While his ideas are of great relevance for all developing countries, this is more so for India and Bangladesh—the two countries that provide the socio-economic settings for much of his empirical works. Sen has praised the remarkable progress in many social development indicators that Bangladesh has achieved compared to India, despite having a much lower per capita income and suffering from the same, or even much worse, institutional and policy failures. In fact, the contradictions of Bangladesh lie in its impressive socio-economic progress achieved under extremely poor institutions of economic and political governance. By drawing upon Sen’s writings on issues ranging from human development and social inequalities to the concepts of freedom and “public reasoning”, this essay aims at understanding the factors underlying Bangladesh’s achievements and the challenges that lie ahead.

How deliberative designs empower citizens’ voices: A case study on Ghana’s deliberative poll on agriculture and the environment

Empowering ordinary citizens with the capacity to deliberate is a core issue in science communication. Despite growing deliberative practices in developed nations, it is significantly less understood how public deliberation can happen among populations who live with limited educational resources and poor urban infrastructure in developing countries. This article studied a case of a well-designed deliberation method, Deliberative Poll, in Tamale, Ghana. I analyzed the stimulus information video and thousands of speech acts from deliberation transcripts to examine how expertise was used and what was deliberated in public dialogue. A broad range of expertise and interests were represented. Participants had thoughtful discussions on complex policy issues and their discussion results were considered by local policymakers. This article contributes to our understanding of how to effectively foster public deliberation among populations in the Global South and measure the nuances of expertise and public reasoning on science.