a familiar criticism of kant, made by hegel and his followers, j .s. mill and others, is that there are no maxims that are in fact contradictory, as required for morality on kant's view. in this paper, i discuss the suggestion that our capacity for rational reflection itself implies universality, and that it is this universality that obliges us to act morally. i consider the idea that self...

The suggestion that deliberative democratic approaches would suit the management of bioethical policymaking in democratic pluralistic societies has triggered what has been called the "deliberative turn" in health policy and bioethics. Most of the empirical work in this area has focused on the allocation of healthcare resources and priority setting at the local or national level. The variety of ...

Electronic democracy has been in use in many countries around the world with mixed success. With the power of the web 2.0 technologies, there are more opportunities to enhance the democratic process through the use of social networking tools. Social networks showed potential for facilitating democracy and democratic change during the Arab spring revolutions, suggesting that they could be utiliz...

This essay takes as its starting point an apparent tension between theories of democratic deliberation and democratic theories of multicultural accommodation and makes the case that many multiculturalists and deliberative democrats converge on an ideal of political freedom, understood as nondomination. It argues for distinguishing two dimensions of nondomination: inter-agentive nondomination, w...

This essay draws from game design to improve the prospects of democratic deliberation during government consultation with public. The argument begins by reviewing problem low-quality in contemporary discourse, then explains how games can motivate participants engage demanding behaviors, such as deliberation. Key features include: origin, governance, and oversight game; networked small groups at...

Questions about the relevance of religious views to public policy have been central in debates over the governance of biotechnology since the 1960s. This article offers an empirical analysis of moments of deliberative politics surrounding human embryo research, primarily within public bioethics bodies. I examine how these bodies have used the idea of public reason as developed in deliberative d...

Electronic democracy has been in use in many countries around the world with mixed success. With the power of the web 2.0 technologies, there are more opportunities to enhance the democratic process through the use of social networking tools. Social networks showed potential for facilitating democracy and democratic change during the Arab spring revolutions, suggesti...

Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achiev­ ing. In this paper, we present a branching­ time possible-worlds model for representing and reasoning about, beliefs, goals, inten­ tions, time, actions, probabilities, and...

This paper poses a Deweyan challenge to both the neoclassical framework of rational choice and models of bounded rationality and deliberation, especially the procedural theory of rationality advanced by Herbert Simon. We demonstrate how modern theories on procedural or instrumental rationality trace their origin to the tradition of British empiricism, especially the philosophy of David Hume. Mo...