Books about Deliberations from Amazon.com

A practicle guide for groups who want to incorporate creative silence, attentive listening and imagination into their routine meetings and working retreats..
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Must we put passions aside when we deliberate about justice? Can we do so? The dominant views of deliberation rightly emphasize the importance of impartiality as a cornerstone of fair decision making, but they wrongly assume that impartiality means being disengaged and passionless. In Civil Passions, Sharon Krause argues that moral and political deliberation must incorporate passions, even as she insists on the value of impartiality. Drawing on resources ranging from Hume's theory of moral sentiment to recent findings in neuroscience, Civil Passions breaks new ground by providing a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint that yields binding and compelling conclusions in politics. Krause shows that the path to genuinely impartial justice in the public sphere--and ultimately to social change and political reform--runs through moral sentiment properly construed. This new account of affective but impartial judgment calls for a politics of liberal rights and democratic contestation, and it requires us to reconceive the meaning of public reason, the nature of sound deliberation, and the authority of law. By illuminating how impartiality feels, Civil Passions offers not only a truer account of how we deliberate about justice, but one that promises to engage citizens more effectively in acting for justice.

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This text proposes a new kind of democracy for the modern era, one that not only gives citizens more power but also allows them more opportunities to exercise this power thoughtfully James S. Fishkin here suggests a solution to the problem of inadequate deliberation, in particular within the presidential nomination system. His reform involves a well-publicized national caucus in which a representative sample of American citizens would interact directly with presidential contenders in order to reflect and vote on the issues and candidates. In adapting democracy to the large-scale nation state, says Fishkin, Americans have previously had two choices. They could participate directly through primaries and referendums or they could depend on elite groups - such as party conventions and legislatures - to represent them. The first choice offers political equality but little chance for deliberation; the second offers the participants an opportunity to deliberate but provides less political equality for the electorate. The national caucus that Fishkin proposes - an example of what he calls a "deliberative opinion poll" - combines deliberation with direct democracy and reveals what the public would think if it had better conditions and information with which to explore and define the issues with the candidates. Arguing for the usefulness of deliberative opinion polls, Fishkin places them within the history of democratic theory and practice, exploring models of democracy ranging from ancient Athens and the debates of the American founders to contemporary transitions toward democracy in Eastern Europe. Fishkin's democratic system proposed in this book will be introduced to the American public in the beginning of the 1992 presidential selection season when the Public Broadcasting System televises the country's first deliberative opinion poll. The PBS 600 is scheduled for February 1992 when 600 randomly selected delegates representing the entire American electorate will convene with the presidential candidates in Austin, Texas for several days. Fishkin is the chief academic adviser to the program..
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This digital document is a journal article from Reliability Engineering and System Safety, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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The infrastructure renewal program at MIT consists of a large number of projects with an estimated budget that could approach $1 billion. Infrastructure renewal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is the process of evaluating and investing in the maintenance of facility systems and basic structure to preserve existing campus buildings. The selection and prioritization of projects must be addressed with a systematic method for the optimal allocation of funds and other resources. This paper presents a case study of a prioritization method utilizing multi-attribute utility theory. This method was developed at MIT's Department of Nuclear Engineering and was deployed by the Department of Facilities after appropriate modifications were implemented to address the idiosyncrasies of infrastructure renewal projects and the competing criteria and constraints that influence the judgment of the decision-makers. Such criteria include minimization of risk, optimization of economic impact, and coordination with academic policies, programs, and operations of the Institute. A brief overview of the method is presented, as well as the results of its application to the prioritization of infrastructure renewal projects. Results of workshops held at MIT with the participation of stakeholders demonstrate the feasibility of the prioritization method and the usefulness of this approach. .
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In Constitutional Deliberation in Congress J. Mitchell Pickerill analyzes the impact of the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions on Congressional debates and statutory language. Based on a thorough examination of how Congress responds to key Court rulings and strategizes in anticipation of them, Pickerill argues that judicial review—or the possibility of it—encourages Congressional attention to constitutional issues. Revealing critical aspects of how laws are made, revised, and refined within the separated system of government of the United States, he makes an important contribution to “constitutionalism outside the courts” debates.

Pickerill combines legislative histories, extensive empirical findings, and interviews with current and former members of Congress, congressional staff, and others. He examines data related to all of the federal legislation struck down by the Supreme Court from the beginning of the Warren Court in 1953 through the 1996–97 term of the Rehnquist Court. By looking at the legislative histories of Congressional acts that invoked the Commerce Clause and presented Tenth Amendment conflicts—such as the Child Labor Act (1916), the Civil Rights Act (1965), the Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990), and the Brady Bill (1994)—Pickerill illuminates how Congressional deliberation over newly proposed legislation is shaped by the possibility of judicial review. The Court’s invalidation of the Gun-Free School Zones Act in its 1995 ruling United States v. Lopez signaled an increased judicial activism regarding issues of federalism. Pickerill examines that case and compares congressional debate over constitutional issues in key pieces of legislation that preceded and followed it: the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1997. He shows that Congressional attention to federalism increased in the 1990s along with the Court’s greater scrutiny..
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How can we create a vital and inclusive pluralistic democracy? In Public Deliberation, James Bohman offers answers to this question, showing how democratic theory and democratic practice can be remade to face new challenges Arguing against the skepticism about democracy that flourishes today on both ends of the political spectrum, Bohman proposes a model of public deliberation that will allow expansions of democratic practice, even in the face of increasing pluralism, inequality, and social complexity.

Bohman develops a realistic model of deliberation by gradually introducing and analyzing the major tests facing deliberative democracy: cultural pluralism, social inequalities, social complexity, and community-wide biases and ideologies. The result is a new understanding of the ways in which public deliberation can be extended to meet the needs of modern societies..
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In this study of the discourse involved in martial deliberations, Ronald H. Carpenter examines the rhetoric employed by naval and military commanders as they recommend specific tactics and strategies to peers as well as presidents. Drawing on ideas of rhetorical thinking from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke, Carpenter identifies two concepts of particular importance to the military decision-making process: prudence and the representative anecdote. Carpenter suggests that attention to these two concepts enables an understanding of how military commanders settle on a course of action and persuade others to support them. Carpenter turns for illustration and insight to key case studies in which military commanders centered their rhetoric on representative anecdotes involving earlier campaigns. He shows Douglas MacArthur persuading the Joint Chiefs of Staff to act on his plan for the Inchon attack; Maxwell Taylor reacting to Robert Kennedy's invocation of Pearl Harbor in deliberations during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Japanese and American commanders deliberating during the battles of Pearl Harbor and Midway; and Orde Wingate, Bull Halsey, and MacArthur debating strategy in the Pacific. In all such deliberations the primary focus is the prudent course. Carpenter suggests that the trend in contemporary society from authoritarianism toward management by persuasion, explanation, and expertise similarly permeates the military. He contends that rhetorical proficiency in martial deliberations can be as important for a military leader as tactical and strategic expertise..
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Can we criticize those who hold beliefs which are likely to be wrong? Or must we abandon notions of truth and objectivity and claim that certain beliefs are best for us while incompatible beliefs are best for others? Truth, Politics, Morality addresses this crucial issue and its implications for democracy by arguing that the notion of truth ought to be returned to the center of moral and political philosophy. Cheryl Misak persuasively makes a case for a certain kind of pragmatism in which a true belief is one that could not be improved by inquiry, nor defeated by experience or argument. Her compelling discussion makes sense of the idea that, despite conflict, pluralism, and the expression of difference, our moral and political beliefs aim at truth and can be subject to justified criticism..
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