An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls but regularly withheld the truth from their patients, Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care and explain the problem with Americans wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having amongst the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation. Gutmann and Moreno-"incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers" (Arthur Caplan)-demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning world of organ transplants and new reproductive technologies that benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges. With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer research, infectious disease and drug development provide Americans with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage? How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for them? What's fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in truly life-and-death situations? A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without paying the price.

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target. In this landmark book, Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book "Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition,"" this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jurgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.

Praise for the previous edition: "

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow directs his attention here to one of today's most controversial social issues: how to get people off welfare and into jobs. With characteristic eloquence, wit, and rigor, Solow condemns the welfare reforms recently passed by Congress and President Clinton for confronting welfare recipients with an unworkable choice--finding work in the current labor market or losing benefits. He argues that the only practical and fair way to move recipients to work is, in contrast, through an ambitious plan to guarantee that every able-bodied citizen has access to a job.

Solow contends that the demand implicit in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act for welfare recipients to find work in the existing labor market has two crucial flaws. First, the labor market would not easily make room for a huge influx of unskilled, inexperienced workers. Second, the normal market adjustment to that influx would drive down earnings for those already in low-wage jobs. Solow concludes that it is legitimate to want welfare recipients to work, but not to want them to live at a miserable standard or to benefit at the expense of the working poor, especially since children are often the first to suffer. Instead, he writes, we should create new demand for unskilled labor through public-service employment and incentives to the private sector--in effect, fair "workfare." Solow presents widely ignored evidence that recipients themselves would welcome the chance to work. But he also points out that practical, morally defensible workfare would be extremely expensive--a problem that politicians who support the idea blithely fail to admit. Throughout, Solow places debate over welfare reform in the context of a struggle to balance competing social values, in particular self-reliance and altruism.

The book originated in Solow's 1997 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. It includes reactions from the distinguished scholars Gertrude Himmelfarb, Anthony Lewis, Glenn Loury, and John Roemer, who expand on and take issue with Solow's arguments. "Work and Welfare" is a powerful contribution to debate about welfare reform and a penetrating look at the values that shape its course.

This book makes a significant contribution to the tradition of liberal political theory: it explores the foundations and limits of the idea of equality within that theory and offers a sustained argument for a persuasive new view of liberalism. Liberal thinking has always displayed a tension between the claims of liberty and those of equality. Professor Gutmann examines the contributions of liberal theorists from Locke to Rawls on the subject of two kinds of equality - equality of opportunity to participate and the equal distribution of economic goods. Valuing both, she shows that, far from being alternatives, the two ideals are compatible to a much greater degree than has previously been thought. Liberal Equality restores egalitarianism to political theory in a way that will forcefully challenge its critics to deeper reflection.

Who should have the authority to shape the education of citizens in a democracy? This is the central question posed by Amy Gutmann in the first book-length study of the democratic theory of education. The author tackles a wide range of issues, from the democratic case against book banning to the role of teachers' unions in education, as well as the vexed questions of public support for private schools and affirmative action in college admissions.

An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls but regularly withheld the truth from their patients, Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care and explain the problem with Americans wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having amongst the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation. Gutmann and Moreno-"incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers" (Arthur Caplan)-demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning world of organ transplants and new reproductive technologies that benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges. With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer research, infectious disease and drug development provide Americans with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage? How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for them? What's fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in truly life-and-death situations? A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without paying the price.

We are all familiar with the image of the immensely clever judge who discerns the best rule of common law for the case at hand. According to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a judge like this can maneuver through earlier cases to achieve the desired aim--"distinguishing one prior case on his left, straight-arming another one on his right, high-stepping away from another precedent about to tackle him from the rear, until (bravo!) he reaches the goal--good law." But is this common-law mindset, which is appropriate in its place, suitable also in statutory and constitutional interpretation? In a witty and trenchant essay, Justice Scalia answers this question with a resounding negative. In exploring the neglected art of statutory interpretation, Scalia urges that judges resist the temptation to use legislative intention and legislative history. In his view, it is incompatible with democratic government to allow the meaning of a statute to be determined by what the judges think the lawgivers meant rather than by what the legislature actually promulgated. Eschewing the judicial lawmaking that is the essence of common law, judges should interpret statutes and regulations by focusing on the text itself. Scalia then extends this principle to constitutional law. He proposes that we abandon the notion of an everchanging Constitution and pay attention to the Constitution's original meaning. Although not subscribing to the "strict constructionism" that would prevent applying the Constitution to modern circumstances, Scalia emphatically rejects the idea that judges can properly "smuggle" in new rights or deny old rights by using the Due Process Clause, for instance. In fact, such judicial discretion might lead to the destruction of the Bill of Rights if a majority of the judges ever wished to reach that most undesirable of goals. This essay is followed by four commentaries by Professors Gordon Wood, Laurence Tribe, Mary Ann Glendon, and Ronald Dworkin, who engage Justice Scalia's ideas about judicial interpretation from varying standpoints. In the spirit of debate, Justice Scalia responds to these critics. Featuring a new foreword that discusses Scalia's impact, jurisprudence, and legacy, this witty and trenchant exchange illuminates the brilliance of one of the most influential legal minds of our time.

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.

Leading experts address questions of public and private roles in assessing, managing, and mitigating major risks to public health and safety in light of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. "This volume provides important insights from the nation's leading experts on how we, as a community and nation, should be rethinking disaster assessment, prevention, and mitigation. Policymakers, legislators, business leaders, and scholars: this is a must-read."--Jon Huntsman, Jr., Governor of Utah "An indispensable resource for all who seek to learn from the unprecedented devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. I commend the authors for recording the valuable lessons learned. Their work will assuredly help our communities be better prepared for the next catastrophe."--James Lee Witt, former Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency "An enormously important volume that comes at just the right time. In the wake of Katrina, new thinking is urgently needed on how to manage catastrophic risk most effectively--especially regarding prevention and recovery. This precious volume offers insights on both fronts, with contributions from many of the nation's leading authorities on risk and disaster. It is a must-read for scholars and policymakers alike."--David A. Moss, Harvard Business School Hurricane Katrina not only devastated a large area of the nation's Gulf coast, it also raised fundamental questions about ways the nation can, and should, deal with the inevitable problems of economic risk and social responsibility. This volume gathers leading experts to examine lessons that Hurricane Katrina teaches us about better assessing, perceiving, and managing risks from future disasters. The 20 contributors to this volume address questions of public and private roles in assessing, managing, and dealing with risk in American society and suggest strategies for moving ahead in rebuilding the Gulf coast. Contributors: Matthew Adler, Vicki Bier, Baruch Fischhoff, Kenneth R. Foster, Robert Giegengack, Peter Gosselin, Scott E. Harrington, Carolyn Kousky, Robert Meyer, Harvey G. Ryland, Brian L. Strom, Kathleen Tierney, Michael J. Trebilcock, Detlof von Winterfeldt, Jonathan Walters, Richard J. Zeckhauser. Ronald J. Daniels is Provost and Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely, including Rethinking the Welfare State: The Prospects for Government by Voucher (with Michael Trebilcock) and The Security of Freedom: Essays on Canada's Anti-Terrorism Bill (coedited with Patrick Macklem and Kent Roach). Donald F. Kettl, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, has written or edited "System under Stress: Homeland Security and American Politics," "The Global Public Management Revolution," "The Politics of the Administrative Process" (with James W. Fesler), "The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for the 21st Century," among many other books. Howard Kunreuther is Professor and Codirector of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. His has written or coedited a number of books, including "Catastrophe Modeling: A New Approach to Managing Risk" (with Patricia Grossi) and "Wharton on Making Decisions" (with Stephen Hoch). Amy Gutmann is the eighth President of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "Why Deliberative Democracy?" (with Dennis Thompson), "Identity in Democracy, Democratic Education, Democracy and Disagreement" (with Dennis Thompson), and "Color Conscious" (with K. Anthony Appiah). Her reviews have appeared in the "New York Times Book Review," "Times Literary Supplement," "Washington Post," and other general publications.

Printer and publisher, author and educator, scientist and inventor, statesman and philanthropist, Benjamin Franklin was the very embodiment of the American type of self-made man. In 1771, at the age of 65, he sat down to write his autobiography, "having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of felicity." The result is a classic of American literature. On the eve of the tercentenary of Franklin's birth, the university he founded has selected the Autobiography for the Penn Reading Project. Each year, for the past fifteen years, the University of Pennsylvania has chosen a single work that the entire incoming class, and a large segment of the faculty and staff, read and discuss together. For this occasion the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish a special edition of Franklin's Autobiography, including a new preface by University president Amy Gutmann and an introduction by distinguished scholar Peter Conn. The volume will also include four short essays by noted Penn professors as well as a chronology of Franklin's life and the text of Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, a document resulting in the establishment of an institution of higher education that ultimately became the University of Pennsylvania. No area of human endeavor escaped Franklin's keen attentions. His ideas and values, as Amy Gutmann notes in her remarks, have shaped the modern University of Pennsylvania profoundly, "more profoundly than have the founders of any other major university of college in the United States." Franklin believed that he had been born too soon. Readers will recognize that his spirit lives on at Penn today. Essay contributors: Richard R. Beeman, Paul Guyer, Michael Weisberg, and Michael Zuckerman.

In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In "Color Conscious," K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's most vexing problem.

Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that "race" has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various "essences" to them. Appiah argues that, while people of color may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under the banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life.

Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being color blind because American society is not color blind. Fairness, not color blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice. Whether policies should be color-conscious, class conscious, or both in particular situations, depends on an open-minded assessment of their fairness. Exploring timely issues of university admissions, corporate hiring, and political representation, Gutmann develops a moral perspective that supports a commitment to constitutional democracy.

Appiah and Gutmann write candidly and carefully, presenting many-faceted interpretations of a host of controversial issues. Rather than supplying simple answers to complex questions, they offer to citizens of every color principled starting points for the ongoing national discussions about race.

Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation-state's monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges. Ignatieff argues that human rights activists have rightly drawn criticism from Asia, the Islamic world, and within the West itself for being overambitious and unwilling to accept limits. It is now time, he writes, for activists to embrace a more modest agenda and to reestablish the balance between the rights of states and the rights of citizens.

Ignatieff begins by examining the politics of human rights, assessing when it is appropriate to use the fact of human rights abuse to justify intervention in other countries. He then explores the ideas that underpin human rights, warning that human rights must not become an idolatry. In the spirit of Isaiah Berlin, he argues that human rights can command universal assent only if they are designed to protect and enhance the capacity of individuals to lead the lives they wish. By embracing this approach and recognizing that state sovereignty is the best guarantee against chaos, Ignatieff concludes, Western nations will have a better chance of extending the real progress of the past fifty years. Throughout, Ignatieff balances idealism with a sure sense of practical reality earned from his years of travel in zones of war and political turmoil around the globe.

Based on the Tanner Lectures that Ignatieff delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2000, the book includes two chapters by Ignatieff, an introduction by Amy Gutmann, comments by four leading scholars--K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher--and a response by Ignatieff.

Americans are joiners. They are members of churches, fraternal and sororal orders, sports leagues, community centers, parent-teacher associations, professional associations, residential associations, literary societies, national and international charities, and service organizations of seemingly all sorts. Social scientists are engaged in a lively argument about whether decreasing proportions of Americans over the past several decades have been joining secondary associations, but no one disputes that freedom of association remains a fundamental personal and political value in the United States. "Nothing," Alexis de Tocqueville argued, "deserves more attention." Yet the value and limits of free association in the United States have not received the attention they deserve. Why is freedom of association valuable for the lives of individuals? What does it contribute to the life of a liberal democracy? This volume explores the individual and civic values of associational freedom in a liberal democracy, as well as the moral and constitutional limits of claims to associational freedom.

Beginning with an introductory essay on freedom of association by Amy Gutmann, the first part of this timely volume includes essays on individual rights of association by George Kateb, Michael Walzer, Kent Greenawalt, and Nancy Rosenblum, and the second part includes essays on civic values of association by Will Kymlicka, Yael Tamir, Daniel A. Bell, Sam Fleischacker, Alan Ryan, and Stuart White.

The essays in this volume explore the moral foundations and the political prospects of the welfare state in the United States. Among the questions addressed are the following: Has public support for the welfare state faded? Can a democratic state provide welfare without producing dependency on welfare? Is a capitalist (or socialist) economy consistent with the preservation of equal liberty and equal opportunity for all citizens? Why and in what ways does the welfare state discriminate against women? Can we justify limiting immigration for the sake of safeguarding the welfare of Americans? How can elementary and secondary education be distributed consistently with democratic values? The volume confronts powerful criticisms that have been leveled against the welfare state by conservatives, liberals, and radicals and suggests reforms in welfare state programs that might meet these criticisms.

The contributors are Joseph H. Carens, Jon Elster, Robert K. Fullinwider, Amy Gutmann, Jennifer L. Hochschild, Stanley Kelley, Jr., Richard Krouse, Michael McPherson, J. Donald Moon, Carole Pateman, Dennis Thompson, and Michael Walzer.

How should we live? What do we owe to other people? In "Goodness and Advice," the eminent philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson explores how we should go about answering such fundamental questions. In doing so, she makes major advances in moral philosophy, pointing to some deep problems for influential moral theories and describing the structure of a new and much more promising theory.

Thomson begins by lamenting the prevalence of the idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between fact and value--that to say something is good, for example, is not to state a fact, but to do something more like expressing an attitude or feeling. She sets out to challenge this view, first by assessing the apparently powerful claims of Consequentialism. Thomson makes the striking argument that this familiar theory must ultimately fail because its basic requirement--that people should act to bring about the "most good"--is meaningless. It rests on an incoherent conception of goodness, and supplies, not mistaken advice, but no advice at all.

Thomson then outlines the theory that she thinks we should opt for instead. This theory says that no acts are, simply, good: an act can at most be good in one or another way--as, for example, good for Smith or for Jones. What we ought to do is, most importantly, to avoid injustice; and whether an act is unjust is a function both of the rights of those affected, including the agent, and of how good or bad the act is for them. The book, which originated in the Tanner lectures that Thomson delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 1999, includes two chapters by Thomson ("Goodness" and "Advice"), provocative comments by four prominent scholars--Martha Nussbaum, Jerome Schneewind, Philip Fisher, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith--and replies by Thomson to those comments.

"Even though identity is a big subject these days, the role of identity in democratic politics has received far too little critical attention. It tends to get either indiscriminate praise as a route to self-realization and to group justice, or derogatory dismissal as a vehicle of prejudice and partiality, or radical neglect as a poor relation of group interest. Amy Gutmann's book provides a splendid scrutiny of this rich and diverse terrain, ending with a coherent and integrated understanding of the role of identity groups in democratic politics. We have reasons to be grateful."--Amartya Sen, Trinity College, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics

"For anyone who believes that identity politics is just identity politics, this timely book will be a revelation. Comprehensive and full of brilliant insight, it remains always accessible as it puts identity politics through its philosophical paces, revealing along the way its indispensability to all politics, to 'civic equality, liberty, and opportunity'--to democracy itself."--Claude Steele, Stanford University

"Amy Gutmann has an unusual--and extremely valuable--ability to take large, contentious subjects and discuss them calmly, lucidly, and imaginatively. The politics of identity and culture easily arouse violent passions even in academia, but this book shows that it is possible to argue toughly and to reach firm conclusions without once resorting to name-calling. I doubt that even one of her readers will agree with all of Gutmann's conclusions--but they will all have to take account of the wealth of empirical evidence and stringent reasoning in this book."--Alan Ryan, Oxford University

"Like all of Gutmann's work, this book is verywell written, clear, convincing, and most of all a pleasure to read. It will become a must for those interested in democracy and human rights as well as in identity group politics and the status of minorities, and will therefore draw the attention of large audiences."--Yael Tamir, Tel-Aviv University, author of "Liberal Nationalism"

""Identity in Democracy" is marked by all of the scholarly virtues to which Amy Gutmann has accustomed her readers. It is a sensible and humane work by a theorist who has no particular theoretical axe to grind, aside from the laudable concern to spell out principles that will allow individuals and liberal democratic societies to benefit optimally from associational life while avoiding some of its seamier aspects."--Daniel Weinstock, University of Montreal

The din and deadlock of public life in America - where insults are traded, slogans proclaimed, and self-serving deals are made and unmade - reveal the deep disagreement that pervades our democracy. The disagreement is not only political but also moral, as citizens and their representatives increasingly take extreme and intransigent positions. A better kind of public discussion is needed, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson provide an eloquent argument for "deliberative democracy" today. They develop a principled framework for opponents to come together on moral and political issues. Gutmann and Thompson show how a deliberative democracy can address some of our most difficult controversies - from abortion and affirmative action to health care and welfare - and can allow diverse groups separated by class, race, religion, and gender to reason together. Their work goes beyond that of most political theorists and social scientists by exploring both the principles for reasonable argument and their application to actual cases. Not only do the authors suggest how deliberative democracy can work, they also show why improving our collective capacity for moral argument is better than referring all disagreements to procedural politics or judicial institutions. Democracy and Disagreement presents a compelling approach to how we might resolve some of our most trying moral disagreements and live with those that will inevitably persist, on terms that all of us can respect.