Democratic Deliberation and Public Bioethics

Since the 1990s, deliberative democracy has been the focus of increased scholarly attention, as well as the locus of initiatives intended to directly engage the public in matters of public concern. Geared to bringing the core tenets of public deliberation to bear onto different contexts within the public sphere, deliberative processes have been implemented in a range of forms, from citizens’ juries to national issue forums, from deliberative opinion polls to participatory budgeting. Ever more frequently, public deliberation has also gained traction in the field of public bioethics. Seizing on their intrinsic dialogic nature, scholars have proposed to harness deliberative processes as a means to address moral disagreement in the public sphere, in order to manage the ensuing and often irreconcilable conflicts around topics of bioethical sensitivity that challenge contemporary liberal democracies. Building upon these premises, this volume aims to reconstruct the theoretical as well as empirical processes of cross-pollination between deliberative democracy and public bioethics.