Bioethics and Deliberative Democracy

The Washington Post recently interviewed Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania. A political scientist, she chairs the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethics.

Why did you decide to take on this challenge?

My scholarly expertise is political philosophy and ethics of public policy. I spent my entire professional career writing and speaking about ethics of public policy and in particular about the advantages of making democracy more deliberative. I founded an ethics center at Princeton -- the University Center for Human Values. I've written books on deliberation and democracy and articles on bioethics. So when the president asked me, it seemed, first, "How could I not accept a call to serve from the president?" And, second, it was a sweet spot of mine to be able to bring a group of experts together to deliberate about important issues in bioethics.

You are known for this idea of deliberative democracy. Could you explain it?

The easiest way of understanding it is what it isn't: It's the opposite of sound-bite democracy. The idea is quite simple, which is: Democracies do better to the extent that they allow people to discuss, including robustly argue about, their differences to try to find common ground where possible -- and, where common ground isn't possible, to come to the greatest respect possible for reasonable differences of perspective on controversial issues. So it's the give-and-take of viewpoints with an aim of finding common ground and reaching mutual respect where common ground isn't possible.

Can you give an example of how this might work?

I think all of the previous bioethics commissions have been models of deliberation. They have all brought commissioners from different perspectives together to talk and argue with an idea of coming up with some action-guiding recommendation. Let me give you the most obvious example from recent history: the commission that President Clinton put together. Shortly after it was formed, Dolly was cloned, and President Clinton charged the commission with coming up with recommendations on how the government should approach the issue of cloning. The commission deliberated and came up with a report that the president recommended. Similarly, on a different issue, shortly after our commission was created, Craig Venter announced that he had synthesized a genome in a cell that was self-replicating. And President Obama has asked our commission to deliberate on that issue and come up with a report in six months that recommends to the federal government policies that the government should undertake, both in reaction to this development and other developments in the field.