Democratic Deliberation and Public Bioethics: The Role of Moderators in Moral and Political Disagreements (Politics)

Deliberative democracy increasingly engages public bioethics, confronting moral disagreement through dialogic, cross-disciplinary approaches.

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.

Virginia Sanchini, PhD, is currently Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at the Department of Oncology and Hemato-Oncology at the University of Milan. She is also Member of the Faculty in the Medical Humanities PhD programme at the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research areas focus on the fields of research ethics, clinical ethics, deliberative democratic approaches to bioethics and empirical bioethics.