Deliberative Democracy and Precautionary Public Reasoning: Exploratory Thoughts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Because public policy is legally binding and, perhaps more pointedly, can have pervasive social and environmental consequences for the autonomy of persons, it should be justifiable to those it could so affect. What is much more controversial, and what constitutes the basic intuitive claim of this exploratory paper, is that certain public policies should be morally justifiable to both existing and future persons. My concern is with policies in such areas as energy, climate change control, nuclear waste management, natural resources management, and genomics research and commercialization, which can no doubt improve our lives and our descendant’s lives, but which can also result in tremendous adverse effects for centuries to come. In this short paper, I suggest that the ideal of deliberative democracy provides a way of morally justifying such policies to both existing and future generations. If we take seriously the requirements of this ideal, we may have to modify our public reasoning so that it includes reasons that are generally acceptable among contemporaries as well as reasons that would be acceptable to posterity. The suggestion I make in this paper is that integral to the ideal of deliberative democracy in the transgenerational context is a future-oriented and precautionary public reasoning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".