Ten Bad Assumptions about Public Deliberation

1. Bad deliberations happen when and only when people have the wrong feelings (especially when the wrong people have them) and bad intentions (and people know when they have bad intentions).
2. Having the wrong feelings makes you (or signals that you are?) irrational; rationality is signaled by a tone (dispassionate, aware but dismissive of the opposition), diction, rationality markers, and expert data.
3. Hatred of an outgroup is always self-conscious and always total (you hate every single thing about them), so that you are rational about the outgroup if you did not consciously intend harm, and are able to identify any virtue in the outgroup.
4. The just world hypothesis—this world, with the current distribution of goods, is just; any other arrangement is unjust. The social order is grounded in the ontic logos.
5. Good decisions come from good people because good people have good judgment (and bad people have bad judgment).
6. Good judgment is signaled by having the right feelings (especially about me), espousing my values, and being certain.
7. Good judgment marks itself as happening in a moment of clarity, so people who have good judgment are certain; a person's degree of certainty is a consequence of the degree of clarity with which that person sees the situation (i.e., certainty is a cognitive state).
8. If a statement is true (which is determined by my agreeing with it) then it must be logical.
9. My memories of what the world was like when I was a child are accurate representations of what that world was like for everyone at the time.
10. That a particular method (of hermeneutics, conflict resolution, or political arrangement, or anything else) has repeatedly led to bad outcomes is no reasonto doubt the method, but can be attributed to the people who engaged in the method having had the wrong feelings and intentions. Recommitting to the method with new feelings will lead to good outcomes.