Abstract

The question of what it means to deliberate well over public goods organizes the central focus of this study. It addresses the question through an examination of the discourse of mainstream American conservative writers and looks to classical modes of prudential or practical reasoning to evaluate it. In their efforts to rehabilitate prudence, conservatives join several moral philosophers, social critics, and rhetoricians who call for a renewed interest in this mode of reasoning to revitalize an enervated public sphere. ;Specifically, the study examines representative American conservatives to illuminate the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of contemporary practical reasoning. These writers, as willing heirs to the tradition of prudential reasoning, attempt to revive it to explore a range of public goods. In doing so, they uncover close relationships between prudence and its allies, rhetoric and practical ethics. In this study, I show that conservative efforts to rehabilitate prudence are neither straightforward nor simple. Conservatives, deliberating within a postmodern context of lost faith in a suspect rationality, extreme philosophical scepticism, and the plural nature of citizen deliberators, have revived a prudence that is changed by its circumstances. ;These changes complicate the prudential relations between the twin pillars of character and experience that constitute classical prudence, destabilize the wisdom of collective and personal narratives, and point to some slippage in the deductive force of practical reasoning derived from probable first premises. Changes that force a rhetorical renegotiation on each of these points suggest that prudence, as intensely sensitive to its context, leads conservative deliberators to a process that is more like the process described by others of widely divergent intellectual and political standpoints than it is to Aristotelian and Ciceronian formulations. Faced with increasingly diverse, interrelated, and complex deliberative contexts, even among themselves, conservatives have uncovered virtues that arise out of the deliberative process itself. While not entirely abandoning pagan character virtues of justice, courage, magnanimity, and magnificence, conservatives point more toward dialogical virtues that stress volitional, ethical, and relational skills associated with empowerment and empathic engagement among factions. The study concludes with the pedagogical implications of these findings