Deliberative democracy and intelligent design: The ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover

Abstract

The Federal District Court decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover halted a school board's attempts to introduce an `intelligent design' account of human origins into science classrooms as an alternative to evolution. The judge's opinion judged the Board members' actions by implicit standards of deliberative democratic discourse, which this article explicates through reference to Rawls's Political Liberalism and Gutmann and Thompson's Democracy and Disagreement.The judge argued that, by their actions in this circumstance, intelligent design advocates did not adhere to these standards. He further argued that it would be impossible for them to do so, because intelligent design is a relabeling of creationism, which has repeatedly failed to meet considered judgments of the definition of science.