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"Rational deliberation is not a switch to be thrown on or off. It is a process, and therefore many of its effects would have to be measured over time. Tellingly, the participants in Haidt's original harmless taboo studies study had little time to deliberate. But as other studies have suggested when people are given more time to reflect, they can change their beliefs to fit the evidence, even when those beliefs might be initially emotionally uncomfortable to them. "To engage in democratic politics means seeing your fellow citizens as equal autonomous agents capable of making up their own minds. And that means that in a functioning democracy, we owe one another reasons for our political actions. "Giving up on the idea that reason matters is not only premature from a scientific point of view; it throws in the towel on an essential democratic hope. Politics needn't always be war by other means; democracies can, and should be places where the exchange of reasons is encouraged. This hope is not a delusion; it is an ideal - and in our countdown to November, one still worth striving for."

'Adrienne Asch, an internationally known bioethicist who opposed the use of prenatal testing and abortion to select children free of disabilities, a stance informed partly by her own experience of blindness, died on Nov. 19 at her home in Manhattan. She was 67. 'In an article in The American Journal of Public Health in 1999, Professor Asch laid out her philosophy in no uncertain terms: "If public health espouses goals of social justice and equality for people with disabilities - as it has worked to improve the status of women, gays and lesbians, and members of racial and ethnic minorities - it should reconsider whether it wishes to continue the technology of prenatal diagnosis," she wrote. 'She added: "My moral opposition to prenatal testing and selective abortion flows from the conviction that life with disability is worthwhile and the belief that a just society must appreciate and nurture the lives of all people, whatever the endowments they receive in the natural lottery." '

H.J. Aaron (health economist) and R.D. Reischauer (former director of HBO): "Health care reform advocates will and should celebrate their history-making legislative success.... But supporters must not relax. They should prepare to meet the serious challenges that remain.... Far from having ended, the war to make health care reform an enduring success has just begun. Winning that war will require administrative determination and imagination and as much political resolve as was needed to pass the legislation."