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DOI: 10.7330_9780874219203.c004 4 M e d i at i n g a n d I n t e g r at i v e A r g um e n t Give peace a chance. John Lennon (1940–1980) In the third unit of the course, students explored ways to mediate disputes and integrate opposing viewpoints, encouraging adversaries to cooperate on the basis of shared interests or goals. Although the project introduced a new set of circumstances for arguing, it also incorporated skills and tactics familiar from our work on reframing and attentive listening. The main difference from previous assignments was that the writer would be intervening in a dispute between other people, acting as a third party to a disagreement.1 To illustrate the act of mediating a dispute, I used my red cardboard arrows, positioning them in the familiar point-to-point relationship, facing one another along a linear axis. But this time a blue arrow entered on a right angle near the point of confrontation. The energy of this arrow moved the others out of the line of contact and, as the momentum shifted, all three proceeded along a new trajectory, blue in the middle and the red ones on either side. When I stopped the blue arrow, the other two continued ahead, as though they were trains on parallel tracks. From an initial position in which the arrows met head to head along a single track, pushing against one another, they ended up moving together along coordinated rather than competing paths. The demonstration provided a visual representation of integrative argument, especially the writer’s role as a mediator in a dispute. Integrative argument is similar to what Michael Gilbert calls “coalescent argumentation,” a mode of argument that aims “to bring together or coalesce diverse positions” (Gilbert 1997, xv). I prefer the term integrative , in part because it occurs in some of the literature on conflict resolution I have found most useful. For example, in When Push Comes to Shove: A Practical Guide for Meditating Disputes, Karl Slaikeu talks about outcomes that offer “integrative solutions to problems, which means that the 90   Barry M. Kroll final action plan includes elements that honor the interests of each side” (Slaikeu 1995, 5). Sam Kaner, in The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, discusses methods that “help people synthesize seemingly opposing alternatives into an integrated solution” (Kaner 2007, 241; italics added). And in Toward Better Problems, perhaps the book that has had the strongest impact on my thinking, Anthony Weston uses the term integrative to describe the effort to “weave conflicting and diverse values into a pattern or story . . . that gives us a way to relate them, to connect them, to try to make sense of them together, allowing them to differ without making the tension totally intractable” (Weston 1992, 30–31). Explo ring In teg r ati ve Approaches To give students a preview of what an integrative approach might involve, I asked them to read a newspaper editorial, “A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage” by David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch (New York Times, February 22, 2009). The writers announce that they have “very different positions on gay marriage.” Yet arguing over these positions has, they say, become unproductive, reaching a point at which further use of adversarial tactics is not going to be useful. To make progress, each side must consider what matters most to themselves and their opponents, agreeing about the core issues. Blankenhorn and Rauch identify the key positions in the following way. On one side, “Most gay and lesbian Americans feel they need and deserve the perquisites and protections that accompany legal marriage.” On the other side, “Many Americans of faith and many religious organizations have strong objections to samesex unions.” So where can the argument go from there? When we talked about the article in class, we focused on the authors’ suggestions for how to bring people on the two sides of the issue together around an agreement. Their proposal is that Congress should “bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage.” But there would be a condition: the federal government would “recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will.” There would also be “religious-conscience protections ” at...

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