The Habermas Test: Arguing Well Means Being Willing to Move
Jürgen Habermas spent a career defending deliberative democracy — the idea that legitimate decisions emerge from reasoned public argument rather than raw numbers or inherited authority. In an Aeon essay, Emilie Prattico credits him with meeting his own standard: he never feared changing his mind. That is the part of deliberation everyone praises in the abstract and almost nobody enjoys in public. A real argument isn't a contest to see whose starting position survives; it presumes that participants can be moved by reasons, including reasons that turn them around. The flattering reading of this is intellectual honesty. The awkward reading is that the person who keeps revising his views can look, from the outside, exactly like the person who never held any.
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Open-mindedness is a virtue mostly in retrospect. A reversal in politics can be praised as growth or dismissed as opportunism, and the evidence offered for either verdict is usually the observer's prior opinion of the person doing the reversing.
The distinction worth keeping is whether the reasons changed or only the audience. That is the harder standard, and it is the one that makes a reputation like Habermas's something other than a long record of inconsistency.