Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue

Geoffrey Klempner
Here, I examine the nature of ethical dialogue from the point of view of its foundations in
the critique of the dominant, disinterested conception of ethics, relating this to my 20 year
experience corresponding with students taking courses with Pathways to Philosophy, including
a prisoner on Death Row, Texas, USA. Ethical dialogue, where we seek the best outcome by our
collective lights, is contrasted with activity in the business arena, where traders are assumed to
be acting from purely self-interested motives. The role of philosophy as an activity of seeking,
in the words of the metaphysician F.H. Bradley, ‘bad reasons for what we believe on instinct’ is
examined from the point of view of our practical interest in learning how to engage in ethical
dialogue, as well as the need to defend the theory of ethical dialogue against rival views. From the
standpoint of theory, the ethics of dialogue is the conclusion of a three-part dialectical argument
involving the refutation of solipsism and the subsequent refutation of anti-solipsism. Looking
at ethical dialogue from the standpoint of praxis, it appears that learning ethical dialogue is
more like learning to dance than learning an intellectual game like chess. It can’t be taught from
a book. One learns ethical dialogue by engaging in ethical dialogue. One consequence of this
radical conception of ethics is a new version of the problem of akrasia. You have the knowledge
and the will, but fail ethically because of your practical inability to engage the other person in
ethical dialogue.

Keywords: philosophical analysis, metaphysics, utilitarianism and deontology, religion, game

theory, philosophy of business

Part I
On 10th December, 2003, Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, his roommate Chris
Brashear, and a neighbour, Steve Champagne, carried out an ingenious plan to
murder Thomas Whitaker’s father, mother and younger brother. The Whitaker
family had gone out to dinner to celebrate Thomas’s graduation from Houston State
College. However, the story about the graduation was a lie. When the Whitakers
returned to their home in Sugar Land, Texas, Brashear, who was lying in wait,
shot and killed Thomas Whitaker’s mother and brother. He shot, but failed to kill,
Thomas Whitaker’s father, Kent. Brashear then shot Thomas Whitaker in the arm.
Brashear fled the scene with Champagne, who was waiting outside in a getaway car.
(Whitaker, T.B. 2012)

Dr. Geoffrey Klempner is Director of the Pathways School of Philosophy, Sheffield UK, and
founder member of the International Society for Philosophers.
10 Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

Hospitalised on a morphine drip, Kent Whitaker sensed that he had an important

decision to make:

I realized that God was offering me the ability to forgive, if I wanted to take
advantage of it. Did I really want to forgive this guy? I know the Bible says
we are to forgive those who hurt us. I know God tells us that vengeance is his,
if he chooses to dispense it. I have even heard secular health professionals say
that forgiveness is the most important thing people can do to heal themselves.
But did I really want to forgive, even if God was offering a supernatural
ability to do so?

In an instant the answer sprang full-grown into my mind. My heart told

me that I wanted whoever was responsible to come to Christ and repent
for this awful act. At that moment I felt myself completely forgiving him.
This forgiveness astounded me, because earlier I had experienced feelings
of incredible sadness and intense anger – even the desire to kill the person
responsible with my own hands. Little did I realize just how important
my decision to forgive would be in the coming months. It would change
everything. (Whitaker, K. 2009)

In 2010, I received an email from Tanya Whitaker, Kent Whitaker’s second wife.
She and her husband wished to book the Pathways Moral Philosophy Programme
(Klempner 1997) for ‘our son’ Thomas, a prisoner in the Polunsky Unit, Texas
Department of Criminal Justice. I had never heard of Thomas Whitaker. It had
been big news in the USA, where Kent was interviewed on the Oprah Winfrey
Show. Thomas duly completed his programme over the subsequent months. By this
time, I knew the whole story. Thomas Whitaker had quickly come under suspicion
from detectives investigating the murder case. On the run in Mexico, Thomas was
finally arrested in September, 2005, and was extradited to the USA where he stood
trial at Fort Bend County, Texas. He was convicted and sentenced to death for First
Degree Murder in March, 2007. Subsequent appeals have so far failed to reverse
the Court’s decision.

Thomas’s essays on philosophy were thought-provoking, but also disturbing, in

the bleak picture they painted of the Polunsky Unit. This was a young man of
considerable intelligence and intellectual curiosity. Yet most young men would not
have done what he did: a conundrum which I never came finally to resolve. Thomas
finished the programme and was awarded his Pathways Certificate in November,
2010.

Subsequently, I discovered the following page on a blog, ‘Minutes Before Six’,

which Thomas shares with several Polunsky inmates:
 Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue 11

I mentioned recently that I had found a really great set of philosophy

correspondence courses from a site in England. I took the one on Ethics
(‘Reason, Values, and Conduct’), because I began to feel that a better
understanding of the subject would maybe help me to understand how I
allowed myself to fall apart the way I did, and become such a mess and a
failure. The course is guided by... Dr Geoffrey Klempner (author of Naive
Metaphysics), and I cannot recommend this program enough. In it, Dr
Klempner espouses the value of an ethics of dialogue, a sort of midway point
between the positions of the solipsist and the disinterested. I really liked that
his system did not fit into the preconceptions I had about ethics being a field
straddling a spectrum with the deontologists on one end, and the utilitarians
on the other. One of the central points to an ethics of dialogue is that moral
discourse exists between an ‘I and a thou’ (taken from a phrase associated
with Martin Buber). In other words, when you and I come together to
discuss whether or not I committed a moral wrong... we both have to start
from a point of actually respecting the other, of allowing the possibility that
our dialectic will change our views. (Whitaker, T. B. 2010)

Whether, as his father Kent had believed, or hoped, Thomas Whitaker became
an ethically better person for having undergone the experience of studying Moral
Philosophy with me, I am not in a position to judge. His understanding of the
theoretical issues was stimulated and, hopefully, deepened. Perhaps, as the blog
entry suggests, he also learned new strategies for negotiating the ethical challenges
presented by daily life in the Polunsky Unit.

The extract also gives a pretty good overview of what the ethics of dialogue is about.
Moral philosophy has been fatally stuck on the alternative of the self-interested
and disinterested standpoints. We all know, or are expected to believe, that the
‘right’ decision is the one that ignores subjective or personal preferences in favour
of what could be seen as the correct action from the impartial standpoint – whether
calculated on the basis of maximum utility, or generated from a deontological
principle, such as Kant’s categorical imperative, or derived in some other way. The
starting point for an ethics of dialogue is that there is no such impartial view. There
is no fixed point for ethics: only the shifting dynamic between individual persons
in relation with one another.

It is a truism that one ought to be prepared to change one’s view in response to

reasoned argument. Otherwise, you merely have two people talking past one
another. The ethics of dialogue isn’t just about making that simple point. The
claim goes deeper: it is that there is no ethical truth other than the truth we create
by our joint efforts, no objective standard but the one we set, or discover, for
ourselves. In the Pathways Moral Philosophy Programme, the case is made for an
objective foundation for dialogue ethics in the ‘authority of the other to correct my
12 Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

judgments’. The other person is not like a thermometer or spyglass, a tool which I
use for gathering knowledge. The question of the limits and fallibility of my powers
of judgment is not up to me alone to judge. In ethical dialogue, I recognise an
authority that objectively exists for me, as my authority exists for you, rather than
one that you or I merely grant for this or that purpose. However, objectivity, in this
case, does not mean a theory that can be used to decide any ethical question. The
only people who can do that are me and you, I and thou.

How do you reach an ethical judgment through ethical dialogue? According to

the ethics of dialogue, there is no special class or category of judgments known
as ‘ethical judgments’. Every judgment is an ethical judgment: just because it is
achieved through a process which is in its aim and practice, inclusive of all those
affected. As the ideal of inclusion is open-ended – because also of the sheer fact
that people themselves can change, and not just their ‘minds’ – there is no point
where you can get to say, ‘this is the ethical truth of the matter.’ The focus of ethical
dialogue is on the process, guided by good will and openness, rather than on the
outcome. To proponents of traditional ethical theories, this is perhaps the hardest
proposition to accept. To believe in the objective necessity for ethical dialogue does
not entail belief in the existence of ‘objective moral facts’ – whatever those may be.

For the last 20 years, my intellectual life has largely consisted of meetings and
dialogue, through email and postal correspondence, with individuals who share
my passion for philosophy. I believe that all dialogue is essentially ethical dialogue;
and that dialogue, that is to say ethical dialogue, is fundamentally different from
trade or quid pro quo, the activity that defines the business arena. As I state in my
conference presentation, ‘Truth in the business arena’,

In ethical dialogue, it is axiomatic that one tells the truth, while all other
rules of conduct have to be argued for on their merits. In the business arena,
it is axiomatic that one does not steal, while all other rules of conduct have
to be argued for on their merits. (Klempner 2014)

In ethical dialogue, the question should not arise whether I am seeking to tell the
truth – by my lights. It is implicit in the fact that I have opened myself up to you,
as you have to me. By contrast, in a commercial transaction, there is always room
for such a question. In the business arena, honesty has a cash value.

Although Kent and Tanya Whitaker paid for Thomas Whitaker’s philosophy
programme – a transaction conducted in the business arena – my dialogue with
Thomas was an ethical dialogue. It was not trade or negotiation, but a meeting
between an ‘I’ and a ‘thou’ in Martin Buber’s sense (Buber 1959). Perhaps one
of the most interesting features of ethical dialogue, illustrated in the quote from
 Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue 13

Whitaker’s blog, is that when someone has experienced dialogue in this sense and
with this intention, they learn to do it with others. The practice of ethical dialogue
is contagious. Perhaps this is what the early Christians understood, when they
followed their simple rule of brotherly and sisterly love.

Part II
As a Jew married to a Roman Catholic, I learned about the ethics of dialogue long
before my philosophical inquiries brought me to that point. The catalyst was a
Good Friday church service which I attended with my late wife, June. As I recount
in the Editor’s Note to Issue 100 of Philosophy Pathways, (Klempner 2005) for Jews,
Good Friday has particularly bitter associations – historically, it is a time that Jews
learned to especially fear, as attacks on the alleged ‘killers of Christ’ rose to a peak.

What did I expect? The service was sombre, moving. There were no words of
hatred. Instead, I felt the reverberations of the intense sense of unity of the
congregation as they pondered a two thousand year old historical incident
which defines their faith. Then the priest delivered a sermon which I shall
never forget.

The theme of the sermon was peace and justice. In the Middle East, then
as now, all the talk was of ‘peace with justice’. But justice demands that the
guilty be punished. And who would there be left, the priest asked rhetorically,
who did not have some part in the guilt? Yet how can there be peace without
justice? The New Testament teaches that peace can only be achieved through
forgiveness and reconciliation. That was Christ’s message to humanity. We
cannot, and should not forget. But we can forgive and beg for forgiveness.

That experience was formative for me. Years later, when I wrote ‘The Ethics
of Dialogue’ and ‘Ethical Dialogue and the Limits of Tolerance’, (Klempner
1998a, 1998b) it was the spirit of that sermon that I tried to recapture. One
cannot be fully human and lack a sense of justice. Yet the ethical demand to
open up to this particular other, to strive to grasp how things appear from the
other’s perspective, however painful that may be, is higher than blind justice.
(Klempner 2005)

F. H. Bradley notes in the Preface to his metaphysical treatise, Appearance and Reality,
that ‘Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct,
but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.’ (Bradley 1897) As it seems to me
now, it was not so much instinct as experience – sometimes painful, ‘racked and
riven by painful adjustments and renunciations on both sides’, as I wrote in ‘The
Ethics of Dialogue’ (Klempner 1998a) – that led me to an implicit understanding
of the nature of ethical dialogue for which I subsequently sought philosophical
justification. The point, however, is that the need to offer such justification is by
14 Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

no means otiose for the would-be philosopher. It is instinct again – or perhaps

experiences that go back to early infancy – that drive the philosopher to seek
reasons and justification, where those not gripped by the questions of philosophy
are content merely to assess practical benefits and get on with their lives.

In the Pathways Moral Philosophy Programme, I describe the case for an ethics of
dialogue as the outcome of a three-stage dialectical progression. The first stage of
the dialectic consists in the case for transcendental solipsism: the theory that the
ultimate description of my experience, my life, can be given from a single standpoint
of the Kantian ‘transcendental ego’. In this view, other persons are merely ‘characters
in the story of my world’. The second stage of the dialectic consists in the refutation
of solipsism. The attempt to maintain a view of the universe as essentially being
‘my world’ breaks down, because my attempts to attain truth are ultimately no
better than trying to use a measuring tape to measure itself. This is the upshot of
Wittgenstein’s case against a private language. ‘One would like to say: whatever is
going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about
“right”.’ (Wittgenstein 1972, para 258, 92e)

It’s a point that I have struggled to explain with generations of Pathways students.
The transcendental solipsist neatly skips over the obstacle set by Kant’s Refutation
of Idealism (Kant 1929). As Kant states, the objects in ‘my world’ are necessarily
identified as objects located in space. This is Kant’s ‘empirical realism’. Where the
transcendental solipsist diverges from Kant is in dispensing with any notion that
there exists anything beyond the world of spatial appearances – a noumenal world,
as Kant believed – in effect, reducing the world to a mere story that I make up
as I go along, my own dream. The dialectical gap that separates Wittgenstein’s
argument against a private language from Kant’s refutation of idealism defines the
standpoint of the anti-solipsist. There is no more meaning to the term ‘I’ than ‘an
other to others who are other to me’.

However, this is where we reach the third stage in the dialectic. I am not just ‘another
person’. Language may not give me the means to state ‘what more I am’ (according
to Wittgenstein’s argument, it cannot), but what I cannot state is nevertheless given
as a task, as Kant himself would have put it: that task is set by the fact that I am the
one asking the question. I am the one asking – not God, not some impartial judge
on high – what to do when faced with this particular situation, this particular other
who is standing in my way, or who calls out for my help. The starting point for
an ethics of dialogue is thus a deepened sense of our own unique subjectivity, not
conceived as a Wittgensteinian ‘private object’ but, rather, as an existential given.
To be a human being, that is to say, an agent, is to be faced with the question: what
must I do?
 Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue 15

Although the route taken is somewhat different, I believe that the outcome of the
dialectic I have described coincides with the view of Emmanuel Levinas on ‘the
other’ (Levinas 1979). The theory of anti-solipsism coincides with what Levinas
would describe as the misguided attempt to ‘thematise’ the other, making the other
just another entity which one encounters in the world, an attempt which sees, or
attempts to see, I and the other as merely ‘two of the same’ – failing to grasp the
profound otherness of the other.

On the subject of dialogue, one could write an essay on the various failed
attempts – some of them comic – by philosophers working in the analytic and
phenomenological traditions to come to a mutual understanding of the different
ways in which they approach the central questions of philosophy, or even what
they conceive those questions to be. Suffice it to say that Levinas is extraordinarily
difficult for a philosopher trained, as I am, in the analytic tradition. I would not
like to say, with any great degree of confidence, that my view of the grounding for
an ethics of dialogue coincides with Levinas’s view of the other, but it is, at least,
close.

Ethical dialogue is something to value, for its own sake and also for its benefits. The
challenge for ethics has always been the challenge of the other, even when this was
not explicitly recognised: for it is ultimately the challenge of showing that I owe
due consideration not just to persons within my narrower or broader circle – my
family, or my co-religionists, or my fellow countrymen – but to every human being,
every ‘other’. The question, however, is the philosophical basis for this claim. If the
basis is not the disinterested view, then that has important consequences. I am not
equally bound to every conscious being in the universe. All conscious beings in the
universe are equal in respect of their being ‘other’, but some, those with whom I
am engaged in ethical dialogue, necessarily have the more immediate claim to my
attention.

Part III
Philosophical practitioners are fond of quoting Epicurus: ‘Empty is the argument
of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.’ The meaning of
the quotation is less often really understood. Philosophers are not wise men or
women who have some special gift of ethical vision, or the ability to offer useful
practical advice. Philosophers argue. That’s what they do, what they are trained
to do. Epicurus was a philosopher who understood this. The challenge is to see
how sheer argument – as contrasted with empirical investigation of the world, or
technological innovation, or merely experience and diligent practice – can ever help
anyone do or achieve anything of value.
16 Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

If all philosophy can do is tell us what we already know, or believe, what use is
philosophy? As a philosopher, I have a view about ethical dialogue. That is
something I have learned from experience, but it is also something I have reasoned
out, defended, honed and refined through a process of dialogue with others who
share my interest in foundational questions. Only because that view has been
reasoned out does it have any special claim to consideration.

In the second decade of the 21st century, it is by no means accepted that philosophy
has any use at all – if it ever had. My baseline defence of philosophy has always
been that the sole justification for my doing philosophy is that I need it. The sole
justification for our doing philosophy together is that we need it.

Different persons have different kinds of need. There is not just one reason for
coming to philosophy, but many:

You can philosophize for sheer enjoyment. Or because you want to change
the world. Or to develop and hone your mental powers. Or out of insatiable,
childlike curiosity. Or because your very life depends upon it. I have had
the privilege to have known students – a few exceptional, but all of them
interesting – who have exemplified each of these goals and ideals. And I
understood perfectly where they were coming from, because I could see a
little bit of me in there too. The joys of philosophy are, or have become, for
me the joys of dialogue. If and when I escape back into my solitude, I shall
take all of this with me. (Klempner 2003)

If, despite the most thorough soul searching, despite everything I or others can say
to kindle your interest in foundational questions, you cannot find that need within
yourself, then nothing will persuade you that philosophy is a worthwhile activity.
I have heard the opinion expressed that all university departments of philosophy
could close down tomorrow without any impact on the intellectual life of the
nation. Philosophers are good at inventing rationalisations for beliefs everyone
already holds – like the existence of an external world, or the need to uphold
ethical values, and when they’re not doing that, they debate problems which no-one
understands, whose solutions no-one cares about. As someone who has devoted his
life to philosophy, this is a hard thing to accept, but I do accept it. I acknowledge
that the words I am writing now are only for those who care about philosophy.
Which is not to say that I would not be prepared to make the most determined
and earnest attempt to get the sceptic to see the point of philosophy. Dialogue is
of little value, if the only time you can engage in dialogue is in conditions that are
favourable to mutual understanding and enlightenment.

Re-reading the above quotation, it is interesting to me now that I was prepared to

countenance the possibility, even as far back as 2003, that at some point I would
 Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue 17

‘escape back into my solitude’. Four years earlier, I had stated:

You can do philosophy in solitude, as Descartes amply demonstrated.

You can carry on a lively dialogue with yourself. Yet in soliloquy one vital
ingredient of the philosophical enterprise is missing. For all our best attempts
to communicate, philosophical vision is always something essentially
idiosyncratic, peculiar to each and every individual. Perhaps because
philosophy is so much a struggle with language, or against language, you
always seem to see more than you can say.

In philosophical dialogue, we can never get completely clear about our

disagreements and differences, because we never get to the point of being
about to state what precisely it is that each of us believes, or the difference
between our respective standpoints. There is always more, in the background,
that one struggles to articulate. Yet in the search for a meeting point,
something new is created that is neither yours nor mine – something neither
of us could have created by our own unaided efforts – the dialogue itself as it
takes on an independent life of its own. (Klempner 1999)

To those persons who don’t get what philosophy is about, it is difficult to explain
how there can be positive value in not knowing one’s way about, in ‘seeing’ things
that despite one’s best efforts one fails to ‘say’. I’m not just talking about the person
of ‘plain common sense’ as he or she used to be called, but notable figures like
the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking, in his recent intemperate attack on the
philosophy of science (Norris 2011). Then again, so many academic philosophers
from the English-speaking analytic tradition seem to betray the very same prejudice.
The value of philosophy is precisely in the way it achieves clarity, they would say.
There’s no disagreement about the value of seeking clarity. However, to quote the
title of a notable philosophy collection from the 1960s, edited by H.D. Lewis,
‘Clarity is not enough’ (Lewis 1963).

As I am a philosopher, I would still want to achieve clarity about the underpinnings

of ethical dialogue, even if it were universally agreed that this is the correct way
to characterise ethical relations. As it turns out, in the world of the 21st century
we know that the reverse is the case. Hypocrisy, bigotry and fanaticism are the
rule, and genuine ethical dialogue the rare exception. I would like to understand
why, and perhaps, by my efforts, potentially reduce the human suffering that this
causes, but I also recognise that this is a process without a final destination. One
understands more, one understands ever more deeply, but the task of philosophical
understanding can never be completed.
18 Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

Part IV
How do you practice ethical dialogue? There is no ‘how to’ or recipe, but there is
something that philosophy can say about its nature, which illuminates what it is
we are trying to do. I hinted at this at the end of ‘Ethical Dialogue and the Limits
of Tolerance’:

...two strangers when they first meet might pause before launching into
conversation, weighing one another up, deciding through the mutual
reading of expressions and postures who is to risk the first move. I cannot
simply blurt out what is on my mind until I am reasonably confident that it
will be taken in the right way. The principles at work here are not principles
of philosophy, or any rational process of assessing ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’. They
are the principles of game theory. (Klempner 1998b)

Here, game theory describes a practical ability that one can’t simply learn by learning
the theory. In this sense, ethical dialogue differs sharply from an intellectual game
like chess. It is perfectly possible to become an excellent chess player without
playing a single actual game of chess. You do this by studying books on chess theory,
playing through the games of chess grandmasters. Of course, however good a chess
player you are, you can get better by playing actual games. One of the things one
learns is the psychological dimension; you play the player and not just the board.
A good chess player knows, for example, when their opponent is beaten, even if
the position is theoretically drawn, but no-one has, or ever will, become proficient
in ethical dialogue by reading a book. You learn ethical dialogue by doing ethical
dialogue with someone who is proficient in ethical dialogue.

A better comparison would be dancing. No-one would ever think of learning

to dance by following diagrams describing where one places one’s feet. Dance is
something you have to feel your way into, a way of letting go which involves a
different part of the self from the ratiocinating, intellectualising part. This is not
to deny that once you have learned to dance, once you have that proprioceptive,
ecstatic sense of how to move your body in that way, then you can without too
much difficulty learn to read symbols on a page as actual bodily movements – as in
the system of Labanotation, developed by Rudolf Laban in the 1920s.

However, certain consequences follow from this; consequences that will not
necessarily be welcome. The most important consequence – which is suggested
by the analogy with learning to dance – is that some persons will never be able
to engage properly in ethical dialogue. Following through the analogy, they may
simply suffer the mental equivalent of ‘two left feet’. However, apart from the
psychological hang-ups that affect a few random individuals, there is a more serious
and more widespread obstacle: the obstacle of belief.
 Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue 19

It is no accident that Western philosophy has championed the ethics of the

disinterested view. It is characteristic of those who possess – or, rather, are possessed
by – a strong system of beliefs, that they are all too willing to impose their belief
system on others in the name of the disinterested view. One analytic philosopher
who has seen this clearly is R.M. Hare. (Hare 1976) A ‘fanatic’, in Hare’s sense, is
not necessarily a potential terrorist or suicide bomber; it is anyone who has a belief
about any value, which they wish to impose on others. Sadly, according to Hare, the
only ethical theory which is consistent with the rejection of ‘fanaticism’ is preference
utilitarianism, which Hare admits would have the theoretical consequence that,

...if the Nazi’s desire not to have Jews around is intense enough to outweigh
all the sufferings caused to Jews by arranging not to have them around, then,
on this version of utilitarianism, as on any theory with the same formal
structure, it ought to be satisfied. (Hare 1976)

In mitigation, Hare pleads that ‘fanatics of this heroic stature are never likely to be
encountered... [and] cases that are never likely to be encountered do not need to be
squared with the thinking of the ordinary man.’

What leads Hare, a distinguished analytical philosopher, into this mess is his
unquestioning loyalty to the principle of the disinterested view. My response to
Hare’s ‘heroic’ Nazi is my response, as I happily admit: ‘You can go to Hell and
I will do my utmost to send you there!’ Deciding rights and wrongs from the
imaginary view from nowhere isn’t ethics but is an intellectual game that has no
connection to the real world of persons engaged in ethical dialogue.

How do you dialogue with the ‘heroic’ Nazi? You don’t. You reach for the nearest
gun, or bomb, and that is the most important philosophical lesson concerning the
ethics of dialogue. There are persons you can do ethical dialogue with. There are
persons that it is worth trying, ever so hard, to do ethical dialogue with, but, if you
fail despite your most earnest efforts, you are not under any ethical obligation to
continue talking. Does that mean that every Nazi or would-be Nazi, or murderer,
or rapist is beyond ethical dialogue? Not at all. The question of whom I, or we, can
dialogue with, and when, is always a practical question that has to take into account
our best judgment about the implications of doing so, for each of us individually,
or together, or for society at large. And that judgment can change – or be changed.

The same problem arises with the ‘true believer’, the religious fanatic. It is perfectly
possible to be devout, to be serious about one’s religious belief, without being a
fanatic (Bayfield 2012). The fanatic, however, will not allow you to have beliefs that
differ from theirs. They see it as an affront, a challenge which must be overcome
before any meaningful dialogue is possible. There is no solution except practical
20 Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

expediency: if you can’t engage in ethical dialogue you can still negotiate on the basis
of quid pro quo. That is to say, you can do business together. If you can’t do business
together, and you can’t find a way to avoid one another, then the only remaining
option is war. Annihilation of one’s opponent, as the Nazis well understood, is the
permanent possibility which underlies all other forms of human negotiation.

As a consequence of our ethical dialogue, we have ethical obligations towards

conscious beings with whom we are unable to engage in ethical dialogue. Human
infants and non-human animals have a claim on our attention that they are unable
to argue for themselves. I owe it to you, my partner in dialogue, to continue to
practise those virtues of attention and concern through whose mutual resonance
dialogue is made possible, in the respect that I give to those temporarily or
permanently excluded from the circle of human dialogue.

Part V
Whatever the reason – whether it be a psychological problem with relating to others,
or the problem of fanaticism – an inability to practice ethical dialogue, according
to the theory we have described, means that you cannot be ethical, period. In terms
of logical structure, the point is the same as the one that was first acknowledged by
aidoctrine, ‘Virtue is knowledge’ (Aristotle 1953). The akratic person knows what is
the right thing to do, but cannot bring him/herself to do it. In the case of the ethics
of dialogue, you can know what ought to be done, you can have the strength of will
to act on your decision, but – perhaps through overpowering resentment, or fear,
or aversion, or disgust – fail precisely at the point where it is necessary to engage
the other in ethical dialogue.

Just as Aristotle grappled with the problem of akrasia as a serious challenge to a

cognitivist view of ethics – the view that there is something in which, objectively,
the possession of ethical knowledge consists – so the most serious challenge for
an ethics of dialogue is the realisation that the persons who can engage in ethical
dialogue are a proper subset of humanity in general. It may well be the case, that a
limited form of ethical dialogue is possible within a community of fanatics. Perhaps
those who practise it are not beyond ‘saving’. If they can do ethical dialogue with
each other, then there is a chance we can do ethical dialogue with them, but ethical
dialogue can only exist in this limited form so long as its nature is not subjected to
philosophical examination.

Is it possible to renounce all belief? As an atheist, albeit a Jewish atheist, I most

certainly have beliefs. If God did exist, and I had a big enough gun – I would kill
Him. If God exists, then He ought not to exist. That’s what I believe. Human
beings do not need God, or gods, meddling in our affairs. There is no reason,
 Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue 21

supposing a Creator does, or did, exist, to be grateful for being created, or for any
of the other supposed ‘benefits’ that such a Creator has imposed on humankind.
Here, I follow Bertrand Russell’s famous essay, ‘A Free Man’s Worship’ (Russell
1917). In describing his ‘tragic’ vision, Russell, in turn, appeals to Nietzsche – a
man of very strong belief, on my reading, who saw nihilism as the greatest threat
to human civilisation.

Could I engage Tanya and Kent Whitaker in ethical dialogue? Of course. We could
start by exploring the different meanings of ‘love’. Christians profess to love all of
humanity, but ethical dialogue teaches that an effort has to be made on both sides.
Christian agape seems to me too general and unspecific, too closely associated with
the metaphysics of the disinterested view; ultimately nihilistic. However, I could be
wrong in my interpretation. Perhaps saying that every human being deserves ‘love’
is merely a colourful way of stating one’s ethical commitment to be open to the
other, so far as that is practically possible.

So the problem isn’t really about belief, as such. It is a problem that anyone who
engages in philosophical thought understands very well: the permanent possibility
of being wrong, of having one’s view of oneself, or of the world, overturned by
considerations that you had not thought of and perhaps, on your own, were
incapable of thinking of. That’s why philosophers read the history of philosophy,
which teaches over and over again the same lesson: If you think you understand,
consider the possibility that what you seem to grasp is in reality a misunderstanding.
If you think you know, remember all the times you ‘knew’, but what you knew was
false.

It is possible, as a solitary thinker and researcher, as I stated above, to do all this for
oneself, but much the better alternative is to do philosophy with others, not least
because nothing is more conducive to preparing the mind – and the psyche – for
true ethical encounter.
22 Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

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