Ethics is not just a matter of doing the right thing. We have ethics because it is commonly unclear or subject to dispute just what the right thing is in a given case. Ethics is intended to resolve these issues. Ethics is a dialogue in which everything said is treated as defeasible. We may engage in such dialogue with others, or internally with ourselves.
Tag: Dialogue
Assumptions
No one gets through life without making countless assumptions about things we cannot properly know. In routine cases, this is usually harmless. That does not remove our obligation to give someone a fair hearing if they initiate dialogue asking about our reasons for feeling committed to the assumption. Except in immediate emergencies, we should always be open to such questions, and on our own initiative we should raise such questions to ourselves in ambiguous situations. This means we also need to learn to be good at recognizing ambiguous situations, which involves lifelong care and active practice at doing it. (See also Epistemic Conscientiousness.)
Dialogue
The ethical importance of dialogue can hardly be overstated. The key to ethical dialogue is mutual acceptance of sincere questioning about reasons. To ask a question is not to make a counter-assertion, and no one should ever take offense at a sincere question.
To qualify as based on good judgment or sound reasoning, a commitment or one’s reasons for holding it must be explainable in a shareable way. Sharing of the kind of meaning-based material inference used in everyday reasoning and judgment (as well as most philosophy) is a social process of open-ended dialogue.
The world’s oldest preserved examples of such rational dialogue (or any kind of rational development) are contained in the works of Plato. Earlier figures just wrote down what they saw as the truth. Plato provided many examples of a method of free inquiry. (Aristotle says the atomist Democritus was another initiator of rational inquiry, but the works of Democritus do not survive.) This is yet another reason why Hegel called Plato and Aristotle the greatest teachers of the human race.
Plato bequeathed to us many idealized examples of reasoning by dialogue. He raised them into an art form, creating a new literary genre in the process. His dialogues vary in the degree to which they approximate free open-ended discussion; most often, one character leads the discussion through question and answer, and sometimes even the question and answer is limited. However, since Plato’s dialogues are like plays portraying self-contained conversations, they are very accessible.
The style of question and answer often practiced by Platonic characters like Socrates — commonly known as Socratic method — provides a model for how anyone can contribute to such a development. The questioner tries to reason only from things to which the answerer agrees, but often has to keep questioning to draw out the needed background.
In a fully free and open dialogue characterized by mutual recognition, any party may make contributions of this sort. As Sellars and Brandom would remind us, to assert anything at all is implicitly to take responsibility for that assertion, which is to invite questioning about our reasons.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 