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The Strains of Dialogue

A dark truth about dialogue is that it often pushes people farther apart instead of bringing them closer together.

Dialogue is often rightly praised as a key to personal growth, scientific progress, and democratic culture. But there is a dark truth about dialogue that we are often reluctant to face, says Richard Keshen, a professor of philosophy at Cape Breton University. The fact is, dialogue even between the most reasonable people often has the effect of pushing people further apart. This is perplexing, says Keshen, since logic suggests that reasonable people should converge in their views rather than diverge. Keshen’s analysis of “reasonable disagreement” will soon be published in a book honouring his former professor at Oxford University, Jonathan Glover.

Keshen describes how reading a book-long discussion about Israel forced him to confront questions about dialogue. The discussion is between two intelligent, fair-minded, and good-willed people, one an American Jew and the other an American Palestinian. The two men start out with every intention of achieving mutual clarification and common ground. By the end of the book, however, they are further apart intellectually and emotionally than when they started (to the point where they call each other names). They are like two people who, starting from different sides of a maze with the intention of meeting in the middle, find they are further apart with each fork in the path.

In his paper, Keshen considers ways of explaining reasonable disagreement. In analyzing possible explanations, Keshen discovers, he maintains, structural features inherent in dialogue that account for why dialogue often pushes people further apart. Take the evident fact that people’s life experiences often allow them to discern relevant facts not easily accessible to people without the same life experiences. This is clearly one reason why even the most reasonable and good-willed interlocutors may continue to disagree. One would think that becoming aware of this explanation would help people adopt a more empathetic and conciliatory attitude to their interlocutors in a disagreemnt. But there is something deeper and less hopeful here, Keshen argues.

Say each interlocutor in a dialogue tries to take to heart the fact that her opposite, on account of her life experiences, is seeing things differently from herself (the title of the debate over Israel, by the way, is called Through Different Eyes). Then the result of this, maintains Keshen, will often be not more mutual understanding, but less. For to absorb this plausible explanation of reasonable disagreement must tend to undermine a person’s confidence in her own beliefs and arguments. This predicament in turn is likely to raise people’s anxieties over the foundations of their deeply held beliefs, and force them away from respectful and empathetic attention to their interlocutors’ arguments. This is one example, argues Keshen, of an inherent feature of dialogue that pushes people further apart.

Glover, who is retiring next year, has written pioneering books on medical ethics, the morality of genetic engineering, and on genocide. With two other philosophers, Keshen is editing the book to honour Glover. As well as his own paper, Keshen has written a tribute to Glover’s influence as a teacher and a friend. The book, entitled Ethics and Humanity: Themes on the Work of Jonathan Glover, will be published in 2009 by Oxford University Press.

Professor Keshen says he is happy to send the full paper to anyone who is interested—and he welcomes reasonable disagreement.

Professor Richard Keshen is a member of the Philosophy department at Cape Breton University. He can be contacted at (902) 563-1303; by fax on (902) 563-1894 or via his website at http://faculty.cbu.ca/rkeshen