Silence and Listening

Abstract

One kind of good listener aspires to be sensitive to the testimony of injustice. Under conditions of oppression, this testimony is silenced. One cause of the silencing is that a dominant rights-based model of distributive justice interferes with our appreciation of a needs-based model of radically egalitarian justice. Another cause is that ambient prejudices threaten to impair the listener. A good listener is not only an individual but also a social animal, one who needs to engage with others in a dialectic of attention in order to undo their own prejudices.

Résumé

Un certain type de personne qui sait écouter aspire à être sensible au témoignage sur l'injustice. Dans des conditions d'oppression, ce témoignage est réduit au silence. L'une des causes de ce silence est qu'un modèle dominant de justice distributive basé sur les droits interfère avec notre appréciation d'un modèle de justice radicalement égalitaire basé sur les besoins. Une autre cause de ce silence est que les préjugés ambiants menacent d'affaiblir la personne qui écoute. Cette personne n'est pas seulement un individu, mais aussi un animal social, qui doit s'engager avec les autres dans une dialectique de l'attention afin de se défaire de ses propres préjugés.

What is good about listening and what is a good listener? Let us begin with a testimony:

david barrie: […] Let me talk a little bit about the Pacific Islanders, the navigational specialists, because they're specially trained and selected. […] On top of [their knowledge of astronomy …], out on the open ocean, they can also use patterns of swell. So swell is a waveform that is not produced by local winds but it's generated by storms, often hundreds or even thousands of miles away. And these swells follow very, very regular courses across the ocean. So these navigators use the patterns of swell also as a kind of compass. They can detect the swells, and they can steer by them. More remarkable though, still, when they get close to an island target, which may be completely invisible because it's low lying, they can also pick up the reflections of the waves from that island and they can work out from those the direction in which to sail to get to the island. (Barrie, 2020)¹

Barrie is describing an example of a form of attending that Simone Weil calls “reading” (Weil, 1946/1990). Reading is, essentially, experiencing meaning. With training, the attention can become sensitive to patterns in the real world. Some reading is common and autonomic, as when we recognize a face. Other reading, such as that described by Barrie, is highly skilled. The trained reader, the expert, perceives more of reality. The navigator perceives the patterns of swell as a compass. And if a compass is an object by which a navigator reliably takes her bearings, then we can say that there really is a compass in the water, waiting to be perceived by the one with the appropriate training. So, the skill is epistemically valuable, insofar as it enables the reader to perceive more of reality; and, in this case, it is also practically valuable, insofar as it enables the reader to navigate thousands of miles.

I wish to make a simple claim, which is that attending to injustice is like attending to these patterns of swell. Like the patterns of swell, injustice is there (whether or not it is understood by the perceiver); and, like the navigators, some folks — those with the appropriate experience or training — will be better able to perceive injustice. There is an important disanalogy, however. When I look at the ocean and see an empty plane, the explanation may be lack of training on my part. However, if I fail to perceive the testimony of injustice, it's likely that my lack of training is not a sufficient explanation. If I'm a beneficiary of oppression — and I am a beneficiary of multiple axes of oppression — then I'm probably prejudiced. Worse, I'm probably unaware of many of my prejudices. These prejudices act like distorting lenses: they distort some of what I perceive.

Let's return to our opening questions: What is good about listening and what is a good listener? One reason that listening is good is that it enables us to learn about injustice. Such learning is necessary for any progressive political action. One kind of good listener will be especially sensitive to the testimony of injustice. There's more than one way of learning about injustice, such as experiencing it directly. However, if I'm privileged, then I won't experience the relevant oppressive injustice directly; thus, if I want to learn about it, then I must rely on testimony. Under conditions of oppression, Weil claims, this testimony is silenced. One cause of the silencing, according to her, is that the rights-based model of distributive justice dominant in North America and Europe interferes with our appreciation of a needs-based model of radically egalitarian justice. Another cause, as Miranda Fricker argues, is that ambient prejudices threaten to impair the listener. Let us discuss each of these moments in turn.

For Weil, the testimony of injustice is expressed in the cry of affliction. Affliction itself is not only physical suffering; it is also psychological and social, and everyone recoils from it, including the souls of do-gooders. The essence of the cry of affliction is expressed by Christ on the cross: “Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, ‘Why am I being hurt?’, then there is certainly injustice” (Weil, 1950/2005a, p. 72). The protest is grounded in a need for the good. When the need is violated without apparent reason — when it is violated and one cannot understand the violation — it provokes the cry. Weil thinks that the need for the good is universal and impersonal; it is also invincible to empirical falsification:

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. (Weil, 1950/2005a, p. 71)

The skeptic replies that this expectation is pitifully naïve, and that the person who clambers out of the crib and continues to harbour the expectation in the face of the mountains of counter-evidence is some kind of idiot who is incapable of inductive reasoning and learning from experience. In his essay, “Justice and Impersonality: Simone Weil on Rights and Obligations,” Steven Burns gives the right response to this skeptical objection:

Even if we have learned to expect some evil, and not to be surprised by it, we are nonetheless saddened by it. This sadness is the sign that we continue, despite what we have learned from experience, to look for good and not evil. (Burns, 1993, p. 480)

Our sadness is one mature form of the continuing need. In response to the experience of evil, the need may express itself as sadness.

Weil distinguishes the cry of affliction from a different cry, one that also protests a perceived injury. These two different cries are associated with two different senses of injustice: on the one hand, injustice as the violation of an impersonal need for the good; on the other hand, injustice as a violation of a personal right. Weil draws the distinction in this way:

This profound and childlike and unchanging expectation of good in the heart is not what is involved when we agitate for our rights. The motive which prompts a little boy to watch jealously to see if his brother has a slightly larger piece of cake arises from a much more superficial level of the soul. The word justice means two very different things according to whether it refers to the one or the other level. (Weil, 1950/2005a, p. 72)

(One might object that Weil is omitting an enormously important phenomenon: protesting the violations of the rights of others. Protest marches are one obvious embodiment of this phenomenon. But perhaps this phenomenon could be accommodated under a revision of the first cry: Why are we being hurt? Or, why are they being hurt?)

Weil thus distinguishes two cries:

1. 1. Why am I being hurt? (impersonal cry of affliction; testimony of injustice)

2. 2. Why has somebody else got more than I have? (personal cry of contention; assertion of a rights claim)

The problem, according to Weil, is that these two cries are easily confused, both by the ones crying and the ones listening. This confusion, and the pollution of the public auditorium by the second cry, contributes to the silencing of the first. Burns considers the objection that the cry of injustice does not deserve such importance as Weil gives it because “so many people cry out too often.” On behalf of Weil, he replies that “there are many cries of merely personal protest; and it is true that these are not nearly as important. But how, then, are we to distinguish the cry of personal protest from the truly impersonal cry of affliction?” (Burns, 1993, p. 484).

Someone encumbered with an exaggerated and fantastic ideal of autonomy may perceive himself to be hurt by the needs of others. As Burns explains, an exaggerated ideal of autonomy

exists in the politics of the radical libertarian. It exists, too, in the businessman's conception of the self-made man. This Horatio Alger figure is entirely a product of his own talent and energy, he has made his own money and deserves every penny of it, he owes taxes to no-one (they are a form of theft), and he ought to be free to use the wealth as he will. (Burns, 1989, pp. 27–28)

Consider an upper-middle-class landowner who protests property taxes: “Why should my hard-earned income be taken away from me and spent on that last vestige of communism, the public library? It's my money, after all, and I have a right to spend it on my own private vision of the good. What I want is not library books, but a swimming pool, a floating lounge chair, a 360° outdoor movie screen, and an infinite supply of strawberry daiquiris.” A decent landowner might demonstrate that there is no injustice here by publicly consenting to the tax. In his critique of Halifax's “tax reform” proposal in The Coast newspaper, Tim Bousquet reports:

When Burns, a retired Dalhousie philosophy professor, learned he was going to save $2,297 a year through “tax reform,” he was incensed, and asked to be included in this article. “If you have a higher income, you should pay more income tax. If you have more valuable property, you should pay more property tax,” he says plainly. “It's just the right thing to do.” (Bousquet, 2009)²

Burns explains that Weil offers two aids to making the distinction between the impersonal cry of affliction and the personal cry of contention: they are silence and purity of expression. Let's focus on the first aid:

to attend to the cry one must exercise self-denial and concentration. “To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction […] is to annihilate oneself” (p. 28 [Weil, 2005a, p. 91]). This is the same sort of silence and self-denial which is required for attention to the truth. The proper name for this intense and pure attention, Weil adds, is love. (Burns, 1993, p. 484)³

One of several things that we have learned from Burns, both from his own example and from his gentle exhortations, is the need for particular examples in philosophy. So, let's consider one. In Tomas Alfredson's (2011) film, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the character George Smiley (played by Gary Oldman) is an exemplar of the Burnsian virtue of listening. For the first 18 minutes of the film, Smiley does not utter a single word. When he finally speaks, in response to an invitation to take a case, his line is: “I'm retired.” However, the under-secretary persuades him to leave retirement in order to solve the mystery of the Russian mole who has infiltrated the British secret service at the highest level. This is not an action movie; we do not watch Smiley running across rooftops and shooting at super-villains. Instead, we watch him sitting around and silently listening to informants.

Among the informants to whom he listens are those who have been shuffled off-stage: for example, Connie Sachs (played by Kathy Burke), an agent struggling with alcoholism, who was fired from the “circus” (the secret service) because she was too good at her job and knew too much. From Sachs, Smiley learns that a Russian double-agent (Polyakov) has been adopted by the circus. When Sachs alerts her boss to the Russian agent, she is triply silenced.⁴ That is, her boss denies the importance of her information and gaslights her, questioning her mental health and suggesting that she is becoming obsessed. Then he fires her. For Smiley, the fact of her firing is a clue, signalling to him that she has valuable information that the establishment is motivated to suppress. Indeed, she does. So, they sit, two forced retirees sharing whisky, while she goes through old photos of her former colleagues and recalls the crucial item of intelligence that got her fired. In the presence of an interlocutor who accords her the credibility she deserves, Sachs is able to communicate her truth; and partly because of the accordance of credibility, her confidence in her own truth is restored: “So I was right, then?” she asks.⁵ If we remain in close-up, this achievement appears to be relatively individualistic. One party communicates meaning; the other silently listens and understands. Is this all there is to good listening, as in Antonio Machado's epigram: “For dialogue, / first ask, / then … listen” (Machado, 1936/1982, p. 177)?

No. Minimally, if the communication is to be successful, the listener must also be free, or at least aspiring to be free, of prejudices toward the informant. The ideal of this freedom is the aspiration of Fricker's virtue of “testimonial justice.” We can understand the virtue by contrasting it with the phenomenon of testimonial injustice, “whereby prejudice distorts a hearer's perception of a speaker so as to deflate the credibility given” (Fricker, 2012, pp. 292–293; cf. Fricker, 2007, p. 28). By contrast, the virtue of testimonial justice “requires the hearer to reliably neutralize prejudice in her judgements of credibility.” To do so, “the hearer must exercise a certain reflexive critical awareness” (Fricker, 2007, p. 92). Because we live in a climate of oppression, in which the very air we breathe is polluted with prejudice (Fricker, 2007, p. 96), it is very likely, especially if we are privileged, that our credibility judgements will be contaminated with prejudice, even if we do not explicitly subscribe to prejudiced false beliefs. Under these non-ideal conditions, a naïve form of testimonial justice will not be realizable. Instead, its form will be corrective — the listener monitors her credibility judgements, and through a process of “conscious, deliberative reflection,” she detects prejudice and corrects for it (Fricker, 2007, p. 92).

Fricker discusses Iris Murdoch's well known example of M and D, which Murdoch herself offers as an illustration of Weilian attention. In the example, a mother-in-law is initially prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. (As more than one commentator has observed, the prejudice in question is classist.) Through an exercise in attention, M succeeds in identifying her prejudice, looking around it, and seeing D for who she really is (Murdoch, 1970, pp. 17 ff.). Fricker writes that this exercise

captures the essence of how we should think about the individual virtue of testimonial justice. First, it requires reflexive awareness that one might be prone to this or that prejudice; second, it exploits a stable motivation to overcome any such prejudice; and third, it ensures a reasonable degree of success in doing so. […] This capacity for attention — the ability to see through prejudice to real human individuals — is indispensable in ethical life. (Fricker, 2012, pp. 295–296)

On this account, Weilian attention and the individual virtue of testimonial justice overlap. However, recall that one of the great insights of anti-oppression theory is that one can perpetuate oppression without intending to. So the intention to monitor and criticize one's own epistemic states will not be sufficient for epistemic justice. Nor can an individual detect all of her own prejudices without some help. Even in its individual form, the virtue of testimonial justice will have a social dimension.

Burns offers us a needed elaboration in what he calls the “dialectical understanding of the moral self” (Burns, 1987, p. 232). He discusses this idea in a couple of articles, “Moral Sanity or ‘Who Killed Boy Staunton’” (Burns, 1987) and “The Place of Art in a Reasonable Education” (Burns, 1989), where he traces its origin to de Beauvoir, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Annette Baier. Probably we can also glimpse its prototype in the Aristotelian virtue of φιλία (philia) or friendship and the practice of συναίσθησις (synaisthēsis) or co-perceiving (Kosman, 2014): friendship is stereo perception. (For insightful reflections on this virtue, see Alice MacLachlan's contribution to this symposium, “Who Do You Think You Are?”) The key feature of this moral self — I shall call it the “dialectical ethical agent” — is that it is neither a mere individual nor a mere nexus in a network; it is neither exclusively autonomous nor exclusively heteronomous. (Burns calls pure autonomy and pure heteronomy “caricatures.”) Here is his sketch of this dialectical agent:

The Other, whose regard momentarily fixes you, is an inescapable part of your being. The moral agent, locus of whatever autonomy and responsibility we are capable of, must also be a self-consciousness, capable of viewing herself as though she were an Other. Now we conceive the self as essentially related to other people. (Burns, 1987, p. 231)

With the exception of feminist philosophy, mainstream moral philosophy has trouble seeing such an agent clearly; but the ambiguity is essential and ineliminable. This agent is ontogenetically social, in the sense that it begins in a condition of utter dependency, and if it eventually learns autonomy, it learns it from others. But it is also constitutively social in an ongoing way, for all of the concepts that it brings into its autonomous interior are borrowed from a social space, and the meaning of those concepts remains socially determined. However, this agent is not merely social in the sense that it is not reducible to a set of relations.⁶ For the dialectical ethical agent, the individual, even if it is not an atom, even if it is socially constituted, is nevertheless real.

As an illustration of the dialectic of the ethical agent, Burns solves the mystery of the death of Boyd Staunton from Robertson Davies's novel, Fifth Business. Burns argues that Staunton recognizes his guilt for a moral wrong and so kills himself. (For our purposes, we do not need to worry about the exact details of the moral wrong.) Crucially, this recognition is not exclusively autonomous; it is not through some heroic inner resources that Staunton achieves it, but rather through a dialectical exercise. Burns writes,

Staunton, to see himself as he morally is, must see himself through the eyes of some particular other person, but of course it is not just any old other who will do. The crucial other is the one whose view is unclouded, informed, and not corruptible by Staunton's attempts at deceit. In this man's life that person is Eisengrim. (Burns, 1987, p. 233)

Eisengrim (a character with an important connexion to Staunton's wrong act) is neither an ideal other nor a friend: he “was free of these complicities [i.e., those of friendship], and was clairvoyant about Staunton's character. It was required for his self-recognition that Staunton see himself through these eyes” (Burns, 1987, p. 235). That is, Staunton's recognition of his own guilt is not something that he could have achieved by himself. He needed the dialectical exercise of being seen by a particular other, and of imagining himself seen from that perspective. A similar dialectical exercise will be indispensable for a virtue of testimonial justice. The correction of prejudices that otherwise deflate credibility judgements cannot be achieved by the individual, however well intentioned, without the assistance of others.

Another resource for critical reflection is art. To paraphrase Adolf Loos, the work of art wants to tear the self out of its comfortable existence (Loos, quoted in Zwicky, 2002, p. 205). As Burns argues in “The Place of Art,” there is a form of aesthetic reasoning that consists “of presenting different examples, of placing things side by side” (Burns, 1989, p. 32). This form of reason-giving is inspired by some very suggestive remarks by Wittgenstein (Moore, 1955, pp. 16–21), and Burns offers a Wittgensteinian illustration of using this reasoning to correct a false aesthetic judgement. He considers the judgement that “the Wittgenstein House looks like a prison.” He then sets some cases side by side, in the first instance contrasting the Wittgenstein House with a typical prison: “the prison would lack, to mention only obvious features, the striking balance between windows and door of the Parkgasse façade, the luxurious complexity of the main entrance, and the dramatically understated ornamentation of the pillars” (Burns, 1989, p. 33).

Figure 1. wittgenstein's house. Main entrance is to the left. Central rectangle is the Parkgasse façade. From Burns, 1989, p. 33. The quoted image is “Southeast elevation” from page 38 of Leitner, B. (1973). The architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein: a documentation. The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Reproduced with kind permission of Bernhard Leitner.

In the second instance, he compares the Wittgenstein House with a sketch of Loos's beach house; this comparison may help us to re-perceive what appeared to be penal austerity as minimalism.

Figure 2. adolf loos's beach house. From Burns, 1989, p. 34. The quoted image is “Haus am Lido 1924” from page 14 of Engelmann, P. (1946). Adolf Loos. Tel Aviv. Public domain.

The analogical reasoning afforded by works of art can correct our initially mistaken perceptions.

To conclude and to bring us full circle, here is an example of analogical reasoning, a work of art by the Nova Scotia-born poet Alden Nowlan. In his poem, “The Bull Moose,” Nowlan sets two things side by side: Christ and a bull moose. We can summarize the main action: down from the mountain and out of the wilderness, lurches and stumbles a god incarnate as a bull moose. He is stopped by a pole-fenced pasture where his bovine cousins shun him and he is taunted by a crowd of hairless apes. Finally, the apes, unreasonably afraid, execute him. Here is the final stanza:

So they held their fire. But just as the sun dropped in the river

the bull moose gathered his strength

like a scaffolded king, straightened and lifted his horns

so that even the wardens backed away as they raised their rifles.

When he roared, people ran to their cars. All the young men

leaned on their automobile horns as he toppled. (Nowlan, 1962/2013, p. 29)

In fact, Christ is never explicitly mentioned, but the imagery makes the comparison inexorable. It should be clear from metaphors such as the “scaffolded king.” The men snickering and trying to pour beer down his throat are the Roman soldiers torturing him with vinegar; the giggling girl with the purple cap of thistles is crowning him with thorns. The meaning of the roar at the end of the poem is the meaning of Christ's roar on the cross, as witnessed in Matthew, 27.46, “Why have you forsaken me?” In other words, it is Weil's cry of affliction, which is a testimony of injustice.

If it was difficult for the Roman soldiers to hear Christ's testimony, it is even more difficult for many of us to hear the testimony of the moose, for Christ had the advantage that he was at least speaking a human language. For many of us, including Weil, it is nonsensical to talk of the moose's testimony of injustice, for a testimony, to contribute to our knowledge, must have propositional content; on this assumption, strictly speaking, the moose cannot tell us anything about the injustice he suffers. Call this the “linguistic prejudice.” We see its classical statement in Descartes's test for mind in Part Five of his Discourse on Method (Descartes, 1637/1985, AT VI.56–59).⁷

The linguistic prejudice is a function of the prejudice of anthropocentric speciesism. To overturn it would require a longer argument than I can make here, but as Wittgenstein (1953/2001) and Jan Zwicky (2011) have observed, not all meaning is propositional; at least some meaning is gestural. Is there a gestural analogue for the cry of injustice? Of course. Think of the linguistic exclamation “No!” and the non-linguistic, guttural gestures and physical grimaces out of which it emerges. Pain is pain, to whomever it happens. If we believe that it is wrong to inflict non-consensual pain, and if we can recognize a community of pain between human and non-human animals, then we have grounds for recognizing ethical obligations toward non-human animals. In his essay, “Ethical Values Down on the Factory-Farm” (Burns, 1996), Burns articulates the rule:

each thing in the world has its own claim to existence. If it is the sort of thing that feels pain, then unless there is an overriding reason, we should not cause it pain. We extend, that is, the human ethical rule, do not cause gratuitous pain, to other beings for whom it is appropriate. (Burns, 1996, p. 539)

Certainly, this extension represents a form of moral progress. But a further step is needed to recognize the political injustice done to the moose.

Through his analogical reasoning, Nowlan is showing us that there is no relevant difference between Christ's question, “Why am I being hurt?,” and the roar of the bull moose. For the wrong done to Christ is that he is treated as a non-human animal. He is humiliated and abused, tortured and executed. But this is the same wrong that is done to the moose. As the gestalt switches back and forth between Christ and the moose, an insight may begin to dawn. If it is wrong to treat a human animal like an animal, why should it be right to treat a non-human animal like an animal? To treat a being like an animal is to subject that being to affliction.

“The moose is too easy. It's not hard for humans to recognize pain in mammals with nervous systems. But is pain a sufficiently sophisticated metric for locating injustice? And how far are you willing to go with this line of thought? What about the mould in the fridge ‘afflicted’ by the bleach I pour on it? What about the coral reefs ‘afflicted’ by ocean acidification?”⁸

Weil defines force in the following way: “it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing” (Weil, 1940–1941/2005b, p. 183). She understands force to violate the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative, which requires us to respect persons and prohibits the treatment of persons as things (Kant, 1785/2005, Ak. 429). Iris Marion Young explains why some force — in her terminology, “violence” — is politically unjust:

What makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character, its existence as a social practice.

Violence is systemic because it is directed at members of a group simply because they are members of that group. (Young, 1990, p. 62)

There are no naturally occurring groups that are, by their very nature, deserving of violence. This is a fully general claim, and includes mould, coral reefs, and what settler cultures would regard as inanimate objects, such as rocks.

One might complain that mould, coral reefs, and rocks are not persons. A person is a self-conscious, rational, social entity, paradigmatically human, possessing intrinsic dignity, and deserving of respect; by contrast, according to this objection, a rock is a mere thing, which exists to be used by persons (cf. Kant 1785/2005, Ak. 428). — But Kant's dichotomy between persons and things, and the restriction of the concept “person” to humans, and even to “animate” beings, appears to be culturally specific (see Bird-David, 1999; Burkhart, 2019; Deloria, Jr, 1999; Hallowell, 1960; Harvey, 2006; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). According to a more ecumenical ethics — what Thomas Birch (1993) calls “universal consideration” — many persons are not human. What, then, is a person? It is a perspective on the universe. Recall Burns's observation, “each thing in the world has its own claim to existence”; one might hear a faint echo of Spinoza: “Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being” (Spinoza, 1677/1992, IIIP6). If it is possible to imagine that perspective, then it is possible to listen to it and to seek to learn from it. Perceiving some cries will require more literacy than others. But the need for literacy does not vitiate the reality of the cries. (Adequately to respond to the objection above would require a separate article; these remarks are merely a prolegomenon.)⁹

To cross a further barricade, and to perceive the political injustice done to the moose, we would need to learn to listen to the cry for what it really is: a testimony, which is a communication of meaning. In the case under consideration, the meaning is a question: “Why am I being hurt?” If we could learn to read that question, then we would see that we owe the asker an answer. In other words, we would find ourselves engaged in the Burnsian dialectical exercise: we would find our own subjectivity seen and addressed by another animal, and find ourselves in an imagined dialogue. And we would find it a bad answer to say: “You are being hurt because I find you alien and it pleases me to humiliate and abuse you.” We would find that this is an insupportable claim because it cannot be addressed to a second person. That is, we cannot say, to a second person, “You are being hurt because: you are a mere instrument for my pleasure.” It is not only morally wrong; it is politically unjust. It is politically unjust because it restricts the freedom and violates the needs of the body and soul of this being arbitrarily on the basis of her membership in a group (see Frye, 1983; Young, 1990): in this case, the group of non-human animals.

Listening is good because it is a way of learning about reality. One feature of reality is injustice. Under conditions of oppression, the testimony of injustice is silenced. One kind of good listener — let us call her the “Burnsian listener” — by engaging in a dialectical exercise with others, trains herself to silence her own inevitable prejudices. In this way, she is better able to hear the cry of injustice, however unexpected its sources may be.