Michael Bavidge's paper 'What's Wrong with Telepathy' questioned the initially tempting idea that we would be much better moral agents if only we could read one another's minds. He concluded, provocatively, that it is the sheer difficulty of human communication together with the ever-present danger of misunderstanding which gives moral dialogue its purpose and force, the friction that gives our moral ideas something to grip. Without the need for moral dialogue, the very notion of moral obligation becomes emptied of content. By contrast, the claim that ethics arises out of ethical dialogue represented a radically anti-foundational approach. There is no bedrock underlying the contingencies and risks of human communication, even though our craving for security repeatedly tempts us to suppose that there must be.
Human dialogue is the bedrock of meaning and of morality.
Geoffrey Klempner, in his paper 'The Ethics of Dialogue', explored the consequences of rejecting an ethic based on the Kantian idea of the disinterested view, and the seemingly insurmountable practical difficulties that face us when we attempt to negotiate the unnegotiable, given the plurality of views about what is moral or valuable. The inquiry was extended to a critique of John Stuart Mill's principle of liberty, exposing Mill's overly optimistic and rationalist approach to ethical conflicts and dilemmas. In the discussions that followed the papers, the deepest division appeared over the question whether ethical dialogue, as the medium from which moral judgements arise, itself requires a logical foundation that only philosophy can provide. Ian Ground argued that such a foundation was not only illusory but redundant, since moral dialogue did not need a foundation of any kind. Geoffrey Klempner took the opposed view, arguing the need for a metaphysical foundation for ethics.