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

Barrie is describing an example of a form of attending that Simone Weil calls “reading” (Weil, 1946/Reference Weil1990). 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/Reference Weil, Rees and Miles2005a, 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:

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:

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:

(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, Reference Burns1993, 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

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:

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:

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 (Reference Alfredson2011) 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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/Reference Machado and Trueblood1982, 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, Reference Fricker, Crasnow and Superson2012, pp. 292–293; cf. Fricker, Reference Fricker2007, 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, Reference Fricker2007, p. 92). Because we live in a climate of oppression, in which the very air we breathe is polluted with prejudice (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007, 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, Reference Fricker2007, 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, Reference Murdoch1970, pp. 17 ff.). Fricker writes that this exercise

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, Reference Burns1987, p. 232). He discusses this idea in a couple of articles, “Moral Sanity or ‘Who Killed Boy Staunton’” (Burns, Reference Burns1987) and “The Place of Art in a Reasonable Education” (Burns, Reference Burns and Hare1989), 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, Reference Kosman2014): 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:

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.Footnote 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,

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, Reference Burns1987, 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, Reference Zwicky, Miller and Ward2002, 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, Reference Burns and Hare1989, p. 32). This form of reason-giving is inspired by some very suggestive remarks by Wittgenstein (Moore, Reference Moore1955, 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, Reference Burns and Hare1989, p. 33).

Figure 1.

wittgenstein's house. Main entrance is to the left. Central rectangle is the Parkgasse façade. From Burns, Reference Burns and Hare1989, 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, Reference Burns and Hare1989, 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:

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, Reference Descartes, Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch1637/1985, AT VI.56–59).Footnote 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/Reference Wittgenstein and Anscombe2001) and Jan Zwicky (Reference Zwicky2011) 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, Reference Burns, Leroux and Létourneau1996), Burns articulates the rule:

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?”Footnote 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/Reference Weil and Miles2005b, 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/Reference Kant, Abbott and Denis2005, Ak. 429). Iris Marion Young explains why some force — in her terminology, “violence” — is politically unjust:

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/Reference Kant, Abbott and Denis2005, 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, Reference Bird-David1999; Burkhart, Reference Burkhart2019; Deloria, Jr, Reference Deloria, Deloria, Foehner and Scinta1999; Hallowell, Reference Hallowell and Diamond1960; Harvey, Reference Harvey2006; Viveiros de Castro, Reference Viveiros de Castro2004). According to a more ecumenical ethics — what Thomas Birch (Reference Birch1993) 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/Reference Spinoza and Shirley1992, 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.)Footnote 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, Reference Frye1983; Young, Reference Young1990): 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.