Towards an inclusive notion of dialog for ethical and moral purposes

Many (more or less) systematic recourses to dialog have developed, some with ethical and moral purposes, either in the ends of resolving differences among people, or to take a decision on a difficult issue. Here we look more closely at two such recourses, especially around the authors and dialog practitioners William Isaacs and Georges A. Legault, who have been working on those perspectives since the late 1970’s. While reconstructing their theoretical way of positioning dialogue, we see overlaps between those approaches, among which similar difficulties around negotiation and argumentation. Speaking of an inclusive approach aims at surmounting those difficulties, which calls for a closer look at a series of points that a theory of competence would have to treat for giving a good account of an “ethical dialogue”. Keywords: dialogue; ethics; morals; communication; negotiation; competence; argumentation; Isaacs; Legault