If someone hates you, they won't ask you for things.

If someone hates you, they won't ask you for things.

We can't literally talk with everybody else on the planet or even with representatives of every group. But we can be in favor of the respectful exchange of ideas in ways that don't presuppose that all the right answers are on our own side. Still, we should all have moral bottom lines. Once genocide or torture begins the priority shifts from understanding to stopping it. One hope I have for the global conversation as instantiated in human rights treaties is that we are slowly coming to consensus on certain moral baselines.

Cosmopolitans begin, I think, with a sense of one thing we all certainly share, which is our fallibility. Nobody has reason to be confident that they're right about everything. That's one of the motivations for conversation across differences. It's in my interest to converse with people who are wrong about different things from the ones I'm wrong about!

The phrase 'academic freedom' is often used carelessly: here is a work that will allow a more careful conversation about those many crucial issues facing the academy, in which a well-worked out understanding of conceptions of academic freedom is, as its authors show, an essential tool.

Unless you have the power to stop the government of Iran beheading teenagers for homosexual acts, there's not much to be done except deplore it unless you are willing to converse with people about why they thinking this is okay.

Conversations...begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I'm using the word 'conversation' not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.