DISCUSSION 
believing that it is undetermined by any formula in the 
common calculus that binds you and your observers. 
This brings out a basic distinction, which I felt to be necessary 
in Dr. Chisholm’s context, between changing people’s ideas by 
dialogue and by manipulation. In manipulation the action is 
essentially one-way, and the manipulator is not precluded from 
depersonalizing the other by treating him as a determinate 
object. In dialogue, the reciprocity of the interaction makes this 
logically impossible, since each necessarily becomes ‘‘undeter- 
mined”’ (in the above sense) to the other as well as to himself. 
This, I think, is the logic behind our instinct for human 
dignity. Man’s characteristic fulfilment is in reciprocal person- 
to-person relationships. Any relationship in which one member 
is not genuinely “open”’ or “‘vulnerable”’—prepared to listen— 
to the other, has in it a manipulative element that does violence 
to the essential nature of the other. 
When we come to matters of conscience, we face an exactly 
parallel distinction, between seeking to enlighten and seeking 
to violate. Dr. Chisholm’s talk itself offers a good example of 
the first. So do the efforts of most conscientious parents, how- 
ever different their views may be from Dr. Chisholm’s. 
To force a man to violate his conscience is something quite 
different. It is always an evil, even if at times the lesser of two 
evils. ‘This is part of what is meant by the absolute authority of 
conscience. To enlighten one another’s conscience, on the 
other hand, is of the stuff of our human responsibility to one 
another. No sane parent can rightly be relieved of it, however 
many others may be allowed to share in the dialogue. 
The easiest way to see the force of this is to ask how Dr. 
Chisholm would feel about his own right to pass on his humane 
view of life to his children. Surely the passion with which he 
speaks belies any suggestion that for him there is nothing 
authoritative or objective about the enlightenment he offers. 
We ourselves could not honestly agree that his children would 
be equally justified in flinging his teaching aside. 
In other words, I am pleading for a realization that although 
conscience can be warped, moral perception is not wholly 
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