ABSTRACT
The prominence of moral judgment in campus controversy is closely linked to how participants come to know the moral standing of those with whom they have entered into conflict. Indeed, there is a sense in which moral conflict is all about our way of knowing self and other. Let us consider a basic distinction between two ways of knowing. In one, knowing is the result of a process of engagement with an object that is not already known, and which, therefore, may be different from those we already know. In the other, objects have all been previously encountered, and our task is to determine with which, among the already known objects, we are currently dealing. Those who know in the second way hold a set of preconceptions they use to know objects, so that the problem of knowing becomes a problem of determining which preconception to apply. Knowing others in this way means insisting on the reality of preconceived qualities of objects, often by using aggression to assure others’ acquiescence to our preconceptions. In other words, when we have recourse to the second way of knowing, knowing others means assuring that others be what we need them to be.
