ABSTRACT
How do I know how to act ethically – to do what’s right in a situation? Should I do what others tell me would be moral behavior, or should I just do what I believe is right? Bakhtin offers a third viewpoint: people ought to be answerable to one another for their actions. In effect, to be ethical we should do the best thing we can live with in a particular situation. To contextualize an exploration of Bakhtin’s theories, I turn first to a work of literature before applying the ideas to child-adult play.
