"ETHICAL LONELINESS"

Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (New York; Columbia U. Press, 2015) ("Ethical loneliness is the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person, or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one's life's possibilities. It is a condition undergone by persons who have been unjustly treated and dehumanized by human beings and political structures, who emerge from that injustice only to find that the surrounding world will not listen to or cannot properly hear their testimony--their claims about what they suffered and about what is now owed them--on their own terms. So ethical loneliness is the experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard. Such loneliness is so named because it is a form of social abandonment that can be imposed only by multiple ethical lapses on the part of human beings residing in the surrounding world." Id. at 1-2. "There are countless ways--lawful and unlawful--of not taking responsibility for all others or some others: desensitization to others and to violence; elitism, racism, and bigotry; acceptance of structural violence; reasoned limitation on responsibility; contracts and rules of behavior; social norms of inequality; and so on. But the self is not a monad. It is changed by circumstances, and circumstances are peopled by others." Id. at 167.).