262 Addendum to the agonistic line of thought, justice benefits from accepting the existence of such conflicts and continuing to conduct a dialogue that is not aimed at rational consensus, but at improving mutual relations despite fundamental differences. I share with this agonistic critique that it is important to recognize identity-related moral conflicts as such and that a dialogue based on rational argumentation alone does not offer a solution. However, based on the analysis of the three theoretical lines of thought, I see reason to look further into whether a stable and just solution of IRMCs can be distinguished. The Transformative Dialogue I have indicated above that the Articulation Ethic lacks a justified criterion for distinguishing one self-concept as ‘more refined’ - in the sense of authenticity - than another. The idea is to base this criterion - inspired by Discourse Ethics - on some form of agreement about the authenticity of everyone’s self-understanding. Important questions with regard to this idea are: “How will this be possible?” and “How does this relate to the desideratum of autonomy, in other words that everyone should in principle be able to be who he or she thinks he or she is?” I call the interaction in which parties agree on authenticity a ‘Transformative Dialogue’. This is a dialogue in which parties become aware of their presuppositions, for example about their identity, and of how these presuppositions limit how they perceive, understand and experience the world and others. Based on this insight, parties can opt for new presuppositions about their identity, enabling a new, more integral and inclusive perspective. A Transformative Dialogue contains a number of necessary steps to arrive at a stable and just solution to intractable, identity-related conflicts or challenges. When going through these steps, it is good to realize that they are conceptual steps. The steps are conceptually sequential in the sense that a subsequent step uses what was conceptually enabled in previous steps. In different situations, these conceptual steps can be interpreted differently in a practical sense. In some dialogues these steps are followed in a self-evident manner, in other situations a method that explicitly marks successive steps can be helpful. The steps of a Transformative Dialogue are: • Step 1: Commitment to conflict resolution: A Transformative Dialogue requires commitment from the parties involved to resolve the conflict. • Step 2: Fusion of horizons: the next step is for parties to understand and fathom each other’s perspective. They put themselves in the other person’s perspective in such a way that they realize that that perspective could also have been theirs. The moment they experience that both perspectives are alternatives for the same characteristic in people’s lives (a so-called ‘human constant’), a fusion of horizons takes place. For example, meat eaters and vegetarians both try to get their food in a sustainable way. Putting yourself in the perspective of the other person can already lead to a transformation, for example if a carnivore simply did not know what the environmental effects of eating meat are.
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