Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, New York : Columbia University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-231-17150-2

Jill Stauffer defines ethical loneliness early in her book as "the experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard" (1).Seemingly simple, but it will take the rest of the book for Stauffer to unpack the complexity of what this means.The result is one of the most interesting philosophical works that I have read in a long time.Ethical Loneliness positions itself in the literature on justice and demands that attention be paid to those who are abandoned in and through experiences of violence, oppression, and power.The book is at times unrelenting in describing examples of cruelty wrought by human beings on other human beings and of the effects of this on those who are subjected to the vilest forms of violence.Reprieve from the difficulties of "hearing" these stories comes in the form of a sort of "trigger" warning: "this book full of stories of violence and injustice is also describing the human condition: our intersubjective reliance on one another" (3).Unexpectedly, what softens the blow is Stauffer's account of "our intersubjective reliance on one another" and her promise to intermingle stories of ordinary examples of ethical loneliness with those of violence.If ethical loneliness describes the human condition, then it is mundane and widespread as well as extraordinary and implacable in its grip on those in contexts fraught with violence, conflict, genocide, and war.It can be found in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, in the experiences of many in colonial and post-colonial societies, in rights-violating societies transitioning to rights-respecting ones, in perpetrators as well as victims of violence, and in those participating in the very institutions designed to address injustices but who are then abandoned because what they say about harm and suffering is not heard.Stauffer's extensive use of testimony "delivered in diverse settings--South Africa, Argentina, Holocaust archives, Native American dealings with US legal proceedings, American prisons, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia" (6)--makes her case for understanding ethical loneliness as an injustice very convincing.Failures to hear or understand are rampant and have resulted in unsuccessful, inadequate, or botched attempts to address this kind of injustice.Sometimes the very processes of reparation, restoration, amnesty, or reconciliation meant to achieve justice fail to really hear what those who have suffered great harms say.When this happens, those who are abandoned may be unable to move on in a world that has not changed and will not change. Ethical Loneliness has implications that go well beyond what has been described thus far.Capturing what is important about the book is no easy task.I will be selective and highlight some

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