In his philosophy, poetry, theology, and personal life, Coleridge revealed his concern with this issue as it manifests itself in the relation between technical and ethical discourse, between fact and value, between self and other, and in the ethical function of aesthetic experience and the role of love in interpretation and ethical action.

Relying on Gadamer's hermeneutics to supply a framework for his approach, Haney connects Coleridge's ideas with, among others, Emmanuel Levinas's other-oriented notion of ethical subjectivity, Paul Ricoeur's view of the other's implication in the self, reinterpretations of Greek drama by Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, and Gianni Vattimo's post-Nietzschean hermeneutics.

Coleridge is treated not as a product of Romantic ideology to be deconstructed from a modern perspective but as a writer who offers a "challenge" to our modern tendency to compartmentalize interpretive issues as the concern of literary theorists, and ethical issues as the concern of philosophers. Looking at the two together, as Haney shows through his reading of Coleridge, can enrich our understanding of both.