Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First ...

The problem with Levinas, on this reading, is that all his talk about “ethics as first philosophy” is apt to make us think that he is trying to do ethics, when he offers something quite different. Along these lines, Critchley distinguishes between two types of moral philosophers in discussing Levinas: “moral perfectionists” and “legislators.”¹⁰ A perfectionist argues that “ethics has to be based on some form of basic existential commitment…that goes beyond the theoretical strictures of any account of justice or socially instituted ethical code.” She believes that “an ethical theory that does not give expression to this basic demand will spin in a void and have no compelling way of explaining the source of one’s motivation to act on the basis of that theory.” By contrast, a legislator is interested in identifying “detailed precepts, rules, and principles that add up to a theory of justice.” Critchley argues that Levinas is a perfectionist. He is interested in something closer to what we might call metaethics; he wants to show us something about the nature of ethical responsibility itself, the nature of the ethical demand. He leaves it to other philosophers to take up the task of spelling out what is required to be ethical.

Yet how much concrete advice does a philosopher need to give for her work to qualify as ethics? And how firm is this distinction between perfectionists and legislators? Consider Kant. Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals is a relatively understudied text; philosophers interested in his ethics tend to focus on Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. Kant’s goal in the Metaphysics of Morals is to explain how his ideas about duty and respect should be put into practice. However, it is not clear that he has this ambition in earlier works. He indicates in Groundwork how the categorical imperative can be used to gauge the permissibility of various forms of conduct, and he offers suggestions in it and in the second Critique about how earlier ethical theories erred in identifying morality with the pursuit of happiness, but his main aim is not to supply us with “rules, principles, and precepts that add up to a theory of justice.” His aim is to explicate what he calls “the laws of freedom,”¹¹ the principles that underwrite our conceptions of ourselves as agents. So, what is Kant—a perfectionist or a legislator? His aim in the Groundwork and second Critique seems to be perfectionist in its focus on the foundations of ethics.