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

His writings are studded with moving descriptions of what it is like to look into the faces of those who suffer, and he is fascinated with the pity such moments evoke. Indeed, perhaps the central aim of his work is to expose the extent to which our lives and thinking are defined by the aptitude for selflessness, what he sometimes calls “saintliness” or “holiness,” which confrontations with human vulnerability reveal in us.

My goal in this book is to defend Levinas against what I believe to be the most serious criticism of him in the secondary literature. This criticism can be put this way: Should we not be troubled by the paucity of advice he gives on how to be ethical? Does it not reflect poorly on his claims about ethics that he never recommends standards for determining ethical conduct? I want to defend Levinas against this criticism. I think he has useful advice about how to be ethical; his critics simply have not read him attentively enough, or, better, they have been so convinced that he cannot offer substantive suggestions on how to determine ethical conduct that they have overlooked moments when he offers advice on this score. Moreover, he has interesting reasons for not offering more advice. For example, we will see that Levinas considers normative ethical theories to be tools we use to attune ourselves to one another’s needs and to balance our “infinite responsibilities” to multiple “others,” and he is reluctant to advance any single ethics because flexibility is needed to discern which ethics best enables us, in a given situation, to render ourselves maximally responsive to one another. His reticence as to what norms should guide ethical conduct is not indicative of skepticism on his part as to whether they can be generated but of a hardheaded pragmatism about the real-world challenges involved in using them effectively.

My more immediate task in this chapter, however, is simply to clarify the basic criticism leveled against Levinas. I say “clarify” because I think the criticism as it is stated is misleading. Levinas’s critics fault him for not outlining anything like a normative ethics, but their real concern is not that he does not but that he cannot offer his readers anything like a normative ethics. Their worry is that he leaves his adherents in a double bind.