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

He insists that the other person is not fundamentally an “alter ego,” another I, another mind or consciousness, and writes that “[t]he Other is the weak, the poor, the widow and the orphan, whereas I am the rich or the powerful.”⁹ He notes that “to recognize the other is to recognize a hunger.”¹⁰ So, Levinas uses autrui, in keeping with its standard use, to refer to other persons, but his examples of face-to-face encounters develop a suggestion about what situations most perspicuously reveal humanity. We are most keenly aware of other persons as other persons in situations where their vulnerability moves us to feel responsible for them. To recognize another person as a person is not to recognize a mind but a being that can be victimized, a being who depends on me for help.

Levinas’s examples also illustrate a point about the force of the responsibility we feel for others. His examples of face-to-face encounters involve spontaneous acts of kindness. The woman in the second scene from Life and Fate cannot explain why she gives up her bread. She does not understand the “power” that moves in her, and her behavior seems foolish to her afterward. Similarly, holding a door open for a stranger is an act of kindness that we perform without thinking about it. Now, one might read Levinas as endorsing a kind of moral anarchy, suggesting that rules and norms get in the way of kindness and that we should engage in random acts of charity.¹¹ However, he is making a different point. What impresses him about these cases is not that they involve going against moral rules;¹² they inspire him because they show that ethics does not depend on rules for its authority. The woman who gives up her bread, despite her hatred, or who manages to show compassion even towards those who have harmed her, does not reason her way to this action. She finds it inexplicable, yet she still does it. Because her action is inexplicable, it shows something about the authority of moral responsibility. In a face-to-face encounter, one recognizes oneself as unconditionally responsible for the other, so responsible that one feels obligated to give even though one may not be able to rationalize it.