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He sees ethical theories as tools we use to negotiate the challenges we face in balancing our responsibilities, and he is reluctant to advance a single ethics because flexibility may be needed to discern which will prove most effective in resolving a given dilemma. As a first stab at indicating his ethics, then, I argue that Levinas begins with a broadly Kantian, liberal outlook. He defends this starting point on pragmatic grounds. His claim is not that Kantian liberalism is, in fact, true, but that, for a variety of reasons, it constitutes the best set of “tools” available to us.
Chapter 4 refines this suggestion by assessing the extent of Levinas’s compatibility with sophisticated forms of Kantian liberalism of the type espoused by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Some commentators, such as Simon Critchley and Steven Hendley, have argued that Levinas’s claims about ethics should be wedded to these sophisticated forms of Kantianism. I show that Levinas would be sympathetic to critiques developed by feminist philosophers and philosophers working in disability studies, and he would follow them in arguing that even these sophisticated forms of Kantianism are flawed in their failure to appreciate the moral significance of caregiving. Chapter 4 challenges the claim that Levinas cannot give an account of justice, then, on two levels. It is wrong because there is evidence that he would accept a more robust account of distributive justice than that found in Kantian liberalism. It also challenges this criticism by modeling how Levinassian modifications can be made to normative ethical theories. It seeks to show that it is wrong to fault Levinas’s philosophy for being unworkable by modeling how concrete revisions to Kantianism can be developed based on Levinas’s remarks on the relation to the other.
In a way, though, this entire defense of Levinas is a bit of a dodge. I initially set out to defend him against what I took to be the most significant criticism of him in the secondary literature—namely, that he cannot give his readers anything like a practical ethics. In defending him, however, I found myself weighing in on a larger issue. For this criticism hinges on a certain understanding of why Levinas thinks that the other cannot be comprehended and on how two sides of his philosophy, the practical and the theoretical, fit together.