An ethics without ontology. Is that Levinas? If so what would that look like? A quote to help us:

"For Levinas, the irreducible foundation of ethics is my immediate recognition, when confronted with a suffering fellow human being, that I have an obligation to do something.To be sure, as Levinas is well aware, none of us can help all of the other suffering human beings, and the obligation to help a particular human being may be overridden by the obligation to help what he calls "the third." But not to feel the obligation to help the sufferer at all, not to recognize that if I can, I must help, or to feel that obligation only when the suffering person I am confronted with is nice, or sympathetic, or someone I can identify with, is not to be ethical at all, no matter how many principles one may be guided by or willing to give one's life for." (p.11)

Latter on the lecture it is stated that:

"There are tensions between the concern of Levinasian ethics, which is situational in the extreme, and the concerns of Kant and Aristotle. Levinas's thought experiment is always to imagine myself confronted with one single suffering human being, ignoring for the moment the likelihood that I am already under obligation to many other human beings. I am supposed to feel the obligation to help this human being, an obligation which I am to experience not as the obligation to obey a principle, as a Kantian would, but as an obligation to that human being. Kant's concern, that I have at least one universal principle---the principle of always treating the humanity in another person as an end, and not merely as a means---a principle which I am not willing to allow to be overridden by considerations of utility, obviously pulls in a different direction, and both the Levinasian concern with the immediate recognition of the other and the Kantian concern with principle have been seen as being in conflict with the Aristotelian concern with human flourishing."

"The tension is real, but so is the mutual support. Kantian ethics, I have argued (as Hegel already argued) is, in fact, empty and formal unless we supply it with content precisely from Aristotelian and Levinasian and yet other directions...And Levinas is right to remind us that even if the ethical person acts in accordance with the Categorical Imperative, her focus is not on the Kantian principle as an abstract rule, but on the particular other person she is trying to help. Most ethicists, however, down to the present day, still opt for one or another of the concerns I have listed, or perhaps opt simply for the Utilitarian concern with maximizing pleasure (the greatest pleasure of the greatest number for the longest period of time, or some successor to that formula) and try either to deny the ethical significance of the other."

Comments

Posted by: enochirios | November 2, 2005 9:08 PM