Could we not forget the other and take refuge in my own egoism? Why should we be concerned with the other?Are these reasonable responses to Levinas phenomeology of the other, given the current emphasis on the strong ego of the entrepreneurial individual making and shaping the world these days?

In her Corporeal Generosity: on giving with nietzsche, merleau-ponmty, and levinas Rosalyn Diprose provides an answer along Heidggerian lines. She says:

...there is a moral responsibility to my responsibility. According to Levinas that disturbing experience of the other's alterity urges me not to turn back...What drives this urge is sometimes described by Levinas in terms of the naked vulnerability expressed in the other's face, the primordial expression "you shall not commit murder". (Totality & Infinity, p. 199)

Don't we need to move from the abstract other to a concrete one, given that our responses are going to depend on who the other is? I'd turn back when faced with a criminal who wants to shoot me. I have no moral responsibility not to turn back surely.

Tis at this point that Levinas goes transcendental. Diprose says that:

Levinas point is that even the most secure individual cannot efface the other's alterity that is its condition, and even the most fragile ego faced with the other's strangeness is nevertheless "autonomous" as a result....In accounting for the urge to respond to the other's strangeness as a command that I cannot escape, Levinas is gesturing towards the idea that even my turning away from the other, that is even the egoism of enjoyment and the self-knowledge and self-possession of autonomy, presupposes another who cannot be possessed and for whom my possessions are destined.(p.138)