Ethics as the Task of Being Human

This paper examines whether Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy is suited to address the contemporary crises facing democratic and social life, including rising autocracy, corporate corruption, and intensifying forms of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Written in the aftermath of the catastrophic ethical failures of the twentieth century, Levinas’s work effectively asks what ethics can mean when traditional moral foundations have been compromised or shown to enable violence. This paper traces Levinas’s response to violence from his early notion of an “unheroic” human will to his later reconcepualization of subjectivity as vulnerability and responsibility. I argue that while Levinas’s thought does not provide a rule or algorithm for determine ethical norms, his work does remain practically meaningful. Ethics, on this view, is not a possession but a recurring, urgent task of asking what ethics, and thus what humanity, is possible for us now.