Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility: The Supererogatory Attitude of Levinasian Normativity 3030616290, 9783030616298

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Julio Andrade

Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility The Supererogatory Attitude of Levinasian Normativity

Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility

Julio Andrade

Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility The Supererogatory Attitude of Levinasian Normativity

Julio Andrade Philosophy Department Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, South Africa

ISBN 978-3-030-61629-8 ISBN 978-3-030-61630-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Bronwyn

Acknowledgments

A special thanks to my wife, Bronwyn Andrade, for her tireless support without which, this work would not have been possible. Your generosity towards family, friends and strangers inspires the ideas I try to articulate in this study. Thanks also to Prof Minka Woermann for her unwavering encouragement. Your uncompromising standards and intellectual rigor has shaped my best ideas. Lastly, I would also like to acknowledge a financial grant provided by Stellenbosch University, South Africa, which assisted me in completing this work.

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Contents

1

Introduction—The Moral Demandingness of Infinite Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Impartialism and the Problems of Supererogation and Moral-Demandingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Infinite Demandingness: Emmanuel Levinas’s Supererogatory Attitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 A Note on the Envisaged Readership of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Chapter Synopses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part I 2

3

1 1 4 9 10 12

Moral Demandingness

The Demandingness of Supererogation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Mapping Supererogation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Sacrifice and the Appeal to Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 The Asymmetry of Supererogation and the Perspectival Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Supererogatory Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Moral Demandingness and Impartialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.1 Impartialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.2 Overdemanding Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.3 Overweening Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.4 Saintly Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assimilating Supererogation, Tempering Demandingness . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Normative and Meta-Ethical Problems of Supererogation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Kantian Reductionism: Perfect and Imperfect Duties . . . . 3.3 Utilitarian Reductionism: Sacrifice and Saving Lives . . . . . . . . . .

17 17 19 21 23 24 26 26 28 30 33 37 38 41 41 43 47 49 ix

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3.3.1 Challenges to the LSA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Theoretical Underpinnings of the LSA—The Problem with the Sacrifice Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

5

59 64 65

Primitive Moral Responsiveness and Supererogatory Attitudes . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Supererogatory Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 The Phenomenology of Supererogation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Moral Incapacity and the Perspectival Problem of Supererogation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Primitive Moral Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Sympathy as a Primitive Response and an Attitude . . . . . . 4.4.2 Empathy and Moral Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73 75 77 80 82 83

Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility: An Analytic-Continental Segue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Analytic and Continental Philosophical Traditions . . . . . . . . 5.3 The Possibility of Impossibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Why Levinas? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85 85 87 93 97 99 99

Part II 6

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67 67 69 69 71

Infinite Responsibility

Levinasian Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 The Other and the Same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 Ethics as First Philosophy (or Metaphysics Precedes Ontology) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.2 Totality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.3 Infinity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 The Epiphanic Face . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 The Signification of the Face . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 The Face as Discourse and Discourse as an Attitude . . . . 6.3.3 Sensibility as Proximity to the Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Asymmetry and Infinite Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 Substitution: Hyperbolic Infinite Responsibility . . . . . . . . 6.4.2 The Saying and the Said . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

103 103 105 105 108 110 111 111 114 117 120 122 124 126 127

Contents

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8

9

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Levinasian Politics and Constructing Levinasian Normativity . . . . . 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Politics and the Third . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Levinasian Normativity and the Autonomy of Undecidability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 The Quasi-Transcendental and Skepticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Constructing Normativity: The Provisional Imperative . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Infinite Response-Ability as Infinite Representation . . . . . . . . . . . 7.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

131 131 133

Supererogation Reconceptualised as Levinasian Normativity . . . . . . 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Reinscribing Taylorian Primitive Moral Responsiveness into the Moral Responsiveness of Levinasian Normativity . . . . . . 8.3 Supererogation Reconceptualised as Levinasian Normativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Saints and Sacrifice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4.1 The (Im)Possibility of Sacrifice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4.2 False Dichotomies: Moral Iteration and Aggregation . . . . 8.5 Objections to a Reconceptualised Supererogation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5.1 Supererogation as Levinasian Normativity Is Banal . . . . . 8.5.2 If Levinasian Normativity Dissolves the Problem of Supererogation Why Retain the Concept? . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5.3 Supererogation as Levinasian Normativity Is Too Morally Demanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

151 151

The Whistleblower as Subject of Levinasian Normativity . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Whistleblowing Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.1 The Whistleblower as Ethical Boundary of the Organisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.2 Provisional Organisational Boundaries and Relational Responsiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 The Choiceless Choice of Whistleblower Sacrifice . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.1 The (Im)Possibility of Whistleblowing Sacrifice . . . . . . . . 9.3.2 The Undecidability of Choiceless Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

175 175 178

135 137 139 142 146 148

153 156 158 158 163 167 167 168 169 171 172

179 182 184 184 186 190 191

10 The Analytic-Continental Divide as Chiasmus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 10.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 10.2 The (Im)Possibility of Moral Skepticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

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10.3 Provisional Ethico-Politico Solutions to Supererogation and Moral-Demandingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 10.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

Chapter 1

Introduction—The Moral Demandingness of Infinite Responsibility

Abstract This introductory chapter outlines the aims and scope of the study. The current study attempts to solve the problems of supererogation in particular, and moral-demandingness more broadly, which it is argued, can be attributed to impartialist moral theories. I claim that impartialist moral theories are typical of the analytic tradition in philosophy. I will argue that the continental tradition offers moral concepts and resources not found in the analytic tradition which are better suited to addressing the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. In particular, I will argue that the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is the most well-placed to address these problems because he radicalises what morality can demand of us. On Levinas’s account, all morality becomes supererogatory, because we have a (morally-demanding) infinite responsibility to, and for the other person. The turn to the continental tradition in general, and Levinas in particular, will require the use of two very different ethical vocabularies. The study is structured in two parts; in the first half the problems of supererogation and moral demandingness, and the purported solutions to these problems, are presented from within the analytic tradition, while in the second half, this is done from within the continental tradition.

1.1 Impartialism and the Problems of Supererogation and Moral-Demandingness The lives of saints and heroes provoke a profound ambivalence in us. On the one hand we admire their devotion to making the world a better place and the sacrifices that entails. On the other hand, that they are willing to bear those sacrifices unsettle us—George Orwell once remarked that (in reference to Gandhi) “saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent” (in Hamilton, 2015, 188). They should be considered guilty of disloyalty—for putting the needs of strangers before the interests of those closer by, friends and family. They should be guilty of working only to secure bread for mouths when human dignity also cries out for roses (cf. Oppenheim, 1911). The revisions to the subtitle of a recent popular non-fiction work by Larissa Macfarquhar, investigating the lives of contemporary ‘saints’, entitled Strangers Drowning (2015), captures our ambivalence towards saints and heroes. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_1

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1 Introduction—The Moral Demandingness …

In the first printing of the book, the subtitle reads ‘Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity’. In subsequent printings this was changed to ‘Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help’. Everyday morality has it then, that while rescuing drowning people and donating large sums to charity is good, beyond a certain point it can also be extreme; that continuously choosing to help others at the expense of your own well-being can be a drastic path to follow; and that the desire to reach and save all those suffering in the world is not just idealistic, but impossible. The term ‘urge’ also hints at forces not entirely within our control. The moral ambivalence saints and heroes provoke can be understood though the problem of moral-demandingness. We can say that obliging everyone to bear the sacrifices saints and heroes bear is to foist a moral obligation on us that is too demanding. While we can all agree that we have moral duties to help others when they are in need, we also believe that there should be a limit to those duties, especially when we have contributed our fair share. We believe that there should be limits to what we owe others, failing which, there will be little, or nothing left of our resources and energies to devote to the special relationships and idiosyncratic projects that sustain our interest in living. While it is a moral obscenity that millions of children are starving to death in the same world in which the pet-accessories market is a multibillion-dollar industry, my choice of private violin lessons for my daughter should not be regarded as a lack of respect for those children. Miller, writes that, in relation to poverty, “equal respect does not entail equal concern” (2004, 367). In other words, we should not have to be equally concerned with everybody and everything all the time. In choosing to donate to aid agencies instead of paying for my daughter’s violin lessons I do not demonstrate the belief that there is now a universal obligation on all parents to stop paying for violin lessons for their children, nor that doing so is the best way to decrease the overall level of suffering of those starving children. Both Kantianism, which requires us to act as if our actions could be universalised, and utilitarianism, which requires us to act so that maximum happiness (or utility or welfare) can be achieved, are examples of this problematic impartialism, which in its essence, has it that, “morally speaking, I am no more important than anyone else” (Cullity, 2004, 92). Impartialism is tied to our notion of moral autonomy. While morality exerts a normative force over us, we also believe we have autonomy to determine the extent of that force, an autonomy which designates a space for our personal concerns. Autonomy then, becomes a mechanism to regulate moral boundaries, to demarcate where the limits of duty lie. The further out the limits of obligation extend the more demanding morality becomes, and the narrower the autonomy of the agent to pursue non-moral interests. Supererogation brings the challenges of moral-demandingness and the limits of duty into sharp focus. In this study then, I will explore the problem of moraldemandingness through the lens of the problem of supererogation. Supererogatory acts are acts which go beyond moral duty. Supererogation then, marks the limit of obligation. Or, as Wessels puts it, concisely, “is the very job of supererogation to protect us from morality demanding too much of us” (2015, 94). In other words, positing a class of supererogatory acts shields us against obligations that are too demanding by placing these obligations beyond duty. Further, because these acts are

1.1 Impartialism and the Problems of Supererogation …

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no longer obligatory, we have the moral choice to not perform them. Supererogatory actions are praiseworthy when performed but also not blameworthy when not performed. We praise them precisely because the agent was free to not perform them. This feature of supererogatory acts is also a feature of morally permissible acts—a morally permissible act does not oblige us, but we are not prevented from performing that act either. However, permissibility does not capture what is praiseworthy about supererogation—sacrificing our comforts so that others can be made better off is not something that leaves us indifferent. This paradox—how a purportedly praiseworthy action can be optional if that action is morally better than the non-optional alternatives—leads to what David Heyd calls the meta-ethical problem of supererogation (1982). The meta-ethical problem poses the question where supererogation might fit in a deontological theory (such as Kantianism) when supererogation requires a class of non-obligatory acts, or, in the case of a non-deontological theory, how supererogation can be accommodated when there is no duty which action must transcend (3). Heyd writes that the problem of supererogation is twofold—in addition to the meta-ethical problem it poses, supererogation also presents a normative problem, which concerns “the demarcation of duty and ‘beyond duty’” (4). As such, the normative problem of supererogation ties directly to the problem of moral-demandingness—where do, and where should, the limits of duty lie? Or, how do we mark the boundary between obligation and supererogation? However, the normative and meta-ethical problems of supererogation are just two sides of the same coin: without duty, there can be no ‘beyond duty’ to demarcate. What duty means, and what the limits of duty are, are inextricably interwoven together. The term ‘supererogation’ is philosophically technical, and perhaps, as Cowley remarks, also “ugly and unpronounceable” (2015, 1). However, supererogation is easily grasped in the paradigmatic cases of saints and heroes. Cowley speculates that this explains the decision by J. O. Urmson, in his seminal 1958 article, ‘Saints and Heroes’—which kicked off the contemporary supererogation debate—to avoid the term ‘supererogation’ altogether (ibid.). Saintly and heroic actions go beyond duty, but they are also praiseworthy, ipso facto, saintly and heroic actions are supererogatory actions. Further, because requiring saintly and heroic actions is too morally-demanding, supererogation is also too morally-demanding. Supererogation then, allows us to explore moral theories “from an unusual angle” which might, Heyd reckons, “underline both some merits and some flaws and inconsistencies in those theories” (1982, 10). Susan Wolf, in her seminal paper ‘Moral Saints’, goes further, and argues that “any plausible moral theory must make use of some conception of supererogation” (1982, 38). The implication of Wolf’s claim is consequential: if supererogation cannot be satisfactorily accommodated within a particular moral framework, then that moral framework should be abandoned. How then, has supererogation been used in traditional moral theories? Or, how have traditional moral theories approached the problem of supererogation, which, I argue, demonstrates the problem of moral-demandingness? Heyd argues that this has been attempted through various assimilation strategies which typically involve two, interrelated stages and which broadly track the

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1 Introduction—The Moral Demandingness …

meta-ethical and normative dimensions to the problem of supererogation: first, the reduction of the supererogatory to the obligatory—a move discernible in Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties—and, second, the expansion of the scope and meaning of duty (1982, 52). Assimilation strategies then, involve pushing the boundaries of obligation further and further out. However, no matter how far out these boundaries are extended, they will necessarily always bump up against a limit, and as such, there will always remain a space beyond that limit—the space of supererogation. Assimilation strategies reveal the deep imbrication of autonomy and the problem of supererogation: the obligations demanded in this expansion of moral boundaries become increasingly costly for the agent, that is, they increasingly restrict the autonomy of the agent to act in certain ways, and somewhere in this expansionary process, the cost tips over into a morally-demanding sacrifice for the agent, something they would rather not choose to incur. Why would the agent choose not to incur a particular sacrifice? They might not want to be impartial about their reasons for refusing such a sacrifice in favour of choosing a special relationship. In other words, the problem of supererogation, and a fortiori, the problem of moraldemandingness arises because impartialist moral theories try to deflect this impartialist failing by making impartialism the foundation of duty. If obligation, or duty, can only be circumscribed in a set of universal and immutable imperatives, then the solution to the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness would appear to lie with a moral framework which does not require impartialism to demarcate its limits. The aim of the current study is to solve the problems of supererogation in particular, and moral-demandingness more broadly, through a turn to an ethics which is fundamentally not impartialist. I will argue that the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is the most well-placed to address these problems because he radicalises what morality can demand of us.

1.2 Infinite Demandingness: Emmanuel Levinas’s Supererogatory Attitude In radicalising moral demandingness Levinas offers a way to assimilate supererogation, not by extending moral boundaries, but by dissolving those boundaries altogether, or, which will be shown to amount to the same thing, by transforming morality into being just boundaries. Levinas argues that we have an infinite responsibility to, and for the other person. An infinite responsibility presents a responsibility of a different order—qualitatively, instead of quantitatively, large—to that of a morallydemanding, but nonetheless, still limited duty. I will claim that on Levinas’s account, all morality, as a certain type of ethical attitude, becomes supererogatory. Even at this introductory stage, it is important to emphasise that Levinas does not articulate moral duties or obligations per se in his work, but instead, speaks of an (infinite) ethical responsibility. This is not to say that Levinas abandons the

1.2 Infinite Demandingness: Emmanuel Levinas’s …

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notions of obligation or duty as the essence of the ethical relation, or that duty and responsibility simply become synonymous terms in his lexicon. More specifically, what Levinas questions in his work is the source of moral duties and obligations. For Levinas, responsibility (and/or duties) to the other person do not find their source in the subject, or the individual self, or the ego, but in the otherness of the other person— what Levinas will also call the strangeness, or alterity of the Other, and what can also be understood as the singularity of the Other. Levinas models the alterity of the Other on the Cartesian idea of infinity, an idea which “in thinking more than it thinks”, exceeds itself (1987, 54). The face of the Other becomes the (non)site of the alterity of the Other which exceeds all attempts by the subject to represent it, because the Other is singular. This inability to adequately know the Other puts the subjects’ autonomy into question and leads, paradoxically, to the subjects’ autonomy being reinvested as a responsibility to (and for) the Other. As such, my earlier claim needs refining: what Levinas questions in his work is not so much the ethical defined in terms of duties, but rather locating the source of those duties in the autonomy of the subject. Instead, our responsibilities, and/or duties, arise from the sensibility of (the face of) the Other. The face, while sensible to the subject, cannot ‘appear’1 through representation to that subject. The term ‘responsibility’ better captures this sensibility than duty; I respond to the Other in a face to face encounter which places me under a duty to the Other—most broadly, the duty not to kill the Other. Levinas spends considerable effort in articulating the phenomenology of this particular response. It is on this reading of Levinas which the project I envisage finds a foothold. Supererogation and Levinas might seem at odds—duty is central to conceptualising supererogation as ‘beyond duty’, while Levinas refuses to define ethics in terms of duty. However, what Levinasian responsibility, as an infinite responsibility, and supererogation, as a too morally-demanding duty, share is the notion of an ethical requirement that is excessive and whose paradoxical formulations stretch the limits of representation. At the root of supererogation and moral-demandingness is impartialism, as I have outlined in the previous section. With this in mind, my earlier claim can be refined once more: what Levinas questions is not duty or obligation per se; rather, ethical duty, or responsibility is a response to a singular Other which emerges from the sensibility of the Other’s alterity, and not from universal moral principles discovered by an autonomous and rational subject. Facilitating the switch from morally-demanding duty/obligation to morallydemanding infinite responsibility will require the use of two very different ethical vocabularies. These differences can be captured in the contrasting terminologies of the so-called analytic and continental philosophical traditions. In a nutshell, I will argue that because the analytic tradition is marked by strong impartialist inclinations in its moral theorising, together with the above claim that the failure to address the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness can be squarely attributed to impartialist moral theories, the theoretical resources of the analytic tradition fall 1I

have placed ‘appear’ in scare-quotes because the manner of the appearance of the face in the ethical encounter is highly problematic—in Totality and Infinity, Levinas refers to the ‘epiphany’ of the face rather than the appearance of the face (1969). See Chapter 6, Sect. 6.3.

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short in this regard. I will argue that because the continental tradition offers moral concepts and resources not exhausted by austere objectivity, instrumental rationality, and impersonal imperatives, that it can address the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness in a much more convincing way. I offer a more sustained and fuller examination of the differences between the analytic and continental traditions in Chapter 5, but at this stage, I can outline two important differences. The first can be discerned in Mollie Painter-Morland’s comment that the continental tradition rejects moral theorising “that purports to be comprehensive in the scope of its analysis and proposals […because it would] elicit unacceptable associations of finality” (2008, 93). I also argue that Levinas is a good exemplar of the continental tradition’s “willingness to reinterpret, rephrase, and translate moral intuitions and insights into different terms” (92). This feature will be critical to my project which similarly relies on an ‘incessant correction’ of its own formulations in order to limit and enact infinite responsibility. A second important difference is the analytic traditions’ tendency to operate with an overly rigid separation between morality and politics, whereas the imbrication of ethics and politics in the continental tradition is constantly acknowledged and the term ‘ethico-politico’ commonplace. The political dimensions of drawing boundaries around moral obligations is just as salient, and fraught with contestation, as drawing boundaries around geographical entities. In examining supererogation and moral-demandingness we cannot neatly separate the political from the ethical aspects of the problem. Take the example of combatting poverty in developing countries and disaster relief, an example that is at the heart of the utilitarian supererogation assimilation strategy I examine in Chapter 3. If we regard donating to aid and rescue agencies as urgent moral duties, then this may rush the necessary deliberations and discount the unintended political consequences of that aid, such as population control, or distortions in the local food and agricultural markets. In other words, what may be required in these cases is not a more demanding morality, that is, more supererogatory acts, but rather, a more nuanced political evaluation. It is this need to bring politics into the discussion which bolsters the case for Levinas in approaching the problems of supererogation and moral demandingness. Critchley writes that for Levinas, “ethics is ethical for the sake of politics – that is, for the sake of a new conception of the organization of political space” (1999, 223). This study will proceed in two parts: part one explicates supererogation, impartialism and moral demandingness, and interrogates the purported solutions offered to the problems these give rise to from within the analytic tradition. This is accomplished chiefly through critiquing Kantianism and utilitarianism—classic analytic moral theories that are impartial to the individual moral agent and their attendant contingencies.2 Part two turns to the continental tradition and the work of Levinas to approach the same problems but with different resources. My work then, in the second half of the study, will consist in reinscribing certain analytic terms and concepts used 2 Heyd

discusses virtue ethics (or rather the ‘Greco-Roman view’ of beneficence and altruism in Aristotle and Seneca) with respect to supererogation (1982, 35–48). I will bracket virtue ethics in this study, partly because the agents’ attitude, which will be central in my attempt to reconceptualise supererogation, can be understood as belonging to the family of terms that includes ‘character’.

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to map and problematise supererogation and moral demandingness in the first half of the study into Levinasian terms. The ambition of my project to span the philosophical divide between analytic and continental moral philosophy will require leaning on the work of commentators in the secondary literature more than is typical in a monograph. Some terms, like ‘proximity’, will be given a different qualifier: the problem of distance identified in examining the supererogation assimilation strategy of Peter Singer’s utilitarianism, and which I will call ‘ontological proximity’, will be reinscribed as the ‘metaphysical proximity’ between the self and the Other in the preoriginary ethical relationship—what Levinas simply calls ‘proximity’. The asymmetry of supererogation which gives rise to the perspectival problem of supererogation—the differing perspectives between the actor of, and observer to, a purportedly supererogatory act on how to describe that act—will be translated as the asymmetry that marks the relationship of proximity between the self and the Other. The reductionism of supererogation assimilation strategies will be reinscribed as a form of Levinasian ‘totalisation’. The specific meanings Levinas attaches to these terms will be made clear once they are unpacked in the second half of the study; I offer them at this stage merely to signpost what lies ahead. The perspectival problem will be shown to be at the heart of the problem of supererogation and not just a peripheral, albeit interesting issue. I will reach this conclusion after demonstrating that more succinctly circumscribing agent autonomy is how the perspectival problem of supererogation might be solved; or as it turns out, dissolved. Because the autonomy of an agent subject to a restrictive impartialism is unable to resolve the asymmetrical perspectives supererogation gives rise to, my argument will track how a Levinasian ethical agent can navigate this asymmetry and, in the process, overcome the perspectival problem. Reinscribing the autonomy of a supererogatory agent from analytic into Levinasian terms is a pivotal move in my argument and requires proceeding with extreme care. This is undertaken in Chapter 7. However, precisely because of its importance, I will elaborate a bit further on this particular reinscription here. Within the proximity of the Levinasian ethical relationship, the agent has no autonomy and is subject to an infinite responsibility (Levinas says that the autonomy of the self is ‘hostage’ to the demand of the Other). Levinas argues that the third party to this relationship of proximity offers a way to ‘correct’ the asymmetry in this relationship. What this means is that the third party is able to limit the infinite responsibility of the self to the Other, and as such, is able to restore a measure of autonomy back to the self. However, because it is impossible to determine who is the third party, and who the Other to the self, this limit to responsibility remains indeterminate. The autonomy of the Levinasian self then, exists in a state of indeterminacy, or rather, following Jacques Derrida, in a state of undecidability.3 I will coin the phrase ‘autonomy of undecidability’ and argue that this type of autonomy allows the agent to both limit and enact infinite responsibility; or, allows the agent to transcend moral 3 Very

briefly, undecidability is not indeterminacy but the struggle between two determinacies. See Chapter 5, Sect. 5.3.

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boundaries that might otherwise be too morally demanding; or, allows the agent to treat supererogatory actions as if they were obligations. More specifically, I will attribute this ‘autonomy of undecidability’ as attaching to a moral agent operating within a Levinasian normativity, rather than a Levinasian ethics. The difference between Levinasian ethics and Levinasian normativity is crucial. Levinasian ethics is, to use one of Levinas’s more well-known phrases, ‘first philosophy’; an “ethics of ethics” as Derrida (1978, 111) claims; or, a way to think the ethical relation that arises in the face-to-face encounter (Woermann, 2016, 133). What I will call Levinasian normativity, in contradistinction, circumscribes an attempt to enact the ethical relation, which Levinas argues, requires “calculation, which is knowledge, and which supposes politics; it is inseparable from the political. It is something which I distinguish from ethics, which is primary” (1988, 171). I propose to enact, or ‘operationalise’ Levinasian ethics as a Levinasian normativity by enlisting an ethical ‘provisional imperative’ which allows for an in/finite series of representations of the Other as a means to recognise the Other’s alterity. This will allow the face to ‘appear’, however fleetingly, so that a calculated, i.e. political, response is possible.4 Drawing on the philosophy of critical complexity of Woermann and Cilliers (2012), in which a provisional imperative is outlined, in order to operationalise Levinasian ethics, marks another original contribution of this study, which to my knowledge has not been attempted before. While some commentators might object to the specific use of a provisional imperative as a means to recognise alterity, attempts to do so, otherwise, the attempt to move from ethics to politics, are not against the spirit of Levinas’s intentions—he writes, “one can without doubt construct an ethics in function of what I have just said, but this is not my own theme” (1985, 90). The phrase ‘autonomy of undecidability’ to circumscribe a Levinasian normativity is admittedly jarring, precisely because autonomy, as the idea of a self-positing sovereign consciousness, is so anathema to Levinasian ethics. For this reason, the term is only introduced after I have unpacked Levinasian normativity as the oscillation between ethics and politics. The phrase ‘autonomy of undecidability’ is not meant to come apart, as this might imply that there are certain choices available to the moral agent. Within the context of Levinasian normativity, the autonomy of the agent does not stand alone, but is always bundled together with the notion of undecidability. The phrase ‘autonomy of undecidability’ could well be a betrayal of Levinas’s ideas. However, if reinscription is regarded as translation, then such a betrayal would nonetheless attract pardon by Levinas himself. Levinas repeatedly says that ‘Traduire, c’est trahir’—‘to translate is to betray’ (Critchley, 2015, 76, translation modified). When the self tries to represent the alterity of the Other, they betray the singularity of the Other. If the Face is discourse as Levinas claims,5 then representation is an attempt to translate that discourse into terms the self can understand. Every representation is a mistranslation of the Other’s demand, and does 4 Strictly speaking, the alterity of the Other can never be recognised as such, because it never appears.

The attempt to recognise alterity, is a political move, aiming at approaching an infinite responsibility to the Other. See Chapter 7, Sect. 7.5. 5 Chapter 6, Sect. 6.3.2.

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violence to their alterity. And yet, the Other must be represented, their demands translated, however badly, if there is to be any hope for justice. My project thus constitutes a double betrayal of Levinas: a translation of Levinasian terms into a philosophical discourse—the analytic tradition—in which he is a stranger, and then into a praxis that attempts to bridge the ethical-political lacuna. The arguments presented in the second part of this study attempt to make the case that such a betrayal and violent translation is necessary in order to address the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. The conclusion I reach is that the subject of Levinasian normativity, operating with an autonomy of undecidability, makes possible the limiting and enacting of infinite responsibility as a certain type of ethical attitude—the supererogatory attitude.

1.3 A Note on the Envisaged Readership of the Study Jargon and specialised terminology are a widespread feature of contemporary scholarship. The pernicious effects of this on reaching wider audiences is well documented. I go to considerable lengths to clarify the specialised terminology used in this study, more specifically, clarifying the terminology used in analytic moral philosophy into terms that continental philosophers working in ethics and politics can easily grasp, and vice versa. My efforts should be robust enough to ensure that these specialised terms are clearer not just to those working from within the analytic or continental philosophical camps but to an even broader set of scholars. To that end, I outline in this section, an envisaged audience for this study regarded both in its entirety and also with regard to specific chapters. Firstly, and most importantly, this work aims for a broad reception in the field of ethics and moral philosophy, these two terms ostensibly covering the same subject matter: instead, reflecting the divide between continental and analytic philosophy. My intention is to build a sturdier bridge with which to facilitate the increasing traffic of ideas between these two positions. Explicating this bridging task is most evident in Chapters 5 and 10, the conclusion of the study. However, demonstrating the reinscription of analytic moral terminology into Levinasian ethical terminology, and developing the implications of that reinscription, happens across the entirety of the second half of the study. Notwithstanding this envisaged broad audience, the study should appeal to two broad groups of readers: those working within Levinasian scholarship (which I expand upon below), and those who have an interest in supererogation; although, in situating the problem of supererogation within the wider concerns of moral-demandingness and tying it to impartialism, I believe that the study will prove to be useful beyond the limited confines of the supererogation literature. Widening the audience in this way also opens up the study to those working in the fields of ‘poverty studies’, ‘development studies’ and the ‘ethics of assistance’ for example. Peter Singers’ 1972 paper ‘Famine Affluence and Morality’ has proved the catalyst for the emergence of a veritable cottage-industry of ideas which cuts across these fields. I

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trust that my critique of Singer’s paper, and tying it to the problem of supererogation, as well as reading it through a Levinasian lens in the study’s second half, will find a niche within this burgeoning scholarship. The topic of moral-demandingness has also fragmented into narrower foci—the investigation of moralism for example. Those with an interest in this moral phenomenon will be spurred on by my critique of Craig Taylor’s work, particularly as his notion of primitive moral responsiveness plays such an important role in my reconceptualisation of supererogation. While my study will appeal to any reader with an interest in Levinas, it should attract in particular, those who are interested in Levinas’s politics, or what he calls the task of ‘constructing ethics’. I label my attempt to construct a Levinasian ethics, a Levinasian normativity. However, as will become clear right from the beginning of the study’s second half, Levinasian ethics and politics are so inextricably intertwined that it is near impossible to make sense of the former without grasping the latter. Trying to untangle that conundrum has seen innovative and interesting attempts to use Levinas’s ideas to solve applied ethics problems across a very wide spectrum. In Chapter 9 I add to these efforts by considering how Levinas might help us to understand whistleblowing and whistleblower subjectivity. The topic of whistleblowing involves experts from a range of disciplines—my analysis of whistleblowing through a Levinasian lens will appeal to those approaching the topic from the viewpoint of business ethics and organisation studies.

1.4 Chapter Synopses In Chapter 2, I map various definitions of supererogation in the literature and point out salient overlaps and divergences. I discuss ‘appeal to cost’ approaches to supererogation which argue that because supererogatory actions represent a large cost to the agent they should be at the discretion of the agent. Determining when a cost becomes a sacrifice, and hence qualifies as supererogation, reveals an asymmetry between the observer and actor who may characterise the same action differently. This leads to the perspectival problem of supererogation and complicates the notion of moral autonomy. I then situate the problem of supererogation within the wider concern of moral-demandingness. I argue that both problems can be traced to impartialist moral theories which constrain the autonomy of the agent. In Chapter 3, I explore Heyd’s characterisation of the problem of supererogation as twofold—a meta-ethical and normative problem. I trace the concomitant strategies of Kantianism and utilitarianism to assimilate supererogation which involve reducing the supererogatory to the obligatory and extending the scope and meaning of duty. The former is briefly examined by way of Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties; while the latter is unpacked through an extended critical analysis of Peter Singer’s so-called life-saving analogy (LSA) articulated in “Famine, Affluence and Morality’ (1972). Chapter 4 returns to the perspectival problem of supererogation in order to examine the imbrication of autonomy and supererogation more deeply. I enlist Bernard

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Williams’s notion of a moral incapacity as a means to characterise the purported supererogator’s description of their actions as something they had to do, and argue that this demonstrates that the autonomy of the agent is no longer necessary for supererogation. I also claim that moral incapacities reveal a certain type of ethical attitude which lead to supererogation, and then introduce Craig Taylor’s ‘primitive moral responsiveness’ as a way to make sense of this attitude. However, I argue that these responses fall short of constituting a proper supererogatory attitude and suggest how Taylor’s account can be ameliorated so that moral responsiveness can still be utilised in the project to reconceptualise supererogation. Chapter 5 segues between the argument of part one, which I reflexively claim tracks arguments that derive from the analytic tradition, to the argument of part two, which can be situated within the continental tradition. I explore the differences between the two traditions and argue that because continental philosophy does not rely on impartialism to support its claims and is more sensitive to situational, contextual and relational contingencies, it is better positioned to address the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. I then present the case why Levinas in particular is best suited to undertake this task. The argument of part two unfolds in three stages: firstly, an exegesis of Levinasian ethics, secondly, an operationalisation of Levinasian ethics into a particular type of normativity; and finally, a reconceptualisation of supererogation as the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity. This is undertaken across Chapters 6, 7, and 8, respectively. Chapter 6 reinscribes the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness conceptualised from within an analytic moral philosophy into the terminology of a Levinasian ethics. Levinasian ethics is then adumbrated chiefly through the figure of the face, whose ‘epiphanic re/presentation’ circumscribes the sensibility, rather than the appearance of the face. The face signifies the alterity of the Other in discourse, which Levinas argues, amounts to a type of attitude of the self toward the Other. I also tie Levinas’s notions of proximity and asymmetry with their conceptual counterparts from the first half of the study. The chapter outlines what can broadly be considered a Levinasian methodology and also outlines Levinas’s innovation of the Saying and the Said. Chapter 7 examines, and builds on, Levinas’s move from ethics to politics which is inaugurated by the third party and who limits the infinite responsibility of the self by acting as the incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity. This incessant correction operates as the diachrony between the Saying and the Said which can also be described as the recursive oscillation between the undecidability of ethics and politics. The chapter then builds on this conception to construct a Levinasian normativity—a normativity without norms—a meta-ethical position which subjects every norm to the imperative of provisionality. Following this, the autonomy of the self, restored by the third, is explicated as an autonomy of undecidability In Chapter 8, I reconceptualise supererogation as the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity. More specifically, as the ethical attitude which recursively imagines the alterity of the Other in order to traverse the undecidability of the ethical and political re/presentations of that alterity in order to limit infinite responsibility

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and, then restore it back again. I then reformulate this provisional formulation to argue that supererogation as Levinasian normativity can also be understood as the (im)possibility of sacrifice, and concomitantly, the provisionality of saintliness and heroism. The chapter concludes by considering, and then dismissing, several objections to supererogation reconceptualised as the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity. Chapter 9 turns to the figure of the whistleblower in order to illustrate how certain features of Levinasian normativity might find practical application. The chapter follows Andrade’s claim that the whistleblower is the ethical, and flexible boundary of the organisation (2015). I argue that this flexibility of organisational boundaries illustrates the provisionality of Levinasian normativity, and that consequently, the whistleblower is better understood as the ethico-politico boundary of the organisation. I then turn to a reading of Alford’s paper on whistleblower narratives (2007). I argue that the autonomy of undecidability which marks the subject of Levinasian normativity, offers a more helpful understanding of whistleblowing autonomy than the notion of ‘choiceless choice’, while the recursive oscillation of Levinasian normativity offers a way to escape the prison of static time whistleblowers find themselves in. In Chapter 10, I conclude the study by revisiting the turn to continental philosophy in general, and Levinas in particular, as a means to solve the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. In light of my exegesis of a Levinasian ethics and subsequent construction of Levinasian normativity, I elaborate my claim that analytic moral philosophy fails to solve these problems because of its inclinations to impartialism.

References Alford, C. F. (2007). Whistleblower narratives: The experience of choiceless choice. Social Research, 74(1), 223–248. Andrade, J. A. (2015). Reconceptualising whistleblowing in a complex world. Journal of Business Ethics, 28(2), 321–325. Cowley, C. (2015). Introduction: The agents, acts and attitudes of supererogation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 1–23. Critchley, S. (1999). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Critchley, S. (2015). The problem with Levinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cullity, G. (2004). The moral demands of affluence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Violence and metaphysics. In A. Bass (Trans.), Writing and difference (pp. pp 97–192). London: Routledge. Hamilton, C. (2015). Religion, forgiveness and humanity. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 185–205. Heyd, D. (1982). Supererogation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1987). Collected philosophical papers (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.

References

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Levinas, E. (1988). ‘The paradox of morality’: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas by T. Wright, P. Hayes and A. Ainley (A. Benjamin & T.Wright, Trans.). In R. Bernasconi & D.Wood (Eds.), The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the other. London: Routledge. MacFarquhar, L. (2015). Strangers drowning: Voyages to the brink of moral extremity. London: Allen Lane. Miller, R. W. (2004). Beneficence, duty, and distance. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32(4), 357– 383. Oppenheim, J. (1911). Bread and roses. American Magazine, p. 214. Colver Publishing House. Painter-Morland, M. (2008). Business ethics as practice: Ethics as the everyday business of business. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. Urmson, J. O. (1958). Saints and heroes. In A. I. Melden (Ed.), Essays in moral philosophy. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Wessels, U. (2015). Beyond the call of duty: The structure of a moral region. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 87–104. Woermann, M. (2016). Bridging complexity and post-structuralism: Insights and implications. Switzerland: Springer International. Woermann, M., & Cilliers, P. (2012). The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics. South African Journal of Philosophy, 31(2), 447–463. Wolf, S. (1982). Moral saints. The Journal of Philosophy, 79(8), 419–439.

Part I

Moral Demandingness

“It is the very job of supererogation to protect us from morality demanding too much of us” (Wessels 2015; 94). “The moral question here is less one of quality – What should I do? – than of quantity: When can I stop?” (MacFarquhar 2015; 61).

Chapter 2

The Demandingness of Supererogation

Abstract This chapter commences with a basic definition of supererogatory acts as moral acts that go beyond duty which are praiseworthy when performed, but not blameworthy when not. I then map various definitions of supererogation in the literature and point out salient overlaps and divergences. I take J. O. Urmson’s paper ‘Saints and Heroes,’ in which he calls for an additional class of moral actions beyond the tripartite deontic schema of obligatory, non-obligatory and permissible actions, as my starting point. I then use his later position which insists on the agents’ sacrifice as a necessary requirement for supererogation to introduce ‘appeal to cost’ approaches within supererogation. These approaches have it that because supererogatory actions cost the agent a great deal they should be at the discretion of the agent. However, supererogation is marked by an asymmetry between the observer and actor who may characterise the same action differently—the agent may regard performing a purportedly supererogatory act as just their duty. This asymmetry leads to the perspectival problem of supererogation and complicates the notion of moral autonomy. I then situate the problem of supererogation within the wider concern of moral-demandingness. I show that problematic overdemanding morality, which by turns is unpacked as ‘overweening morality’ and, following Susan Wolf, ‘saintly morality’, is a direct consequence of impartialism—a feature of certain moral theories which require the agent to detach themselves from their personal projects and special relationships when making moral decisions. I find that impartialism constrains the autonomy of the agent to decide whether certain acts are too morally-demanding, and as such should be regarded as supererogatory acts.

2.1 Introduction Supererogatory actions are extraordinary—they are performed in addition to the ordinary demands of morality. There are however many refinements, extensions and qualifiers to this purported definition. In this opening chapter I will proceed without settling on any one categorical definition of supererogation. Following Heyd, I will be concerned with the “conceptual mapping rather than moral truth” of supererogation (2015, 41). I will attempt this through exploring, systematically, certain common and © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_2

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recurring features of supererogation present in the literature. These include praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, sacrifice and cost, and most importantly, duty and ‘beyond duty’. Concatenating these features and doing so in one order, rather than another, to cobble together a plausible conceptualisation of supererogation does, however, risk circular definitions. So, for example, praise and blame are evaluative notions that we assign to morally significant acts and persons performing such acts. But if performing a supererogatory act is praiseworthy because performing a supererogatory acts is morally significant, then in virtue of what is a supererogatory act morally significant? What is praiseworthy about going beyond one’s duty? One possible answer is that a supererogatory act should be praised and be seen as morally significant (the notions being interchangeable) because it is an autonomous act. Saying that the supererogatory act is optional brings this link with autonomy to the fore. However, there is an ambiguity in the term ‘optional’ that is being elided here. This is apparent when we say that the supererogatory act is optional because it goes beyond duty; optionality in this instance says no more than that the supererogatory act is nonobligatory, that is, that it goes beyond duty. The term ‘optionality’ is an attempt to circumvent the problem that defining supererogation as ‘going beyond duty’ raises— that is, defining the boundary between duty and beyond duty, and determining what autonomy does the agent have in establishing that boundary? The exercise of autonomy to perform an act that goes beyond duty is, however, insufficient to elicit praise; after-all we are free to refuse even the most pedestrian calls to do good. Autonomy must somehow tie up to ‘the extra’ which supererogatory acts require. Determining what amounts to ‘extra’ means determining what is required in the first place. We can choose to go beyond duty only by first knowing where duty ends. Duty and autonomy thus implicate each other in conceptualising supererogation and determining where the moral significance of supererogation comes from. Problematising either one thus problematises the other. To sharpen the question of autonomy we should more clearly specify what the agent is being asked to choose between when deciding to perform a supererogatory act, and further, what are legitimate considerations in motivating that choice one way or the other? In making those choices there is a resistance to supererogation which Levy argues “stems from the urge to deny a personal dimension in morality in favor of the universal” (2015, 239). This confrontation between the personal and the universal is also present in those for argue for an impartialism in morality and those who resist those calls. The conceptualisation of supererogation both traces and widens this debate. The chapter will proceed as follows: in the first section I offer a preliminary and basic definition of supererogation. I then consider another group of definitions that centre on the praiseworthiness aspect of supererogation. I also present David Heyd’s more formal definition of supererogation and trace his response both to J. O. Urmson’s (1958) paper ‘Saint and Heroes’ and Urmson’s subsequent rejection of that position. In the section thereafter I characterise Urmson’s volte-face as demonstrative of an appeal to cost approach to the existence, or non-existence of a separate class of supererogatory actions. Appeals to cost approaches focus of the purported sacrifice of agents which serve to distinguish them as supererogators. These approaches

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highlight the asymmetries of perspective that can mark supererogation. In Sect. 2.4 I outline how these asymmetries reveal the imbrication of autonomy and the attempts to conceptualise supererogation. The chapter’s final section argues that this imbrication problematises certain moral theories attempts to conceptualise supererogation and can be traced back to the impartialism of those theories. Impartialism is tied to the broader philosophical problem of moral demandingness, and then further examined through the lens of what is termed ‘overweening’ and ‘saintly’ morality.

2.2 Mapping Supererogation A first and basic definition of a supererogatory act is a moral act that goes beyond duty. As such, these types of actions are non-obligatory. Another way of formulating this idea is to say that supererogatory acts are like moral duties but just “more of the same” (Drummond-Young, 2015, 136); or “duty-plus” acts (Brinkman, 2015). The use of the terms ‘beyond’, ‘more’ and ‘plus’, leads Wessels to characterise this way of understanding as ‘the threshold model for supererogation’,1 where in every situation “there is a threshold for the good to be done such that, firstly, it is obligatory to perform an action that meets the threshold, and, secondly, every action that exceeds the threshold is supererogatory” (2015, 88). The idea of a threshold, or of a boundary or limit, in relation to supererogatory actions is succinctly captured in Urmson’s notion of “going the second mile”, which he claims cannot be one’s duty in the “same basic sense as it is to go the first” (1958, 205). Another broad definition of a supererogatory act has is that “a supererogatory action is praiseworthy if performed, but not blameworthy if omitted” (Cowley, 2015, 2). This definition, rather than drawing attention to duty and the beyond of duty, highlights the responses of other moral agents’ attendant to the action performed. However, to say that a moral act is supererogatory because it is praiseworthy when done but not blameworthy when not, is to be drawn into a potentially circular conceptualisation of supererogation. This is revealed by posing the question ‘why is going beyond duty a praiseworthy thing to do?’ Another way of framing this concern is to ask why we praise certain actions and not others—to which we can reply, ‘because they are morally significant’. In other words, if praiseworthiness and moral significance are comparative evaluative terms, then claiming moral significance as a necessary condition for supererogation becomes redundant. The responses of other moral agents to the non/performance of supererogatory actions do however shine a light on another peculiar feature of supererogation: its asymmetry. This asymmetry is located in the differing perspectives of those witness to, and those performing a purportedly supererogatory act. This perspectival asymmetry is taken up in the section to follow.

1 Wessels

rejects the threshold model because it leads to problematic ‘supererogation holes’ which “are actions that do not deserve to be called supererogatory even though they are better than some that do” (2015, 103).

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David Heyd, undoubtably one of the most prominent and important theorists in the supererogation literature, offers a formal definition of a supererogatory act as an act that is (1) neither obligatory nor forbidden; (2) one whose omission is not an instance of wrongness (or deserving of sanction or criticism); (3) one which is morally good in virtue of its consequences and its intrinsic value (being beyond duty); and (4) one that is done voluntarily for the sake of another’s good (and is thus meritorious) (1982, 115–116). Heyd takes conditions (2) to (4) as sufficient conditions for supererogation, justifying the inclusion of (1) for expository and convenience purposes. While I will not comment on Heyd’s definition at this stage, I include his definition here to outline what aspects will need to be addressed in a conceptual mapping of supererogation; that is, duty (1), praiseworthiness and blameworthiness (2), moral significance (3), and the autonomy of the moral agent (4). However, these features mutually implicate one another and separating them is not always possible, or desirable: for example, condition (4) seems to imply that the moral significance of the supererogatory act derives from the autonomy of the agent, whereas condition (3) seems to locate the moral significance of supererogation in (the beyond of) obligation(1). That would make the definition potentially circular—a concern pointed out in the previous paragraph. Supererogation has its roots in Christian ethics2 and starts from the tale of the Good Samaritan who helps a distressed victim to an inn and pays for his lodgings there. The Latin phrase quocumque supererogaveris translates as ‘whatsoever thou shalt spend over and above’, in reference to the promise of the Good Samaritan to pay for any further expenses incurred by the innkeeper in accommodating the victim (Heyd, 1982, 17). While the Samaritan’s duty (as a Christian) ends once the have tended to the victim and got them to a place of rest, the payment for further expenses goes beyond this Christian duty. “Spill[ing] into secular ethics, initially living in the shadows though” (Wessels, 2015, 87), the contemporary debate around supererogation is inaugurated by Urmson’s seminal essay ‘Saints and Heroes’ (1958). There Urmson takes aim at the traditional tripartite classification of moral actions as either obligatory, permissible or forbidden—purporting to exhaust the category of moral actions—and argues that saintly and heroic actions do not fit neatly into any of these categories. Although supererogatory actions are neither obligatory nor forbidden, saying that they are permissible, while true, fails to capture important features about them; one of these features being that declining to take up such permissibility is not blameworthy. While the term ‘supererogation’ is not deployed in Urmson’s paper, the eponymous protagonists of the title have come to stand in for the most paradigmatic exemplars of supererogation. However, Urmson also claims that the less conspicuous cases of “disinterested kindness and generosity” also count as doing more than one’s duty, and while these go “just beyond ones duty” as against the saintly and heroic actions that go “a very long way”; both types of actions present a challenge to traditional morality (205). Heyd agrees that actions that go just beyond doing one’s duty should 2 For

a comprehensive discussion of supererogation’s theological origins in Christianity, see Heyd (1982), Chapter 1.

2.2 Mapping Supererogation

21

count as supererogatory actions and examines beneficence, volunteering and forgiveness as further examples of supererogation (1982, 142–164).3 Many contest the claim that kindness and other quotidian moral acts can amount to supererogatory acts, not least Urmson himself, who makes a volte-face on his position in ‘Saints and Heroes’ some thirty years later. Urmson writes that he regrets arguing for a replacement of a tripartite deontic structure—obligatory, permissible and forbidden acts—with a tetrachotomy which includes supererogatory acts (1988, 167–169). In revising his position, Urmson argues that everyday acts, such as kindness and considerateness, while praiseworthy and non-obligatory, are of a different order to the actions of saints and heroes. The significant heterogeneity between holding a door open and jumping on a grenade to save one’s fellow platoon-members from the blast of an explosion for example, should preclude a special category of supererogation. What then marks this heterogeneity and supersedes the conditions of praiseworthiness and optionality? Sacrifice, answers Urmson—a sacrifice enacts a great cost from the moral agent, while small acts of kindness do not. In maintaining that sacrifice marks the actions of saints and heroes from other praiseworthy and non-obligatory actions, Urmson can be understood as invoking an ‘appeal to cost’ argument for the existence of supererogation.

2.3 Sacrifice and the Appeal to Cost John Rawls writes that supererogatory acts are not required, though normally they would be were it not for the loss or risk involved for the agent himself […] For while we have a natural duty to bring about a great good, say, if we can do so relatively easily, we are released from this duty when the cost to ourselves is considerable. (1971, 100)

While Rawls argues that supererogation involves loss or risk, the magnitude of such a loss or risk is vaguely circumscribed—‘considerable’. However, a considerable cost is not quite yet a sacrifice, and so, if we take Urmson’s argument seriously, does not necessarily lead to supererogation. Kagan gets closer to Urmson’s, and our common-sense understanding of sacrifice when he says that the notion of a considerable cost encompasses “money, time, effort and life itself” (1989, 232). Peter Singer endorses Rawls’ position, but specifically uses the term ‘sacrifice’ to refer to such a cost: “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (1972, 231). However, Singer’s project is concerned with demonstrating that such a sacrifice is not supererogation; or rather, that what constitutes the threshold for sacrifice, and hence, supererogation should be lowered. Singer’s claim, and my argument against it, will take up most of the chapter to follow. However, it can be briefly noted here that the utilitarian notion of marginal utility can be understood as 3I

will explore the case of forgiveness in Chapter 4, Sect. 4.2.1.

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a type of a regulating mechanism between cost and sacrifice, and so, also, between obligation and supererogation. Drummond-Young raises concerns with appeal to cost approaches on the grounds that there are also duties that are hard to fulfil because they are costly and risky (2015, 127). In this regard, one can think of keeping promises, which may become onerous when the cost initially envisaged in keeping such promises escalates because of changed circumstances. In such instances, the obligation to keep one’s promise are also costly and risky, so supererogatory actions do not have a monopoly on cost. However, the problem remains: at what point does a cost, even a considerable cost, become a sacrifice and hence lead to supererogation? If circumstances deteriorate to such an extent that honouring a commitment made in advance would require an agent to make a sacrifice, then them not doing so would not be blameworthy, even though they had an initial obligation to do so. Drummond-Young then gives a second argument against the appeal to cost approach by noting the “prevalence of low-cost favours and small supererogatory acts” such as directing a lost tourist in a friendly manner (ibid.). This is, however, just the concern that Urmson raises, and is precisely what is in question: whether small acts can count as supererogatory acts because they cost the agent little to perform. The problem of moral iteration offers another way to recast the cost of performing small non-obligatory actions and whether they might have a place within supererogation. Drummond-Young recognises the argument that “I might have to perform quite a few of them [small moral acts] to achieve a satisfactory moral standing and demanding yet more of me could eat significantly into my time and the possibility of pursuing other projects” (128). This is a very important aspect of the problem of moral demandingness—the high cost of moral iteration: very small and undemanding moral acts iterated enough times can exact a big cost on the agent, and thus constitute a sacrifice. I explicate the problem of moral demandingness in detail in the final section of this chapter, while moral iteration is returned to in the chapter to follow.4 Before considering one final objection to appeal to cost approaches in the subsection to follow, I want to note a point raised by Cowley. Cowley considers Urmson’s heroic grenade-jumper and remarks that if the grenade-jumper dies in his attempt to spare his comrades the effects of the blast, then “it is not clear what he has incurred is a cost given that he does not live to experience it as a cost”, even though he might experience such risks and anticipated costs in the moment of jumping before he is killed (2015, 5). Or, if the grenade-jumper believes that he will be killed by the explosion anyway (because he is closest to it perhaps), he may calculate that he has nothing to lose, and so may as well try to save his comrades’ lives. The appeal to cost in such considerations is likely to distort our understanding of supererogation as requiring sacrifice. The scope of this distortion will become clearer when explicating the perspectival problem of supererogation below.

4 Chapter

3, Sect. 3.3.1.2.

2.3 Sacrifice and the Appeal to Cost

23

2.3.1 The Asymmetry of Supererogation and the Perspectival Problem Drummond-Young offers one final challenge to the appeal to cost approach: “those who perform even significant supererogatory acts sometimes do not consider that they have paid any costs at all” (2015, 128). In other words, the supererogator themselves may not regard their actions as meeting the threshold of sacrifice. Consider once more Urmson’s hero who jumps onto a grenade to save his comrades. To the observer of this scene this act is praiseworthy because it goes beyond duty, even beyond those duties required of a soldier in wartime; and yet, to the soldier, the action may appear as precisely just his duty: “I am a soldier and part of being a soldier includes me doing whatever I can, no matter how dangerous, to prevent any harm from coming to my comrades in the theatre of war”. Supererogatory acts may thus present two different, asymmetrical, perspectives to the observer and the agent—the spectator might view the act as supererogatory, whereas from the perspective of the agent that very same act is regarded as obligatory.5 These considerations have resulted in calling the asymmetry of supererogation, ‘the perspectival problem of supererogation’ (Drummond-Young, 2015, 125). Levy writes that these asymmetrical perspectives should be understood as “how others are restricted from asserting that the supererogatory action is obligatory or (morally) blaming the actor for non-performance” (2015, 229). The asymmetry of supererogation thus leads to an asymmetry of blame. The corollary of an asymmetry of blame, an asymmetry of praise—that praise should be restricted if the supererogatory act is understood as obligatory—can further complicate the perspectival problem: if calling an act ‘supererogatory’ is a way to say that we shouldn’t even attempt such actions then, as MacFarquhar writes, “praise is a disguised excuse” (2015, 61). The perspectival problem of supererogation also informs statements such as “I don’t think I did anything that special. I think what I did is what everybody normally should be doing. We all should help one another. It’s common sense and common caring for people” which are commonly encountered in the literature (Monroe, 1996, 104, in Horgan & Timmons, 2010, 40). The quote is from an interview with a so-called ‘righteous gentile’ who risked their life to hide Jews from Nazis during the Second World War. The risks taken and sacrifice borne by such agents seem to be paradigmatic cases of supererogation, leading some theorists to argue that such first-hand accounts are really just misdescriptions—that the agent is either misremembering their experience, or is being overly modest and self-effacing (Horgan & Timmons, 2010, 40). As such, these actions, the first-hand accounts of the purported supererogator notwithstanding, should still be considered supererogatory, at least from the perspective of the observer. However, others, most notably Bernard Williams, regard the claim by a moral agent that they could not act otherwise in a particular situation as a genuine incapacity (1981b, 1993). Williams calls such

5 In

Chapter 4 I will call such agents, hesitant, or reluctant heroes and saints.

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an incapacity, to refrain from performing a (supererogatory) action, a ‘moral incapacity’. The moral (in)capacities of an agent directly impact upon the scope of the autonomy of the agent. I will tie William’s account of moral incapacity to autonomy and supererogation in Chapter 4. Levy describes these expressions of an action appearing as necessary to a moral agent, but not to the observer, as the agent’s “consenting to his responsibility for acting [supererogatorily]”, even as the agent disputes the description of their action as supererogatory (2015, 229).6 The term ‘consenting’ points to the imbrication of autonomy and responsibility, of autonomy and duty. The analysis in the chapters to follow will reveal just how deeply imbricated they are, and how difficult it will be to pull them apart. While the agent might hold themselves responsible for performing a supererogatory action, or under a (self-assumed) obligation to perform such an act, “nobody else can call on him to perform such an act” (Urmson, 1958, 204). However, this would depend on how that act was characterised by others: if it was seen as obligatory then the agent’s consent in this regard would not be necessary, and anybody else could call upon the agent to perform that action. In other words, however the act was characterised by the agent themselves, if such an act was characterised as obligatory by those observing the performance, then the moral autonomy of the agent, to dissent from such characterisation, would be constrained.

2.4 Supererogatory Autonomy At this point I return to Urmson’s volte-face in positing a distinct class of supererogatory actions. Urmson’s later position has it that no class of supererogatory actions exist in spite of the commonalities of moral significance and optionality because of the huge discrepancies in cost to the moral agent within that purported class. As I have argued, the morally significance and praiseworthiness of an action are interchangeable evaluative notions, and as such, claiming that an action is supererogatory because it is morally significant is to beg the question. This leaves only optionality to consider as a criterion for supererogation in Urmson’s original formulation. Heyd however, urges us to ignore Urmson’s later position, and argues that constructing a distinct class of supererogatory actions can be achieved on the basis that supererogatory actions all share the following features: their “optionality, agent discretion and nonuniversalisable nature” (2015, 45). Optionality can be read to mean non-obligatory, but this does not clarify things. What we are trying to determine is why these nonobligatory actions require a class of their own, and to say that these non-obligatory actions are optional (or voluntary) adds little to helping us make that determination. The terms ‘choice’, or ‘autonomy’ can equally stand in for ‘discretion’. Before 6 Levy

replaces obligation with responsibility and in this instance, they can be taken as equivalent concepts so that the citation might equally read as ‘consenting to his obligation for acting’. I will in Part II of the study replace obligation with responsibility as a means to reconceptualise supererogation but will stipulate a specific meaning of responsibility as distinct from obligation.

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25

picking apart ‘autonomy’, it is necessary to first be clear what Heyd means by ‘nonuniversalisability’, because, as it turns out, this concept will be found to be deeply interconnected with autonomy. Heyd argues that supererogation being non-universalisable means that supererogatory action breaks out of the impersonal and egalitarian framework of the morality of duty – both by displaying individual preferences and virtues, and by allowing for some forms of favouritism, partial and unilateral treatment of someone to whom the agent wishes to show special concern. (1982, 175)

The core feature of Heyd’s non-universalisability is partialism—making allowance for the individuals’ exercise of favoritism and acknowledging personal preferences. In contrast to partialism, is impartialism, which, in a nutshell, can be expressed as the sentiment, “morally speaking, I am no more important than anyone else” (Cullity, 2004, 92). In other words, my preferences should carry no more weight than the preferences of others. As such impartialism does not offer an opportunity to break from ‘the morality of duty’ and to perform supererogatory acts. However, the exercise of favoritism is at the discretion of the moral agent. What follows from this is that in the context of supererogation, partialism and impartialism, or non-universalisability and universalisability, cannot be meaningfully critiqued apart from a critique of moral autonomy (or agent discretion). Such a position also implies that the distinct features Heyd attributes to supererogatory actions, their “optionality, agent discretion and non-universal[isability]” (op cit.) can fold into one another. In order to pursue this line of inquiry, a more thorough examination of impartialism will be necessary. This will be done in the section to follow by contextualising impartialism within the broader concern of moral demandingness. Before moving onto that, a brief recapitulation of the chapter thus far: Supererogatory acts were variously defined as morally significant acts that go beyond duty; as non-obligatory actions so that they are praiseworthy when performed but also not blameworthy when not; as optional and at the discretion of the moral agent because non-universalisable. However, it was shown that these terms were often conflated such that circular definitions resulted. The divide between those who argue that supererogatory acts can extend beyond heroic and saintly acts to include small everyday acts was examined at the hand of ‘appeal to cost’ approaches to supererogation. On the one side are those who argue supererogatory actions should involve a costly sacrifice from the agent. However, determining what amounts to a sacrifice, and hence a supererogatory action, is problematic and so only shifts the inquiry down a level. The claim that the magnitude of the cost incurred by the agent is not determinative of supererogatory status was strengthened by exploring it through the lens of the perspectival problem of supererogation. The perspectival problem describes the asymmetry of blame (and praise) that characterises supererogation. Here the moral agent claims, that from their viewpoint, they do not consider their actions as constituting a sacrifice, and as such, to them, their actions amount to fulfilling an obligation, even if others observing the act consider those acts supererogatory. This

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asymmetry of supererogation, in turn, implicates the autonomy of the moral agent, not least to decide what amounts to a sacrifice; or, to include partial considerations in making that decision.

2.5 Moral Demandingness and Impartialism 2.5.1 Impartialism In mapping the core features of, and the concomitant challenges to supererogation in preceding sections of this chapter, I have not systematically traced such conceptualisation through any one particular moral theory. However, as the last section pointed to, it would seem that impartial moral theories might be responsible for some of the challenges such an attempt raises. Impartial moral theories include deontological moral theories, best exemplified by Kantianism, and consequentialist moral theories, best exemplified by utilitarianism. While there are major differences between Kantianism and utilitarianism in general, and with their approaches to supererogation in particular (which are explicated in the chapter to follow) “each identifies morality with a perspective of impartiality, impersonality, objectivity, and universality” (Alford, 2001, 149). Impartialism removes the caprice and contingency of the individual, and as such, attempts to make moral decision-making rational and calculable. Apropos this project, Bauman writes that, “morality is ‘in order to’. Moral acts are means to an end” (1993, 56). Whether that end be advancing the greatest happiness of Man as envisaged by Mill, or respecting Man’s inherent dignity as proclaimed by Kant, impartial morality hems in an individual’s telos, in order to postulate a universal telos. Singer concurs with this overview and argues that moral theories (including not just Kantianism and utilitarianism, but also existentialism amongst others) cannot justify themselves “in terms of any partial or sectional group. Ethics [must] take a universal point of view” (2011, 11). Put into an ‘egalitarian framework’ (Heyd’s term used above in relation to non-universalisability), impartialism provides us with “the principle of equal consideration of interests” whose “essence […] is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions” (20). One implication of this stance is that friends and family have no special claim on us. If so, then I have no more reason to run into a burning building to save my daughter than to save a stranger. Results like these mean that impartialism attracts a large cohort of detractors. One detractor is Miller, who argues that Singer is conflating consideration for others with respect for others: “Equal respect does not entail equal concern” (2004, 367).7 Miller also turns to special relationships to motivate his claim—“I do not regard the life of the girl across the street as less valuable than the life of my daughter, but 7 The

formulation ‘equal respect for others’ is a very Kantian formulation. What Miller means is that respecting others, in terms of being cognisant of their interests, does not mean we should grant equal weighting to those interests.

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27

I am not equally concerned with her. I am not inclined to do as much for her when she is just as needy as my daughter, even if her parents have reached their limit” (ibid.). This is not to say that the impartialist—in particular, the utilitarian—does not permit showing greater concern for one’s daughter. Doing so, in fact, creates more utility in the world because of the happiness it brings to both parents and children. However, even this ‘greater concern’ for one’s daughter has implications unacceptable to Miller. The utilitarian would not regard sending one’s child to college as showing unequal respect for the poor, and would allow for unequal considerations in making that decision. However, Miller asks us to consider sending one’s daughter to an expensive college which would ensure her the best possible education. This unequal consideration of the interests of your daughter relative to the interests of the poor would be unacceptable to the utilitarian, because you could send your daughter to a much more affordable college, and the money so saved could then be given to the poor. Although this arrangement might increase the overall utility in the world, Miller argues that “I do not manifest unequal respect or show that I attribute less worth to some lives when I use money to pay for an excellent college education for my daughter, rather than not doing so and risking worsening her life” (369). This is because wanting the best college for my daughter “expresses an appropriate valuing of our special relationship” and not the view that her life is more valuable than a poor child in the developing world (ibid.). Schmidtz argues that impartialism attempts to erase “a pivotal feature of our moral psychology that when we focus on something, it takes on added moral significance” (2000, 689). Schmidtz calls this the ‘phenomenon of selective focus’. Schmidtz retells the story of animal rights activist Paul Watson, who had gone to Japan to confront fishermen killing dolphins. When Watson was posed with the question of who he would save if both a fisherman and a dolphin were found caught in a net, he replied with, “I did not come to Japan to save fishermen; I am here to save dolphins” (Watson, 1995, 341 in Schmidtz, 2000, 689). Schmidtz interprets Watson’s answer as the position that, although he (Watson), may be philosophically committed to viewing humans and dolphins as equals, he has no obligation to be preoccupied by that particular commitment. He is committed to respecting humans and dolphins alike, but he is not committed to giving them equal time when deciding how to plan his life. (ibid.)

The best articulation of this line of thought, which opposes impartialism, and is contained in Miller’s and Schmidtz’ s arguments above, is developed in Bernard Williams’ work (1973, 1981a, 1981b). In ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, Williams starts with the idea that everyone has a set of desires and concerns, which he calls the agent’s ‘projects’, that help to constitute the character of that moral agent (1981a, 5). These projects, which can be either one separable project or a nexus of projects, need not be one’s raison d’etre in the sense that being frustrated in achieving them would be grounds for despair, or even suicide, nor do these projects need to be self-centered. Nonetheless, these projects give meaning to the moral agent’s life and provide “motive force which propels him into the future” (13). Utilitarianism

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requires us, as impersonal utility-maximisers, to shelve, or seriously contradict, our personal projects, and so act anathema to our characters, whenever those conflicted with the demands of utilitarianism (14). As for Kantianism, “there can come a point at which it is quite unreasonable for a man to give up, in the name of the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents, something which is a condition of his having any interest in being around in that world at all” (ibid.). In other words, without any interests with which to make sense of the common good, the moral agent is unlikely to be convinced that the common good will be able to make sense of their interests. Although Kant, in the Groundwork for Metaphysics of Morals, speaks of duties to oneself—to develop one’s talents for example8 —the individual’s identity is still compromised on this account. The moral motivation that drives the duties to the self must derive from reverence for the moral law, which in turn is derived from the rationality of the human being. However, our dreams and aspirations may spring from deep-seated emotions we are unable to articulate, and so, even if they may appear eccentric or frivolous to others, they are at the center of who we regard ourselves to be. Kantian duties to oneself are owed are to a self that is indifferent to circumstances or context, duties separate from special relationships, concerns and foci, so that the duty to develop one’s talent is circumscribed within certain universal injunctions. In summary, impartialism attempts to reduce the particularities of moral identity and the complexities of moral motivation to a simple, universalisable moral calculus in the case of utilitarianism, or a categorical moral imperative that can be universalised in the case of Kantianism. Heyd asks, “If everyone worked for the promotion of the general good, whose good would be promoted?” (1982, 174). In its pursuit of an impersonal, objective, and universal ideal, impartialism subverts the uniqueness of an agents’ moral identity so that they become a mere “locus of causal intervention in the world towards the achievement of that ideal” (ibid.).

2.5.2 Overdemanding Morality In order to both extend the discussion of impartialism, and also to bring supererogation back in, I will now situate impartialism within the wider concern of moraldemandingness. That morality should not be too demanding is a conclusion that can already be gleaned from the appeal to cost approaches examined in Sect. 2.3. To say that an obligatory action should not cost the agent too much, or to say that sacrifice is a requirement that goes beyond duty, is at the same time to say that morality should not demand too much of us. It is also to say that supererogation is too morally demanding. Wessels puts the point succinctly, “it is the very job of supererogation to protect us from morality demanding too much of us” (2015, 94). In other words, positing a class of supererogatory actions protects us from overdemanding obligations by placing these obligations beyond duty; and, supererogation exempts

8 See

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#ForUniLawNat. Accessed 2 May 2019.

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29

us from morally-demanding obligations by making them optional; and, supererogation releases us from the morally-demanding imperative to universalise all morality. Levy writes that the resistance to supererogation “stems from the urge to deny a personal dimension in morality in favor of the universal”, and yet supererogation also “forces a confrontation” with such a personal dimension (2015, 239). Impartialism, as has been argued, also forces a confrontation with the personal, and so, a fortiori, moral demandingness will also be concerned with reconciling the universal with the personal. In Moral demands in Non-Ideal Theory, Liam Murphy claims that the “prima facie plausibility of this belief [that there is a limit to the demands of morality] is very high: it stands in no obvious need of a deeper rationale” (2000, 15). However, this claim is offset by a footnote in which he acknowledges that a deeper rationale might still be possible, alluding to Nagel’s discussion of moral-demandingness in terms of the “clash between the personal and impersonal points of view” (ibid.). This is precisely the lens through which I will explore the issue of moral demandingness. It should be noted that there are many who argue, particularly with respect to utilitarianism, that if prima facie plausibility, or common morality, clashes with the tenets of (impartialist) moral theory then “so much the worse for the common moral consciousness” (Smart, 1973, 68). In addition to cost to the moral agent (which was also found to circumscribe the boundaries of supererogation), Murphy identifies two further aspects to moral demandingness—alienation and confinement—but then also immediately raises doubts about whether these are indeed aspects of overdemandingness or ‘exotic’ problems in their own right (2000, 21–33). Alienation concerns the motivations of the moral agent appropriate to personal relationships in the face of impartialist moral theories (21); while the confinement concerns “the range of permissible options for action” (26). I will not pursue Murphy’s suggestion that alienation and confinement might be stand-alone problems but will take them as aspects of overdemandingness.9 The problem of alienation traces the account given in the work of Bernard Williams as explicated above. The problem with confinement is that it narrows the range of options open to the agent to choose from (29). Murphy clarifies that the problem of confinement “turns on the very fact that options are cut off, not with what is lost when particular options are cut off”, in other words, confinement robs the moral agent of “the intrinsic benefit of greater autonomy” (ibid.). Moral permissibility is a more felicitous concept with which to explore confinement, and how it operates to restrict the autonomy of the agent. To say that an action is morally permissible is to say the action under question is neither obligatory nor forbidden, and so attracts neither praise nor blame when performed or not. In the chapter’s opening section it was remarked that to say that supererogatory actions are morally permissible, because they are neither obligatory nor forbidden, failed to capture their significance because not performing a supererogatory act is not blameworthy (Not performing obligatory acts are blameworthy, whereas the non-performance of a forbidden act is not, not 9 In Chapter 3 I will include the problem of distance in morality and fair-share considerations as further aspects that fall within the ambit of moral demandingness.

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blameworthy). In order to illustrate how moral permissibility operates to confine the moral agent, that is, to restrict the agent’s autonomy, I will situate this concern within what Craig Taylor calls morality’s ‘overweening’ (2012).

2.5.3 Overweening Morality Taylor writes that while overdemanding morality (moral demandingness) and overweening morality are richly connected, the latter concerns morality’s “overstepping its proper bounds in our lives” (2012, ix). This overstepping distorts morality and has the tendency to expand into moralism in which every concern is turned into a moral concern. One characteristic of this moralism is an “unreasonable focus on moral judgement at the expense of other modes of thought about, or responsiveness to, the world or our own humanity” (59). One such mode is what Taylor calls a “primitive moral responsiveness”—an immediate and unthinking responsiveness (viii). Explicating, and developing Taylorian primitive moral responses is an important move in my project to reconceptualise supererogation and is undertaken in Chapter 4. The concern with specific moral judgements is not only that they might be faulty, excessive or inappropriate. Beyond understanding moral thought as the “application of moral concepts, theories and principles to actions, people and events” which issue in particular moral judgements, Taylor argues that moral thought also involves “a kind of knowing how to respond to a particular situation as opposed to knowing that something is the case” (15). He takes the example of adultery and the moral claim that ‘to commit adultery is wrong’. It may well be true that it was wrong of your friend to have had an extra-marital affair, but harshly rebuking them and continuing to do so may not be the best moral response. A better moral response might be an expression of pity, especially if you know, for example, that the marriage had been loveless and abusive for many years. Such a response need not be seen as endorsing infidelity, but as a recognition of the fragility of human relationships. Alice Crary, in Beyond Moral Judgement, also regards moralism as problematic insofar as it flows from moral judgement (2007). By attending only to their individual moral judgements, a moral agent risks assuming that it must in principle be possible for her to understand the circumstances of her life in the absence of the kinds of refinements of sensibility that explorations of different modes of responses to the world promise to foster. The risk is that of committing herself to simply retaining certain biases or forms of moral ignorance, and the trouble is that, if she commits herself to preserving these biases, however mild and non-judgemental she otherwise is, she can’t help but veer toward a kind of moral presumptuousness. (196)

It is this presumptuousness which Crary understands as moralism.10 It paints a picture of the moral agent as one whose moral development has been stunted, and will remain 10 Rowland

Stout argues that moral presumptuousness involves “adopting a role that you do not have and are not entitled to adopt” (2015, 145). He uses the example of a neighbour who takes it upon themselves to collect their neighbour’s daughter from school because they (the neighbours) feel that it is not appropriate for a young girl to walk home from school by herself. This, even though

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stunted, so long as that moral judgement forecloses the need to wrestle with your moral responses in engaging the world. By presuming immutable moral principles, and themselves as an immutable moral self, the agent betrays themself as a purportedly impartial agent. Both Taylor and Crary lay the problem of moralism, as an example of overweening morality and moral presumptuousness respectively, at the door of impartialism. The impartial agent who can only turn to an objective and impersonal moral theory is bound to believe that judgement is the best, or only way to respond to other moral agents and moral situations. Worse, they may turn every situation into a moral situation, becoming a moral Midas. The best illustration of the distortions of impartialism and moral judgement is offered by Bernard Williams ‘one thought too many’ objection’ (1981a). Williams’ objection centres on the issue of moral permissibility and illuminates how impartialism attempts to resolve the conflict between moral and non-moral demands. After explicating the objection, I will consider Taylor and Crary’s response to Williams. Williams considers a scenario (posited by Charles Fried in An Anatomy of Values) in which a man must decide whom of two people to save from drowning (1981a, 17). One of those drowning is his wife, but the man is beholden to impartialism’s demand to treat both equally in making his decision. Perhaps the only way for him to remain impartial, considering that one of those drowning is his wife, is to submit the decision to a coin-toss! Williams is puzzled by Fried’s answer that “the occurrence of the accident may itself stand as a sufficient randomizing event to meet the dictates of fairness, so he may prefer his friend, or loved one” (quoted in Williams; ibid.). What puzzles Williams is that this man thinks he needs to justify his choice to save his wife in the first place, and that he requires an exemption from absurd arbiters such as a coin-toss, which can “legitimate his preference, yielding the conclusion that in situations of this kind it is at least all right (morally permissible) to save one’s wife” (18). This way of thinking, argues Williams, provides the agent with one thought too many: it might be hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife. (ibid.) (emphasis added)

In other words, impartialism arrogates to itself the authority to declare what is morally permissible and what is not. Williams’ point is that impartialism can claim no such authority; the authority should rest with the agent. Moral permissibility thus impinges on the autonomy of the agent. It is worthwhile to trace Williams’ conclusion by returning to an earlier point in his argument where he responds to D. A. J. Richards’

the neighbourhood is safe, and the parents are busy working parents and they have specifically told the neighbour that they see no harm in the daughter walking home alone from school. In such a case, the neighbour is being presumptuous and in this instance such a purportedly generous act is actually a “corruption of generosity” (ibid.). In such presumptuousness we can recognise Crary’s agent who “commits herself to preserving these biases [that a young girl working home alone is a dereliction of parental duty], however mild and non-judgemental she otherwise is” (op cit.).

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suggestion of a principle of supererogation that might be accepted by John Rawls in the latter’s famed ‘Original Position’11 : A principle of mutual love requiring that people should not show personal affection and love to others on the basis of arbitrary physical characteristics alone, but rather on the basis of traits of personality and character related to acting on moral principles. (Quoted in Williams, 1981a, 16)

Williams reply to this “richly moralistic account” is that its righteous absurdity is no doubt to be traced to a feeling that love, even based on “arbitrary physical characteristics”, is something which has enough power and even authority to conflict badly with morality unless it can be brought within it from the beginning. (ibid.)

Williams’s critique of moral permissibility offers a more nuanced understanding of why impartialism, and a fortiori, moral demandingness is problematic. If morality operates only in an impersonal manner, then it will inevitably clash with the freedom to love arbitrarily, which operates in a personal manner. However, Taylor argues that there is still a place for impartialism in morality; what we should reject is “the way in which, on certain impartialist conceptions of ethics, we conceive of the conflict between certain moral and other values and then how that conflict is to be resolved” (2012, 70). As we have seen, one reason for the conflict between the personal and the impersonal is moral judgement that is grounded in a universal objectivity. Crary agrees that rejecting impartialism wholesale misconstrues the issue, and that these critiques reveal a deeper problem: on the one hand considerations grounded in our emotional attachments are endorsed, but on the other hand we disassociate from those attachments by “adopting a reflective point of view from which they are treated as inessential to who we are” (2007, 198). The upshot of this is that many impartiality criticisms aim to demonstrate “not only that we need to abandon moral impartiality in order to preserve our integrity but, moreover, that the abandonment of such impartiality is equivalent to the abandonment of an understanding of moral reflection as a rational pursuit” (ibid.). In other words, such impartiality criticisms betray a narrow conception of rationality so that 11 Heyd argues that despite Rawls’ unsystematic treatment of supererogation, Rawls’ work nonetheless still “constitutes an explicit recognition and a tentative explanation” of the supererogatory within the general theory of justice and duty (1982, 101). Rawls argues that there are no principles of supererogation that can be agreed upon in the originary position because supererogatory acts belong to the category of moral permissions. However, permissions are not morally neutral either: “Their moral worth is at least partly related to the values which the contractors in the Original Position try to realize as much as they can. Supererogatory acts are beyond duty but aim at the same type of values as obligatory actions” (ibid.). So, although Rawls recognises that there are moral acts that go beyond duty, that recognition is secondary insofar as it plays no part in establishing the foundation of his theory of justice. Furthermore, because supererogatory acts have no moral significance for Rawls beyond permissions, his theory of justice will necessarily fall back onto the classic tripartite deontic scheme of obligatory, forbidden and permissible actions that Urmson argues is so problematic. As per the footnote in Chapter 1, I will not consider contract theories (of which I take a Rawlsian theory of justice to belong to) and supererogation in this study for the reasons indicated there.

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“modes of thought that depart from impartiality in being directly informed by feelings have an inherent tendency to fall short of rationality” (199). Such a conception informs the pejorative rejoinder ‘Don’t get so emotional, you won’t be able to think straight’. To address this problem Crary makes the case for a wider conception of rationality. This wider conception of rationality regards the idea that “an abstraction from everything affective is necessary to attaining” impartiality as confused (204). By ‘everything affective’ Crary means to include moods, feelings and attitudes, which are not always amenable to deliberation and articulation. Conceived in this wider manner, impartiality is not problematic per se; what is problematic is certain moralistic conceptions of impartiality that consider only moral judgements as rational. Taylor and Crary show that moral rationality need not consist only in, or primarily of, moral judgement. An affective moral rationality, and/or a primitive moral responsiveness, offers a way to remedy how impartialism constrains the agent’s moral autonomy. It also offers a way in which to deal with the challenges that conceptualising supererogation raises. I will build on both affective rationality and primitive moral responses as a means to do so, returning to this part of my project again in chapter four. In the final subsection of this chapter’s section on moral demandingness, I will frame the problem of impartialism through one final lens—saintly morality. I do so because the figure of the saint features as one of the paradigmatic exemplars of supererogation, although what about a saint is praiseworthy has not been expanded upon further than noting the sacrifices saints (and heroes) make. What I will also underscore in this final subsection is the impact that variously, moral demandingness, overweening morality and moral sainthood, has upon the autonomy of the moral agent.

2.5.4 Saintly Morality In her seminal paper ‘Moral Saints’, Susan Wolf argues that sainthood, in the event that it is attainable, is an undesirable aspiration because of the sacrifices such a life demands (1982). The argument in its broad outline is familiar—it is an appeal to cost in order to create a supererogatory space so that the moral autonomy of the agent can be respected. Wolf’s moral saint is a person “whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be” (419). A moral saint’s life is then, of necessity, “dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole” (420). In devoting most of their time to fighting poverty, volunteering for good causes and donating their money to aid agencies, the moral saint is not playing the guitar, reading philosophy or practising their backstroke technique. While none of these could claim to be “a necessary element in a life well lived, a life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren” (421). Furthermore, the moral saint would have to rule out other non-moral characteristics which go against “the moral grain”, such as a cynical or sarcastic wit, because

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this “requires that one take an attitude of resignation and pessimism toward the flaws and vices to be found in the world” (422). Against this, the moral saint seeks out the “best in people” and “gives them the benefit of the doubt”; in short, someone who is “very, very nice” and not offensive (ibid.). But, argues Wolf, “there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand”; or, rather, “there is a limit to how much of any single value we can stand” (423). These limits are glimpsed in the use of epithets such as ‘do-gooder’ to name moral saints, and George Orwell’s cryptic remark that saints should be “considered guilty until proven innocent” (in Hamilton, 2015, 188). Wolf continues by remarking that moral saints not only sacrifice activities and events that conflict with the attainment of moral perfection, they also supress and subsume their desires for these things. The people who we admire and look up to are well rounded in their pursuits and inclinations, and they personify non-moral virtues such as athletic prowess or a scathing and irreverent sense of humour (426). Carbonell rejects Wolf’s characterisation of the moral saint as such a bleak and unattractive person, because “moral commitments do not grossly distort an agent’s personality to the extent she proposes” (2009, 372). Carbonell offers the life of one Dr Paul Farmer, a doctor and medical anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, as an attractive counter-example to Wolf’s undesirable moral saint. Through his non-profit organisation, Partners in Health, Farmer runs clinics that treat the world’s poorest and sickest patients. In spite of Farmer’s extreme devotion to others and the sacrifices he has made, his life is anything but barren; indeed, he flourishes. Larissa MacFarquhar in Strangers Drowning, writes that the question of whether living the life of a moral saint is desirable or not cannot be answered in the abstract, pace Wolf, and that “only actual lives convey fully and in a visceral way the beauty and cost of a certain kind of moral existence” (2015, 11). Her book goes on to relate the lives of several individuals Wolf might call moral saints, but which she calls ‘do-gooders’—a pejorative word intended to demean but whose value MacFarquhar hopes to restore. Nonetheless, MacFarquhar agrees that the notion of a moral saint at the very least invokes profound ambivalence, not least because “if do-gooders are always thinking of how the world is unjust and needs to be changed – if they want to replace our world with another, better one – then do they love the world that we know, which is the world as it is?”(12). Drummond-Young also draws on the example of an individual whose life had been “dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others” (but calls this particular individuals’ life a ‘heroic life’ rather than a ‘saintly life’) but does so to argue that such lives demonstrate that supererogation cannot “really apply” to a life but only to acts (2015, 129, Fn. 8). She refers instead to a ‘supererogatory lifestyle’ and uses scare-quotes to indicate her hesitation at the phrase, perhaps because we seem to lose something important if we use this term to describe the life of a saint. I would suggest that what that something is, is a type of attitude, a supererogatory attitude, an attitude which I will elaborate on in chapter four. Peter Singer attempts a rebuttal of Wolf by arguing that non-moral pursuits cannot take priority over moral demands (2011, 213). He asks us to consider the case of a doctor facing a hundred injured victims of a train crash and the moral opprobrium we would feel if the doctor decided to only treat fifty victims, and then went to the opera,

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justifying his doing so on the grounds that attending opera is part of a well-rounded human life. Of course, in that situation no one would condone the doctor’s actions, because Singer is describing an emergency situation. In attending to such a situation, and missing out on going to the opera, Schmidtz argues, “we are inconvenienced, maybe even at risk, but we are not abandoning life as a member of a kingdom of ends and replacing it with life as a mere means” (2000, 700). I will return to this point in chapter three when I include such considerations in the discussion of distinguishing duties to rescue from duties of justice.12 Notwithstanding these rejoinders, Wolf argues that impartial moral theories would seem to support the moral saint. However, despite the moral demandingness that such a position entails, Wolf argues that impartialism has good reason to reject the moral saint. In the case of utilitarianism, there would not be support for the pursuit of moral sainthood as a universal ideal at the general level because, a world in which everyone, or even a large number of people, achieved moral sainthood – even a world in which they strove to achieve it – would probably contain less happiness than a world in which people realized a diversity of ideals involving a variety of personal and perfectionist values. (1982, 427)

There are also other, pragmatic, reasons for the utilitarian, to discourage everyone from striving for sainthood: encouraging people to strive toward happiness-producing goals that are more attractive and attainable would more positively influence people and so likely result in greater overall good (ibid.). Despite the unattractiveness of the moral saint depicted by Wolf, the utilitarian may still not be convinced at the personal level to abandon their quest for moral sainthood. This is because the empirical suffering in the world would still far outweigh any happiness, they as an individual would accrue by living a more well-rounded, less saintly life. Psychologically, devoting all one’s attention to the downtrodden and poor would most likely impose a toll on one’s mental health. However, if others should point out to them that their striving for moral sainthood might well exact such a cost, the individual utilitarian would be better served by not acting self-righteously (428). Nonetheless, “suckingit-up” and not acting “holier than thou”, while making such a utilitarian a less “nauseating companion [… and] a more bearable public personality […], is at the cost of giving him a personality that must be evaluated as hypocritical and condescending when his private thoughts and attitudes are taken into account” (ibid.). Thus, even at the individual level moral sainthood would likely be an unattractive proposition to the committed utilitarian. The Kantian faces a similar motivational quandary: developing one’s powers to achieve physical, artistic and intellectual excellence must arise, as a Kantian, from the reverence we have for human dignity. While this is a commendable motivation, “it is hardly what one expects to be dominantly behind a person’s aspirations to dance as well as Fred Astaire [or] paint as well as Picasso” (431). Wolf urges the aspiring saint to interpret Kantianism as “providing a stringent but finite set of obligations and constraints [so] that one is as morally good as can be so long as one 12 Section

3.3.1.2.

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devotes some limited portion of one’s energies toward altruism and the maintenance of one’s physical and spiritual health” in order that Kantianism not ‘swallow up’ their entire personality” (431–432). In other words, the aspiring saint needs to draw boundaries around their obligations and carve out an autonomous space for other pursuits. However, our task is precisely to determine where such boundaries ought to be drawn. Wolf discusses one implication of placing an “upper bound on moral worthiness” within such an interpretation of Kant: she recognises that despite her claim that moral sainthood is an undesirable ideal, “it seems perverse to insist that, were moral saints to exist, they would not, in their way, be remarkably noble and admirable figures” (432). By placing an upper bound on moral worthiness we would be stripped of the moral instrument of praise for the actions moral saints perform and the lives they lead. Bounding morality would mean that we would have no way of acknowledging that sacrifice is morally significant, and with it, one path to acknowledging the moral significance of supererogation. It would, however, be misguided to draw the conclusion from this that we should allow moral agents to be morally ‘average’ simply to facilitate moral sainthood. Wolf’s point is that placing upper bounds on moral goodness restricts the autonomy of the moral agent to express their moral identity by performing, inter alia, supererogatory acts, acts which we deem praiseworthy. As a way to resolve the dilemma she describes—not advocating sainthood as an ideal to live up to but also admiring and praising the appearance of such sainthood— Wolf offers ‘the point of view of individual perfection’ (later shortened to just the ‘perfectionist point of view’) which she contrasts with ‘the moral point of view’. The ‘moral point of view’ is the view that we are “just one person among others equally real and deserving of the good things in life” (437). That is to say, the moral point of view is just the impartialist point of view. The ‘point of view of individual perfection’ is the viewpoint “from which we consider what kind of lives are good lives, and what kinds of persons it would be good for ourselves and others to be” (ibid.). In other words, the perfectionist point of view is one that allows the agent greater autonomy to decide how best to live their life. Wolf then argues that since both viewpoints offer a way to comprehensively evaluate a person’s life, each viewpoint “takes account of, and, in a sense, subsumes the other” (ibid.). However, the perfectionist viewpoint is ours to choose, whereas the moral viewpoint is not. The perfectionist viewpoint provides us with reasons independent of moral reasons to live our lives in certain ways. The perfectionist viewpoint is thus congruent with a supererogatory viewpoint. As such, Wolf concludes that from the ‘moral point of view’, that is, from an impartialist viewpoint, if there are reasons to live lives that seem good from outside that impartialist point of view, then “any plausible moral theory must make use of some conception of supererogation” (438). The way impartialist ethical theories make use of supererogation is to ‘protect us’ from overdemanding, overweening and saintly morality (Wessels op cit.). They mostly do so by employing a reductionist strategy in order to ‘assimilate’ (the term used by Levy, 2015) supererogation within their frameworks, and so dispense with the supererogatory as a distinct class of moral actions. In the chapter to follow I will, following Heyd (1982), trace how Kantianism and utilitarianism, both impartialist

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moral theories, go about trying to assimilate supererogation into their theoretical frameworks.13 In that process, the autonomy of the moral agent to accept or resist such an assimilation will be further implicated.

2.6 Conclusion The positions of the two most prominent voices in the supererogation debate, and the about turn of one of those voices, which argue for and against the existence of a separate class of supererogatory actions respectively, provide a neat summary of the moral issues at stake in conceptualising supererogation. On the one hand, Urmson argues for a distinct category of supererogatory actions, and then later rejects that argument because of the gulf separating non-obligatory actions such as everyday generosity and jumping on a grenade to shield others. The gulf demonstrates to Urmson, and many others, that sacrifice is the determinant factor in supererogation, or would be if a separate class of supererogatory actions did in fact exist. Heyd, on the other hand, argues that the focus on cost obscures what is significant about supererogatory actions: their optionality, agent discretion and non-universalisability. While I have argued that optionality is just another (unhelpful) way to say ‘nonobligatory’, I also demonstrated that agent-discretion and non-universalisability could not come apart so easily. Heyd’s characterisation of supererogatory actions as non-universalisable actions opens the door onto the wider debate that impartialism in morality provokes. In attempting to universalise the moral principles the moral agent can appeal to in moral decision-making, impartialism depersonalises the moral agent by alienating them from their ground projects and special relationships. Mandating an agent to be impartial and objective in making moral decisions is a too morallydemanding imperative because it can encroach upon, and even efface, the autonomy of the moral agent. Impartialism leads down the slippery path to moralism where the boundaries between moral and non-moral concerns become blurred. An overzealous defence against this possibility risks sidelining affectivity and other forms of moral responsiveness in the mistaken belief that moral judgements are the best form moral thought can take. 13 I

will choose to bracket virtue ethics in this study as indicated in a footnote in Chapter 1. Notwithstanding the reasons given there, I will offer a few remarks about virtue here. Paradigmatic supererogatory acts such as those performed by Urmson’s saints and heroes do often demonstrate great moral virtue, such as courage, and the good character of the moral agent performing them. However, not every supererogatory act need manifest virtue (running into a collapsing building to save a child might, in the circumstances, be less courageous than foolhardy, especially if one also has children who might be bereft a parent should the attempted rescue turn tragic), while not every virtuous act is supererogatory (it hardly makes sense to describe being a loyal friend as going beyond duty). Heyd (2015, 32) agrees with the claim that the virtuous agent does not act only from duty but also from a particular character, yet “that does not mean that a virtuous person does necessarily more than her duty. If the virtuous person has only one moral option in any particular situation, then the question of whether this choice is obligatory or supererogatory does not make sense. It is simply the only right choice.”

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The concern that if supererogation is not non-universalisable then the autonomy of the agent, to perform supererogatory acts or not, will be adversely impacted is connected to the concern that impartialism has deleterious effects on the autonomy of the moral agent. The moral demands that impartialism makes on the agent is too demanding because such demands limit the autonomy of the individual. Protecting the encroachment upon the agent’s autonomy by carefully circumscribing morality’s ambit, that is, by rejecting impartialism (but not wholesalely rejecting it), is a necessary requirement for supererogation. Conversely, positing a supererogatory class of actions should extend protection to the agents’ autonomy.

References Alford, C. F. (2001). Whistleblowers: Broken lives and organizational power. London: Cornell University Press. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Brinkman, M. (2015). Disjunctive duties and supererogatory sets of actions. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 67–86. Carbonell, V. (2009). What moral saints look like. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 39(3), 371–398. Cowley, C. (2015). Introduction: The Agents, acts and attitudes of supererogation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 1–23. Crary, A. (2007). Beyond moral judgment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cullity, G. (2004). The moral demands of affluence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Drummond-Young, E. (2015). Is supererogation more than just costly sacrifice? Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 125–140. Hamilton, C. (2015). Religion, forgiveness and humanity. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 185–205. Heyd, D. (1982). Supererogation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heyd, D. (2015). Can virtue ethics account for supererogation? Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 25–47. Horgan, T., & Timmons, M. (2010). Untying a knot from the inside out: Reflections on the “paradox” of supererogation. Social Philosophy & Policy, 27(2), 29–63. Kagan, S. (1989). The limits of morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Levy, D. K. (2015). Assimilating supererogation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 227–242. MacFarquhar, L. (2015). Strangers drowning: Voyages to the brink of moral extremity. London: Allen Lane. Miller, R. W. (2004). Beneficence, duty, and distance. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32(4), 357– 383. Monroe, K. R. (1996). The heart of altruism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Murphy, L. B. (2000). Moral demands in non-ideal theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmidtz, D. (2000). Islands in a sea of obligation: Limits of the duty to rescue. Law and Philosophy, 19(6), 683–705. Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. Singer, P. (2011). Practical ethics (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smart, J. J. C., & Williams, B. (1973). Utilitarianism: For and against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stout, R. (2015). Adopting roles: Generosity and presumptuousness. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 141–161.

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Taylor, C. (2012). Moralism. Durham: Acumen. Urmson, J. O. (1958). Saints and heroes. In A. I. Melden (Ed.), Essays in moral philosophy. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Urmson, J. O. (1988). Intuitive moral thinking. In D. Seanor & N. Fotion (Eds.), Hare and critics: Essays on “moral thinking”. Oxford: Claredon Press. Watson, P. (1995). Tora! Tora! Tora! In J. Sterba (Ed.), Earth ethics. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Wessels, U. (2015). Beyond the call of duty: The structure of a moral region. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 87–104. Williams, B. (1973). A critique of utilitarianism. In J. J. C. Smart & B. Williams (Eds.), Utilitarianism: For and against (pp. 77–150). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981a). Practical necessity. In Moral luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981b). Practical Necessity. In Moral luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1993). Moral incapacity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 93, 59–70. Wolf, S. (1982). Moral saints. The Journal of Philosophy, 79(8), 419–439.

Chapter 3

Assimilating Supererogation, Tempering Demandingness

Abstract This chapter interrogates how Kantianism and utilitarianism propose to deal with the challenge supererogation presents. In order to facilitate this examination, Heyd’s description of this challenge as the twofold problem of supererogation— the meta-ethical and normative problems—is turned to. The meta-ethical problem arises because non-deontological moral theories such as utilitarianism are not based on duty, and so speaking of acts beyond duty becomes meaningless; while in deontological theories such as Kantianism, there is no space for supererogatory acts because they are not obligatory. The normative problem concerns the scope and limits of duty. Kantianism and utilitarianism attempt to assimilate supererogation by a two-fold strategy that broadly maps onto the meta-ethical and normative problems—a reduction of the supererogatory to the obligatory, and an extension of the limits of duty. I approach the former by examining Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. I argue that this distinction fails to reduce the supererogatory to the obligatory. I approach strategies to extend the scope of duty through a critical analysis of the life-saving analogy (LSA) Peter Singer presents in his 1972 essay ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. I argue that this strategy fails because the principle underpinning the analogy—what I call the ‘sacrifice principle’—is not an a-theoretical principle as Singer claims, but a utilitarian principle. This is problematic because the findings from the previous chapter show that utilitarianism is an impartial moral theory, and impartialism is too morally-demanding on the agent. I conclude that neither Kantianism, nor utilitarianism, can satisfactorily assimilate supererogation, because both are impartial moral theories. The challenges that supererogation presents to moral theory in general, and to moral autonomy in particular remain as a result of this finding.

3.1 Introduction The difficulties in conceptualising supererogation identified in the previous chapter demonstrate the absence of a “knockout argument in the debate about the very existence of a separate category of supererogatory action” (Heyd, 2015, 41). Nonetheless, I will argue in this study that a solution to those challenges is possible—a solution, © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_3

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to extend Heyd’s pugilistic metaphor, which offers a victory on points rather than by knockout. While the difficulties of settling on a definitive concept of supererogation have been extensively mapped, this chapter will return to the first and most basic definition of supererogation as actions going beyond duty in order to reframe those difficulties. The purpose of such a reframing will be to better explicate how moral theories, specifically impartialist moral theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism, in the words used by Susan Wolf, ‘make use of’ the concept of supererogation. The previous chapter has demonstrated that impartialism frustrates certain moral theories attempts to do so. This frustration drives the impetus to contain supererogatory actions within a particular theoretical framework by reducing the significance of supererogation and in this process to assimilate supererogation away. In this reframing of the challenges facing a satisfactory account of supererogation, I start with Heyd’s claim that “the philosophical problem of supererogation is twofold” (1982, 3). Heyd describes the first problem as a meta-ethical problem, and the second as a normative problem. In brief, the meta-ethical problem is found in the paradox of supererogation which states that if duty is central to supererogation, then any theory in which duty is a secondary or derivative feature will struggle to clarify a ‘beyond duty’; while theories in which duty is foregrounded struggle with actions that are not required by duty. The normative problem concerns how to demarcate the boundary between duties required and not required by a theory. However, these two aspects of the problem of supererogation do not come apart quite as easily as that, and neither do the parts of a strategy to assimilate supererogation, although it is possible to identify two concomitant parts of such a strategy that roughly line up with the meta-ethical and normative problems of supererogation. Tackling the meta-ethical component of supererogation is best demonstrated by Kant’s attempts to reduce the supererogatory to the obligatory through his distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. A purported solution to the normative problem of supererogation is best demonstrated in utilitarianism’s attempt to widen the scope of duty to include an ostensibly supererogatory act such as charity as a moral requirement. These two parts of the strategy to assimilate supererogation do however risk turning previously acceptable moral obligations into morally demanding obligations, which in turn risk an unacceptable infringement of the autonomy of the moral agent. The chapter will proceed as follows: after outlining the normative and meta-ethical problems to supererogation and the concomitant strategies to solve those problems in further detail, the discussion in the section thereafter, and which constitutes the bulk of the chapter, moves onto a close reading and critical analysis of Peter Singer’s (1972) essay ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. The essay will be shown to be representative of utilitarian attempts to assimilate supererogation through extending the scope and meaning of obligation. In that process several other moral concerns will emerge and will need to be addressed. These include the so-called problem of distance in morality (Kamm, 1999), fair-share approaches to moral-demandingness (Murphy, 2000) and also responding to the cumulative moral-demandingness of morally iterated obligations. As one possible solution to the problems Singer’s essay raises, I will also examine how the principle of beneficence might be employed to regulate the boundary between overdemanding supererogation and acceptable obligation.

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The chapter reaches the conclusion that both Kantianism and utilitarianism fail to assimilate supererogation and fail because of their impartialism.

3.2 The Normative and Meta-Ethical Problems of Supererogation Heyd claims that “the philosophical problem of supererogation is twofold”—a metaethical problem, and a normative problem (1982, 3). The meta-ethical problem of supererogation is contained in the following purported paradox: acts of supererogation are, by definition, distinguished from acts of duty; on the other hand, they have meaning only in the framework of a moral theory based on the concept of duty […] Non-deontological theory […] cannot accommodate supererogation, because if there is no duty, then a fortiori there cannot be action which transcends duty. On the other hand, a purely deontological theory (like Kant’s) does not leave room for supererogation, either, for supererogation, is a class of non-obligatory acts. (ibid.)

In other words, how can a purportedly ‘good’ action be optional if that action is morally better than the non-optional alternatives? The source of the paradox can be traced back to the so-called ‘good-ought tie-up’: if an action is good, then an agent ought to do it. Heyd traces Joseph Raz’s formulation of this dilemma into the language of reasons for action (1975). Raz, according to Heyd has it that. if a supererogatory action is morally good (praiseworthy) there must be reasons for doing it, and these reasons must outweigh any conflicting reasons for not doing it; as there are conclusive reasons that require the performance of the act, one ought (conclusively) to do it; but if the action ought to be done, omission must be blameworthy. It seems therefore, that an action cannot be both morally good and optional. (1982, 167–168)

Heyd’s counter-argument is that Raz is conflating evaluative with deontic concepts, or, to put it somewhat differently, as Levy does, “a causal picture of action has infected a normative explanation of action” (2015, 234). There are a wide range of uses of ‘ought’, and which are often incompatible. ‘Ought’ can be used in a commendatory way and, in such cases, its use is tied up with ‘good’, which then provides a reason for action; but only if ‘good’ is interpreted impersonally (Heyd, 1982, 171–172). Heyd continues: The existence of a gap between judgements of what is good to do and what one ought to do is that ‘good’ may be used impersonally, while ‘ought’ involves human agency. This is a general difference between value concepts and deontic concepts. ‘Good’ characterises states of affairs, motives, personality traits as well as actions, independently of the existence of agents who can bring them about or hope to. ‘Ought’, however, at least in its prescriptive sense, applies only in situations in which there is an agent of whom a certain action is required […] it cannot be the case, therefore, that any valuable state of affairs in itself constitutes a reason for action (in the sense of ‘ought’) for an individual person. (ibid.)

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Prescriptive reasons for action for Heyd, then, do not exhaust all that is unique about supererogatory actions.1 The paradox of supererogation2 places the notion of duty, or obligation at the centre of a satisfactory conceptualisation of supererogation. Duty, as I have outlined it in the previous chapter, is minimally understood as an imperative that is universal. If however, obligation is problematised as something that can only manifest as a set of universal imperatives, as impartialism suggests, then one solution to the paradox of supererogation would be to abandon duty altogether.3 The second problem of the twofold problem of supererogation that Heyd identifies is a normative problem, and concerns “the demarcation of duty and ‘beyond duty’” (4). In other words, the normative problem of supererogation has got to do with the scope and the limits of duty. Moral agents can share the same meta-ethical understanding of the concept of duty—as something which follows from moral law and derives from the dignity of the individual (Kantianism), or as something which stems from the requirement to maximise happiness (utilitarianism)—and still disagree over what the limits of that duty may be. The normative problem of supererogation goes directly to the question of the autonomy of the moral agent because autonomy and duty implicate each other: the further duties extend, the more they have the potential to encroach upon the autonomy of the moral agent. The normative problem of supererogation thus raises the spectre of an overdemanding and overweening morality, a concern that was extensively examined in the previous chapter. The identification of a meta-ethical and normative dimension to the problem of supererogation suggest two corresponding, and complementary, ways in which to approach the problem: firstly, reduce the supererogatory to the obligatory; secondly, extend the meaning and scope of duty. Heyd argues that this is precisely what Kantianism attempts to do (1982, 52). The second strategy, writes Heyd, just makes 1 Horgan and Timmons argue that a reason for action can also play a non-requiring role; in particular,

a moral-merit-conferring role (2010, 53–56). This is one way that reasons for action can be extended so as to avoid the paradox of supererogation. 2 Kamm describes another interesting paradox that arises from the interplay between supererogation and obligation: it is sometimes permissible to perform a supererogatory action rather than an obligatory action; that is, we can on certain occasions perform an action that goes beyond duty and in the process forgo doing our moral duty in that situation (1985). Kamm asks us to consider the case where I have promised to meet a friend for lunch at a certain time (thus having a moral duty to uphold that promise). On my way to meet my friend, I come across a car crash in which an injured victim requires a kidney transplant to survive. Donating the kidney goes beyond duty—it is supererogatory—but I am willing to do it. It is absurd to claim that I can’t perform the supererogatory act because I have a previous moral duty, to uphold a promise, which must be discharged first (119–120). Nonetheless “we do have to make certain efforts to do our duty, though we need not make the same efforts to do a supererogatory act which we may nevertheless do instead of duty. Furthermore, we may not violate a duty for some personal goal, though we may pursue the same personal goal instead of doing a supererogatory act for the sake of which we may violate the duty” (119). 3 Such a solution suggests itself in a citation by Levy included in Chapter 2 wherein the performance of a purportedly supererogatory action appearing as necessary to a moral agent can be described as the agent’s “consenting to his responsibility for acting” supererogatorily (2015, 229). I will seek to substitute duty with responsibility as the pivot on which supererogation turns in the second half of the study.

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the first strategy more plausible, although it may on occasion grant some space to supererogatory acts. However, Heyd cautions that these two strategies are not always clearly distinct, and as such “should be understood merely as auxiliary tools of analysis and interpretation” (ibid.). Before unpacking Heyd’s charge that Kantianism attempts to assimilate supererogation away, I will first say something about utilitarianism in this regard.4 I will argue in the section to follow that such a two-pronged strategy to assimilate supererogation through reductionism, and extension of duty, is also discernible in utilitarianism.5 I will do so by through a close reading and critical analysis of Peter Singer’s seminal 1972 essay ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. Singer is of course one of the leading contemporary exponents of utilitarianism, and in this essay he attempts to reduce charity (an ostensibly supererogatory act) to duty in order to assimilate the supererogatory. More than 35 years later, Singer would confirm that (in reference to ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’), I originally used the term ‘moral obligation’ in order to break away from the idea that giving to assist the poor is ‘charity’, that is, something that is good to do, but not wrong not to do [that is, supererogatory]. I wanted to suggest that failure to make a significant effort to assist the desperately poor is a failure to meet some minimal standard of moral decency. (2009, 259)

The reductionist mechanism at the heart of Singer’s (1972) essay is what has come to be called the life-saving analogy (LSA). Although the LSA can be understood as a meta-ethical strategy to reduce charity to obligation, it can also be seen as a normative attempt to expand the meaning and scope of duty. As such, it operates in a similar way to Kant’s reductionist strategy, namely, expanding the scope of duty to make the reduction of the supererogatory to the obligatory more plausible. As a more general discussion of utilitarianism’s reduction of supererogation, Heyd talks about the “deontic implications of utilitarianism” that follow from characterising the moral status of actions in terms of the goodness (or utility or welfare) of their consequences, which is that “actions can be described as obligatory only if certain conditions relating to their outcome obtain” (1982, 73). Put differently, although utilitarians do not generally speak of a moral duty as Kantians do, an action can be said to be obligatory (and hence falling under a duty to perform it) if it would result in the most good for the most moral agents. In other words, while utilitarians do not stress the language of duty, they do claim that we have moral obligations—obligations which operate in service of maximising overall utility.6 The upshot of this is that “while deontology tends to be too strict in its definition of ‘moral’ (considering 4 I once again draw the reader’s attention to the footnotes in both Chapters 1 and 2 wherein I motivate

my reasons for focusing on Kantianism and utilitarianism—because they exemplify impartialist moral theories—and not other moral theories such as virtue ethics. 5 The reductionism I refer to here, the reduction of the supererogatory to the obligatory, must be distinguished from a deeper utilitarian reduction (and which can be characterised as impartialism), that Sen and Williams define as “the device of regarding all interests, ideas aspirations and desires as on the same level, and all representable as preferences, of different degrees of intensity, perhaps, but otherwise to be treated alike” (1982, 8). 6 I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point.

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only obligatory actions as having moral value), utilitarianism is inclined to provide a definition of ‘moral’ which is too wide (taking every ‘useful’ action as morally good)” (ibid.). Starting from opposite positions, utilitarianism and Kantianism reach the same conclusion in denying supererogation a place within their respective moral frameworks. Utilitarianism, because “no action which is morally good can be nonobligatory” [that is, no action which increases the overall balance of utility should not be obligatory]; and Kantianism, because “no action which is beyond duty can be morally good” [that is, no action which does not meet the categorical imperative can derive from the moral law] (ibid.). The notion of duty for utilitarianism is derivative; duty is “defined by the theory in terms of the concept of the good”, that good being the welfare of the maximum moral agents, and as such utilitarianism better illustrates the normative problem of supererogation—the demarcation of duty—than Kantianism (ibid.). Kantians, conversely, see the concept of duty as primary and the moral goodness that follows from doing one’s duty as derivative. In other words, demarcating the limits of duty from a perspective which understands duty as derivative more clearly demonstrates how the moral boundaries between supererogation and obligation are arrived at. So, if moral boundaries are derived from a conception of duty, then that demarcation must be made explicit. On the other hand, in stressing the language of duty, Kantianism already implies a demarcation of duty. The Kantian is, in a manner, always operating at the metaethical level: the categorical imperative produces the applicable obligation, which must be universalisable, which then frames the moral boundaries in which that obligation must apply. That is to say, in universalising the obligation, the limits of that obligation are drawn. The moral agent then acts within the boundaries set by that (universalisable) obligation by performing the action that will fulfil that obligation. In the case of the utilitarian the limits to their obligation (to maximise utility) are shaped by the moral situation they find themselves in—the choice to act in one way rather than another within that situation will produce different outcomes. These different outcomes will have differing utility values which will, in turn, shift the moral boundaries to accommodate the maximum utility accordingly. Despite these differing emphases, both utilitarianism and Kantianism struggle to demarcate the limits of duty. This struggle is a function of the requirement that duty must be universal and impartial. However, these differing emphases motivate my decision to interrogate the meta-ethical dimension to the problem of supererogation (and the accompanying assimilation strategy) through Kantianism (following Heyd), and interrogating the normative dimension to problem of supererogation (and the accompanying assimilation strategy), through utilitarianism (by way of a critical analysis of Singer’s LSA). I start with Kantianism and then continue with utilitarianism in the section to follow.

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3.2.1 Kantian Reductionism: Perfect and Imperfect Duties In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant declares that “an action that is neither commanded nor forbidden is merely permissible… An action of this kind is called morally indifferent” (1964, 21). It is this tripartite deontic classification of actions that Urmson argues is inadequate to account for supererogation, precisely because supererogatory actions, as permissible actions, are not morally indifferent. The problem Kant faces with respect to supererogatory acts, argues Heyd, stems from Kant’s understanding of moral duty as a categorical imperative (1982, 52). As a categorical imperative, an obligatory act is not optional for the moral agent to perform. Furthermore, Kant writes that moral acts should be performed “wholly out of respect for duty and not from aroused feelings” (1949, 192). In other words, the only legitimate reason for action is one that stems from reverence for a universalisable moral law, not special relationships, not the desire to be a hero or saint. However there is a conflict in Kant between a desire for a rigorous theory of duty and to acknowledge humanity’s aspirations to perfection, a conflict Heyd characterises as Kant’s ‘Rationalism’ versus his ‘Pietism’ (1982, 52). In positing a distinction between imperfect and perfect duties, Kant hopes to extend the meaning and scope of duty. By this innovation, Kant believes a purportedly supererogatory act, such as charity, can be regarded as a duty. With duty extended, Kant can now more plausibly reduce the supererogatory act of charity to the obligatory duty of justice. In the Groundwork (or Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals), Kant distinguishes between perfect duties, which are narrow and “allow no exception in the interest of inclination”, and imperfect duties which are wide and allow for some exception (in Heyd, 1982, 62). Keeping a promise is a perfect duty, as the moral agent has no choice as to how to fulfil that duty except by keeping the promise; whereas an imperfect duty, such as charitable giving, can be discharged in a number of different ways such as deciding who to give to and how much, for example. However, for Kant, imperfect duties are just as compelling as perfect duties, their prescriptive force being equal, when the “right kind of situation” to which they apply appears (Timmermann, 2005, 23). The distinction between the obligatory, in the case of perfect duties, and the optional, in the case of imperfect duties “lies within the sphere of duty” (Heyd, 1982, 62). In other words, imperfect duties do not ‘go beyond’ duty as such, and so an imperfect duty, although allowing the moral agent more choice than a perfect duty, is still not a supererogatory action. This is because the choice concerns the mode of application of the obligation, and not whether to fulfil the obligation or not in the first place. However, once the obligation is fulfilled, one cannot fulfil more than that obligation. Heyd offers a neat summary: since Kant sometimes defines imperfect duties as duties to adopt ends (rather than engage in particular acts), supererogation and imperfect duty do not belong to the same level of discourse: by doing many acts of charity one does not act supererogatorily, since one cannot be more charitable than required. (2016)

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The move to extend the scope of duty, to recall Heyd, is usually to make the strategy of reducing the supererogatory to the obligatory more plausible. So, continuing, Kant extends the scope of duty by categorising charity as an imperfect duty, and then reduces charity (ostensibly a supererogatory act) to justice (ostensibly an obligatory act), the former being (imperfect) “duties of good-will, or benevolence”, the latter being (perfect) “duties of indebtedness or justice” (Kant, 1963, 191 in Heyd, 1982, 58). Heyd reconstructs how Kant effects this reduction from Kant’s argument in the Lectures on Ethics: if we all did what justice required of us, there would be no misery in the world (barring sickness and misfortune), and as such, no need for charity (or any other supererogatory acts) (1982, 58–59). Human nature is, however, unjust, but, Providence has implanted the “instinct of benevolence” in us so that we may “restore what we have unrighteously procured”. We are therefore all responsible for injustice, whether directly through violating another, or indirectly by belonging to an unjust society, and thus charity is “a duty we owe to mankind… an act of duty imposed upon us by the rights of and the debt we owe to them.” (Kant quoted in Heyd; ibid.) Heyd dismisses Kant’s move by noting that illness and tragedy often drive the need for charity, and these are independent of the justice of our social institutions (59). Additionally, even in a world where everyone did their fair share, there are good reasons why people would want to do more, and sacrifice their share for others (family, friends and strangers) who have less. These reasons might include generosity which, for those so inclined, “is a value that must be expressed in action” (ibid.). Kant’s rejoinder to Heyd would likely be to call such self-sacrificing (supererogatory) acts, acts of charity and a violation of one’s duties to oneself. In reply to this possible rejoinder, Heyd asks us to imagine counter-examples: an extremely generous, and supererogatory, act of beneficence may be regarded as a vice (self-indulgent prodigality) but hardly as a violation of duty. Thus, “the pursuit of one’s perfection, even if it is morally valuable, cannot be treated as a duty, and ipso facto as supererogatory” (ibid.). In the final analysis Heyd rejects Kantianism’s reductionist attempts to accommodate supererogation through the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, calling such attempts “qualified supererogationism” (1982, 4). Theorists who do find Kant’s reductionism of supererogation through positing imperfect and perfect duties successful (Timmermann, 2005; Baron, 1987), still find it necessary to hedge their positions with conclusions that note the exceptions “for the bare external supererogatory act” (Baron, 1987, 262). Contrary to Baron’s assertion, I believe these exceptions are very important to attend to and go to the heart of the matter. The qualifier ‘bare external’ (to a supererogatory act) is thus a red-herring—determining what amounts to supererogation, externally bare or otherwise, is exactly what is at stake here. Once the external is posited, and the external in this sense must refer to the beyond of beyond duty, then a space for the supererogatory has been conceded. While I concur with Heyd in finding Kantian attempts to assimilate supererogation through positing perfect and imperfect duties unconvincing, I believe Kantianism fails because such considerations fall within the broader concerns I have outlined against Kantianism as an impartialist moral theory.

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3.3 Utilitarian Reductionism: Sacrifice and Saving Lives In ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Peter Singer (1972) argues for, and develops, what has come to be known as the life-saving analogy (LSA). Singer constructs his analogy by first positing a seemingly uncontroversial moral principle: “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (231; emphasis added). Note how in using the term ‘sacrificing’, Singer has already implicitly laid out the strategy he intends to pursue: if sacrifice is taken as a large or considerable cost to the agent, then this blunts the force of appeal to cost arguments to demarcate what counts as a supererogatory action and what an obligatory action, and as such makes the task of extending the scope of obligation (and so assimilating supererogation) much easier.7 Following Miller (2004), I will call Singer’s principle the ‘sacrifice principle’. In doing so what is at stake can be more clearly discerned, especially since Singer claims that his principle is supposedly ‘a-theoretical’. By this Singer means that such a principle should be acceptable to not just consequentialists, but also to Kantians, virtue theorists and existentialists amongst others, and as such he hopes to throw “a broad net” (2007, 476). Importantly, he concedes that “some will start from different foundations and will not accept the principles from which […] I begin” (ibid.). My contention will be that Singers’ foundations, being rooted in the impartialism of utilitarianism, are not just different, but fundamentally shaky. Singer considers an application of his sacrifice principle: a child is drowning in a shallow pond that I happen to be walking past. Most would agree that I ought to wade in and pull the child to safety; muddying my clothes and ruining my new shoes is a small price to pay for saving the child’s life. Singer then argues that allowing the poor in distant countries to starve is analogous to letting a child drown. Just as we have a moral duty to save a drowning child, we also have a similar moral duty to assist those suffering from malnutrition, hunger and disease in the developing world. This assistance to the poor will primarily take the form of financial donations to charities and aid agencies. In what follows, I will divide my analysis of Singer’s argument as it appears in ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ into two stages: firstly, I will consider whether the analogy between the drowning child and the starving child holds (undertaken in Sect. 3.3.1 below); secondly, I will investigate whether Singer’s sacrifice principle is sound enough to support the drowning child part of the analogy (undertaken in Sect. 3.3.2 below). The former consideration assumes that the sacrifice principle can indeed support the analogy, while the latter consideration possibly prevents the analogy from getting off the ground in the first place. In the second stage of my analysis (Sect. 3.3.2)—considering the soundness of the sacrifice principle—I will argue, following Gomberg (2002), that the sacrifice principle is just a utilitarian principle, and is not supported by an ‘a-theoretical’ argument. If utilitarianism is problematic because of its impartialism (an argument made in the previous chapter), and the sacrifice principle rests on utilitarianism, 7 See

Chapter 2, Sect. 2.3.

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then the sacrifice principle is also problematic. As such, the LSA becomes fatally compromised and so thwarts Singer’s attempt, and a fortiori utilitarianism’s attempt, to redraw the boundaries between obligation and supererogation.

3.3.1 Challenges to the LSA Singer anticipates two objections to the LSA (the assumption being that the sacrifice principle underpinning it is sound): firstly, the proximity, or distance objection—that the child drowning is close to us, whereas those starving in the developing world are far away—and, secondly, what has been called, following Liam Murphy (2000), the ‘fair share’ objection—that there are many others in the same financial position as me, but if they do not contribute to aid agencies it potentially increases my moral obligation to assist the destitute (both near and far) to make up the shortfall. These two objections are considered in the two subsections that follow.

3.3.1.1

Problematising Proximity

The proximity objection hopes to deny the moral equivalence attempted by the LSA by pointing to the fact that the drowning child is here, close by, and in front of me, now; while the starving child, who will be assisted by the aid agencies I donate to, is far away, usually in another country or another continent, and reaching them is typically complicated and frustrated by logistical and other practical issues. Singer dismisses this objection by arguing that. the fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. (1972, 232)

He attributes this confusion to practicality, noting that it is easier to judge how to assist someone who is close by. While the analysis to follow will support Singer in his dismissal of the proximity objection, I nonetheless hope to show that Singer moves too quickly, and that proximity is highly problematic. I start by examining Kamm’s reframing of proximity to include not only the physical distance between a moral agent and a ‘victim’, but also the physical distance between the moral agent and the means available to save that victim (1999). Thereafter I inspect proximity as ‘psycho-social distance’, which in the event will be shown to be commensurate with salience. The choice of the term ‘proximity’ instead of ‘distance’ better captures the differing resonances between these two types of distance—physical and psychosocial—while retaining spatial connotations that I believe will keep the ‘beyond’ of ‘beyond duty’ of supererogation at the front of our mind. In deploying the term ‘proximity’ to discuss how close or far the agent is from the recipient of their charity, one should also keep in mind how close or far the agent’s actions are from the boundary which demarcates obligation and supererogation. The term proximity will

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also take on a particular significance in the second half of the study when it will be reinscribed to reflect certain ethical concepts. Frances Kamm takes up the proximity problem in her essay, ‘Does Distance Matter Morally to the Duty to Rescue?’ (1999). The question is intended to rule out considerations, other than distance, that might render the LSA dis-analogous. In order to consider what these other considerations might be, Kamm, as a first step, argues that. if we are trying to find out whether a factor X matters per se […] we must construct a set of comparable cases, one with factor X and one without it, and hold all other factors in the two cases constant. I call this ‘equalizing the cases’. (658)

One way to ‘equalise the cases’ between the drowning child and the starving child in the LSA is to note that there is only one drowning child who needs our help, whereas there are likely to be many starving children needing our help, and that it is this factor—the number of victims, rather than distance—that matters per se. In order to equalise the cases then, one would need to consider the scenario where we can save one child drowning in front of us and the scenario where we can save only one starving child (through donations to aid agencies) who is far away. If we decide that it made no difference whether we could save one or more victims, we could then eliminate this factor—the number of victims—from our considerations and be satisfied that it was distance per se that was producing the differing outcomes (assisting the drowning child because they are close, while not assisting the starving child because they are far away). Other factors that need to be varied in comparing the two cases, in order to be sure that one is dealing with distance per se, might include the probability of success— jumping in to rescue a drowning child is more likely to save a life than is donating to an aid agency. Another might be the mechanism of rescue—the fact that, in the case of the drowning child, money will be lost (in replacing the water-damaged shoes, for example), while in the case of the starving child, money itself (via donation to aid agencies) becomes the mechanism whereby the victim is saved. These factors— number of victims, probability of success in saving a life, mechanism of rescue, inter alia—may thus be considered countervailing to the argument that it is distance that matters to the duty to rescue. Furthermore, in controlling for these various factors, we need to consider that, although one factor may carry certain weight in our comparison, such a factor “can be swamped by, or interact with, certain contextual factors so that it sometimes has no weight” (ibid.). After a consideration of a host of these equalising cases, Kamm arrives at the conclusion that “reference to distance between ourselves and strangers […] is misleading” and that moral proximity should be understood not just in relation to the person requiring help, but also in terms of the moral agent’s proximity to the threats and means to assist that person (672). These means of assistance may themselves be far away from either the moral agent or person requiring help, or both, but in all of these cases, Kamm argues that there is still a compelling argument that a duty to aid exists. So, by way of an imaginary scenario, we may not be physically close to a drowning child, but we can still see that a child is drowning in our local pond, some kilometres from our home because

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we are connected to a live webcam feed trained on that pond for the purposes of observing wild birdlife. The fact that we are physically far away from the drowning child is immaterial if we can also imagine that there is some kind of mobile app that we can use to activate rescue machinery situated at the pond’s edge to scoop the drowning child out of the pond. In other words, a duty to rescue based on proximity can also be used as a reason in support of a duty to aid distant strangers, if distance is understood as proximity to not just the agent or victim, but also as proximity to the means to assist the victim. The answer, then, to the question Kamm asks in the title of her essay, is that distance does not matter morally to the duty to rescue. So, although Kamm reaches a similar conclusion to Singer, her reasons are instructively different and allow for an expansion of the notion of physical distance. One factor that merits separate consideration from the other factors considered by Kamm is moral salience. Salience, rather than proximity, it is argued, is the factor that should be regarded as that which generates the duty to rescue. Kamm distinguishes salience from proximity, saying salience “refers not only to the obviousness and inescapability of noticing need, but also to the continuing imposition of this knowledge on us” (664). Kamm argues, however, that need at a distance can also be salient if, say, I had very long-distance vision, and so salience is a factor that can be equalised in both near and far cases (In an age of live-streaming, positing ultra-longdistance vision may not be necessary to make the point that salience can be a factor at any distance). Unger argues that although salience puts us under psychological pressure to rescue those close by, it does not of itself generate the duty to rescue (1996). However, salience can also be understood as a form of proximity. Hanna describes what she calls, ‘psycho-social distance’, which arises from “separational moral thinking” and involves thinking of the world. as filled with ‘moral situations’ [which] are discriminable real-world events involving moral agents embedded in their […] ordinary lives [with] some of their actions, reactions and interactions [and] the immediate actual or possible consequences of those actions […] and those persons’ immediate evaluations of those immediate consequences. Given a moral situation, we automatically distinguish between the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’: between (i) those persons whose positioning somewhere in the moral world is inside a given ongoing moral situation, and (ii) those persons who just happen to be outside that situation. (1998, 462)

We include a child drowning before us as an insider to our moral situation, which results in a concomitant duty to assist, while we exclude children starving far away as outsiders to our moral situation and reject a concomitant duty to aid via donations to charities. Hanna writes that morality is essentially contextual and thus it is legitimate to base moral judgments on discriminations between moral ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, and that “what is up for grabs is just how we determine the boundaries of the relevant moral situation” (463). Psycho-social distance then, just amounts to determining where to draw the boundaries between supererogatory and obligatory actions. This is precisely what this study is attempting to delineate. Kwame A. Appiah offers another argument against the sacrifice principle and reaches the conclusion that proximity can serve as a reason to save a drowning

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child (or not) if it were reformulated as an ‘emergency principle’ (2006, 161). This principle would say that “if you are the person in the best position to prevent something really awful, and it won’t cost you much to do so, do it” (ibid.). In is instructive that in positing this emergency principle Appiah avoids the term ‘sacrificing’ (unlike Singer), which once again recalls appeal to cost approaches which use cost as the mechanism which shifts the boundaries between obligation and supererogation. Adopting the emergency principle need not commit you to save starving children by donating to aid agencies. Appiah argues that this is because if Singer was really consistent then he would not save the child from drowning in the shallow pond if in doing so the suit that would be saved from ruining could be sold for several hundred dollars, which could then save two or more children dying from starvation. The sacrifice principle is always looking for something worse to prevent, an absurdity which conceals, Appiah argues, “a way of saying you should do the most you can to minimize the amount of badness in the world” (ibid.). As a negative formulation, this is almost impossible to determine. So, following on from the emergency principle, I would save the child from drowning because I happened to be the closest and thus in the best position to prevent that drowning, and not because of a cost–benefit calculation between saving my suit and the drowning child’s life. In addition to Appiah’s emergency principle, there are several other principles in the literature that are appealed to, some based on more traditional principles, such as beneficence, and other’s coined by the authors themselves. Beneficence will be examined in the subsection to follow, while a footnote to that discussion outlines a ‘sympathy principle’. In outlining his proximity objection, Singer also writes that “if we accept any principle of impartiality, universalizability, equality, or whatever, we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us” (1972, 232; emphasis added). If Singer bases the LSA on a principle of sacrifice, then one conclusion we can draw from this citation is that he regards the sacrifice principle as an impartial and universalisable principle. However, the unacceptable consequences of impartiality and universalisability—the constraining of the moral agents’ autonomy being the most egregious—means that Singer’s sacrifice principle rests on shaky ground despite his successful dismissal of the proximity objection. If the sacrifice principle is indeed compromised by its impartialism then the question that will need answering is: ‘If we do not accept any principles of impartiality or universalisability, can we discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us?’ I will only be in a position to answer this question satisfactorily in Chapter 8. Kamm’s dissolution of the problem of proximity suffers from a similar objection: she arrives at her conclusion via impartialist considerations: Kamm’s strategy to ‘equalise’ the various cases under consideration (in order to eliminate features other than distance doing the theoretical work) is no more than an impartialist strategy— in equalising the cases I strip the agents involved in those cases of any contingent and contextual factors that may give rise to special relationships, or which may constitute their (Williamson) ground project. Equalising the cases, or what Taylor calls the “picking out of a common factor”, allows us to disregard the individual drowning child in front of us or the individual starving child far away from us in

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favor of some impersonal good I could do for another (2012, 79). Taylor urges us to see the claims of those far away as “extensions of” our existing web of moral relationships with other human beings (such as those who are suffering in front of us) rather than “as analogous to” those relationships (ibid.). I now turn to consider the second chief objection to the LSA—the fair share objection.

3.3.1.2

Fair Share Objections and Moral Iteration

Singer claims that the sacrifice principle “makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position” (1972, 232). While Singer does not use the term, the problem he is highlighting has come to be called the ‘fair-share’ problem. Liam Murphy gives an account of the fair-share objection which arises in situations of partial compliance with an “optimizing principle of beneficence” (2000). He writes that to expect an agent to “take on as much of the shares of the non-complying others” in addition my own fair share with respect to an optimizing principle of beneficence is unfair (7). In other words, a fair-share objection is just another formulation of the charge of overdemandingness encountered in the previous chapter: to expect me to do more than my fair share in being beneficent to others worse-off is too morally demanding, and as such infringes on my autonomy. In response to this, Murphy advocates a collective principle of beneficence— requiring “agents to promote the well-being of others up to the level of sacrifice that would be optimal under full-compliance” (ibid.). This would follow from imposing a compliance condition on principles of beneficence—that “the demands on a complying person should not exceed what they would be under full compliance” (ibid.). There are two things that bear remarking on here: again, the choice to employ the term ‘sacrifice’ is revealing. As with my comments in regard to Singer’s use of this term in positing his (sacrifice) principle, using the term already implies a large or considerable cost. What needs to be determined is the magnitude of that cost and whether that cost is fair—if it is too big, then the cost becomes a sacrifice, which then constitute prima facie grounds to count as supererogation. Secondly, what Murphy calls the optimizing principle of beneficence is just what utilitarians would call ‘marginal utility’. There are good reasons why Singer avoids the term ‘beneficence’ which will become apparent in Sect. 3.3.2.1 below. Singer describes marginal utility in the following way: “the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependants as I would relieve by my gift” (1972, 241). In other words, both marginal utility and the optimising principle of beneficence operate as a cost-regulating mechanism which shifts the boundaries between what could be considered a fair and unfair cost (a sacrifice); or, as a means to regulate the boundaries between obligation and supererogation. Singer reckons that fair-share types of argument, the argument that “numbers lessen obligation” are absurd and issues the following challenge: “Should I consider that I am less obliged to pull the drowning child out of the pond if on looking around

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I see other people […] who have also noticed the child but are doing nothing?” (233). This part of the question applies to the first half the LSA—the drowning child part. He continues, and shifts to the second half of the LSA—the donating to aid organisations part: If everyone in circumstances like mine [sufficiently affluent] gave £5 to the Bengal Relief Fund [or any other aid organisation], there would be enough to provide food, shelter, and medical care for the refugees; there is no reason why I should give more than anyone else in the same circumstances as I am; therefore I have no obligation to give more than £5. Each premise in this argument is true, and the argument looks sound. It may convince us, unless we notice that it is based on a hypothetical premise, although the conclusion is not stated hypothetically. The argument would be sound if the conclusion were: if everyone in circumstances like mine were to give £5, I would have no obligation to give more than £5. (ibid.)

As it is, Singer states that the hypothetical does not obtain—“it is more or less certain that not everyone in circumstances like mine will give £5”—and so the argument has no bearing; thus, we do have an obligation to give more than £5, even when others do not contribute their fair share. Now, while each argument on its own is sound, tying them together as a means to overcome the fair-share objection is problematic in that it assumes that the analogy between saving the drowning child and donating to aid-agencies holds. This is exactly what needs to be proven in the first place. My argument is that the analogy does not hold. I submit that a better argument against the fair-share objection is presented by Garrett Cullity in The Moral Demands of Affluence (2004). He claims that when others do not contribute their fair share, then we should constitute a new collective of those who are willing to help and recalculate a new share (76–77). However, the chief concern with such an argument is that it might end in a too morally demanding position—consider the following series of iterations: under a certain collective, C, my fair share is X; when others don’t contribute their share, then under a new collective, C1 , my new share increases to X + Y (Y being the shortfall under C divided by the number of agents who do contribute and constitute C1 ). However, under C1 there may be still others who do not contribute, because they no longer consider the amount X + Y fair, and so yet another new collective must be established, C2, under which the share attributed to each agent increases to X + Y + Z. Each further iteration of this scenario will produce agents who decide that the new share is no longer fair, and thus too morally demanding. Before examining Cullity’s proposed solution to this problem, I will need to first briefly contrast moral iteration with moral aggregation, and then tie them to rescue situations. Iterative moral approaches usually arise in emergency situations, while aggregative approaches usually apply to everyday situations. Brad Hooker writes that the situation in which we are confronted with a drowning child is typically a rare, onceoff occurence, while the plea to donate to charities is likely to be a common and recurring one (1999, 179). An aggregative approach would “consider [it] a moral requirement to make sacrifices over the course of your life that add up to something significant” and would not require you to do anything beyond this “even when you could save some additional lives” (180) (I place ‘sacrifices’ in italics to alert the

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reader to my previously raised reservations when this term is used to indicate a cost to the moral agent—‘sacrifice’ already indicating a large and considerable cost). The iterative approach might arise in the situation where, after saving a child from drowning, we continue on our way and happen to come across another child drowning in another pond. The moral force to save that child, assuming that such moral force exists, would not be lessened because we had just saved another child. Although it is unlikely that we will encounter a drowning child very often, and, surely even more unlikely after we have encountered one drowning child already, the problems arising from iteration in such a scenario do not map onto the corresponding scenarios envisaged in the analogue of starving childing in the LSA. The analogy between saving drowning children and donating to aid agencies breaks down because the former results chiefly from emergency situations where iteration is unlikely, while the later, as a recurring and common situation, can only be limited by an aggregative approach. An aggregative approach also describes how a fair share approach, as envisaged by Murphy, should be circumscribed.8 The LSA then, in conflating rescue situations with unjust situations, is attempting to sidestep the fair-share objection, which is in turn, an attempt to sidestep the charge that taking on unjust situations in a morally iterative manner is just too morally demanding. Gomberg calls the conflation of rescue situations with unjust situations the “fallacy of philanthropy” which is a means to “short-circuit political discussions of large-scale causes of poverty” (2002, 30). Gomberg stipulates ‘philanthropy’ to mean primarily the “assimilation of the practical issues raised by hunger and poverty to our duty to rescue victims of calamity, [and] secondarily the substantive proposal to give money to hunger relief organisations such as CARE, UNICEF, or Oxfam” (ibid.) It is this assimilation that Gomberg calls the fallacy of philanthropy. In calling widespread poverty an emergency, or a rescue situation, the fallacy of philanthropy circumvents any meaningful debate about how to best tackle poverty. Gomberg writes that “[t]he issue here is how this emergency arose” and so. speculations about causes of poverty9 and consequences of alternative responses are relevant to whether we should aid the victims of absolute poverty, but in our ethical culture parallel speculations about how the child came to be in need of rescue or the consequences of the rescue are irrelevant to whether we must rescue […] this irrelevance makes for a disanalogy with our beliefs about how to approach issues of absolute poverty and its consequences. Here we believe, causes of poverty and consequences of our action are relevant to what we do. (64)

Singer counters that these types of speculations should be seen as practical, rather than philosophical concerns, that do not challenge the idea that we should be sacrificing 8 In

order to contrast ‘rescue’, or emergency situations with ‘everyday’, or recurring situations I propose to use the phrase ‘unjust situations’ instead of ‘everyday’ situations. This because such a formulation has resonances with the ‘fairness’ alluded to in fair-share approaches. It also then allows me to posit duties of justice as against duties to rescue. 9 Gomberg attributes the causes of extreme poverty primarily to capitalism and argues that we should “put an end to market institutions that systematically deprive people of entitlements to food, to put in their place social understandings and relationships that put the fundamentals of human well-being outside the forces of the market” (2002, 61).

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things of moral importance to prevent starvation (1972, 239). Amongst these practical concerns should be the question whether individual donations are the best means to achieve an end to poverty and starvation (ibid.). Singer dismisses the idea that donating to aid agencies allows governments to avoid their political responsibilities; but says the onus is on those who refuse to donate to aid agencies as a means to force government action to prove that their stance will exert the requisite pressure10 (ibid.). Singer’s intentions in enlisting the LSA, however, are not directed at institutions, such as governments, but individuals. He writes that the response, ‘it’s the government’s responsibility’, made by many people is a cowardly evasion rather than a principled stance. Singer also addresses a Malthusian concern that famine relief will merely postpone starvation if population control is not addressed. He accepts that such an argument has merit but rejects the conclusion that this absolves us from obligations to stop starvation because the suffering that starvation causes is happening now. The conclusion that should be drawn is rather that “the best means of preventing famine, in the long run, is population control” (1972, 240; emphasis added). If this is viewed through the dichotomy of the rescue/justice situation, it would appear that Singer is arguing that we have to assist the starving children now because they are in a rescue situation. However, if we cannot extricate ourselves from the present situation, in which children are starving now, how will we be able to attend to the plight of the starving children in the long run? Schmidtz puts the matter, perhaps insensitively, in the following way—we know when we can regard the drowning child scenario as a “solved problem”, whereas we cannot make a similar determination in the case of global poverty and wide-spread starvation (2000, 693). In the former case, “I know exactly when it will be time to get on with my own life”, whereas in the latter “tomorrow will be indistinguishable from the face it presents to me today, no matter what I do.” In the drowning child scenario, “the problem goes away and leaves you alone once you fix it”, while in the starving and poverty scenarios, “the problem is a permanent feature of your moral landscape no matter what you do” (ibid.). The reductive logic that the LSA uses to address matters of causation in rescue and unjust situations is captured in a scathing characterisation by Gomberg as “Drowning? Pull her out! Hungry? Feed her!” (2002, 53). Such sentiments fail to capture the complexity of the causes of poverty and starvation and are absent in cases of drowning in ponds. The consequences that might follow from feeding starving children—excessive population growth, dependency, market distortions—are also more complex than those involved in rescuing drowning children, which may simply entail erecting a fence around the pond’s perimeter and restricting access. Gomberg writes that “our ethical culture treat[s] duties of rescue in a non-consequentialist way [because] our ethical intuitions about rescue are derived from learned and 10 A host of commentators argue that governments should not provide any foreign aid at all, and that government-level aid is not only unhelpful, but exacerbates poverty, from inculcating dependency and entrenching corrupt incumbents, to the distortion of local markets. A selection of these commentators, which focuses on aid to Africa, includes The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid isn’t Working—Robert Calderisi (2006), Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa—Dambiso Moyo (2009), and Why Africa is Poor—Greg Mills (2010).

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shared ethical norms” (2002, 40). Ethical norms, such as the prohibitions against theft and killing, give rise to ethical duties and arise from “shared expectations of conduct [… and] the expectations we share about our responsibilities toward one another” he argues, and “someone who would allow a child to drown so as not to be late to class utterly fails our expectations of ethical decency” (41). Gomberg rejects Singer’s attempt to dismiss the fair share objection to the LSA by conflating rescue and unjust situations. While I support Gomberg’s reasoning, his invocation of non-consequentialism and the advocacy of ethical norms which result from shared expectations indicate to me the need for a satisfactory theoretical explanation for what underpins our moral responses to rescue and unjust situations. That is to say, while the analogy in the LSA fails to establish a moral equivalence between saving a drowning child (a duty to rescue) and aiding a starving child (a duty of justice11 ), there are arguably still duties to rescue and duties of justice, albeit incommensurate. In the case of the LSA, the question now reverts back to what generates the duty to rescue the drowning child? For Singer, the answer is simple—the sacrifice principle generates the duty to rescue (the drowning child). He does not need to posit a separate principle which generates a duty of justice because the LSA equates a duty of justice with a duty to rescue; thus, a duty of justice will also be generated by the sacrifice principle. The sacrifice principle then, is doing a lot of theoretical lifting in the LSA. If it is found to be problematic, then the LSA will become unstuck. Before turning to a critical analysis of the sacrifice principle which purports to provide the theoretical underpinning to the LSA in the next subsection (3.3.2), a brief summary of the argument presented in Sect. 3.3.1: Singer considers two objections to his analogy between saving a drowning child in front of me and saving a starving child far away by donating to aid agencies: the proximity objection and the fair share objection. Singer argues that the distance between us and those needing help should be immaterial to our decision to intervene. Singer’s argument is supported Kamm, and Hanna, who motivate for an extension of physical distance and psycho-social distance respectively—both extensions make distance irrelevant. On these approaches, the proximity objection to the LSA is overcome. However, by linking proximity to a sacrifice principle, a principle which he argues is impartial and universalisable, Singer exposes a weakness in his position. On the second objection to the LSA, I argue, following Gomberg, that Singer fails to defeat the fair share objection because Singer is mistakenly conflating rescue and unjust situations. As such, defeating Singer’s dismissal of the fair share objection ipso facto supports the argument that the LSA is too morally demanding to stand.

11 I use the formulation ‘a duty of justice’ in spite of the problematic idea that justice can be thought of as an obligation. The formulation is meant as a shorthand to indicate duties that may arise from being faced with an unjust situation as against a rescue situation. Kant speaks of acts of charity as “duties of good-will, or benevolence”, while perfect obligations are “duties of indebtedness or justice” (in Heyd, 1982, 58).

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3.3.2 Theoretical Underpinnings of the LSA—The Problem with the Sacrifice Principle The previous subsection completed the first stage of analysing Singer’s assimilation strategy to redraw the boundaries between supererogatory and obligatory actions through the mechanism of the LSA. The first stage examined the analogy between the drowning child and the starving child through a consideration of the proximity and fair share objections. Now, in the second stage of the analysis, I will investigate whether Singer’s sacrifice principle can provide a moral foundation for the LSA. Whereas the first stage of my analysis assumed, for the sake of argument, that the sacrifice principle could support the analogy (although the analogy was subsequently found to be flawed), the argument here would prevent the analogy from getting off the ground in the first place. I will now claim, following Gomberg, that the sacrifice principle is just a utilitarian principle in disguise. If so, then the sacrifice principle is problematic because utilitarianism, as an impartialist moral theory, is problematic. As such, the LSA is fatally compromised, and so, Singer’s attempt, and a fortiori utilitarianism’s attempt, to redraw the boundaries between obligation and supererogation comes to nothing. Gomberg calls Singer’s use of the sacrifice principle to argue that we ought to save a drowning child in front of us, as well as donating to aid agencies, an “atheoretical argument” (2002, 20, footnote 45). By this Gomberg means that Singer hopes to prove his argument without appealing to any particular moral theory. Singer confirms as much when, some 35 years after publishing ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ he writes that he was trying to throw a theoretically “broad net” in that essay. However, in ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, Singer had remarked that the “attack on the present [1972] distinction between duty and charity is one which has from time to time been made against utilitarianism”, which would have us “working full time to increase the balance of happiness over misery” (1972, 238). To my mind, these remarks betray Singers dependence on utilitarianism to make his argument in the LSA. What Singer offers in the LSA is not an a-theoretical argument, but a utilitarian argument for the shifting of the boundaries between duty and charity (supererogation). His later comments cannot in themselves invalidate that. Gomberg argues that Singers’ quandary is that Singer “is a utilitarian who wishes to use an atheoretical argument for an obligation to aid victims of absolute poverty; he assumes that his a-theoretical argument is compatible with his commitment to utilitarianism as the fundamental practical imperative” (2002, 20). In order to fully flush out the utilitarian foundations at the heart of the LSA and to sharpen the argument that the sacrifice principle is necessarily a utilitarian principle, I will contrast the sacrifice principle with a principle of beneficence as explicated by Cullity.

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3.3.2.1

Cullity’s Principle of Beneficence and the Extreme Demand

In The Moral Demands of Affluence, Cullity proposes to substitute Singer’s sacrifice principle with a principle of beneficence as a starting point to ground both rescuing a drowning child and donating to aid agencies (2004).12 Beneficence, for Cullity, is simply a concern for other people’s interests, and when we save a drowning child who is close, or a starving child who is far away via donations to aid agencies, it is their interests (in not drowning or not starving) that generate a duty to help them (16). Cullity, in a similar move to Singer, notes that his argument, founded on a principle of beneficence, does not presuppose any theoretical allegiance to either Kantianism, consequentialism or virtue ethics (31). But why should we accept the principle of beneficence instead of the sacrifice principle in order to get the inquiry started? Singer says that “it has to be recognized that some will start from different foundations and will not accept the principles from which Cullity, or I, begin” (2007, 476). The problem with Singers remarks here, I claim, is that Singer is not using ‘foundations’ to go all the way down. Singer starts from the foundation of the sacrifice principle to argue that we should rescue drowning children. However, the question that Singer does not ask, and which requires an answer, is ‘what is the foundation on which the sacrifice principle rests?’ If we start from the ‘foundation’ of the beneficence principle to argue we should rescue drowning children, the question of what founds the beneficence principle will likewise still require answering. Singer gets to the heart of the matter when he argues that his principle—the sacrifice principle— or a principle of beneficence, will need to be supported by a different argument, which “might, for instance be based on the nature of ethics and the requirement of universalizability, or impartiality, as an element of ethics” (480). In other words, here is Singer’s conceding that the sacrifice principle cannot be an a-theoretical principle. That Singer lists only ‘the requirement of universalizability, or impartiality’ as elements of ethics also reveals what is most essential in his reckoning about ethics in general and utilitarianism in particular. As a next step, I still need to argue that the sacrifice principle is also necessarily a utilitarian principle. Before continuing with that line of argument, it is illuminating 12 Yet another principle that claims to able to ground our duty to rescue is proposed by Miller, who advocates for a ‘principle of sympathy’, a more moderate duty, which he describes as:

One’s underlying disposition to respond to neediness as such ought to be sufficiently demanding that giving which would express greater underlying concern would impose a significant risk of worsening one’s life, if one fulfilled all further responsibilities; and it need not be any more demanding than this. (2004, 359) So, the sympathy principle would require us to be cognisant of the suffering in the world and take steps to assist in alleviating that suffering where we could, but would not require us to be actively seeking out all the trouble spots in the world, or even our own local community, or the poverty relief programmes out there designed to address those respective trouble spots. The sympathy principle would rein in frivolous and ostentatious spending but not require that we consider, and agonise over, each and every purchase we make as an opportunity lost, forever, to save another human being.

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to consider Cullity’s motivations for wanting to substitute the sacrifice principle with a principle of beneficence. Cullity describes Singer’s form of argument in the LSA as following a “subsumptive picture of moral justification [which] treat[s] the task of justifying moral judgements about particular actions as the task of identifying general moral principles under which those judgements can be subsumed as instances” (2004, 12). In other words, Singer argues that what is wrong about not saving a drowning child can be explained by invoking a principle which says not preventing a great harm befalling someone else when to do so comes at little cost to you is wrong; and “[t]he argument for the life-saving analogy then continues by pointing out that this principle covers the failure to contribute to aid agencies as well; therefore, that must be wrong too” (ibid.). Cullity claims that such subsumptive forms of argument are problematic and that enlisting a principle of beneficence overcomes this. Cullity is concerned that the analogy Singer tries to make in the LSA is too tenuous, a concern which the analysis in Sect. 3.3.1 confirms. In response to the second half of the LSA, which deals with donating money to aid agencies, Cullity considers what moral iteration might entail. If an iterative approach to the question of how much and how often I should donate to the poor is adopted then this will culminate in, what Cullity calls, ‘the Extreme Demand’ (78–79). The extreme demand has it that: I am morally required to keep contributing my time and money to aid agencies (or to some other comparably important cause), until either (a) there are no longer any lives to be saved (or comparably important goals achieved) by those agencies, or (b) contributing my share of the cost of our collectively saving one further life (or doing something comparably important) would itself be a large enough sacrifice to excuse my refusing to contribute. (ibid.)

Described in this way, the Extreme Demand appears very similar to Singer’s sacrifice principle, up to and until the level of marginal utility. Cullity, however, rejects the Extreme Demand, and so ipso facto, Singer’s sacrifice principle. Cullity writes that people have other interests besides not drowning and not starving, and “pressing the life-saving analogy suggests that threats to life exhaust what is bad about extreme poverty” (2004, 10). Bernard Williams has noted that we all have ground projects that sustain us and shape our characters and identities. These encompass special relationships and other life-enhancing goods like music for example. A world without these goods might be as bad as a world without enough food. The iteration of the Extreme Demand—sacrificing up to the point of marginal utility—denies us and others, opportunities to pursue these goods because “when I do so, I should accept that there are almost always going to be more impartially valuable things I could be doing instead” (131). The Extreme Demand considers other interests, such as cultivating friendships, wrong for us to have (because there are starving children in the world), with the result that “someone else’s interests in getting what it is wrong for her to have cannot be a good reason for requiring me to help her” (137). Consider a child in a refugee camp orphaned and left without any relatives as a result of war. The gift of a doll would provide comfort to this girl and could be the object around which a sustaining friendship with another child in the refugee camp might arise. However, according to the Extreme Demand, a doll might seem

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extravagant at worst, and unnecessary at best, when more food for the refugees in the camp is needed; thus, it would be wrong for the girl to have the doll. And because it is wrong for the girl to have the doll, despite the comfort it may bring her, I do not have a good reason to help her acquire that doll (by donating to a charity that collects old toys in the developed world and distributes them in refugee camps, for instance). The Extreme Demand then, flowing from an iterative approach, leads to an absurd conclusion and must be rejected. Singer faults Cullity’s rejection of the Extreme Demand, and ipso facto the sacrifice principle up until the level of marginal utility, by considering two implications that follow from Cullity’s claim that the Extreme Demand does not provide reasons for us to assist others when they pursue non-altruistic interests (2007, 481). The first is to consider whether the Extreme Demand implies “that the interests of others in achieving the fulfilments of ordinary life do not provide reasons for us to assist them when instead we could be saving the lives of others?” (ibid.). If so, Singer says that he sees no problem: the greater good of saving lives must always win out over the lesser good of friendship and personal achievements, and so the Extreme Demand is not absurd. This is a utilitarian stance, and once again demonstrates the fiction that the sacrifice principle is a-theoretical. Another way of understanding Cullity’s claim, argues Singer, is that the Extreme Demand implies that the interests of others in achieving the fulfilments of ordinary life do not provide reasons for us to assist others even when assisting them has no impact on our ability to save the lives of others” (ibid.). It is this result, Singer claims, which Cullity’s argument—that the extreme demand should be rejected because it has absurd implications—needs in order to succeed. However, Singer argues that the above cannot follow from the Extreme Demand, because the Extreme Demand is compatible with consequentialism, which holds that “if we can cause someone’s interests to be satisfied, without thereby harming anyone else, or failing to satisfy greater interests that we might have satisfied, we should do so” (ibid.). Singer locates the fault in Cullity’s reasoning as Cullity slipping “non-consequentialist assumptions into his argument […] Consequentialist reasons for action depend on the background assumptions of what is within your power to change” (ibid.). Singer uses an example to illustrate his point: Suppose you have some spare time next week, and you could use it so save the lives of several people, but instead you choose to improve your skills in playing the guitar […] suppose also that there is nothing I can do to affect your decision to spend your free hours next week practising the guitar. What I can do, however, is give you some tips on how best to improve your guitar playing. If I give you these tips, you will have a much more fulfilling week than if I do not give them to you. Everything else is equal – whether or not I give you tips will have no impact on either your or my life-saving activities, now or at any future time. Then, on consequentialist views I do have good reasons to give you the tips, and these reasons are independent of whether I judge that it is wrong of you to spend your spare time next week playing the guitar, rather than saving lives. Any other approach would, for a consequentialist be pointless moralism. (481–482)

However, there is another way to characterise withholding guitar-playing tips in the above case which is less ‘pointless moralism’, and more an attempt, however

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misguided, at moral persuasion. By withholding guitar-playing tips, on this understanding, I would hope to get my friend to consider his position of not doing more to contribute to saving lives. I could point out that, even if he did not have the time, he could instead donate money to life-saving aid agencies. At the very least, I would hope that my withholding guitar-playing tips would make him realise that there are repercussions to his position, which might include a questioning of our friendship, for example. In response to this, Singer would merely underscore his point that “there is nothing I can do to affect your decision to spend your free hours next week practising the guitar”, which would include carefully constructed moral arguments, other than consequentialist arguments, attempting to persuade a change of mind. For Singer then, we do have reasons to help others achieve their goals, which do not include assisting other others who are suffering by donating time or money to aid agencies, because not helping them achieve these other goals has no effect on the goal of helping other suffering people. Singer then asks whether one needs to be a consequentialist to accept the Extreme Demand. Or, which amounts to the same thing, does one need to be a utilitarian in order to accept the sacrifice principle? At this point, it is clear that Singer should abandon the pretensions of the sacrifice principle being a-theoretical. Nonetheless, Singer replies that it is not necessarily the case that one has to be a consequentialist to accept the Extreme Demand, “only that on some non-consequentialist views, the Extreme Demand leads to absurd conclusions” (482). One such absurd conclusion being the conclusion that Cullity draws, specifically, that “someone else’s interests in getting what it is wrong for her to have cannot be a good reason for requiring me to help her.” Singer says that the problem lies with “the moralistic screening of interests that supposedly give rise to reasons for us to assist” (ibid.). As examples of this moralistic screening of interests, Singer refers to countries that block needleexchange programmes for heroin addicts which have been shown to reduce the risk of transmission of HIV. However, a utilitarian is also always screening interests—in their case, as a way to determine the utility that may result from a particular course of action. On some accounts, this screening for utility is just another form of moralism which involves,inter alia, “thinking about morality […] in ways that discount the importance of other (non-moral) values” (Taylor, 2012, 2). In other words Singer’s sacrifice principle, as a utilitarian principle (and which tries to extend the scope and meaning of obligation), can also be regarded as an example of the moralism. Moralism was identified as a species of moral demandingness, which in turn, results from impartialist moral theories, of which utilitarianism is an example.13 I have countered Singer’s claim that one need not necessarily be a consequentialist to accept the Extreme Demand, which I argued is just the sacrifice principle in another formulation, because non-consequentialism involves a moralistic screening of interests. In other words,

13 Chapter

2, Sect. 2.5.3.

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my argument is that adopting the sacrifice principle necessarily involves accepting utilitarianism14 ; the sacrifice principle cannot be an a-theoretical principle. To recapitulate the argument presented in Sect. 3.3.2: The sacrifice principle which underlies the LSA is not an a-theoretical principle but, necessarily, a utilitarian principle. Utilitarianism is problematic because of its impartialism, which makes it too morally-demanding. The LSA fails because it is grounded in utilitarianism. The goal of the LSA is to demonstrate how utilitarianism might allow a shift in the boundaries demarcating supererogation from obligation through extending the scope and meaning of obligation. By this measure, utilitarianism also then fails to extend the scope and meaning of obligation, which was described as a move designed to address the normative problem of supererogation. As such, utilitarianism fails to assimilate supererogation. Utilitarianism fails to assimilate supererogation because of its impartialism. Demonstrating that utilitarianism fails to address the normative problem of supererogation, also serves to show that Kantianism fails in this respect because both utilitarianism and Kantianism are examples of impartialist moral theories. To recall, Heyd writes the two parts of two-part assimilation strategy (the normative and meta-ethical parts) are auxiliary tools of analysis and interpretation, and so failing to solve the normative problem of supererogation also entails failing to solve the meta-ethical problem of supererogation. This last part of the argument supplements the investigation of Kantian supererogatory reductionism undertaken in Sect. 3.2.1 of this chapter.

3.4 Conclusion This chapter reframed the problems confronting a conceptualisation of supererogation identified in the previous chapter, as a meta-ethical and a normative problem. This reframing was necessary in order to demonstrate how impartialist moral theories attempt to assimilate supererogation. In the event, I demonstrated that both Kantianism and utilitarianism, and impartialist moral theories in general, fail to offer satisfactory solutions to both the meta-ethical and normative problems of supererogation. While the innovation of perfect and imperfect duties granted the moral agent more discretion to exercise their autonomy, and thus to mitigate the more demanding strictures of Kantianism, the net effect was merely to expand the space in which Kantian obligations had moral force. In other words, while the im/perfect duties distinction might push the boundary of obligation further out, a moral space beyond that extended border where supererogation still operates, remains—Kantianism cannot reduce supererogation to obligation and assimilate supererogation. Another 14 While not all non-consequentialist positions are deontic, I am only concerned with deontic nonconsequentialist positions, such as Kantianism, at this stage of the study. The analysis thus far has focused on deontic and consequentialist positions, specifically Kantian and utilitarian positions, with respect to how they attempt to assimilate supererogation into their ethical frameworks. Other non-consequentialist positions are taken up in later chapters.

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formulation of this strategy would couch the terms in the language of cost: positing imperfect duties purports to discount the cost to the moral agent of those duties: while extending obligation through imperfect duty increases the cost to the moral agents’ autonomy, that increase is offset by allowing the agent discretion in how they go about fulfilling that imperfect duty. Increasing the cost on the moral agent through extending the meaning and scope of duty appears to particularly unsettle utilitarianism. In the attempt to bypass this concern Singer from the beginning describes this increased cost to the agent as the agent sacrificing. However, to call a cost a sacrifice is already to have settled that the cost is a large and considerable cost, although the exact cost remains unclear. In breaking down the fiction that the principle Singer uses to establish the LSA is an a-theoretical principle, calling such a principle, a sacrifice principle clears the path to proving the unstated assumptions underlying utilitarian strategies to assimilate supererogation. Arguing that proximity and fair-share objections to morally iterative demands such as donating to the poor should be dismissed because a principle of sacrifice overrides them is already to have neutered the charge that such a principle is too morally demanding because the cost to the agents’ moral autonomy is too large. In opting to cast Singer’s principle, and by extension, utilitarianism, as an extreme demand, Cullity is at least being upfront about what is at stake in the debate. By invoking marginal utility in ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ Singer shows his hand and reveals the utilitarian machinery which regulates the shifting of boundaries between obligations (to maximise overall utility) and supererogation. As with Kantianism, while the boundaries may be moved, there will necessarily remain a moral space beyond that extended boundary. That necessary space is the space of supererogation. If supererogation requires sacrifice (because it goes beyond duty) then it is toomorally demanding for the agent. However, part of charge against both Kantian and utilitarian attempts to assimilate supererogation is that their proposals to do so are themselves too morally demanding. Moral demandingness encroaches upon the moral autonomy of the agent, and yet supererogation calls upon the autonomy of the agent. I have identified impartialism as the chief cause of this encroachment upon the agent’s moral autonomy. In order to move beyond this impasse, which the normative and meta-ethical problem of supererogation underscore, the scope and meaning of duty (or obligation) will need to be extended but, extended in such a way that the personal and the partial can be included. In the next chapter, I will identify the most felicitous point where such an opening can be made.

References Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. New York: Norton. Baron, M. (1987). Kantian ethics and supererogation. Journal of Philosophy, 84, 237–262. Calderisi, R. (2006). The trouble with Africa: Why foreign aid isn’t working. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Cullity, G. (2004). The moral demands of affluence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gomberg, P. (2002). The fallacy of philanthropy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 32(1), 29–66. Hanna, R. (1998). Review of “living high and letting die.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 28(3), 453–470. Heyd, D. (1982). Supererogation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heyd, D. (2015). can virtue ethics account for supererogation? Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 25–47. Heyd, D. (2016). Supererogation. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/supererogation/. Hooker, B. (1999). Sacrificing for the good of strangers—Repeatedly. Living high and letting die by peter unger review. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59(1), 177–181. Kamm, F. M. (1985). Supererogation and obligation. The Journal of Philosophy, 82(3), 118–138. Kamm, F. M. (1999). Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Law and Philosophy, 19, 655–681. Kant, I. (1949). Critique of practical reason (L.W. Beck, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. (1963). Lectures on ethics (L. Infield, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Kant, I. (1964). The doctrine of virtue: Part II of ‘The Metaphysic of Morals’ (M. J. Gregor Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Levy, D. K. (2015). Assimilating supererogation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 227–242. Miller, R. W. (2004). Beneficence, duty, and distance. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32(4), 357– 383. Mills, G. (2010). Why africa is poor. Johannesburg, South Africa: Penguin. Moyo, D. (2009). Dead aid: Why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa. London: Allen Lane. Murphy, L. B. (2000). Moral demands in non-ideal theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raz, J. (1975). Permissions and supererogation. American Philosophical Quarterly, 12, 161–168. Sen, A., & Williams, B. (1982). Utilitarianism and beyond. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schmidtz, D. (2000). Islands in a sea of obligation: Limits of the duty to rescue. Law and Philosophy, 19(6), 683–705. Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. Singer, P. (2007). Review essay on “the moral demands of affluence.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 75(2), 475–483. Taylor, C. (2012). Moralism. Durham: Acumen. Timmermann, J. (2005). Good but not required?—Assessing the demands of Kantian ethics. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2, 9–27. Unger, P. (1996). Living high and letting die: Our illusion of innocence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 4

Primitive Moral Responsiveness and Supererogatory Attitudes

Abstract This chapter follows the idea that supererogation is better understood as a type of ethical attitude. To that end, I offer several examples of purportedly supererogatory attitudes, including the example of forgiveness. I return to the perspectival problem of supererogation and the case of reluctant heroes and saints in order to deepen the examination of the imbrication of autonomy and supererogation. I trace Bernard Williams’s notion of a moral incapacity in the purported supererogator’s description of their actions as something they had to do. I draw the conclusion that moral incapacities demonstrate that autonomy can be bracketed in the project to conceptualise supererogation. I also claim that moral incapacities reveal a certain type of ethical attitude that can form the basis of reconceptualised supererogation. I argue that such an attitude manifests in, what Craig Taylor calls, a ‘primitive moral responsiveness’—a responsiveness which is an immediate and unthinking response to the suffering of another. However, because this response is the result of a recognition of the other’s suffering as like my own, these responses slip back into a deliberative response which undermines itself. This is made evident in contrasting Taylor’s understanding of sympathy as a paradigmatic primitive moral response with empathy. I focus on the imaginative aspect of empathy to argue for an understanding of empathetic imagination as a non-deliberative and affective response to another person which emerges out of a particular moral relationship with another. This is undertaken in order to ameliorate what I take as problematic in Taylor’s account, so that primitive moral responsiveness can still serve as the foundation for a reconceptualisation of supererogation as a type of ethical attitude.

4.1 Introduction In the examination of appeal to cost approaches to supererogation in Chapter 2, firsthand accounts by moral agents of their purportedly supererogatory actions expressed their belief that they ‘could do no other’ (than perform the contested act). These agents indicated that they felt obligated to perform certain actions such as saving someone’s life, and also, importantly, that they did not regard such actions as constituting a sacrifice. In saying that what they did was what anyone in their position would do, © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_4

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these actors can also be understood as meaning that they did not consider their actions as resulting from a too morally demanding requirement. This chapter will take these reflections by hesitant, or reluctant saints and heroes, as we may want to call them, as a starting point in order to explore two interrelated ideas that point to a possible solution to the two-fold problem of supererogation. The first is that the responses of such moral agents reveal a certain moral attitude. In the preceding two chapters the mapping of supererogation has for the most part involved examining supererogatory actions. However, placing the discussion of reluctant saints and heroes under what in Chapter 2 was called ‘the perspectival problem of supererogation’,1 signals my endorsement of Cowley’s assessment that “the objective meaning of the [supererogatory] act partly depends on the way the supererogator comes to think about it” (2015, 4). This chapter will develop the idea that the conceptualisation of supererogation is better approached through positing a certain kind of ethical attitude—a supererogatory attitude. My claim that attempts to satisfactorily conceptualise supererogation fail because these typically proceed along impartialist lines finds support in other comments Cowley makes: he writes, The way that the supererogator thinks about the act will itself depend on contingent features of her perspective, e.g. ways of adverting, ways of understanding, ways of spontaneously responding; and these will further depend on the supererogator’s biography and on the particular roles and relationships that she finds herself in vis-à-vis other particular people, groups, projects, and ideals, together with the supererogator’s own understanding of those roles and relationships. (ibid.)

In other words, focusing on supererogatory actions to the exclusion of certain kinds of attitudes in itself contributes to embedding impartialism in supererogation. A shift to supererogatory attitudes then, will counter the resistance to supererogation Levy talks about and which he argues “stems from the urge to deny a personal dimension in morality in favor of the universal” (2015, 239).2 Supererogatory attitudes will allow space for special relationships and the pursuit of the individual’s ground projects. In doing so the autonomy of the moral agent will be allowed further expression. How much more, and if that will be enough, will still need to be determined. This point leads to the second idea which follows from the first-hand accounts of reluctant heroes and saints, and which I will develop in conjunction with a supererogatory attitude. I noted that some theorists regard the first-hand accounts of reluctant saints and heroes as misdescriptions, attributable to modesty or mistaken memories. In this chapter I take up Bernard Williams’ notion of a ‘moral incapacity’, which takes these claims by purported supererogators that they could not act otherwise in a particular situation seriously (1981, 1993). If moral incapacity can nullify the moral autonomy of the agent, then it would appear that autonomy is no longer necessary to conceptualise supererogation. After this finding, only the attitude of the purported supererogator would remain to conceptualise supererogation with and so 1 Section 2I

2.3.1. cited this remark of Levy’s in the introduction to Chapter 2.

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avoid supererogation’s assimilation. However, fleshing out such a supererogatory attitude will require substantial effort. My project to do so will involve enlisting Craig Taylor’s notion of a primitive moral response (2012), an idea which was touched upon in the discussion of moralism in Chapter 2. However, in interrogating this idea, I will show that primitive moral responses cannot get us all the way to a satisfactory account of a supererogatory attitude and will need to be supplemented with other moral resources. In order to describe those resources, a wholly other ethical framework and vocabulary will be required. That project will constitute the second half of this study. This chapter, which forms the final part of the first half of the study, will commence by offering a preliminary outline of a supererogatory attitude which is best illustrated in the example of forgiveness. Thereafter, I turn to explicating moral incapacity and what this implies for moral autonomy in general. I then extend this analysis to outline the implications for supererogation in particular. In the chapters’ final section I will follow Taylor’s critique of moral incapacities which lead him to posit primitive moral responses. I will argue that Taylor’s primitive moral responses fall short of constituting a satisfactory supererogatory attitude because they are both too selfdirected, and eventually turn in on themselves as the agent attempts to represent the suffering of another. I will motivate my argument by way of a brief exploration of empathy and moral imagination which is offered to counter Taylor’s claim that sympathy is the paradigmatic primitive moral response.

4.2 Supererogatory Attitudes 4.2.1 Forgiveness3 Heyd notes that “supererogation is primarily attributed to acts or actions rather than persons, traits of character, motives, intentions, or emotions” (1982, 1). However, the differing, and typically asymmetrical perspectives of the actor in, and observer to, a purportedly supererogatory act puts this broad generalisation in doubt. Heyd himself, in discussing what is considered a paradigmatic example of supererogation—forgiveness—says that what is involved in forgiveness is a “focus on the attitude involved rather than on any description of the content of an action” (2005, 159; emphasis added). In addition to the philosophical issues it raises, forgiveness covers a wide area of enquiry encompassing, inter alia, jurisprudence (with its legal concerns of mercy and pardon), sociology (in particular, criminology and theories of punishment) and politics (as it relates to such interventions as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up to investigate apartheid-era atrocities, to achieve retributive justice). My examination of forgiveness will be very narrow—to provide 3 For

a recent systematic treatment of forgiveness in Anglo-American philosophy, see Griswold (2007).

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an example of a supererogatory attitude, and also at the same time to the show how the personal dimension of forgiving operates in supererogatory attitudes. The Oxford English Dictionary defines forgiving someone as stopping feelings of anger or resentment towards someone for an offence, flaw, or mistake.4 Heyd argues that forgiveness should be considered supererogatory because it is neither morally required, nor prohibited, that is, optional for the agent, and is also morally praiseworthy (1982, 154–164).5 Heyd begins by describing a supererogatory ‘forbearance’ as “when a person does not do something which he is morally entitled to do” (152). Forgiveness is a supererogatory forbearance, since the aggrieved party is morally entitled to harbour feelings of resentment and claims to retribution towards the one who has wronged them, and yet chooses not to (162).6 Heyd says that “human resentment is an understandable response to insult and injury, since human beings are sensitive about their self-respect and eager to assert it when they are offended” (2005, 154). It is this giving up of justified resentment that the aggrieved party is entitled to that makes forgiveness morally praiseworthy and thus beyond duty. The giving up of justified resentment is a forbearance that is “constituted by a ‘change of heart’, an expression of a new attitude, the willingness to restore personal relations of friendship” (159; emphasis added). The aggrieved party’s perspective toward the wrongdoer changes when forgiveness is offered; apropos the colloquialism that, henceforth, we see the wrongdoer in a different light. What this change in perspective typically entails is a separation of the act of wrongdoing from the person of the wrongdoer (Benbaji & Heyd, 2001, 571). This strategy allows us to maintain our “commitment to those values on the basis of which the initial negative response was made” (573). In forgiving someone who has broken their promise to us, we do not thereby demonstrate that we do not value upholding promises; we can still find the act of breaking a promise unforgivable even as we grant the promise-breaker forgiveness. Heyd emphasises the personal dimension of an individual’s perception (toward their wrongdoer) present in forgiveness, and contrasts this with the impersonal and impartial principles required in considerations of justice and duty (2005, 159). Going beyond duty, Heyd writes, “is often either motivated by personal affinity to another person or creates such a personal relation” (ibid.). The personal dimensions that characterise forgiveness testify to the centrality of autonomy in the conceptualisation of supererogation. This brief examination of forgiveness illustrates the claim that supererogation can manifest in a type of attitude as seen in the perspectives of those party to forgiveness.

4 See

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/forgive (accessed March 20, 2019). posits that the conditionality of the forgiveness granted is significant in determining the supererogatory status of forgiveness (2010). He argues that, whether the wrongdoer is repentant, or not, is morally relevant and, as such, conditional forgiveness—forgiving repentant wrongdoers—is sometimes a duty and sometimes supererogatory, whereas unconditional forgiveness—forgiving unrepentant wrongdoers—is typically supererogatory (541). 6 See Hamilton’s discussion of Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery, whose response to his torture by his Nazi captors was to hold “fast to his resentment, believing it to be, amongst other things, a fitting way of bearing witness to the horrors he had suffered” (2015, 199). 5 Gamlund

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4.2.2 The Phenomenology of Supererogation Horgan and Timmons offer a comparative phenomenological description of obligatory and supererogatory acts from the perspective of three moral agents which I will reproduce here in order to bolster the claim that the subjective experience or attitude of the purported supererogator can constitute supererogation (2010).7 The first two moral agents experience their situation as an instance of duty, while the third experiences it as an instance of supererogation. The first moral agent agrees to do volunteer work for a charity on the weekend, while the second moral agent happens upon a donation request in his post and decides to donate to an aid agency. The first agent commits to a specific course of action (to help with a clean-up effort) and thus submits to a perfect Kantian duty, while the second agent follows an imperfect Kantian duty because his obligation is not specific—he can donate any amount he wishes, for example.8 Horgan and Timmons provide a bare psychological sketch of the two agents, imagining their inner dialogue: when Saturday comes, the volunteer (the first moral agent). is not in the mood to participate; she would rather take it easy. She considers just not showing up, thinking that because of the many volunteers likely to be involved, her not showing up would not make a noticeable dent in the clean-up effort. But she thinks, “Once I get out there, maybe I’ll perk up and it won’t be so bad, and besides, I did say I’d help, so I really ought to get ready and just go.” With that thought, she looks for her gardening gloves, which she’ll need for the job. (43)

The second moral agent who happens upon a donation request letter in his post, which he usually just throws away, but for no particular reason now opens, finds himself moved by the reports contained in the letter and. decides to do a bit more exploring by going to the organization’s website, where he listens to radio broadcasts, watches videos, and reads more about the needs of people across the globe. He hasn’t made charitable donations in the past – it never seriously entered his mind – but now he is thinking about it. He thinks about his own well-being and reflects on the kind of good luck he’s had throughout his life, compared to the bad luck of people living in hostile circumstances. As he mulls this over, he thinks, “Well, I don’t have to give to this organization – and besides, don’t I pay taxes, and doesn’t some of that money go to foreign 7 Horgan and Timmons phenomenological description forms the basis of their argument that a moral

reason to perform an action can also play a non-requiring role; in particular, a moral-merit-conferring role (53–56). What this entails is that “a moral reason, M, plays a moral-merit-conferring role when performing an action for reason M confers some degree of moral merit on an action which, were it performed for some other reason, would either lack merit or enjoy less merit” (54). In other words, Horgan and Timmons describe how a reason for action with respect to a supererogatory action operates by conferring merit on the action in question, which is optional for the agent to perform. It is the possibility that a moral agent’s reason for performing a supererogatory action can be moral-merit-conferring, without also being requiring, that a supererogatory action can be “deontically optional yet morally meritorious”; or, as per previous formulations, supererogatory acts are voluntary yet praiseworthy (63). See Chapter 3, Sect. 3.2 on reasons for action. 8 See Chapter 3, Sect. 3.2.1 on perfect and imperfect duties.

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Although different, Horgan and Timmons describe both these experiences of moral obligation as a “felt demand that itself is experienced as a kind of vector force, [with an] ‘objective feel’ [that] appears to come from features of the situation that one confronts and that are independent of one’s desires, preferences, and aversions” (44). Indeed, the volunteer experiences the demand of her promise to help as contrary to her preferences; she would prefer to stay at home when the weekend arrives. There is also a “sense that one would be subject to some sort of psychic discomfort as a result of failing to perform the contemplated obligation-fulfilling action” (46). Such psychic discomfort might vary from feelings of guilt to mild disappointment in oneself. Coming to the experience of the third moral agent performing a supererogatory act, Horgan and Timmons imagine a fairly mundane act but, nevertheless, one done from altruistic motives (47–48). On moving into a new community, our moral agent, Olivia, learns that a neighbour, Mary, who has recently lost her husband to cancer, is an avid baseball fan but no longer attends games on account of having no one to go with. It occurs to Olivia. that it would be a nice gesture to offer to go to a [baseball] game with Mary, although she herself had no particular interest in the game. But she thinks: “Here is a chance to do something nice for someone, and the fall semester doesn’t start for another couple of weeks. Why not?” She calls Mary, who is delighted by the invitation, and they end up going to a game […] Olivia does not feel a demand of any sort to take Mary to a baseball game. Nor does she experience any sort of demand to do something nice for Mary or for neighbours generally. Olivia isn’t callous; she would gladly do favours for others if asked […] she is simply moved by her neighbour’s circumstances, together with the fact that there is something she can do that would be much appreciated by Mary. Taking Mary to the baseball game would be “beyond the call of duty” and, in effect, is experienced by Olivia as such. We say “in effect” because of course, while the thought that her offer is beyond the call of duty need not enter Olivia’s mind, her experience involves her sense that the offer is not something she is morally required to do, but something that it would be good to do. (ibid.)

Horgan and Timmons argue that Olivia’s not experiencing her invitation to Mary as a felt demand is qualitatively different from the volunteer’s and donator’s experiences who do feel their experiences as such (49). It is this difference in the subjective experience and attitudes that allows us to characterise the last scenario as supererogation. Another illustration of a supererogatory attitude is presented in Gaita’s discussion of sainthood, which relates the story of one Lakmaker, who attends to the suffering of a fellow inmate in Auschwitz (2000). Cowley uses this example to argue that here is a case in which action was limited and ineffective (the inmate had advanced typhus and Lakmaker was himself very weak), but that the attitude of tenderness Lakmaker showed was supererogatory in that it went “far beyond anything that could be reasonably expected of him in the circumstances” (2015, 11). Cowley goes further in his argument that supererogatory attitudes deserve equal attention to supererogatory actions—he considers giving someone the benefit of the

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doubt, or hoping for the best, or trusting someone, as worthy of the label ‘supererogatory’, “not because they go beyond the call of moral duty, but because they go beyond the epistemic duty to apportion belief to available evidence” (14). In this estimation love is the epitome of a supererogatory attitude insofar as love motivates one to act beyond the call of duty (15). Cowley’s valorisation of supererogatory attitudes is important to my argument. His examples, and the other examples in this subsection illustrate the inner workings of such attitudes in more detail than that offered in the discussion of the perspectival problem of supererogation in Chapter 2. I will however, go much further that merely valorising supererogatory attitudes, and claim that supererogation just is a particular ethical attitude. In order to describe what such a supererogatory attitude amounts to, I will first need to unpack Bernard Williams notion of moral incapacity so that autonomy in relation to supererogation can be explored further.

4.3 Moral Incapacity and the Perspectival Problem of Supererogation Bernard Williams first introduces the notion of an incapacity to perform a particular action as tied to a ‘practical necessity’, which concludes a deliberative process following the question ‘What ought I to do?’ (1981). This ‘ought’ need not involve any moral obligation at all, for example—I ought to start running so that I can lose weight. However, when the ‘ought’ does involve a moral obligation, it might well be that the moral agent ought not to do that particular thing, because they may also be under some other moral obligation (125). Such conflicting moral obligations might arise in the situation of a moral dilemma, for instance. Expanding on this distinction, Williams explains that “ought is related to must as best is related to only” (ibid.). What this means is that “by telling someone that he ought to do X if he wants Y is that X is the best or favoured means to Y; if it is the only means to Y, then he must do it if he wants Y” (ibid.). After weighing all the options and courses of action available, the moral agent might conclude that they must perform a particular action and that they cannot do otherwise, because it is, for them, the only way to achieve a particular outcome. The ‘cannot’ is not a physical impediment, a rhetorical sleight or a psychological deceit; which becomes clear when a moral agent claims that they cannot perform a certain act but then intentionally do so (128). The differences between practical necessity and ‘ought’ can also be illustrated by contrasting this ‘cannot perform a certain action’ with the claim that one ought not to perform a certain action (which can still be true, even when the moral agent performs that action). In reaching the conclusion that they ought to perform a certain action as a practical necessity, the moral agent recognises that such a conclusion represents “a certain incapacity of mine” (ibid.). Williams, some twelve years later, develops this idea

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into the notion of a moral incapacity, which is not “an incapacity to engage or be engaged in moral outlook” but rather. incapacities that are themselves an expression of the moral life: the kind of incapacity that is in question when we say of someone, usually in commendation of him, that he could not act or was not capable of acting in certain ways. (1993, 59)

Williams uses as a paradigmatic example of moral incapacity, Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521. There, Luther famously declared ‘Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders’ (Here I stand; I can do no other). Williams argues that by this declaration, what Luther meant was that in reaching this position “there were indefinitely many things he could now not do” (61). He could not recant and disavow his criticisms of the Catholic Church contained in his 95 theses for example, because “Luther’s practical necessity to act as he did is one that is an expression of his moral outlook” (Archer, 2015, 112). Williams distinguishes moral incapacities from other physical and psychological incapacities, with the chief criterion being that “a moral incapacity belongs to the species: incapacity to do a certain thing knowingly” (1993, 62). If I cannot lift 500 kg then that is a physical incapacity; however, if under hypnosis, it turns out that I can, after all, lift 500 kg, then it is not true that I possess that incapacity, at least under certain conditions (ibid.). A psychological incapacity, however, might preclude you from performing a certain act if you were conscious of it—Williams uses the example of eating roast rat: if you were made aware that you were eating rat, instead of chicken, for instance, then by continuing to eat the roast rat you could not plausibly claim that you had a psychological incapacity, manifested in disgust, with eating rat (ibid.). If, however, you cannot take another bite at the behest of a roast rat-aficionado, you might try to overcome this psychological incapacity, but in spite of all the aficionado’s persuasion, still fail to do so. The distinction between a psychological and moral incapacity can also be understood as the difference between a causal, or determinative force and a normative force. A moral incapacity bounds the agent normatively and as such, the agent will never try to overcome that particular moral incapacity (63). This is because moral incapacities are expressions of the agent’s moral life, and in attempting to overcome them, or in ceasing to identify with them, that incapacity no longer counts as a moral incapacity, although as Archer remarks, the incapacity may still remain as a psychological incapacity (2015, 115). Archer puts forward the example of a person claiming to be incapable of murder yet actively seeking to overcome this aversion—such a person cannot be said to have a moral incapacity to murder. As such, “moral incapacities then are not simply incapacities to act in certain ways, they are also incapacities to try to act in those ways” (ibid.). With the notion of a moral incapacity established, the implications for supererogation can now be drawn. Archer argues that the actions of moral exemplars such as Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews from death in Nazi-occupied Hungary, and who asserted that he had no choice but to do so, fall under the notion of a moral incapacity, and that such actions constitute a moral necessity (2015). Archer continues by noting that “in order for an act to involve sacrifice there must have

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been an alternative act that the agent could perform” and that because of the moral incapacity of the agent, no such alternatives presented themselves (119). In other words, because there were no alternatives to doing what the agent did—they could do no other—what they did do could not constitute a sacrifice for that agent. At this point it is necessary to recall appeal to cost approaches to supererogation and how, in calling an action a sacrifice, we have already supposed that the agent has borne a large cost, and thus to mark their action as supererogatory.9 While the perspectival problem of supererogation shows that the reluctant saint and hero considers their actions obligatory and what others would also do, moral incapacity problematises this finding. Moral incapacity reveals that the reason why the agent believes these purportedly supererogatory actions are, and should be obligatory, and why they believe that anyone else would do the same in their position is because there are no alternatives to doing what they did—not just no alternatives for themselves, but no alternatives for anybody else in their position. Moral incapacity thus universalises the perspectival problem of supererogation. In the process of nullifying the asymmetry of blame characteristic of the perspectival problem, the autonomy of the agent is also impacted. What follows from this is that the autonomy of the moral agent with regard to supererogation is put into serious question. If sacrifice, or considerable cost is not necessary for supererogation because there are no alternative courses of action open to the agent, then the autonomy of the agent is not necessary for supererogation either. Better still would be to say that the autonomy of the agent can only find expression in their attitude toward supererogation—a supererogatory attitude. At this stage the content of a supererogatory attitude is still sketchy, notwithstanding the examples offered in the previous section. In order to develop the idea of a supererogatory attitude I will now consider the objection raised by Craig Taylor against Williams’s notion of a moral incapacity and which subsequently leads Taylor to postulate a primitive moral responsiveness.

4.4 Primitive Moral Responses Taylor challenges Williams on the idea that moral incapacities only, or typically, result from a deliberative process (1995). To be clear, Taylor notes that Williams does not mean only certain deliberative conclusions that a moral agent does reach, but also conclusions they might reach, if they were not deliberating under false assumptions, for example (2002, 62). For Williams, even if no actual process of deliberation occurs, “the idea of a possible deliberation by the agent […] gives us the best picture of what the [moral] incapacity is” (ibid.). In other words, a moral incapacity that was not obviously so before deliberation can sometimes reveal itself as such through the process of deliberation. Taylor provides the example of a moral agent R, a member of an anti-government movement fighting an authoritarian regime, 9 See

Chapter 2, Sect. 2.3.

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who discovers that a comrade has betrayed the cause (1995, 277). R deliberates on the appropriate course of action, considering, inter alia, the need for a strong show of leadership and discipline, and concludes that the only moral option is to execute his comrade himself. However, when the time comes to confront his comrade, he discovers that he can’t pull the trigger. Taylor considers what this discovery—that one cannot go through with the act of intentionally killing somebody—entails: On the one hand, we might say that R has discovered something in this situation about himself, about what real fear is like or whatever – that is relevant to his conclusion that (in the end) he cannot kill his comrade. But on the other hand, it might be suggested that what R has discovered here is simply that he cannot kill his comrade. (278)

Taylor argues that it is the latter reply which resists explanation in terms of some further deliberation; whether this entails deliberating about R’s life project, or about other information forthcoming from the situation. In other words, further deliberation about whether or not to proceed with the execution, “has simply been ruled out” (ibid.). R’s moral incapacity to continue with the execution of his comrade, in spite of all the preceding deliberation, is an example of what Taylor calls a ‘primitive response’; ‘primitive’ being used “to emphasize the point that such responses cannot be further analysed, broken down and explained in terms of something more basic, such as an agent’s motives, beliefs and practical deliberations” (282–283). In a later response to a critic, Taylor elaborates on primitive moral incapacities, saying that “R need not be acting here on the basis of any reason that he might recognise as flowing from his dispositions, commitments, and so on” (2002, 65). If R could answer the question why he could not kill his comrade with the reply ‘because he is my comrade’, then such a reply would constitute a reason and ipso facto would not be a primitive response. Such a reply might indicate a possible psychological incapacity. However, R cannot articulate why he cannot kill his comrade and the reason why he cannot is precisely because such reasons are not present, and cannot be present, to the agent. Nevertheless, such a primitive response is still a moral incapacity insofar as the agent cannot bring himself to perform the act in question, despite concluding that good reasons to do so exist. An important caveat is necessary here: Taylor’s primitive response which moves the agent to act cannot be called a reason for action10 —that would imply that the agent had deliberated on their course of action and could articulate, however vaguely, their motivations and beliefs flowing from their dispositions and commitments and so on. Such a deliberative response would no longer be a primitive response, as defined by Taylor. The primitive response, which moves the agent to act, is thus better described as a ground for action. In Moralism, Taylor offers a more concise formulation of his notion of a primitive response, articulating what he takes to be the two most important aspects of a primitive response; first, they. are immediate and unthinking in the sense that they are not mediated by certain prior thoughts we might have about the particular human beings we are responding to […which] is not to 10 Naming a ‘reason for action’ recalls the problematic part these play in paradox of supererogation which can be traced back to the so-called ‘good-ought tie-up’. See Chapter 3, Sect. 3.2.

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concede that such responses are merely mindless or instinctive. Rather, and this is their second aspect, such responses are […] themselves a form of recognition of another’s humanity. (2012, viii)

A primitive response, such as the example of R above, argues Taylor, is not just a response which moves us to act, but is also “constitutive of our conception of human nature” (2002, 3). Understanding human nature, according to Taylor (9), involves asking “what is the source of the motivation within a particular agent […] which underlies the reasons an agent gives for acting, and which explains their being moved.” But asking this question is to suppose that “a person’s actions can always be explained as flowing from certain features of that agent or of human beings generally, so that a person’s actions never themselves feature at the most basic level in our conception of human nature” (ibid.). In other words, a primitive response, to the suffering of another for example, is itself both the action (of recognition of such suffering) that the agent performs, and that which moves the agent to perform this action. Another important implication of a primitive response as an unthinking and immediate response is that it is not a voluntary response and is thus not an expression of the agent’s moral autonomy. This is, however, not problematic insofar as supererogation is concerned, as it has been established above that autonomy is no longer necessary for supererogation. The second aspect of a primitive response in the above citation by Taylor is that primitive responses consist in recognising the humanity of others. To expand on what this recognition amounts to and to tie these primitive responses to supererogatory attitudes, I turn to Taylor’s exploration of what he considers a paradigmatic primitive response—sympathy.

4.4.1 Sympathy as a Primitive Response and an Attitude In his philosophical analysis of sympathy, Taylor argues that sympathy is “a primitive response to the suffering of another” (2002, 3). This means that the phenomenon of sympathy cannot be broken down and explained in terms of something more fundamental such as a desire or a motive. Furthermore, sympathy, as a primitive response, consists in recognising the humanity of the one we sympathise with and which moves us to act. Taylor considers how we can know that another is suffering, and so be moved to sympathy, by building on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of other minds in Philosophical Investigations (1958). Taylor links a primitive response to what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’ (2002, 5). Taylor argues that “our conception of thoughts and feelings of others is constituted by our expressive responses to their expressive behaviour” (ibid.). So, for example, an expression of sympathy toward someone crying out in pain is an indication of our belief that they are feeling pain—there is no way to ‘know’ that they are in fact in pain in the way that I know that I am in pain. While they may be faking their pain, my sympathetic response still constitutes a conception of the other’s pain. Our primitive

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responses to others thus express our attitude that the human before us is “the kind of being that has thoughts and feelings” (84). This attitude, an attitude towards a soul, is the recognition of the other’s humanity (to feel, to suffer) and is revealed in my primitive response to the other. Up until now, I have used Taylor’s term ‘primitive response’ to indicate a primitive moral response. This does not go against Taylor’s intention, as his argument is that such primitive responses are constitutive of moral agency, but I now want to directly address his caveat that not all primitive responses need be moral responses (2002, 5). Besides sympathy, an equally immediate and unthinking (that is, primitive) response to the sight of a leper, for example, could be to turn away in disgust, or embarrassment. Taylor argues that these types of (primitive) responses cannot be called moral responses. In keeping with his project, he rejects appealing to an agent’s reasons or grounds for action to determine whether or not a primitive response is moral. Instead, he argues that responses such as disgust are not primitive moral responses because they are not constitutive of how we understand human suffering; such primitive responses. fail to recognize the suffering of another as like one’s own. More precisely […] where sympathy is totally absent from our dealings with another we fail to recognize their suffering as making the kind of claim on others that we take it that our own suffering makes”. (6; emphasis added)

Reformulating this point later on, he says that “sympathy establishes a certain connection between us, a connection according to which we recognise others, their joys, sufferings and so on, as like our own” (136; emphasis added). My concern with Taylor’s argument is that it is the recognition of the suffering of the other, as like my own, which is constitutive of moral agency. In order to clarify my concern, I will cite Cullity’ s formulation of a possible complaint an impartialist might level against Taylor’s position—“I make the reason to help other people too self-regarding [in that] this offers a fact about me as the reason for helping, rather than the good it would do for him” (2004, 22).Taylor rejects this criticism on the grounds that. the relation between them and me is not itself my reason for helping them. On the contrary […] my sympathetic response to others itself helps to constitute the web of relationships through which we recognize another as an appropriate object of various kinds of concern. (2012, 79)

However, my concern is less about reasons for helping, which may or may not be selfish, but rather, how I can recognise the sufferings and joys of the other as like my own. If I am not in a relationship with the other, then how will I be able to recognise their suffering and joy as suffering and joy, much less as suffering and joy as like my own? Part of my unease with Taylor’s understanding of sympathy as constitutive of moral agency is reflected in Desmond’s concern with “the extent that the sympathizer has oversight and control over the other […] Sympathy retains us within the circle of our comfort zone” (2010, 249). As the sympathiser, it is my response that guides and directs the moral encounter. The other’s reaction to my response, far from demonstrating the complexity of their identity, serves only to course-correct my own moral

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agency. One might ask why Taylor devotes a monograph to sympathy and never once considers contrasting it with a concept very often conflated with it—empathy. Jamison writes that “empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see” (2014, 5). This is exactly what I believe is missing in Taylor’s account—an acknowledgement of a suffering beyond what a moral agent can recognise. The most obvious phenomenon to contrast with sympathy is empathy (although this distinction can be confusing: what Adam Smith and David Hume called ‘sympathy’ most contemporary philosophers consider ‘empathy’ [Prinz, 2011, 212]). I will explore the empathy debate in more detail below in order to contrast it with sympathy as a primitive moral response. This will inform my explanation, in the subsection to follow, of what I take to be problematic about primitive moral responses. Before that, I offer another example of how Taylor’s requirement that recognition of another’s suffering be like one’s own can lead, when pressed far enough, to his idea of a primitive moral response as immediate and unthinking being undermined. To recall, Taylor’s positing of primitive responses is meant as a corrective to Williams’s moral incapacities which follow a process of deliberation. Consider a personal story Taylor relates about a friend who tries to help a ‘baglady’ on the street by buying her a loaf of bread, only to have it thrown back in his face (2002, 140). Taylor writes that in order to understand this exchange, we need to consider that “humiliation is also a form of suffering” (ibid.). This is undoubtedly true; but that understanding—of the forms suffering can take—depends on, as he acknowledges, “a good deal of reflection”. However, reflection is also a form of deliberation, which will blunt and transform the primitive response which Taylor defines as immediate and unthinking. To return to Taylor’s example of R, the moral agent who, after reflecting, discovers that at the crucial moment, he cannot pull the trigger on his traitorous comrade: R can still step aside, reflect on his hesitation, deliberate further, come back to confront his comrade, lift the gun and, again, fail to pull the trigger. In other words, further reflection might still prevent R from performing the very specific action of pulling the trigger on his comrade. Whereas, in the case of the bag-lady, the moment, so to speak, has passed—further reflection on Taylor’s friend’s part would most likely not include the original action of giving a loaf of bread to the bag-lady. Will he run after the bag-lady and apologise to her for his presumptuousness, assuming that he recognises that his offer was condescending? Or, is reflecting on the reaction of the bag-lady supposed to inform his response to their next possible encounter, or with another bag-lady? What if the bag-lady cannot eat bread and this is the reason why she threw the bread back? Is it so difficult to imagine a bag-lady who is gluten intolerant? Perhaps the bag-lady despaired at the thought of yet another day having to eat only bread, bread being the preferred choice of bag-ladies, or so Taylor’s friend imagines. The friend can only recognise the true source of the bag-lady’s suffering if he places himself in a relationship with her (benefactor, friend, neighbour, for example), which might then provide answers to these questions. I believe that Taylor fails to heed Williams’ critique that in the present case “reflection can destroy knowledge” (2011, 164). In the present case, I would argue that the knowledge in question amounts to knowing how to respond when confronted

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with a bag-lady. How do I recognise the bag-lady’s humanity which encompasses her suffering in all its various manifestations and complexity? How can I recognise the bag-lady’s suffering as like my own when I cannot recognise that she might suffer wounded pride just as I do? In order to recognise the source of her suffering, what may be needed is not sympathy, but empathy. This would however depend on what is meant by empathy.

4.4.2 Empathy and Moral Imagination Although I do not intend to provide a rigorous conceptual analysis of empathy here, it is useful to very briefly outline the current debate around empathy.11 I intend this exercise only to indicate a possible way forward from what I consider problematic in Taylor’s account of primitive moral responses, but whose schema I hope to retain in spite of this. In so doing, I will follow Smith who claims that because “the concept of empathy is contested […,] in offering an account of it some stipulation is perhaps inevitable” (2017, 720). One feature of empathy that reoccurs frequently in these stipulations is imagination. That, however, usually just pushes the debate back to a consideration of what imagination encompasses as a means to empathise with another person. My own position will involve understanding empathetic imagination as a nondeliberative and affective response to another which emerges from a particular moral relationship with another. Describing that relationship and delineating the scope of that relationship will be the work of the most of part two of this study. Matravers divides the current state of the field of empathy inquiry into the ‘mindreading camp’, arising from the functionalist concern of how we can know the contents of another’s mind, and the ‘emotions camp’, situated within a broader debate on the nature of emotions (2017b).12 The former is concerned with “working out what other people are thinking”, while the latter is “about feeling what other people are feeling” (ibid.). I will argue that moral imagination offers a means to both feel what the other feels and a means to ‘work out’ what the other thinks and as such serve as a bridge, however narrow, between these two camps. As it turns out, imagination is precisely what the emotions camp turns to in order to distinguish themselves from the mind-reading camp. However, I will show that the way imagination is read by some in the emotions camp reveal a certain conception of affectivity which map onto

11 For

more on empathy, see the collections of essays on the topic—Coplan and Goldie (2011) and Maibom (2014), the monograph by Stueber (2006), and the overview by Matravers (2017a). 12 Matravers refers the reader to the origins of the debate in Edward Titchener’s coining of the term ‘empathy’ as a translation of the German term ‘Einfühlung’ (1909). Matravers explains the core idea of einfühlung as that “beauty is a matter of our ‘animating’ parts of the world by projecting our inner states into them’ (2017b). It is this ‘projection’ of our inner –mental and/or emotional—states that forms the basis of the debate: are these states projected into or onto other people? How are these states actually ‘projected’ into or onto others—if these states are mental states what is a ‘mental projection’?

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the elements of Taylor’s primitive moral responsiveness I find problematic and want to advance beyond. Within the mind-reading debate, Matravers cites Stueber’ s definition of empathy as “a form of inner or mental imitation for the purpose of gaining knowledge of other minds” (2006, 28). Matravers likens figuring out what other people think to figuring out the inferential connections they will make, and that this project is more likely to yield results than the “messy business “of figuring out what people feel. In consequence, ‘gaining knowledge of other minds’ has been restricted to the study of purely cognitive states which has tended to displace investigation into emotions (2017b).Taylor’s turn to Wittgenstein’s theory of other minds, on which he builds his primitive moral responsiveness, situates him in the ‘mind-reading’ camp described above, although of course, Taylor says he is providing an analysis of sympathy, not empathy. Furthermore the description of a primitive moral response as the recognition of the other’s suffering betrays a privileging of cognitive states. I also argued that Taylor’s primitive moral responsiveness break down and the immediacy and unthinking nature of that responsiveness eventually turns toward how to acquire knowledge of the other’s suffering. Within the emotions debate, the following Maibom definition is standard: “S empathizes with O’s experience of emotion E in C if S feels E for O as a result of: believing or perceiving that O feels E or imagining being in C” (2014, 3; emphasis added). Empathy requires one to imagine how the other experiences the world and their place in the world—what has been called ‘in-their-shoes’ empathy (Goldie, 2011). Darwall writes that empathy “consists in feeling what one imagines he feels, or perhaps should feel” (1998, 261). Prinz is one commentator who takes objection to the ‘imaginative’ element in empathy and argues that “the appeal to imagination seems overly intellectual. Imagination sounds like a kind of mental act that requires effort on the part of the imaginer” (2011, 211). The issue for Prinz then, is not with imagination per se, but with how imagination is understood to operate, which in Prinz’s description, appears to amount to just another way of thinking. If imagination is to be understood as a non-deliberative (non-intellectual) ‘feeling’ act that derives from the emotions, then emotions would seem to require, on Prinz’s account, no effort. That is to say, empathetic imagination should be understood as an immediate and unthinking act—in other words, a Taylorian primitive response. On this interpretation, Taylor’s sympathy is just empathy. But my concern with Taylor’s notion of a primitive response is that it is based on my recognition of the other’s suffering as like my own; the question of whether a primitive moral response is sympathy or is empathy is not my concern, at least in so far as the relationship between myself and the other is left unanswered. The way forward then is to imagine the other’s suffering in a way that is not based on a recognition of that suffering as like my own. Again, whether that imagination is then understood as the basis for sympathy or empathy is not what interests me. My concern is how the recognition of the others suffering (whether that be as sympathy or empathy) as a non-deliberative and affective response to the other can move me to respond in a certain way, a supererogatory way. As a non-deliberative and affective response, as a truly immediate and unthinking response, such a response will amount

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to the primitive moral response Taylor hopes for. In turn, I will argue that in order to respond in this way, a certain attitude will be required, a supererogatory attitude. Such a supererogatory attitude will in turn circumscribe, and be circumscribed by, the autonomy of the moral agent. In Chapter 8 I will posit moral imagination as a recursive modality which consists in the continuous revision of my representations of the other’s suffering which, because they are not like my own, I fail to recognise, but which nonetheless still shape my moral responses to the other in the process of revising those representations. This recursive modality will be used to overcome the problem I identify in Taylor’s primitive moral responses and will constitute the basis of a supererogation reconceptualised as a certain type of attitude, a supererogatory attitude. While there is a lot of ground to cover before the workings of such a moral imagination can be revealed in complete detail, what this will encompass can at this stage be glimpsed in the work of Patricia Werhane who works in the discipline of business ethics. Werhane and Moriarty define moral imagination as “the ability to discover and evaluate possibilities within a particular set of circumstances by questioning and expanding one’s operative mental framework” (2009, 4). Werhane and Moriarty distinguish moral imagination from other forms of reflection (or cognition or knowledge) by writing that moral imagination. is grounded in practice and distinguished by the following three characteristics: 1. Beginning not with the general but with a particular situation; 2. Entailing the ability to disengage from one’s primary framework or to extend or adapt that framework in a meaningful way; 3. Dealing not merely with fantasies but with possibilities or ideals that are viable and actualizable. (ibid.)

The first characteristic ties up with understanding supererogation as a nonuniversalisable phenomenon. The second is a reminder that neither Kantianism nor utilitarianism, for example, can satisfactorily extend their moral frameworks without assimilating supererogation in the process. The third characteristic ties up with a claim that I will make in the second half of the study that it is the possibility of sacrifice rather than actual sacrifice that is at work in supererogation and that the supererogatory attitude should be directed at this possibility in order to counter supererogation’s morally demanding infringement on our moral autonomy.

4.5 Conclusion Believing that actions are the only, or best medium through which to conceptualise supererogation is already to have foreclosed the personal dimension of morality as a source to draw from in order to address the many problems that beset supererogation. A possible solution to the perspectival problem of supererogation (a problem which distils all the other problems of supererogation) only suggests itself if supererogation is understood as dependant on the way the supererogator comes to think about their actions. The problems of supererogation become less intractable if we understand supererogation as a certain type of attitude, a supererogatory attitude.

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In positing this attitude, the moral autonomy of the moral agent is put into question. If a supererogatory attitude flows from moral incapacities an agent has and which are revealed in the asymmetries of certain moral situations, wherein the agent believes there are no alternatives to a particular course of action, then the autonomy of the moral agent is no longer necessary for supererogation conceptualised as a supererogatory attitude. However, in order for a moral incapacity to operate in this way, it cannot be the endpoint of a deliberative process, partly because moral deliberation rarely results in an endpoint. Taylor’s moral primitive responses give us a way to understand moral incapacities as non-deliberative—unthinking and immediate, and as such, responses that are not entirely up to the agents’ discretion. However, I demonstrated that the non-deliberativeness of primitive moral responses unravels, and for the reason that they are a form of recognition. That recognition based in deliberation, is a deliberation that is self-directed and which believes it can recognise the other through its own representations of that other. If this shortcoming can be overcome, then I believe that primitive moral responsiveness can form the basis of a supererogatory attitude. In turn I believe that a supererogatory attitude is the best way forward to untangle duty and autonomy so that in the absence of the later the former can be dispensed with. I argued that in previous conceptions of supererogation autonomy and duty were imbricated so tightly that extending one meant extending the other—shifting the boundaries of duty meant demanding more of the agent’s autonomy. However, if supererogatory attitudes makes autonomy unnecessary, then the necessity of obligation to conceptualise supererogation is also put into question. In the absence of autonomy and obligation, and deliberation and action, I will need other concepts in order to construct a moral framework in which a supererogatory attitude operating through a type of moral imagination can withstand critical scrutiny. By my reckoning, an entirely other ethical vocabulary will be necessary to achieve this. However, in order to ensure continuity, this other vocabulary will need to faithfully translate the concepts used in the first half of this study such that the problems of supererogation, and what they imply for moral philosophy more generally, are not lost sight of. In order to achieve such a fidelity the next chapter will segue between two different philosophical traditions—the analytic and the continental philosophical traditions.

References Archer, A. (2015). Saints, heroes and moral necessity. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 105–124. Benbaji, H., & Heyd, D. (2001). The charitable perspective: Forgiveness and toleration as supererogatory. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 31(4), 567–586. Coplan, A., & Goldie, P. (2011). Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Cowley, C. (2015). Introduction: The agents, acts and attitudes of supererogation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 1–23. Cullity, G. (2004). The moral demands of affluence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Darwall, S. (1998). Empathy, sympathy, care. Philosophical Studies, 89, 261–282. Desmond, J. (2010). A summons to the consuming animal. Business Ethics: A European Review, 19(3), 238–252. Gaita, R. (2000). A common humanity; thinking about love and truth and justice. London: Routledge. Gamlund, E. (2010). Supererogatory forgiveness. Inquiry, 53(6), 540–564. Goldie, P. (2011). Anti-empathy. In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives (pp. 302–317). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Griswold, C. (2007). Forgiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, C. (2015). Religion, forgiveness and humanity. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 185–205. Heyd, D. (1982). Supererogation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heyd, D. (2005). Supererogatory giving: Can derrida’s circle be broken? Annual Review of Law and Ethics, 13, 149–165. Horgan, T., & Timmons, M. (2010). Untying a knot from the inside out: Reflections on the “paradox” of supererogation. Social Philosophy & Policy, 27(2), 29–63. Jamison, L. (2014). The empathy exams. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. Levy, D. K. (2015). Assimilating supererogation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 227–242. Maibom, H. L. (2014). Empathy and morality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Matravers, D. (2017a). Empathy. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Matravers, D. (2017b). Recent work in the philosophy of empathy. Available at https://emotionre searcher.com/recent-work-in-the-philosophy-of-empathy/. Accessed 9 March 2019. Prinz, J. (2011). Is empathy necessary for morality? In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives (pp. 211–229). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Smith, J. (2017). What is empathy for? Synthese, 194, 709–722. Stueber, K. R. (2006). Rediscovering empathy: Agency, folk psychology, and the human sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press. Taylor, C. (1995). Moral incapacity. Philosophy, 70, 273–285. Taylor, C. (2002). Sympathy. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, C. (2012). Moralism. Durham: Acumen. Werhane, P. H., & Moriarty, B. (2009). Moral imagination and management decision making. Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics. Available at https://www.corporate-ethics. org/pdf/moral_imagination.pdf. Accessed 9 March 2019. Williams, B. (1981). Practical necessity. In Moral luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1993). Moral incapacity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 93, 59–70. Williams, B. (2011). Ethics and the limits of philosophy. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 5

Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility: An Analytic-Continental Segue

Abstract I have argued that the failure of Kantianism and utilitarianism to solve the problems of supererogation in particular and moral-demandingness in general, arise on account of their impartialism. I now claim that moral enquiry within the analytic tradition proceeds chiefly along impartialist lines. This chapter argues that because continental philosophy does not rely on impartialism to support its claims about morality, and is more sensitive to situational, contextual and relational contingencies which allow the personal to play a more prominent and determinative role, it is better positioned to address the problem of moral-demandingness and offer a reconceptualisation of supererogation. This chapter is a segue between the argument presented in part one of this study—broadly representative of the analytic tradition—to the argument presented in Part II—broadly representative of the continental tradition. I explore some of the salient differences between the two traditions and then trace one paradigm of a methodology operative in continental philosophy—‘the possibility of impossibility’. This Derridean-inspired paradigm purports to demonstrate the paradoxes and limits of establishing the conditions for the meaning and application of certain philosophical concepts and language. Derrida’s idea of the undecidable decision is introduced as a way to elaborate on these (im)possible concepts. I then make the case that Emmanuel Levinas is the most well-suited continental philosopher to approach supererogation and moral-demandingness because his notion of infinite responsibility is a radical reinscription of moral-demandingness which attempts to dissolve all ethical boundaries, including the purportedly boundary between obligatory and supererogatory actions. I conclude by offering a short preview of my methodology in part two of the study: a Levinasian reinscription of certain concepts that featured in the first half of the study’s attempts to conceptualise supererogation—these being proximity, asymmetry and autonomy.

5.1 Introduction The difficulties the seemingly basic concept of supererogation as moral acts that go beyond duty raises, and possible solutions to those difficulties have been thoroughly explored in the preceding chapters. It would seem that the theoretical resources in © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_5

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Kantianism and utilitarianism are insufficient to address the paradoxes and contradictions that conceptualising supererogation produces, as are the critiques that target those theories on account of their impartialism. Understanding supererogation as a shield against morality demanding too much of us begs the question of how demanding morality ought to be. If impartialism results in morality that is too demanding, then a personal dimension should keep that demandingness in check. However, if moral incapacities are a legitimate constraint on the autonomy of the individual, that is, if moral incapacities exert a powerful enough normative force on the individual to make the demandingness of supererogation irrelevant, then how exactly does the personal dimension counter impartialism with respect to supererogation? How can a primitive moral response be unthinking but also the basis of a moral autonomy that is manifested in a type of attitude? It is the intractability of these questions and seemingly circularity of the replies to these questions that calls out for a wholly other ethical framework with which to make sense of these issues. As a way forward, I will now attempt a leap across a philosophical divide; a leap which will see the study shifting register from one engaged in the analytic philosophical tradition (and I make the reflexive claim here that the terminology and method employed thus far falls within this tradition), to one engaged in the so-called continental philosophical tradition. If it is not clear from what has gone before, I lay the greater portion of blame for a failure to solve the problems of supererogation squarely on the distortions that impartialism produces in moral theory. Impartialism is in turn, characteristic of most moral philosophy conducted within the analytic tradition. Unlike analytic philosophy, continental philosophy does not rely on impartialism to support its claims about morality. As a broad outline to the more detailed examination to follow, Painter-Morland writes that the continental philosophical tradition rejects the idea that [the moral responses of individuals] can be prescribed or proscribed in the form of immutable principles, codes or laws [since these] are seen as being, in a sense, called forth by appeals that emanate from a particular set of situational, contextual and relational contingencies. (2008, 91)

A shift to continental philosophy will allow an examination of supererogation without moral obligation understood as universal and immutable principles that fix the boundaries of duty at one point. Being responsive to ‘situational, contextual and relational contingencies’ means that continental philosophy will allow the personal to play a more prominent and determinative role in conceptualising supererogation. Responsibility, precisely as the way in which the individual responds to relational contingencies—response-ability—offers better prospects to untangle the imbrication of duty and autonomy that so frustrates the conceptualisation of supererogation in the analytic tradition. This chapter will briefly explore the analytic/continental philosophical divide in order to make the transition to part two of this study—wherein I enlist the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) to reconceptualise supererogation—less alienating. After delineating some important differences between the two traditions in the

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chapters first section, I then I offer a more sustained examination of one paradigmatic methodology that can be found in continental philosophy in the section thereafter. In the process of explicating the differences between the two traditions I will constantly be returning the discussion back to the problems of supererogation, moraldemandingness and impartialism raised in the first half of the study. In so doing I will be motivating my reasons for claiming continental philosophy’s distinct advantages over analytic philosophy to address those problems. I conclude the chapter by making the case that Emmanuel Levinas is the most well-suited continental philosopher to offer a reconceptualisation of supererogation as a supererogatory attitude. I also offer a short preview of how I intend to proceed in part two of the study, which will involve a Levinasian reinscription of certain key concepts that have featured so far in the study—these being proximity, asymmetry and autonomy.

5.2 The Analytic and Continental Philosophical Traditions One fairly uncontroversial characterisation of continental philosophy is as “a professional self-description: that is, it is a way that philosophers and philosophy departments organize their research and teaching and indicate their intellectual allegiances” (Critchley, 2001, 38). As such it is a relatively recent description. It is also a less interesting description than what Critchley calls a deeper cultural feature “internal to ‘Englishness’”, which pits a “Benthamite empirical-scientific” (that is, analytic worldview) against a “Coleridgean hermeneutic-romantic” (that is, continental worldview) (48). I will try to explain what this means in what follows. Critchley’s invocation of ‘Englishness’ points to an alternative description of analytic philosophy as Anglo-American philosophy. This description is however also problematic: despite the hegemony of analytic philosophy in the Englishspeaking world, there are universities in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia that specialize in continental philosophy, and several more in the USA (40). Understood in this way, the purported analytic/continental divide, argues Bernard Williams, rests “upon a confusion of geographical and methodological terms, as if one were to classify cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese” (in Critchley, 2001, 32). The geographical distinction would broadly, and problematically, pit the European continent’s philosophy against an Anglo-American grouping; the methodological distinction might oppose a phenomenological1 against an analytic methodology respectively. The broad strokes of an analytic methodology will become 1 Phenomenology

as a branch of continental philosophy starts with Edmund Husserl, whose work is founded on two related ideas: “the idea that thoughts are not subjective mental experiences but have an objective content that is capable of analysis” and the intentionality thesis: “every thought is directed towards objects in the world and not locked up in some cabinet of consciousness” (Critchley 2001, 14). Following this, Heidegger and Levinas, to put it very roughly, analyse the content of the subjects’ thoughts and experiences in, and of, the world, to arrive at an understanding of subjectivity that is respectively ontological and ethical. These phenomenological projects are examined in Part II.

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apparent as this chapter progresses. The problem with identifying continental philosophy with phenomenology is that other ostensibly continental philosophers, poststructuralists for example,2 regard themselves apart from, and/or in opposition to phenomenology (40). The challenges to delineating a continental methodology is captured in the subtitle to the chapter ‘Research Problems and Methodology’ in the Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy (2009): three paradigms and a thousand exceptions.3 I will skip James Burton’s discussion of both the second and third paradigms as well as the thousand exceptions to those paradigms. Instead, I will draw upon certain features outlined in the first paradigm—‘the possibility of impossibility’. I believe these features will support my decision to turn to the continental tradition in search of ethical resources lacking in the analytic tradition and which might offer solutions to the problems of supererogation in particular, and impartialism and moral demandingness more generally. Before outlining the methodological paradigm of the possibility of impossibility in the section to follow, I note that Burton’s pairing of methodological paradigms with certain individual philosophers4 dovetails with Richard Rorty’s methodological distinction in which “analytic philosophy deals with problems, [and] continental philosophy deals with proper names” (in Critchley, 2001, 55).5 While Critchley dismisses the idea that continental philosophy is unconcerned with problems and their argumentation, he does affirm the “tendency [in continental philosophy] to focus around the texts of a particular philosopher [so that…] rather than writing a paper called ‘The concept of Truth’, one might write a paper on ‘The concept of Truth in Husserl and Heidegger’” (ibid.). ‘The concept of supererogation’ is not a paper one will find browsing through texts in continental philosophy. A recent edition of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (77, 2015), based on the Institute’s annual conference in Dublin 2014, and devoted to the topic of supererogation, had just one paper out of ten described as belonging to the continental tradition (in the event, the continental philosopher enlisted to explore supererogation was a very obscure one—French philosopher, Jean-Marie Guyau [1854–1888]). Following on from the method referred to in the previous paragraph, my intention in the second part of this study is to write on ‘The concept of supererogation in Emmanuel Levinas’. In invoking the proper name 2 Woermann

describes post-structuralism as “a response to the structuralist attempt to develop systemic knowledge of language” (2016, 3). While post-structuralism is subtly different from postmodernism—“a response to the ideals of modernism, in which universal abstract principles were sought and contingency avoided”—they share an overarching aim to “debunk as myth the idea of final structure (or a meta-discourse to explain all language forms)” (ibid.). 3 Grayling assigns those not given their own entry in the section on continental philosophy in ‘The History of Philosophy’ to un salon des refuses (2019, 506–512). 4 Burton writes that the first paradigm is representative of the work of Jacques Derrida, while the paradigm of ‘the possibility of philosophy’ can be attributed to Alain Badiou, and the paradigm of ‘concept creation’ to Gilles Deleuze (2009). 5 Grayling elides such a distinction and writes that in talking about continental philosophy he will “as with the section on analytic philosophy, proceed by attending sometimes to thinkers and sometimes to themes” (2019, 473).

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Levinas, my intention is to offer possible solutions to the problems of supererogation. However one may wish to categorise Levinas—as phenomenologist for example6 — arguing that he at the very least, falls within the continental philosophical tradition is uncontroversial. I will motivate my reasons for settling on Levinas rather than other continental philosophers as the best suited to the task of reconceptualising supererogation in the final section of this chapter. Conversely, Levinas is not a philosopher that is commonly studied within the analytic tradition.7 However one notable attempt to find common ground between analytic and continental moral philosophy in the work of Levinas can be found in Michael Morgan’s Discovering Levinas (2007). He explains that one of his book’s aims is to put Levinas “on the map of twentieth-century Anglo-American moral theory” (xiii). Although he does not critically analyse the positions of analytic philosophers such as, inter alia, Stanley Cavell, Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard, that he puts into conversation with Levinas, he does seek to provide interpretations of Levinas “in terms that […] the Anglo-American reader can grasp” (xiii–xv). My study can be seen as a focusing of such a project insofar as it directs its attention to the conceptualisation of supererogation and the attendant problem of moral-demandingness within moral philosophy—themes that Morgan gives scant attention to in his book. Indeed, in almost 500 pages, the term ‘supererogation’ is never used. While Morgan does tackle the objection of the ‘demandingness’ of Levinasian ethics in a chapter subsection (289–299)—a charge that is similarly made against extending the scope and meaning of duty in the manner of Peter Singer’s LSA (life-saving analogy)—Morgan chooses to label the demandingness of Levinasian ethics as Levinas’s ‘single-mindedness’. It is also worth mentioning that the LSA, and its ‘entire literature’, is mentioned by Morgan only in a footnote (83, Fn.74), and then only to note its link with beneficence as undertaken in Cullity’s The Moral Demands of Affluence (2004).8 The paucity of conversations between Levinas and analytic philosophy should also be viewed in light of Neil Levy’s remarks on the differing audiences that continental philosophy and analytic philosophy aim at (2003). Levy writes that as normal scientists, analytic philosophers address themselves to fellow specialists […] she knows will share her technical vocabulary and her sense of what problems she ought to be concerned with […] The Continental philosopher addresses an educated layperson she knows will possess at least an outline knowledge of the history of Western thought. (296) (Emphasis added) 6 See

for example Morgan (2007, 44–50).

7 Levinas has been taken up by such analytic philosophers such as Hilary W. Putnam (2002), Richard

J. Bernstein (2002) and Stanley Cavell (Critchley 2002, 5). Putnam and Bernstein include papers in the Cambridge anthology Critchley introduces, but focus on the more religious aspects of Levinas’s oeuvre—Judaism and theodicy respectively. Critchley refers to Cavell’s 2000 paper ‘What is the Scandal of Scepticism?’ which appears in Cavell (2005). While noting that Levinas would not approve of the Cavellian terminology, Critchley writes that Levinas can be understood as a type of ‘moral perfectionist’ in that both Cavell and Levinas’s projects are informed by “some form of basic existential commitment or demand that goes beyond the theoretical strictures of any account of justice or any socially instituted ethical code” (2002, 28). 8 See Chapter 3, Sect. 3.3.2.1.

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One interesting result that follows this is that continental philosophy is “characteristically advanced in the form of books that are relatively accessible (if only in the sense that they have the room to explain their specialized terminology), while AP [analytic philosophy] is advanced in the form of journal articles” (ibid.) (Emphasis added).9 I trust that the reader will recognise the paradox of my approach to supererogation and moral demandingness, which draws from both the analytic and continental traditions, and is undertaken in the form of a book. A significant aspect of my methodology in this study will consist in explaining the specialized terminology of Levinas, although I will do so through means of reinscribing analytic vocabulary into Levinasian terminology. (More on this point in Sect. 5.4 below.) Levy’s characterisation of the analytic philosopher as a ‘normal scientist’ needs further explanation and ties up with the points made above that analytic philosophy is concerned with problems. Grayling writes that analytic philosophers “emphasize detail over ‘big picture’ accounts of what they study” (2019, 339).10 In this prioritisation of detail over big picture, the analytic philosopher tends to ignore “the background conditions of enquiry”, and in moving through these specific problems in a systematic way, demonstrates their greater friendliness and sympathy to science (Cooper in Levy, 2003, 296). It is not that continental philosophers do not recognise the value of science, but rather they object to the hegemony of science in contemporary society, leading to what Beaney calls ‘scientism’: “the view that the natural sciences provide the model for explanation and understanding in other fields, including philosophy” (2017, 109). In a reflexive twist, part of what constitutes that scientific model is bracketing the background conditions of enquiry, that is to say, the historical contingencies from which those conditions emerge. In turn, these contingencies lay bare the nonrational and political features that condition all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and more apposite for my purposes, ethical knowledge (Levy, 2003, 288). It is this undervaluing of the nonrational and political in the analytic tradition that I believe is partly responsible for the inadequate solutions to the problems of supererogation proposed in that tradition. The privileging of rationality discounts the important role that affectivity can play in addressing the shortcomings of impartialism underlying most analytic moral philosophy. In particular, the non-rationality of primitive moral responsiveness offers a way to solve the problems of supererogation, but crucially only if that responsiveness is not based upon the recognition of the

9 Reading

Levy’s remarks on vocabulary and terminology uncharitably—one technical, the other specialized, respectively—it would seem that continental philosophers at least try to make their terminology accessible to a larger audience: they will try to speak in the language used by the other side, whereas analytic philosophers will only speak to those who speak their language. 10 I believe that it is only by attending to the bigger pictures of moral-demandingness and impartialism that the detailed problems of supererogation can be tackled. In this process, other detailed problems like the problem of distance in morality and the problem of moral iteration (discussed in Chapter 3) reveal themselves as ways to further understand the details of the problem of supererogation.

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other like myself, something which appears difficult to do, if not impossible, from within the analytic tradition.11 The political dimensions to morally-demandingness, and the utilitarian supererogation assimilation strategies that try to justify this demandingness, are clearly discernible in the debate that surrounds Singers’ LSA. Fair-share considerations in deciding how much we need to donate to charities who help those starving place the issue firmly within questions of justice and within the ambit of the political. The charge that development aid creates dependency and that eradicating poverty needs to address structural economic issues points to the need for political responses before, or in addition to, asking how much we should donate to charity. As analytic philosophy tends to deal with problems, which in turn requires that they specialise, and specialisation requires marking firm boundaries around fields of enquiry, analytic moral philosophy tends to keep the political apart from the ethical. This tendency is not useful in attempting to solve the problems of supererogation, and a fortiori, the problem of moral-demandingness. Demarcating strict boundaries seems to cause analytic philosophers unending anxiety—whether they be between ethics and politics, or between duty and what is beyond duty. Continental philosophy on the other hand places great importance on the relationship between ethics and politics. Continental philosophy recognises such a significant overlap between the two ostensibly separate domains, that the term ‘ethico-political’ has become common usage within the tradition. Notwithstanding this imbrication of ethics and politics, the nature and extent of this overlap is fiercely contested. Caroline Williams poses several questions that outline this contestation: Are we to conceive of ethics as a distinctive mode of thinking about politics, or should we rather think of politics as a distinctly ethical practice? Is politics subordinated to ethics as a form of first philosophy, as Levinas argues, such that the turn to ethics is, necessarily, a turn away from politics? (2009, 109)

Levinas’s notion of ‘ethics as first philosophy’ will be adumbrated in the chapter to follow. The suggestion that a turn to ethics might be a turn away from politics is, however, misleading—a better formulation would have it that in turning to ethics we have already turned to politics. This claim too will be made sense of in the chapter to follow. My turn to the resources of continental philosophy in general, and Levinas in particular, are in part motivated by my belief that a notion of the ethico-political, as against the notion of the ethical simpliciter, offers potentially more useful solutions to the problems of supererogation than that offered by analytic philosophy. Before delineating a further contradistinction between the methodology of continental and analytic philosophy, a caveat on the terms ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ and their various other forms is necessary. I have generally used the term ‘morality’ in the first half of the study, whilst in this chapter the term ‘ethics’ has started to appear more frequently. In the second half of the study, I will shift towards using the term ‘ethics’, although there may be exceptions. This move is not arbitrary and broadly tracks the division of my study into analytic and continental approaches. Williams argues that 11 See

Chapter 4, Sect. 4.4.

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5 Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility … discourses of morality often presented in Kantian form [or impartialist form] commence with the principle of moral autonomy and presuppose some concept of human nature or principle of moral subjectivity which acts in accordance with a rule or law. A moral subject thus acts according to a pre-existing law, usually a prescriptive and universal maxim, to which it is both obligated to conform its conduct, and indeed, is supposed to will, in a disinterested way, that it does so conform. An ethical subject, by contrast, requires no such constitution according to an a priori law, and there is no moral law that precedes and produces a certain form of ethical conduct. On this reading, ethics is concerned with the kinds of relations and practices that may ground […] a subject of ethical conduct. (2009, 110)

One important distinction then between ethics and morality is where moral autonomy derives from—in morality it derives from a rational moral agent who bounds themselves to a universal and timeless law. Autonomy is a very important Kantian term and my analysis in the first half of the study has rejected Kantianism on the grounds of its impartialism. It is there therefore prudent to clarify a few points in this regard, not least to correct a wrongful impression that such a universal obligation operates as a causal, or determinative force, rather than a normative force. For Kant the normative force of a universal obligation derives from the rationality of the agent. It is the agent as a rational subject which allows the agent to discover the categorical imperative and which obligates the agent to perform certain actions. Levinas’s ideas can be useful here to contrast this moral subject with the ethical subject. While Levinas, like Kant, believes that the human has an inherent dignity and that the other should not be used as a means to an end, for Levinas the autonomy of the agent—to be bound by a normative force—derives from the sensibility of the agent, not the rationality of the agent. More particularly, it is the sensibility of the ‘alterity’ (for now, ‘difference’) of the other person within an asymmetrical relationship with that other person which obligates the agent. However, Levinas eschews the term autonomy to describe this obligation to the other. It is because there is no universal law which the rationality of the agent might discover that the agent remains undecidable as to what action might release them from this (infinite) obligation to the other. Another way to put this, is to say that the agent is bound by the undecidability that the other’s alterity presents them with. This undecidability—not a Levinasian term, but a Derridean term which I will expand upon shortly—informs my decision to characterise the autonomy of the Levinasian agent as an autonomy of undecidability. That this autonomy is a normative rather than a causal force is revealed when, in turning away from the other, we inadvertently affirm the existence of such an obligation. This is of course moving much too quickly—the details and implications for ethical theory of such a notion of autonomy will only emerge over the course of the second half of the study, and which will then be used to reconceptualise supererogation.

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5.3 The Possibility of Impossibility Burton offers the continental paradigm of ‘the possibility of impossibility’ as a means to describe the “sense of the ending or closure of philosophy or metaphysics” that, while prefigured by Hegel and Nietzsche, emerges most prominently in the work of Heidegger and Derrida, in response to, inter alia, the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust (2009, 13). Burton clarifies that what results from positing these possible impossibilities (of which I will give examples of below) is not a call to abandon the lines of enquiry in which these manifest, but rather the abandoning of certain “approach[es] to, or understanding of, philosophy and philosophizing that [have] become ethically untenable, politically suspect, or insufficient on some theoretical grounds (often its own) requiring the calling into question of previously central philosophical concepts or concerns” (ibid.). One such ethically untenable assumption is the existence of any universal law which might be turned to in order to end the ‘interminable disagreements’ Alasdair MacIntyre claims characterises so much of contemporary culture (2007). Jean-Francois Lyotard writes that consensus is impossible because there is no (what he calls) ‘grand narrative’ with which to stitch together all the other ‘incommensurable’ (MacIntyre’s term) narratives (1984). Levinas claims that knowledge of the other person is impossible because such knowledge arises from an ontology of Being that is insufficient, on its own grounds, to know that other person without violating the otherness of that other person in the process. However this claim of the impossibility of ontology to “designate access to Being through language and reason” is only possible through the language of ontology (Burton, 2009, 14). Derrida argues that the conditions that mark the possibility of a concept, in particular limit concepts, such as the gift, justice and hospitality, are simultaneously also the conditions that mark the impossibility of that concept. For example, in Given Time Derrida argues that the concept of the gift requires that we give knowing that we are offering a gift, yet that very awareness nullifies it as a gift because knowing that we are giving raises the question of reciprocity (1992a). The conditions for the possibility of the gift—awareness of giving—are then also the conditions for the impossibility of the gift. This is because that awareness inaugurates expectations of reciprocity, even if that reciprocation amounts only to a simple ‘thank you’, and so transforms the gift into an exchange. Derrida will often use the shorthand (im)possibility to indicate this possibility of impossibility. The notion of the possibility of impossibility is also reflected in such formulations of ‘representing the unrepresentable’ and ‘saying the unsayable’. Levinas makes sense of the latter formulation by positing the Saying and the Said, where the Said is always unsaying the Saying—I discuss this Levinasian innovation in Chapter 6. Grayling remarks that analytic philosophers have little patience with such “ab/uses and con/fusions of language” which, in its “unexplained neologizing […] seems impressionistic and slippery, the unclarity a mask for unclarity of thought” (2019, 472). Grayling also notes the common appearance of the virgule and other associated devices in continental philosophy which serve as a visual reinforcement of the mutual imbrication of concepts—the un/representable other, the dis-inter-estedness of the

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‘otherwise of being’,12 the (im)possibility of justice (ibid.). Richard Kearney more charitably characterises these ways of trying to explicate the possibility of impossibility as the “use of ‘extraordinary language’” (in Burton, 2009, 14). Levinas’s use of the terms ‘hostage’, ‘trauma’, ‘obsession’ and ‘persecution’ to describe the ethical responsibility owed to the other is certainly extraordinary (Paul Ricoeur describes it as ‘scandalous’13 ), but such jarring terms do serve a purpose, and are an example what Levinas calls “exasperation as a method of philosophy” (1998, 89).14 The use of such terms, as will become clear later on this study, do in fact demonstrate the continental tradition’s claim that the problem is language, and that “language (and therefore the thought we seek to transmit by its means) is irreducibly and irremediably misleading, imprecise, clogged beyond recall with the corpses of past beliefs and assumptions” (Grayling, 2019, 472). The term ‘hostage’ that Levinas uses for example, better illustrates how the autonomy of the moral agent is captured: not by some impartial and universal obligation, but by the person of another human being— a hostage-taker. Ironically then, ‘obligation’ contains within it the corpse of a belief in the impersonality of morality. Burton argues that analytic philosophy’s preferred method of “dealing wherever it can with problems that are solvable in the logical terms in which they are stated, almost like mathematical equations” implies that impossibility has no place—“if a problem appears insoluble, either it is insufficiently stated, insufficiently analysed or it is a false problem – the nonsensical presenting itself as though meaningful” (2009, 14). However, the problem of supererogation, for example, is not a false problem if the heart of that problem is understood as determining whether there are limits to what morality can demand of us. The problem of supererogation is also not insufficiently stated—the twofold problem of supererogation is a normative and metaphysical problem and the extensive analysis of that twofold problem undertaken in this study’s first half is also not insufficient. Indeed, the analysis was extended far beyond its narrow focus to probe whether the problem could be more sufficiently stated. Perhaps that is the issue—which returns us to the previous sections claim by Grayling that analytic philosophy eschews the bigger picture in favour of narrow detail. The problem is that it is impossible to posit limits to what morality can demand of us without also triggering another problem that as a result of stating the problem (of the limits of morality) in those terms, cannot be stated in the same terms that give rise to that problem in the first place. To which the analytic philosopher might simply reply that this stating of the problem—of the stating of the problem—is itself insufficiently stated! There is thus an impasse in which “the analytic representative refuses impossibility while the continental embraces it” (Burton, 2009, 15). It is to this logic of either/or that Derrida responds with an aporetic logic—the logic of both/and. Aporia is epitomised by moral dilemmas where one is confronted 12 Levinas writes that the ‘otherwise than being’ “has no verb which would designate the event of its un-rest, its dis-inter-estedness, its putting-into-question of this being – or this estedness –of the being” (1985, 100). 13 In Perpich (2008, 84). 14 See Chapter 6, Sect. 6.4.1.

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with two choices: a decision that is impossible to make because both choices are equally compelling; X is the right thing to do and also not the right thing to do. Undecidability is perhaps an easier way to get to grips with the slippery notion of (im)possibility. Derrida writes that the undecidable is not merely the oscillation or tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision; it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. (1992b, 24)

Derrida later clarifies that an undecidable decision is an (im)possible decision because “undecidability is not indeterminacy. Undecidability is the competition between two determined possibilities or options, two determined duties” (1999, 79). The undecidable decision cannot be decided after undertaking a moral deliberation and yet I must deliberate in order to get me to that point where the undecidable decision must be decided. Another contrast to Derrida’s contrast of undecidability with indeterminacy, and which further illustrates the dynamics at play in the undecidable decision, is the contrast between undecidability and uncertainty. In what follows I will turn to John Desmond’s ‘A Summons to the Consuming Animal’ (2010) for inspiration. Although Desmond is chiefly concerned with animal rights in his paper, his critique, insofar as it focuses on utilitarianism (by way of Peter Singer’s work), aligns with this study’s critique of the utilitarianism as an instance of impartialist moral theory. In particular, Desmond takes aim at moral theories that “preserve the notion that it is correct to draw moral boundaries and also to use calculation as a means to reducing complexity in making ethical decisions” (246). I have shown that utilitarianism attempts to redraw the moral boundaries of obligation by means of assimilating supererogation. Utilitarianism uses proximity to a recipient to calculate how far is too far to constitute an obligation, reducing the complexity of development aid and poverty reduction. Ethical complexity arises out of uncertainty: “in everyday life it will often be too difficult to work out the consequences of every decision we make, and if we were to try to do so, we risk getting it wrong because of the pressures of the situation” (Singer in Desmond, 2010, 247). The pressures of a situation may manifest themselves as those considered by Kamm in relation to distance for example, and may include the number of victims in the situation, the probability of success in saving lives in that situation, the mechanisms of rescue available and the salience of the victims’ plight in that situation15 (1999). All these pressures make what the right response should be uncertain. The attitudes, perspectives and motives of the agent’s party to such situations add still further complexity, and these do not lend themselves to measurement as easily as number of, or distance to victims, which can then be plugged into a moral equation.

15 See

Chapter 3, Sect. 3.3.1.1.

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Returning to Desmond’s critique of calculation as a means to reduce ethical complexity, Desmond marks Singer privileging of reason in the act of moral recognition as problematic as it may lead to cognitive dissonance: “if I recognize that another suffers as I do, that may constitute a reason for me taking their suffering into account” (2010, 246) (emphasis added). In addition to cognitive dissonance I add the concerns raised in the previous chapter to such a type of moral recognition. My concern with Taylor’s primitive moral responses hinged on their description as a form of recognition of the other’s suffering as like my own.16 That is to say, I took primitive response, as the recognition of another’s suffering as like my own, to be problematic because such a recognition is an attempt to evade the uncertainties involved in claiming what the others’ suffering consists in. A primitive moral response, in order to remain primitive, should resist calculation and reason with a moral affectivity. A primitive moral response if it is to remain an immediate and thinking response needs to embrace undecidability. Desmond concludes that the reduction of undecidability to uncertainty [ is …] a means to evade exposure to moral complexity and the fact that morality is not a calculable process, nor one where [universal] rules can afford any comfort that might enable us to avoid this responsibility, because one is dealing always with singularities. (2010, 247)

The reduction of undecidability to uncertainty can be seen operating in the assimilation strategies of impartialist moral theories which attempt to reduce the undecidability of supererogation—in determining what constitutes a sacrifice for example— to the uncertainties of proximity for example. Impartialist moral theories can only calculate the point that must be reached in order to decide the undecidable decision, but once at that point of decision, Kantian and utilitarian imperatives are no longer sufficient to determine what must be decided. Although uncertain as to the correct decision, we are nonetheless responsible for the decision we do eventually make. We cannot evade responsibility for our decisions by declaring: ‘I followed the categorical imperative’ or ‘I sought to maximize utility’. The notion of undecidability also provides support and structure to my postulation of what I called at the end of the previous section, ‘the autonomy of undecidability,’ in addition to illustrating the notion of (im)possibility. I said the Levinasian agent is undecidable as to what action might release them from their (infinite) obligation to the other person, which could also be seen as the agent being bound by the undecidability that the other’s alterity presents to them. Formulating the possibility of (the) impossibility (of deciding) as undecidability makes a stronger link with the autonomy of the moral agent, which I have indicated is crucial to the project of reconceptualising supererogation.

16 Chapter

4, Sect. 4.4.

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5.4 Why Levinas? As a model exemplar of the paradigm of the possibility of impossibility, it is my contention that the work of Emmanuel Levinas is extremely well-placed to address the manifold problems of supererogation and so able to offer a reconceptualised supererogation that solves these problems. Except, Levinas would be reluctant to call these ‘problems’ as such. The main reason for my claim is that ethical responsibility for Levinas is infinite—there are no limits to the moral demands that the other person can make on me. Supererogation, as that which goes beyond duty, or which goes beyond responsibility, can be seen as that which marks the boundary with the obligatory. While attempts to assimilate supererogation in the manner that impartial moral theories such as Kantianism and utilitarianism try to do fail, the strategy always involves pushing the boundaries of obligation further and further out. The actions demanded in this expansion become increasingly costly to the agent and somewhere in this process the cost becomes a sacrifice to the agent. However, no matter how far out these boundaries extend, they always bump up against a limit, and as such there will always remain a space beyond that limit—the space of supererogation. Obligation in this view of supererogation remains finite, and duty, while becoming increasingly more demanding, never becomes so demanding that the very subjectivity of the moral agent is annihilated. If positing limits to obligation, or responsibility, is what makes supererogation problematic then the solution that suggests itself (perhaps the only solution in light of all the other solutions examined in the study’s first half) is that obligation should have no limits—obligation should be infinite. One of Levinas’s commentators, Richard Bernasconi, puts the issue in stark terms— “Either one is infinitely responsible, or one has refused responsibility” (2002, 239). This remark can be translated into the various (analytic) terms used in the study’s first half—either one has infinite duties or one refused all duties; either every moral cost is a sacrifice or no moral cost is a sacrifice; either supererogation is too morally demanding or it is not demanding at all. In other words, Levinas is the best candidate with which to approach the problem of supererogation because he fundamentally radicalises the moral demandingness that serves to bound supererogation. In radicalising moral demandingness Levinas offers a way to assimilate supererogation not by extending moral boundaries but by dissolving those boundaries altogether, or, which will be shown to amount to the same thing, by transforming morality into all boundaries. On Levinas’s account, morality just is supererogation; and we all have an infinite responsibility to the other person. Such a responsibility is indeed a morallydemanding responsibility, but it is the only responsibility in which the autonomy of the moral agent can find expression. While impartialism narrows the autonomy of the moral agent, Levinas will argue that the autonomy of the agent is to be found in that very narrowing. While not as critical as the reason given above to the question ‘Why Levinas?’, Levinas’s interest in the figure of the saint is nonetheless worthy enough to comment on. Levinas says that

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5 Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility … we cannot not admire saintliness. Not the sacred, but saintliness: that is, the person who in his being is more attached to the being of the other than to his own. I believe that it is in saintliness that the human begins; not in the accomplishment of saintliness, but in the value. It is the first value, an undeniable value. (1988, 172)

The saint is of course one of the central exemplars within the supererogation literature, and as such Levinas’s remarks on saintliness can offer further insights into the problems of supererogation and support my Levinasian reconceptualisation. These remarks and the implications for the viability of such a reconceptualised supererogation will be investigated in Chapter 8. I can however offer a glimpse into that line of inquiry by saying that I will call saints (and heroes), provisional saints (and provisional heroes) which will allow for the cost of sacrifice that is so problematic in supererogation, to be cashed out (following the Derridean formulation) as the (im)possibility of sacrifice. My strategy to reconceptualise supererogation will involve, as an initial move, reinscribing into Levinasian terms, three concepts—proximity, asymmetry and autonomy—that have featured in the first part of this study. The problems of proximity illustrated how certain reductive strategies to the moral demandingness of supererogation, in particular Singer’s LSA, fail. The asymmetry (of blame) between the purported supererogator and spectator was identified as leading to the perspectival problem of supererogation. Proximity and asymmetry in turn point to how autonomy and obligation are imbricated in the problem of supererogation –proximity can either relax or tighten the force of obligation, thus either restricting or amplifying the moral agent’s autonomy to dismiss demands from those far-away. The asymmetry of the perspectival problem gives the moral agent the autonomy to claim a supererogatory act as obligatory but can also lead to the autonomy of the agent being incapacitated. While there are several other terms that I used to map supererogation and its problems, my focus on these three particular terms is that they have specific resonances and inflections in Levinas’s ethical framework. Together, these three concepts— proximity, asymmetry and autonomy—form useful entry points into the complexity of Levinas’s ideas, especially for the uninitiated. These concepts will not however be the only concepts that I translate into Levinasian terms. In order to strengthen my attempted reconceptualisation I will also be pointing out, as I go along, how certain Levinasian concepts offer a different, and better framing of issues raised in the first half of the study, in particular, those wider issues which follow from and give rise to supererogation. So for example, I will argue that Levinasian ‘totalisation’, which describes the attempts to reduce the singularity of the other person, is discernible in the assimilation strategies in which impartialist moral theories attempt to reduce supererogation to obligation. The space of beyond also features prominently in Levinas—the subtitle to his second great work Otherwise than Being is Beyond Essence. For Levinas, the problem with what is beyond obligation is the problem of how we can talk about this beyond if the language with which we might talk about this beyond is on this side of that beyond. It is hoped that this process of back and forth translation between Levinas and the analytic tradition will allow the reader to better navigate the seemingly startling claims he makes, especially in relation to his claim of an infinite responsibility not just to, but also for, the other person.

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5.5 Conclusion This chapter serves as a segue between part one and part two of this study and describes the methodology I will use in my attempted reconceptualisation of supererogation. In part, that method involves translating certain ethical terms employed in analytic moral philosophy in such a way that they find resonance with similar enquiries within the continental tradition. However, supererogation is not a topic investigated in the continental tradition, and as such it will be necessary to build upon other concepts in order to construct a bridge with the analytic tradition. This will be done through an isomorphism between the notions of (supererogation as) moral demandingness and (supererogation as) infinite responsibility. In attempting such a task, I invoke Richard Rorty’s hope that at some time in the future the divisions between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions will come to be seen as no more than an “unfortunate temporary breakdown of communication” (Quoted in Critchley, 2001, 123).

References Beaney, M. (2017). Analytic philosophy: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernasconi, R. (2002). What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer? In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 234–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, R. J. (2002). Evil and the temptation of theodicy. In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 252–267). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, J. (2009). Research problems and methodology. In J. Mullarkey & B. Lord (Eds.), Continuum companion to continental philosophy (pp. 9–32). New York: Bloomsbury. Cavell, S. (2005). The scandal of scepticism. In S. Cavell (Ed.), Philosophy the day after tomorrow (pp. 132–154). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Critchley, S. (2001). Continental philosophy: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Critchley, S. (2002). Introduction. In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 1–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cullity, G. (2004). The moral demands of affluence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Derrida, J. (1992a). Given time: I. Counterfeit money (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1992b). Force of law: “Mystical foundations of authority” (M. Quaintance, Trans.). In D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, & D. G. Carlson (Eds.), Deconstruction and the possibility of justice (pp. 3–67). New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1999). Hospitality, justice and responsibility: A dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In R. Kearney & M. Dooley (Eds), Questioning ethics. Contemporary debates in philosophy (pp. 65– 83). London: Routledge. Desmond, J. (2010). A summons to the consuming animal. Business Ethics: A European Review, 19(3), 238–252. Grayling, A. C. (2019). The history of philosophy. London, UK: Penguin Random House. Kamm, F. M. (1999). Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Law and Philosophy, 19, 655–681.

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Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1988). ‘The paradox of morality’: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas by T. Wright, P. Hayes and A. Ainley (A. Benjamin & T. Wright, Trans.). In R. Bernasconi & D. Wood (Eds.), The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the other. London: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Levy, N. (2003). Analytic and continental philosophy: Explaining the differences. Metaphilosophy, 34(3), 284–304. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. MacIntyre, A. (2007). After virtue. London: Duckworth. Morgan, M. L. (2007). Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Painter-Morland, M. (2008). Business ethics as practice: Ethics as the everyday business of business. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perpich, D. (2008). The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Putnam, H. (2002). Levinas and Judaism. In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 33–62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, C. (2009). Politics and ethics. In J. Mullarkey & B. Lord (Eds.), Continuum companion to continental philosophy (pp. 109–126). New York: Bloomsbury. Woermann, M. (2016). Bridging complexity and post-structuralism: Insights and implications. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.

Part II

Infinite Responsibility

“My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning” (Levinas 1985; 90). “I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility” (Levinas 1985; 99). “Either one is infinitely responsible, or one has refused responsibility” (Bernasconi 2002; 239).

Chapter 6

Levinasian Ethics

Abstract This chapter reinscribes the problems of supererogation and moraldemandingness conceptualised in the first half of the study from within an analytic moral philosophy, into the terminology of a Levinasian ethics. The scope of Levinas’s project is examined by way of explicating the concepts of ‘totality’ and ‘infinity’ that comprise the title of Levinas’s first major work. Totalisation operates to reduce the alterity of the Other, while the idea of infinity serves as a model for how the alterity of the Other might be represented in this totality of knowledge. A Levinasian ethics is then adumbrated chiefly through the figure of the face which delineates this mode of the Other’s representation. I use the shorthand epiphanic re/presentation to describe the sensibility, rather than the appearance of the face. The face signifies the alterity of the Other in discourse, which Levinas argues, amounts to a type of attitude of the self toward the Other. I then explicate the Levinasian term ‘proximity’ which describes the relationship between the self and the Other in the face-to-face encounter which cannot be expressed in themes or categories. I contrast this metaphysical notion of proximity with the problems of physical and psycho-social distance found in the LSA (life-saving analogy) which I call ontological proximity. Thereafter, I explore the asymmetrical relationship between the Other and the self in the face-to-face encounter which results in an infinite responsibility to and for the Other. I compare this asymmetry with the asymmetry of supererogation, which is contained in the perspectival problem of supererogation. I also offer insights into what can be regarded as a Levinasian methodology—a method of exasperation—which relies on hyperbolic and extreme formulas to make the case that the self is responsible even for the Other’s responsibility. The chapter concludes by outlining Levinas’s innovation of the Saying and the Said, which attempts to demonstrate how the ethical demand of the Other can described in language which is always interrupted by the singularity of that demand.

6.1 Introduction Diane Perpich (following Bernard Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 2011), describes the Enlightenment philosophers’ moral question ‘what ought I to © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_6

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do?’ and the Ancient Ethicists’ moral questions ‘How should one live?’ and ‘What is the best life for human beings?’, as the “end points of a continuum along which normative ethical enquiry may run, depending on whether it is individual actions or the shape of a whole life that is most at issue” (2008, 3). As a straightforward answer to these questions, the notion of an ‘infinite responsibility’ will make little sense. What then does Levinas mean by ‘ethics’? Levinas remarks that: “My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning” (1985, 90). While Levinasian ethics is a “radical rethinking of the question of the meaning of the ethical”, Perpich cautions that it is not “an ethics per se” (2008, 7). She also argues that “Levinas’ work is not about the specifics of our moral life so much as it is a struggle to say how we come to find ourselves within moral life at all” (12). Levinas then, does not seek to propose moral rules or offer normative guidelines; he does not seek to define an ethics, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general, or, what Critchley has called, the “primordial ethical experience” (1999a, 3). As this does not offer itself as a theory of ethics, what is in question can be described, following Derrida, as “an ethics of ethics” (1978, 111). At this stage, my interpretation of this formulation is that an ethics of ethics offers itself as a means to evaluate whether a particular way of discovering or determining the ethical is itself an ethical way to proceed in the matter.1 The classical ethical questions ‘Why be good?’, ‘Why do the right thing?’ or ‘Why should I sacrifice myself for another?’ require reasons and rational arguments to support the moral claims made in answering them. However, for Levinas, the resources of philosophical enquiry that would help us answer these questions are themselves irretrievably flawed and are bound to mislead us. One particular philosophical resource in moral philosophy is impartialism. Levinas opposes impartialism, but for more far-reaching reasons than those offered in the first half of the study. Levinas would characterise the impartialist perspective as an “imperialism of the same” (1969, 39). By this Levinas means that impartialism seeks to reduce everything that is different or other to the same, so that the other can be systemised into a body of knowledge and spoken about. Levinas fears that in such a process the meaning and significance of the ethical would disappear. So too would the meaning and significance of saintliness and supererogation. The chief aim of the chapter is to adumbrate a Levinasian ethics so that his project becomes intelligible to the analytic reader who may not be familiar with his work in general, and his peculiar language—critics would by turns say, confusing or mystical language—in particular. I will proceed by explicating the key ethical terms used in his two great works, Totality and Infinity (1969), and Otherwise than Being (1974), to 1 In addition to referring the reader to the caveat I issue in Chapter 5, Sect. 5.2 between the use of the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, I also note Critchley’s remark that Levinas is inconsistent in using the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’. The latter indicates “the socio-political order of recognizing and improving our human survival”, while ethics is the “prima philosophia of an ethical responsibility towards the other” on which morality is itself founded (1999a, 4). I will follow Critchley’s convention of speaking of the distinction between ethics and politics (in place of ethics and morality), although I will include morality, normativity, and what Levinas calls ‘constructing ethics’ under politics. This will be made clearer as I proceed in the second half of the study.

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make sense of his central claim that I am infinitely responsible to, and for the Other, because the singularity of the Other is beyond all forms of representation.2 In doing so, I will continuously be looking back to the first part of the study in order to establish an ethical isomorphism between the analytic moral concepts used to circumscribe supererogation and moral demandingness and Levinas’s own moral concepts. One example will be to map the ‘assimilation’ of supererogation into obligation onto ‘totalisation’ of the other to the same. In other instances, I will reinscribe certain terms analysed in the first half of the study—proximity, asymmetry and autonomy—in order to bring out their specific Levinasian resonances. The chapter commences by following the description of Levinas’s philosophical framework as ‘ethics as first philosophy’, one of his most well-known formulations. The first section delineates the scope of the Levinasian project though examining the ‘other and the same’ by way of explicating the two central concepts of ‘totality’ and ‘infinity’ that comprise the title of Levinas’s first major work. The section thereafter unpacks the figure of the face as the mode in which the Other signifies their alterity. Levinas will later describe the relation between the Other and the self in the face-to-face encounter as ‘proximity’. At this point I will qualify the proximity described in the LSA—the problem of distance—as an ontological proximity, and reinscribe that as a metaphysical proximity.3 I then explore the asymmetry between the Other and the self, which marks the face-to-face encounter, and which leads to an infinite responsibility to, and for the Other. I use this understanding of asymmetry to reinscribe the asymmetry associated with the perspectival problem of supererogation discussed in the study’s first half.4 I also outline Levinas’s innovation of the Saying and the Said as a response to the critiques offered against Totality and Infinity. I conclude by tying together the terms proximity, asymmetry and autonomy: proximity is the asymmetrical ethical relation between the Other and the self which holds the autonomy of the self, hostage to the Other. I also introduce Levinas’s notion of the third party to the face-to-face encounter between the self and Other as the means through which the autonomy of the self, so circumscribed, is restored.

6.2 The Other and the Same 6.2.1 Ethics as First Philosophy (or Metaphysics Precedes Ontology) In ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, Levinas argues that the 2 Following

the convention established in Alphonso Lingis’s translation of Totality and Infinity, “Other” (autri) will refer to ‘the personal Other, the you’, while ‘other’ (autre) will refer to otherness or alterity (FN at 1969, 24). 3 See Chapter 3, Sect. 3.3.1.1. 4 See Chapter 2, Sect. 2.3.1 and Chapter 4, Sect. 4.3.

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correlation between knowledge, understood as disinterred contemplation, and being, is, according to our philosophical tradition, the very site of intelligibility, the occurrence of meaning (sens). The comprehension of being […] as such, is first philosophy. (1989, 76)

Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy and places epistemology at its centre. Epistemology, concerned with the problem of knowledge, drives Cartesian scepticism, and asks, inter alia, ‘How do I know that I exist?’, ‘How can I know that others exist?’, and ‘How can I know that what I perceive is real, and not some kind of illusion?’. Thereafter, from Kant’s transcendental idealism to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, these questions dominate philosophical enquiry, and are linked to the concomitant problem of transcendence: how can we transcend our limited perception and faculties of reason to discover the nature of the world and things ‘in themselves’ (the ontological question), rather than how they appear to us? Martin Heidegger, arriving after Husserl, then argues that philosophical enquiry needs to put ontology front and centre again—ontology as first philosophy. In Being and Time, Heidegger hopes to dissolve the question of how we can know Being, by addressing the question of the nature of Being (1927/1962). Being must be distinguished from beings—the ontico-ontological distinction. Beings are the ‘entities’ that are in the world, for example, plants, rocks, dogs and humans. All these are beings who exist in the world and who all share the attribute of Being. However, all beings taken together do not constitute a genus, as the term ‘Being’ is ambiguous (Inwood, 2000, 16). Heidegger extends Aristotle’s two types of Being, “‘that’-being, the fact that something is, or exists, and ‘what’-being, what that thing is” to also include a third type of being: “‘how’-being, the mode, manner, or type of an entity’s being” (17). Human beings are different from other beings in that they are the only beings who ask the question ‘What is Being?’ Their how-being, or mode of Being, is thus markedly different to the mode of being of other beings, such as plants and dogs. Heidegger posits human beings as particular kinds of beings, as Dasein—“Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue” (1962, 191). Dasein’s mode of Being is an already knowing being born into an immanent world—or as Heidegger would have it—‘thrown’ into an immanent world. Dasein’s situatedness in a world of contingency dissolves the problem of transcendence because, for Heidegger, “[s]elfhood presupposes and is founded on transcendence” (1988, 300). Heidegger inverts the Cartesian ‘I think therefore I am’ into ‘I am therefore I think’; thus, I do not need to transcend the world, and myself in the world, in order to know the world and myself. My Being, as Dasein, is already a transcendent knowing. Levinas summarises Heidegger’s argument in Being and Time: “Being is inseparable from the comprehension of Being (which unfolds as time); Being is already an appeal to subjectivity” (1969, 45). For Levinas, this is highly problematic. Substituting the term ‘existent’ for Dasein, Levinas argues that to affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation

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with the Being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom. (Ibid.)5

Freedom here “denotes the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other” so that knowledge (ontology) leads to a reduction of justice (ethics) (ibid.). (The ‘same’, which has a very specific meaning in the Levinasian vocabulary, will be explicated shortly.) The primacy of the relation with Being, enacted as ontology, “consists in neutralising the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it” (ibid.). In order to guard against this neutralisation of the other, the relation with the other should be primary, not the relation with Being: ethics should be first philosophy; or in another formulation, “Metaphysics precedes ontology” (42).6 Elsewhere, Levinas claims that “the question of the meaning of being [is] not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice” (1989, 86). Ethics as first philosophy seeks to justify our existence before Being. Already the paradoxical nature of Levinas’ work starts to assert itself; Bauman asks What may ‘before’ mean when being, ontology, are not yet? Is not the time sequence (to which words like ‘before’ and ‘after’ refer) at home in ontology only? Do not simultaneity and succession, ‘before’ and ‘later’, appear only together with the ontological being? (1993, 71)

In answering the questions he poses, Bauman argues that, for Levinas, “the ‘before’ of moral condition is a non-ontological before, a condition in which ontology does not interfere […] ‘Before’ in the absence or in spite of ontology may have only moral sense, and that sense is: better” (72). To say that ethics is before ontology, therefore, is to say that ethics better represents the mode of being of existents. One of Levinas’s translators, Richard Cohen puts it as follows: ethics’ “‘being’ is not to be, but to be better than being” (in Levinas, 1985, 10). Bauman concludes that the ‘before’ of morality is instituted not by the absence of ontology, but by its demotion and dethroning. Morality is a transcendence of being; more precisely the chance of such a transcendence. The moral self comes into its own through its ability to rise above being. (1993, 72)

How the moral self does this is explicated in what follows.

5 In this passage, Levinas means justice to stand for ethics: “In Totality and Infinity, the word ‘ethical’

and the word ‘just’ are the same word, the same question, the same language” (1988, 171). In later works, Levinas draws a strict division between ethics and justice, where the former stands as first philosophy and the latter comes to be associated with politics (see Chapter 7, Sect. 7.2). 6 In order to distinguish the modality of ethics from ontology, Levinas also refers to ethics as ‘metaphysics’: “the aspiration to radical exteriority, thus called metaphysical” (1969, 29) (Emphasis added). ‘Exteriority’ is described in the subsection to follow.

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6.2.2 Totality In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that the ethical relation arises from selves who, while they can sustain and satisfy themselves by ‘feeding’ on the realities of the world that they find themselves in, nonetheless experience a metaphysical desire that “tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other” (1969, 33). ‘Alterity’ very broadly refers to otherness or difference; however, for Levinas, alterity should not be understood in its more common contrastive or relative sense—alterity is not “a dialectical opposition to the other” (38). Rather, the absolutely other, the metaphysical other, “is other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same” (ibid.). By ‘the same’, Levinas means the ‘I’, the self, who is “produced as egoism” and is always seeking to assert its own subjectivity (ibid.). Peperzak clarifies that my experience of otherness, based on observations of the other “are immediately integrated by my self-centred, interested and dominating consciousness […looking to] transform the phenomena into moments of my material or spiritual property”; such a phenomenology “is a form of egology” (1993, 19). Levinas goes on to argue that “[T]he absolutely other is the Other” (1969, 39). Otherwise put, the alterity of the other person is radically other. This leads Perpich to claim that Levinas’ conception of alterity is better captured by the idea of singularity [rather] than by the notion of difference or even otherness. It is not the other’s difference from me, but his or her immediate and concrete presence, here and now, in an absolutely unique bit of skin that interests Levinas. (2008, 18–19)

Levinasian alterity, understood as singularity, “guards against a tendency to interpret the adjective absolute in the phrase ‘absolute alterity’ in a way that equates the alterity of the other with something remote, distant, inaccessible, and in every respect unswayable” (19). Levinas writes that the I, in attempting to grasp the alterity of the other, “discovers the dogmatism and naïve arbitrariness of its spontaneity, and calls into question the freedom of the exercise of ontology” (1969, 43). In confronting the Other, the self pushes against the limits of its freedom to create and define its subjectivity: “The presence of the Other makes me aware of my own solitude […] but on the other hand, the alterity of the Other confronts me with something wholly different to myself […], we do not experience otherness” as such (Woermann, 2016, 130). Levinas then coins his definition of ethics—the “calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other” (43). The I is not an ego who thinks their own subjectivity (I think therefore I am), but one whose subjectivity is hostage to the Other. The I is not the I of an ego but the I of election: ‘me voici’—‘Here I am’ (1998a, 114). I am chosen therefore I am. The Other is singular, and the self’s singularity comes from not being able to substitute themselves for anyone else in response to the Other’s singularity. Levinas continues: The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics. Metaphysics,

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transcendence, the welcoming of the other by the same, of the Other by me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the same by the other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge. (1969, 43)

Levinas is saying that the strangeness (alterity) of the Other can only be preserved if the autonomy of the self is prevented from reducing the Other’s otherness to the same of the ‘I’. Ontology seeks the comprehension of alterity by enacting “a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term” (ibid.). The interposition of this middle term amounts to an attempt to represent the other in a coherent and systematic theory and as such requires categories and concepts. Overgaard lists some of the names this middle term has often gone by— “‘sensible qualities’ (Berkeley), ‘concept’ (German Idealism), ‘horizon’ (Husserl), ‘being’ (Heidegger)” (2007, 225). The conceptualisation of the other, which Levinas also calls the ‘thematization’ of the other, ensures that the same and the other form a totality of knowledge. This is the ontological totality referred to in the title of Totality and Infinity. I will explicate the infinity of the title in the subsection to follow. Totality and Infinity is subtitled ‘An Essay on Exteriority’, which locates the other outside of this totality. Levinas argues that “Being is exteriority: the very exercise of its being consists in exteriority” (290). By exteriority, Levinas also means alterity (ibid.). For Levinas then, the Being of existents manifest as an alterity which ensures that the other is not reduced to the same, that is, totalised inside a system of knowledge. Levinas says that “the identity of the individual does not consist in being like to itself, and in letting itself be identified from the outside by the finger that points to it; it consists in being the same—in being oneself, in identifying oneself from within” (289). In other words, the other cannot be represented by any concept or theme that is purportedly like it—the other can only be represented by, and as, itself. As such any relation with an Other is as a “relation without relation” (80). Exteriority (or the alterity of the other) interrupts Being (or ontology) which is always moving toward a totality in which everything can be known and represented. Critchley summarises: “When I totalize, I conceive of the relation to the other from some imagined point that would be outside of it and I turn myself into a theoretical spectator on the social world of which I am really part” (2002, 13). Exteriority is thus not meant to be understood in spatial terms (an ontological category) which, in positing boundaries between the other and the I, demarcates an exterior and interior, an inside/outside relation—Levinas writes that “exteriority is true not in a lateral view apperceiving it in its opposition to interiority” (1969, 290). Exteriority is rather the metaphysical, or non-ontological, field where the other is revealed as truth, where “the truth of being is not the image of being […] it is the being situated in a subjective field which deforms vision, but precisely thus allows exteriority to state itself, entirely command and authority: entirely superiority” (291). This citation is just one of many where Levinas states his strong aversion to visual metaphors and conceptualisations. (I will elaborate on this shortly). How then does exteriority state its truth? Or, to rephrase the question, how can the Other represent themself from within themself to an I within another system that they are outside

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of? To answer this, we must turn to the infinity Levinas writes about in Totality and Infinity. Before doing so, I want to tie Levinas’s concept of totalisation to the supererogatory assimilation strategy explored in part one of the study.7 The assimilation strategy details how impartialist ethical theories, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism, attempt to assimilate supererogation within their frameworks through a reduction of supererogation to obligation. It is my claim that this assimilation can be understood as a type of totalisation—a reduction of the alterity of supererogatory actions, actors and attitudes in order to know them as a type of obligation. Impartialism amounts to an “imperialism of the same” which, through certain representations like the LSA (life-saving analogy), reduces the other of supererogation to the same of duty. In order to preserve the alterity of supererogation, it must be understood as a type of exteriority in Levinas’s sense (which is, however, not to equate it with the Levinasian Other). Arguing that claim is the project of part two of this study.

6.2.3 Infinity In seeking a model for the ethical relation with the other, as a ‘relation without relation’, Levinas takes inspiration from Descartes’ Third Meditation. Here, the relation with infinity circumscribes a relation of the same with the other, “where the transcendence of the relation does not cut the bonds a relation implies, yet where these bonds do not unite the same and the other into a Whole” (48). Elsewhere, Levinas explains that “in thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks” (1987, 54). This is because in the idea of infinity, the ideatum of infinity surpasses the idea of infinity so that the distance that separates ideatum and idea constitutes the content of the ideatum itself […] The transcendent [the other] is the sole ideatum of which there can only be an idea in us; it is infinitely removed from its idea, that is, exterior, because it is infinite. (1969, 49)8

The distance between the idea and ideatum of infinity is represented by that which is unrepresentable—the exteriority of being, that is, the alterity of the other. The structure of representation contained within the idea of infinity becomes, for Levinas, the model for how exteriority can state its truth: as the “the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me” (50). The other, as infinite, presents itself as that which surpasses itself. Levinas calls this way in which the Other presents himself, ‘face’ (ibid.). This presentation is however not a conscious or intentional act of the Other. Facing is a mode of presentation which does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows 7 Chapter

3. ideatum is the external object around which an idea (or concept) forms. In the case of the idea of infinity, the ideatum is the paradoxical object which must both include and exceed itself.

8 An

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the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities […] It expresses itself . (Ibid.)

Facing is the mode in which the inexpressible is expressed. Levinas later clarifies that the face cannot present itself as such because the face is what cannot appear (1985, 85). Levinas instead talks about the appearance of the face as the ‘epiphany’ of the face (1969, 51). I will expand on this shortly.

6.3 The Epiphanic Face In expressing itself , the face manifests itself: “the manifestation of the face is already discourse” (66). Levinas writes that speaking “is a way of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form, an opening in the openness” (in Visker, 2003, 280). Responding to the epiphany of the face is the way the I comes out from behind the mask of the self. What then does the face say? Levinas writes, “the first word of the face is the ‘Thou shalt not kill’” (199). This imperative should not just be taken literally, but also as the metaphysical violence of reducing the other to the same, or, as Levinas says more eloquently in the preface to Totality and Infinity, as an “interruption [of the other’s] continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance” (21). Levinas continues, “there is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute, it is the poor for whom I can do all” (1985, 89). The face is an authority that bounds my autonomy through the very force of its fragility and frailty. The face bounds me but, Levinas claims, “without opposing me as an obstacle or enemy” (1969, 215). The face resists me, but with a “resistance of what has no resistance – the ethical resistance” (199). What the Other resists is the ego’s attempts to represent their alterity, and resists in facing the ego. In ‘Substitution’, Levinas describes this resistance as a type of passivity, which, though not an act, nonetheless still has normative force (1989). Critchley elaborates on this Levinasian passivity as a “passivity that’s more passive than all passivity, an ultra-passivity that might itself be a kind of quasi-activity or a passivity that’s beyond the opposition of activity and passivity” (2015, 71).

6.3.1 The Signification of the Face Levinas writes that the face expresses itself as the alterity of the Other—the “face is signification, and signification without context”; that is, without categories and representative themes such as race or gender (1985, 86). Levinas argues that when you regard the face of the Other as the composite of nose, eyes, forehead and chin

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you objectify them. He says the “best way of encountering the other is not even to notice the colour of his eyes”. One only has to think of the ‘blue eyes and blond hair’ Aryan trope to understand Levinas’s concerns here. Levinas clarifies that the face is “meaning all by itself. You are You” (ibid.) To recall, the alterity of the Other, manifested in the face of the Other, is better understood as the singularity of the Other. What this amounts to Levinas claims, is that the face “is an appeal or an imperative given to your responsibility: to encounter a face is straightaway to hear a demand and an order” (2001, 48). This “summons […] to my obligations” by the face means that my subjectivity is held hostage by the other: “the I is a privilege and an election [by the Other]” (1969, 245). This is another way in which Levinas formulates his definition of ethics as “the calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the other” (43). This summons by the face of the Other, argues Perpich “invoke[s] responsibility as a non-causal, non-physical but still binding force: it arouses, resists, commands, demands, convinces, summons, elects” (2008, 87). In others words the face is a normative force that obligates and ties the self to the Other. However, while this is what the face expresses or signifies, it is not what is seen in the face—the face does not appear. Levinas argues that “vision is not a transcendence” (191), and that “vision is essentially an adequation of exteriority with interiority […] The exteriority of discourse cannot be converted into interiority” (295). What is meant by the exteriority of discourse will be returned to below. Simply put, vision totalises the other into the same, because of its finite character (the other is demarcated as the infinite) which requires a systemisation of multiple qualities into a unity. Vision objectifies that which is seen. It must be noted that by vision Levinas includes all the other senses, touch, hearing etc., so that vision stands in for all experience (1969, 188)—perception in its systemisation of qualities into meaningful objects— sounds, smells etc. reduces the exterior to the interior. Critchley says that “the ethical relation [with the other] takes place at the level of sensibility, not at the level of consciousness” (1999b, 98). The significance of the face cannot be accessed through perception, which dominates the face by decomposing it into its constituent parts and then reconstituting those into a totality. As against the appearance of the face—which is sensed but not perceived— Levinas instead talks about the ‘epiphany’ of the face (1969, 51), which, to reiterate, is “meant to suggest a means of manifestation totally distinct from perceptual appearance or cognition” (Perpich, 2008, 61). As such, a better way to describe the appearance of the face, is as an epiphanic appearance or presentation—a mode of presenting, to recall one of the above citations, which ‘exceeds itself’. This epiphanic presentation is a presentation of the unrepresentable. In order to keep this peculiar mode of the face’s appearance front of mind, and so that I do not have to constantly qualify my remarks in this regard, I will use the shorthand ‘epiphanic re/presentation’ when talking about the appearance/presentation of the face. Furthermore, I refer to epiphanic re/presentation and not just epiphanic presentation because this mode of presentation of the face leads to, and must lead to, a representation of the Other by the ego. Bauman writes that, “it is the Other who commands me, but it is I who must give voice to that command, make it audible to myself” (1993, 90): it is the Other

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who presents their alterity epiphanically as Face, but it is I who must represent that epiphany to myself.9 The invocation of the face as an epiphany is however problematic—it suggests that the face to face encounter does not “occur as an actually lived experience, or perhaps better, as one dimension of actually lived social experience […but is] some eccentric or anomalous experience, such as a mystical or an ecstatic experience” (Morgan, 2007, 47 FN21). Morgan, following Bernasconi’s ‘Rereading Totality and Infinity’ (1989), notes the two ways in which the face is treated by Levinasian scholars: as a concrete experience—an empirical reading, or as “the condition for the possibility of ethics”—a transcendental reading (2007, 45–46). However, Morgan writes that these two readings do not have to culminate in an either/or, but that both readings are possible (46). Bernasconi remarks that even Levinas is uncertain about which of these interpretations better captures the significance of the face. My own reading is that Bernasconi mischaracterises Levinas’s position as uncertainty, when undecidability (to use a term introduced in the last chapter) better describes Levinas on this point. To recall, undecidability is not indeterminacy, but rather the rivalry between two determined possibilities.10 Undecidability is a way to maintain the tension between the face as concrete experience and transcendental condition. Levinas writes that “it is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be pity, compassion, pardon and proximity in the world – even the little there is, even the simple ‘after you sir’” (1998a, 117). Here Levinas explicitly locates the face as transcendental—the condition of being hostage—within the concrete experience of allowing another person to pass before you do. Perpich argues that Levinasian transcendence “does not go ‘outside’ the limits of our finite being […] The transcendence of being takes place in being, in the finitude of a finite being, and never leaves this finitude behind” (2008, 32). Apropos this claim, Perpich quotes Jean Wahl: “The greatest transcendence consists in transcending transcendence, that is to say, in falling back into immanence” (ibid.). Perpich clarifies that for Levinas “it is not [however] a matter of ‘falling back’ into immanence, but of seeing in immanence a mode of existing that is already beyond immanence” (ibid.). Kenaan expresses the same idea in another formulation: radical alterity despite its apparent inaccessibility belongs to ordinary experience. Where in the ordinary does it show itself? Right here, there…when trying, for example, to communicate with a waitress in a really strange restaurant on Main street, when at a stoplight, a man looks at us from the other car, or earlier, at a grocer’s, a woman buying ice cream for her daughter. Sometimes we greet the other person and sometimes we do not. But the ‘gleam of exteriority’ is there […] in ‘the face of the Other’. (2011, 151)

It is precisely these concrete and empirical experiences of the Other that I will draw on to construct and explicate a Levinasian normativity in the following chapter. The 9 The

necessary move from epiphanic presentation to epiphanic representation will be elaborated upon in the chapter to follow as the necessary move from ethics to politics. In Sect. 7.5, I build upon this move, or oscillation, between epiphanic presentation and representation to posit the response of the ego to the epiphany of the face as producing a series of infinite representations of the Other. 10 Chapter 5, Sect. 5.3.

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tension between the empirical and transcendental will also be described as the tension between the ethical, in the Levinasian sense, and the political—I will explore this further in the chapter to follow. One final way to understand the concrete/transcendent duality of the face is to turn to quantum mechanics in which quantum entities possess a wave/particle duality: a quantum entity may behave as either a wave or a particle depending on certain environmental factors obtaining.11 A quantum entity can be either a concrete thing or a movement. The face as a movement is a verb. That is, the concrete face of the Other becomes a transcendental face in its facing towards the self. Kenaan concurs with this reading, arguing that “the face is […] essentially, a facing” (2011, 154). Drawing on the derivations of the Hebraic word for face, panim, as a kind of movement, Kenaan suggests understanding the facing of the face as a type of turning movement in order to avoid the static and mirroring structure implied by the condition of facing (ibid.). The face, he argues “is thus not one of those things that occupy a given space, but again is present as an event, a movement, an entry, a trespassing, into the sphere of the ego”. The face is both the concrete singularity of the Other before me in a face to face encounter, and also the transcendental event, or movement, of epiphanic re/presentation occurring in intersubjective space. What this reading of the face as a facing shows is that the face is something which emerges from the encounter between the self and the Other. Perpich elaborates on this reading: the face does not exist before the encounter with it. It is not a pre-existing ‘something’ that the ego bumps up against or discovers […] The face is not ‘there’ by itself in a first moment and then encountered in another; rather, the encounter brings me face-to-face with the other. It is in the encounter that the face is produced as such. (2008, 76)

However, this does not mean that “the ethical awaits an empirical encounter, which would seem to leave those who had not had such an encounter free of ethics” (Bernasconi, 2002, 246). That is to say, the face is always already facing, and as such I am always already hostage to the Other’s demands on me. In a later interview, Levinas suggests “the approach of the face” is a better phrasing than the ‘relation with the face’ (2001, 57). The approach of the face suggests the movement of the face Keenan alludes to.

6.3.2 The Face as Discourse and Discourse as an Attitude The ‘exteriority of discourse’ means that the face signifies in language, not through means of language. Levinas writes that “the face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. […] To present oneself by signifying is to speak […] Discourse is not simply a modification of intuition (or of thought), but an original relation with exterior being” (1969, 66). Levinas makes clear that what he means by this is that

11 See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality (accessed 19 July 2019).

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ethics manifests itself in conversation12 with the Other: “The calling in question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language” (171). Why is discourse an original relation with exteriority? Levinas answers that it is because discourse maintains the distance between me and the Other, the radical separation asserted in transcendence which prevents the reconstitution of totality, cannot renounce the egoism of its existence, but the very fact of being in a conversation consists in recognizing in the Other a right over this egoism, and hence in justifying oneself. (40)

The fact of being in conversation means that I first have to recognise that there is someone, an Other, with whom I am taking, failing which, I am delivering a soliloquy, and tipping into solipsism. Overgaard explains that, for Levinas, “ethics essentially has to do with the way discourse places us before an interlocutor, rather than with anything we might state in discourse” (2007, 241). In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas famously distils this distinction into the difference between the Saying (le dire) and the Said (le dit) (1998a). It is well established in the literature that Otherwise than Being, and the innovation of the Saying and the Said, is Levinas’s most sustained response to Jacques Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (1978)—the most articulate critique yet offered of Totality and Infinity. Atterton locates Derrida’s critique as a reply to Levinas’s “description of language itself as ethics [and not] the use of language to describe ethics” (1992, 60) (Emphasis added). Derrida points out that “Levinas deprives himself of the very foundation and possibility of his own language [so] [w]hat authorizes him [Levinas] to say, ‘infinitely other’ if the infinitely other does not appear in the zone he calls the same?” (1978, 156). By denying that the Other, as absolute other, can appear within the order of ontology where language demarcates the Other as other, Levinas perpetrates a “transcendental violence” on the Other (ibid.). Derrida expands on Levinas’s term ‘exteriority’, a spatial term, and asks why Levinas uses this term in order to signify a non-spatial relationship? (140). Derrida continues: If every ‘relationship’ is spatial, why is it necessary still to designate as a (non-spatial) ‘relationship’ the respect which absolves the other? Why is it necessary to obliterate this notion of exteriority without erasing it, without making it illegible, by stating that its truth is its untruth, that true exteriority is not spatial, that is, is not exteriority? That it is necessary to state infinity’s excess over totality in the language of totality; that it is necessary to state the other in the language of the Same; that it is necessary to think true exteriority as nonexteriority, that is, still by means of the Inside-Outside structure and by spatial metaphor […] all this means, perhaps, that there is no philosophical logos which must not first let itself be expatriated into the structure Inside-Outside. (Ibid.)

What Derrida means is that there is no ‘view from nowhere’, an Archimedean point beyond the inside-outside totality of same and other in which the exteriority of Being (as alterity) can be conceptualised and expressed. Derrida calls the quest for this imagined Archimedean point ‘logocentrism’—“the determination of the being of the entity as presence”; that is to say, interiority (1976, 12). One of Derrida’s 12 Lingis

(the translator of Totality and Infinity) notes that the term ‘conversation’ can also be translated as ‘discourse’, discours (1969, 39).

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most notorious claims has it that “There is no outside text” (158), which he also formulates as “there is nothing outside of the text” in the same passage (163). The nuance between these two formulations is not important for the present purpose, but Derrida’s clarification that “there is nothing outside of context” is (1988, 136). In the context of the same and the other, there is nothing outside of—exterior to—the totality of the same and the other in which the language of Being, as exteriority, could be made meaningful. Despite the problematic spatial connotations of the term ‘exteriority’ which tie it to the ontological moorings of language, Levinas in his later work persists in using another spatial term—‘proximity’—to signify the ethical relation signified in theface-to-face encounter. Before outlining Levinas’s reasons for this, I want to cite another of Derrida’s formulations of his critique of Levinas’s claim that thought is language and that “thought consists in speaking” (1969, 40). Addressing this idea, Derrida asks: How to think the other, if the other can be spoken about only as exteriority and through exteriority, that is, nonalterity? And if the speech which must inaugurate and maintain absolute separation is by its essence rooted in space, which cannot conceive separation and absolute alterity? If, as Levinas says, only discourse (and not intuitive contact) is righteous, and if, moreover, all discourse essentially retains within it space and the Same – does this not mean discourse is originally violent? (1978, 145)

Atterton argues that Derrida has here interpreted Levinas’s claim that “thought consists in speaking” too narrowly (1992, 61). Atterton draws attention to another occasion in Totality and Infinity where Levinas repeats this claim but with an important qualification—“Language thus conditions the functioning of rational [Atterton’s emphasis] thought; it gives a commencement in being, a primary identity of signification in the face of him who speaks” (1969, 204). Atterton suggests that what Levinas means by this qualification is a “thought which isn’t simply reducible to reason (or understanding), a language not simply reducible to ontology” (1992, 61). Atterton then continues citing this passage in Levinas in order to explain what such a type of thinking amounts to; Language conditions thought – not language in its physical materiality, but language as an attitude of the same with regard to the Other irreducible to the representation of the Other, irreducible to an intention of thought, irreducible to consciousness of…language as an attitude of the mind. (1969, 204, Atterton’s emphasis)

Atterton notes that the distinction between language as attitude and language as materiality can however be reinterpreted from the “classical point of view as none other than the dissociation of thought and language (logos) as such” which, as Atterton remarks, is exactly the view Derrida considers Levinas to have left behind (1992, 62). Atterton’s rejoinder to Derrida is that the “classical schema invoked in Totality and Infinity […] is not that separating thought and language, but that which separates sensibility and understanding” (ibid.). While this may be so, the issue still comes to a seeming impasse—how can we understand, or think, the sensibility of the face in the language of the face? There appears to be a certain circularity at play. Consider that Levinas also says that in “sensibility interpreted not as a knowing […] in seeking in

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language contact and sensibility […] we have endeavoured to describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization” (1989, 89). The key to moving past this impasse is to be found in the Saying and the Said, more particularly, the trace of the Saying within the Said, adumbrated in Otherwise than Being (taking as its key chapter ‘Substitution’, developed from an essay of the same name, and from which the last citation comes). At this point it suffices to understand the Saying as the signification of the ethical relation with the Other, and the Said as the (doomed, but necessary) attempt to describe this signification within discourse. I will expand on this in Sect. 6.4.2 below. Critchley outlining the schema of Otherwise than Being, argues “the deep structure of sensibility is proximity to the other, [while] the deep structure of proximity is revealed as substitution” (2015, 81). Substitution will be explored in the section to follow at the hand of Levinas’s notion of an infinite responsibility. I will turn to a brief discussion of proximity next, the chief motivation being to offer a reinscription of the concept of proximity used in part one of the study within the context of the LSA and supererogation.13 I want to conclude this subsection by tying Levinas’s description of language as an attitude with the postulation in chapter four that supererogation should be understood as a type of ethical attitude. To recall, building on from reluctant heroes and saints descriptions of their actions as something that they had to do, as reflective of a certain kind of ethical attitude, I posited a rehabilitation of Taylor’s primitive moral response as a sensibility which operates by way of an affective moral imagination which is able to recognise the suffering of the Other without it needing to be like my own. By translating this into Levinasian terminology we get the following: recognising another’s suffering as like my own amounts to a reduction of the other to the same, a totalisation of the alterity of the Other. If language, or discourse, is an attitude as Levinas claims, and furthermore, if discourse is exteriority, which is in turn the epiphanic re/presentation of the alterity of the Other, that is the ethical relation of the face to face, then ethics itself can be understood as a type of attitude. My aim in the second half of the study is to establish how the ethical relation signified in the face-to-face encounter with the Other appears as a supererogatory attitude if its appearance is marked by an epiphanic re/presentation.

6.3.3 Sensibility as Proximity to the Other To return to Levinas’s understanding of sensibility introduced above: the sensibility of the face is irreducible to consciousness (or perception) of the face. However, because “not everything that is in consciousness would be posited in consciousness” (1989, 91)—because the face is exteriority—“consciousness is affected, then, before forming an image of what is coming to it, affected in spite of itself” (92). What is coming to the self is the Other, but the self cannot know what the Other ‘looks’ like (the image of the Other) because the Other as other cannot appear. As such, 13 Chapter

3, Sect. 3.3.1.1.

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argues Levinas, sensibility is not a knowing but a proximity, and proximity “appears as the relationship with the other, who cannot be resolved into ‘images’ or exposed in a theme” (89). Proximity is thus better understood as a metaphysical nearness or closeness, that is, as an epiphanic re/presentation of the alterity of the Other signifying as face. Levinas also calls the relationship of proximity, which is irreducible to consciousness, ‘obsession’ (90). Obsession is not a ‘hypertrophy” of consciousness, but rather “a persecution where the persecution does not make up the content of a consciousness gone mad; it designates the form in which the ego is affected, a form which is a defecting from consciousness” (91). Why does the self feel persecuted? Because the Other is always too close. No matter how far I physically or physiologically distance myself from the Other, the Other is always ethically close, and as such I am infinitely responsible. Levinas’s use of emotive and dramatic terms like ‘obsession’ and ‘persecution’ is a core part of his methodology—I return to this in the section to follow. Like exteriority, proximity has spatial connotations, but, Levinas writes, “the relationship of proximity cannot be reduced to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to the simple ‘representation’ of a neighbour” but, also like exteriority, as the relation without relation with the Other, proximity is irreducible to ontological categories (images and themes) and is “already an assignation” (90). Proximity as closeness, or nearness, better connotes the (a)temporal dimensions of the relationship with the Other than exteriority does. Proximity is […] an obligation anachronously prior to any commitment. This anteriority is ‘older’ than the a priori. This formula expresses a way of being affected which can in no way be invested by spontaneity: the subject is affected without the source of the affection becoming a theme of representation […] The relationship with exteriority is ‘prior’ to the act that would effect it. (Ibid.)

‘Prior’ can denote spatiality, as well as temporality. Levinasian proximity thus also indicates a ‘closeness’ in time (but not understood as an ontological category), so that proximity, in addition to encompassing closeness (fidelity) to epiphanic re/presentation, further encompasses a metaphysical closeness meant to convey the ordering of such epiphanic re/presentation in non-ontological time. This ordering takes place in the non-ontological field of time Levinas calls an-archy: “Proximity is thus anarchically a relationship with a singularity without any mediation of any principle, any ideality” (ibid.). Levinas’s shift in terminology from exteriority to proximity is meant to signal his move to less ontological language, the surreptitious danger that Derrida demonstrated Levinas not to have entirely avoided. Nonetheless, Levinas’s central notion, whether expressed in exteriority or performed through proximity, remains the same: a preoriginary confrontation with an absolute alterity in a face to face encounter, in which the Other and I stand facing one another in a relation without relation. However, the Levinasian term proximity (to describe the ethical relation with the Other) does facilitate for an easier reinscription of the same term used in part one of the study in conceptualising supererogation. In the analysis of the LSA (life-saving analogy),14 14 Chapter

3, Sect. 3.3.

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proximity referred to the spatial relation with the other whose physical, psychological and psycho-social distance from us determined how they were to be represented— either as morally deserving recipients of assistance because they were drowning in front of us, or as undeserving because they were suffering hunger in countries far away. Singer attempts to reduce the relation between myself and the starving child close by and the hungry child far away to the same (moral relation), through the interposition of ontological themes such as distance and utility. These themes in turn reduce the alterity of Other in the very designation ‘drowning other close by’ and ‘hungry other far away’. Whether the Other is physically (ontologically) close or far, the Other is always metaphysically close. The question Kamm asks in the title of her essay—does proximity (physical and/or psycho-social distance) matter morally to the duty to rescue—is a question that only makes sense once we accept that (Levinasian) proximity always matters. The spatial relationship with the Other can never capture the alterity of the Other, so determining whether one’s response falls under a duty to rescue or a duty of justice is not only misguided, but unethical.Levinas argues that “[j]ustice only remains justice in a society where there is no distinction between those close and far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest” (1998a, 159). A first reading of this citation seems to have Levinas offering support to Singer’s position. However, because Singer’s impartial approach reduces the alterity of the drowning child close by and hungry child far away to the same moral response, there is the danger of ‘passing by the closest’. To see how this might be possible, consider the iterative case15 of the drowning child: I save one drowning child, continue on my way and come across another child drowning in another pond close by. While in the second, third, and fourth iteration of the scenario, I cannot pass by the drowning child without being duty-bound to rescue them, after enough iterations I will be ‘let off the moral hook’ to save them. I will be allowed to ‘pass by the closest’ because marginal utility eventually kicks in and the resultant moral calculation excuses that omission.16 Another way to describe this is to say that marginal utility will let me off the hook as it draws a boundary beyond which the agent’s omission is excusable. The solution then to the problem of distance, or what I call ontological proximity, lies in its reinscription as metaphysical proximity. Metaphysical proximity folds distance in such a way that the moral agent and recipient of rescue are always close enough for the normative force of the face of the recipient to be sensible by the agent.

15 Chapter

3, Sect. 3.3.1.1. example, after saving the fourth drowning child, I am so physically exhausted that going in after the fifth drowning child sees the very real possibility of my drowning, and by extension, also the possibility of the child in the pond drowning. In such a scenario, impartialism would not have me go in after the drowning child. 16 For

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6.4 Asymmetry and Infinite Responsibility Exteriority, or the alterity of the Other expressed in the face, also ‘effectuates’ (Levinas’s term) itself as the “curvature of the intersubjective space [which] inflects distance [between the Other and I] into elevation [from the I to the Other]” (291). This is because the face comes “from a dimension of height” (215). The result of the ‘curvature of intersubjective space’ results is what Levinas calls the “Asymmetry of the Interpersonal” (215). The inflection into elevation produced by the intersubjective field is not an error needing correction but “the very mode in which the exteriority of being is effectuated in its truth” (291). That truth is that the Other is singular, that the Other is infinite, and infinity cannot be assimilated into a totality. Levinas writes, “It is not the insufficiency of the I that prevents totalisation, but the Infinity of the Other” (80). I will unpack the nature of the asymmetry between the self and the Other by exploring Levinas’s notion of an infinite responsibility to the Other that such an asymmetry gives rise to. Perpich remarks that “in our everyday ways of talking, responsibility is more or less synonymous with accountability” (2008, 81). Responsibility on this standard account has the agent acting voluntarily and is limited to what is possible for the agent to do—captured in the dictum ‘ought implies can’. On the standard account, responsibility is universal and reciprocal in the sense that it applies to everyone equally. However, universal responsibility does not mean that we all have the same responsibilities, but rather that the reasons that justify my responsibility for some action in some particular set of circumstances will hold for all relevantly similar agents, actions, and circumstances. If I am responsible for making some effort to save the child in danger, so are others who find themselves in this or a similar situation. This is so because of the close tie on the standard account between responsibility and reasons. Reasons clarify the basis for an agent’s action; they say why she acted as she did and are capable of exculpating her in the right circumstances. Responsibility on the standard account is attributable when the agent has the right relationship to (and thus the right reasons and motive for) the action in question. (83)

The right reasons would be reasons that can be defended by an appeal to the categorical imperative, or ones that lead to the optimisation of utility; the right motives would include a motive that wills itself to act in accordance with the universalising aspect of the categorial imperative. However, the asymmetry of the interpersonal means I can never know if my reasons to help the Other in one way rather than another are satisfactory explanations because I can never have, or rather, I can never know if I have, the right relationship with the Other. This is because the Other always resists such knowledge which reduces their alterity. The I tries to closer approximate the alterity of Other in the face to face encounter but the epiphanic re/presentation of the face poses a limit to those attempts. Expanding a citation used in the previous section, Bauman clarifies that it is the Other who commands me, but it is I who must give voice to that command, make it audible to myself […] I embark on the search for the content of the command. But I cannot find that content in any way except through ‘representing’ […] What I ‘find’ is the Other’s command as I have articulated it; my representation of the Other’s voice. (1993, 90)

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If I can never know if my reasons are sufficient to discharge my responsibility to the Other, then my responsibility to the Other must remain infinite. Derrida writes that “for Levinas and myself if you give up the infinitude of responsibility, there is no responsibility. It is because we act and live in infinitude that the responsibility to the other is irreducible” (1996, 86 in Critchley, 1999b, 107). If the Other as other is infinite, then limiting responsibility is tantamount to saying that the Other’s alterity is not infinite. This is why Levinas inverts the standard account of responsibility from one that is limited, dischargeable and reciprocal to one that is, in Perpich’ s characterisation, “infinite, irrecusable and asymmetrical” (2008, 81). Levinas writes that “I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. The I always has one responsibility more than all the others” (1985, 99). The self is thus not just responsible to the Other, but also for the Other—responsible even for their responsibility. Levinasian infinite responsibility thus subverts the dictum ‘ought implies can’ so that, Perpich writes, “the requirement that the scope of responsibility not exceed the power of an individual to meet the demand” is abandoned, implying that, for Levinas, ought exceeds can” (2008, 84). The Levinasian asymmetry of the interpersonal reveals the asymmetry of blame which emerges from the perspectival problem of supererogation in a new light.17 The asymmetry of blame had it that a moral agent could not be blamed or held responsible if they refused to perform a supererogatory action (although they would be praised if they did). This asymmetry also traced how, from the agent’s perspective, they felt that they had no choice in performing such an action and, as a result, they alone could hold themselves responsible. However, Levinas would say that such a moral agent had no choice period; whether from the perspective of the supererogator, or from the perspective of the spectator. That is to say, the Other (as spectator) could hold the supererogator responsible for failing to perform the supererogatory act, whether or not the supererogator did so themselves. Furthermore, even if the reluctant supererogator performed the supererogatory act in question, they would still not have discharged their responsibility. As to the notion of blame or praise, supererogation’s perspectivalism misconstrues the nature of ethical subjectivity. Levinas argues that “responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject but precedes essence in it [...] I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation” (1998a, 114). Plant takes this to mean that the ethical relation should not, therefore, be construed as something grievous, tragic or ‘terrible,’ for this would miss Levinas’s point that there is no pre-existent ‘I’ to which the accusation of the other ‘happens’. Only if this were the case would the vocabulary of lamentation [or blame] be appropriate. (2003, 433)

This brief delineation of an infinite responsibility portrays some of the moral demandingness of Levinas’s position, but it is only when turning to his account in Otherwise than Being that a true understanding of the scope and depth, the demandingness, of infinite responsibility emerges. 17 See

Chapter 2, Sect. 2.3.

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6.4.1 Substitution: Hyperbolic Infinite Responsibility Perpich remarks that, while “the core features of responsibility remain stable between Levinas’s two works, they are rendered in Otherwise than Being in increasingly hyperbolic terms” (2008, 118). An infinite responsibility is not merely irrecusable and asymmetrical—the I is responsible not just to but also for the Other. However, Levinas insists on using “extreme formulas” which have the self declaring that, “I am responsible for the persecutions that I undergo” (1985, 99). Further, the I, “assumes the condition – or uncondition – of hostage [answering] to the point of expiating for others”. Although Levinas recognises that these “utopian and, for an I, inhuman conception[s]” will scandalize, the key to grasping their force is that only the self can utter them (1985, 100). Levinas writes that My responsibility is untransferable, no one could replace me […] Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively […] I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible, a noninterchangeable I. I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me. (101)

This new, hyperbolic, sense of infinite responsibility emerges around the notion of substitution, which, as indicated previously, is the central chapter in Otherwise than Being. Before unpacking this central concept, it is illuminating to turn to remarks Levinas’s makes elsewhere to clarify his use of ‘extreme formulas’ as constituting a type of methodology. Levinas justifies moving from one idea to its superlative […where…] a new idea – in no way implicated in the first – flows, or emanates from the overstatement […] Emphasis signifies at the same time a figure of rhetoric, an excess of expression, a manner of overstating oneself, and a manner of showing oneself. (1998b, 89)

Levinas coins this “exasperation as a method of philosophy” (ibid.). Clarifying Levinas’ method here, Perpich explains that the older and more familiar notions of responsibility are not the basis on which a new account is built or justified; rather, hyperbole renders the older notions vulnerable or susceptible to showing responsibility differently and permitting a new sense (meaning and orientation) to emerge. (2008, 119)

To exaggeration and hyperbole, Levinas also adds iteration. In a by now well-known image, Derrida compares Levinas’s thinking to waves crashing on a beach “always the same wave returning and repeating its movement with deeper insistence” (Critchley, 1999a, 4). As noted, Levinas employs a host of terms to elucidate his core idea of the absolute alterity of the Other. These differing terms are meant to connote differing aspects of the same idea—the irreducibility of the Other and the pitfalls of trying to represent the other in ontological language. Critchley says that in the use of terms such as ‘hostage’, ‘trauma’, ‘obsession’ and ‘persecution’, Levinas transforms the negative into the positive in an “ethics back to front” (2015, 68). In emphasis, Levinas believes he has discovered the via eminentiae, a way to describe the face of the Other in positive terms (1998b, 89). In doing so, he hopes to counter Derrida’s charge, that the other as infinite, which “is also designated negatively in its current positivity:

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in-finite” cannot be stated (1978, 141). Perpich puts this more simply: “since the face can be delineated only in a negative fashion, it remains dependant both conceptually and practically on what it is not” (2008, 62). Through emphasis, Levinas claims that “one passes from the order of presence and representation into another, ethical order” (in Goud, 2008, 14). As such, Perpich writes that the emphasis and exaltation of Otherwise than Being’s language is better suited to traverse “the negations and inversions employed to differentiate the face from objects, the body, and spatiality [which] seem to work in ways that bind the face all the more inextricably to the horizon of representation and objectification” (2008, 62). That I cannot transfer my responsibility to anyone else is yet another example of epiphanic re/presentation or expressing the inexpressible—Levinas writes that substitution is a “passivity more passive than all passivity” (1998a, 14). He warns that that substitution is not an act; but “a passivity inconvertible into an act, the hither side of the act-passivity alternative” (1989, 107). If substitution were a conscious act supported by recourse to reasons and representations, then that would imply that I can assume responsibility for the Other, but there are no reasons and “I have not done anything, and I have always been under accusation – persecuted” (104). There is no subject to which the accusation of responsibility can stick, and so, continues Levinas, “the word I means here I am, answering for everything and everyone” (ibid.). Substitution is “the possibility of putting oneself in the place of the other, which refers to the transference from the ‘by the other’ into a ‘for the other’” (107). In other words, as per my earlier formulation—the self is responsible not only to the other, but also for the other. Substitution is ‘the one-for-the-other’—a term Bernasconi calls Levinas’ working definition of substitution (2002, 235). Levinas writes, enigmatically, “It is no longer a question of the Ego, but of me” (1998a, 13). He also formulates this as “I is an other” by which he means “a subjectivity incapable of shutting itself up” (1987, 151): The other is in the same. Bernasconi suggests that this means that “the relation to the other is now a bond rather than a form of separation [as it was in Totality and Infinity]” (2002, 240). A separation implies a totality of same and other, inside and outside, while the notion of a bond avoids this implication. Where exteriority indicated an alterity outside totality, Critchley argues proximity designates an “an alterity that is internal to subjectivity” (2015, 81). I am not just obligated to the Other but bonded to the Other—I am one-for-theother. This entanglement of subjectivity reveals the questions ‘Why does the other concern me?’ or ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ in a new light; or rather dissolves these questions as problems. These questions are meaningful only if one assumes a separation (as opposed to a bond) between the Other and the self: these questions have meaning only if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned with itself, is only a concern for itself. In this hypothesis it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute outside-of-me, the other, would concern me. But in the ‘pre-history’ of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility. The self is through and through a hostage, older than ego, prior to principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond the egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self. (1989, 107)

This citation recalls the Levinasian invocation of ‘ethics as first philosophy’, where the primary philosophical task is not to comprehend being, but to justify it. As a

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one-for-the-other, the Other has always concerned me and will always concern me— of that there is no question. The question is rather, ‘what is the form that concern takes?’.

6.4.2 The Saying and the Said In order to give effect to the conceptual shift to the-one-for-the-other, Levinas coins the distinction between the Saying and the Said. Critchley remarks that “whereas Totality and Infinity writes about ethics, Otherwise than Being is the performative enactment of ethical writing” (1999a, 8). Levinas writes that responsibility to and for the Other is a Saying, while the Said is the attempt to represent this responsibility to the self (1998a, 138). The Saying is the signification of the face, whose alterity cannot be captured in what is Said. Saying is the transcendental epiphany of the face and the Said, the concrete form of the face. The Saying is the enactment of the ethical relation that cannot be expressed in the Said. Critchley formulates the difference as follows: the saying is my exposure – both corporeal and sensible – to the other person, my inability to resist the other’s approach. It is the performative stating, proposing or expressive position of myself facing the other. It is a verbal and possibly non-verbal ethical performance, of which the essence cannot be captured in constative propositions […] By contrast, the said is a statement, assertion or proposition of which the truth or falsity can be ascertained. To put it another way, one might say that the content of my words, their identifiable meaning, is the said, while the saying consists in the fact that these words are being addressed to an interlocutor, at this moment each of you. (2002, 18)

The danger is that, in saying this, the Saying has already become a Said. Levinas talks of the betrayal of the Saying by the Said, but which nevertheless cannot totally efface the Saying: “The philosophical speaking that betrays in its said the proximity it conveys before us still remains, as a saying, a proximity and a responsibility” (1998a, 168). In order to remain responsible, the I must unsay the Said. Levinas describes the Sisyphean struggle necessary to keep the Saying from falling back into the Said: “the otherwise than being is stated in a saying that must also be unsaid in order to thus extract the otherwise than being from the said in which it already comes to signify but a being otherwise” (3). Being otherwise as being’s opposite, is simply an ontological mode of being that can be described in ontological language—this is the Said. To be otherwise-than-being is to be exteriority, to be in proximity with the Other, to signify beyond being as essence (to use the terminology of the disjunction of the title of Otherwise than Being)—this is the Saying. To mix the terminology of Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being together: in order to prevent the totalisation of the other so that the alterity of the Other remains exterior, infinity must constantly breach totality; the Saying must constantly interrupt the Said. Critchley clarifies that “[e]thical Saying is precisely nothing that can be said” (1999a, 43). The Saying, while indeterminate, still haunts the Said—the Saying “is the perpetual undoing of the Said that occurs in running against its limits” (ibid.).

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The Saying can only be comprehended “in its disruption, or interruption of the Said” (ibid.). The ethical Saying thus prevents the ontological closure of the Said. However, as Critchley explains, “the return to the Said is not a return to the pure Said of ontology, but rather a Said which maintains within itself the trace of the ethical Saying” (232). This ‘second Said’ Critchley calls a ‘justified Said’. The oscillation between the Said and the Saying occurs in a series of infinite iterations in which the former seeks to always closer approximate the latter in its trace. The trace is not the mark of an absence, “but the mark of an effacement of a mark that was already the mark of an absence” (Peperzak, 1995, 177). In other words, the trace does not operate like a fingerprint, marking the absence of someone no longer present; rather, the trace is the sign the person inadvertently leaves behind by wiping away their fingerprint. The trace of the Saying is the absence of the presence of the Saying in the Said. Furthermore, this trace reveals an absent present always already absent. This is because the Saying is the performing of the proximity of the Other which is an-anarchical: not a disorder, but a different order, an order that is “anachronously delayed behind its present moment, and unable to recuperate this delay” (Levinas, 1989, 91). Perpich clarifies that Levinas’ concept of the trace is another way of trying to convey the same idea of a “signifyingness that does not pass through the ontological structures that make of the world an intelligible totality constituted by an ego in consciousness” (2008, 112). The trace of the Saying is the signifyingness of proximity that does not pass through the ontological structures of time. It is this through this ethical an-archy—within the diachrony of the Saying and the Said—that the autonomy of the self lies. Levinas (in Goud, 2008, 21) writes that the “willingness to serve is actually freedom, namely election. In the place of autonomy, I put election based on untransferable responsibility”. In other words, only in substitution can the freedom of the self as a Saying be said. The Saying is always more than the Said, that is, the Saying and Said are asymmetrical: the asymmetry of the interpersonal leads to an infinite responsibility, as does the asymmetry between the Saying and the Said. Some commentators argue that Levinas’s attempt to safeguard the original asymmetry between the Other and the self in the intersubjective space of the face-to-face encounter through the innovation of the Saying and the Said fails. This is because, claims Woermann for example, notwithstanding the notion of ‘the other within the same’, “Levinas [still] denies the kernel of a common identity that is needed to facilitate relationality and recognition” (2016, 133). In other words, both the Saying and the Said need to pass through the ontological structures, such as time, that make the world intelligible. Critchley characterises these criticisms as charging Levinas with a performative self-contradiction: Levinas wants “the Saying [to signify proximity] but he has to do it within the Said, and so he contradicts his purpose” (2015, 76). In order to address these criticisms, I will step back from the Saying and the Said and return to Totality and Infinity where Levinas first explores the Other to the Other who is also an Other to me—the third party. The delineation of the third straddles both Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being—Critchley confirms that “the move to le tiers [the third] is, for Levinas, clearly also a move from the Saying to

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the Said” (1999a, 229).18 The move to the third restores a measure of symmetry to the asymmetry of the interpersonal and so, in Alford’s words, “saves us from being consumed by the infinite need of the other” (2004, 156). The move to the third introduces politics into the original ethical (and dyadic) relation. Levinas writes that the “saying must bear a said [which] is a necessity of the same order as that which imposes a society with laws, institutions and social relations” (1985, 88). The third, as the said, limits the moral demandingness of the face as saying. It is this limiting, Levinas will say ‘correcting’, of the infinite responsibility of the self to and for the Other which will have important implications for the autonomy of the self. This is because the third does not come after the Other but is already there with the Other in the face-to-face encounter. In the next chapter I adumbrate the appearance of third party in full and explore how this opens up onto politics and normativity. That discussion will facilitate my reinscription of the autonomy of the agent, as it was framed within part one of the study, into Levinasian terms. The two other concepts reinscribed into Levinasian terminology in this chapter—proximity and asymmetry—have already indicated the parameters of such an autonomy. Proximity as the ethical relation with the Other is revealed in the asymmetry of that relation—a revelation that can only be epiphanically re/presented. It is because the self has no control over how the face appears (as epiphany) that the autonomy of the self is made hostage to the Other. It is because the Face exerts a normative force over the self that the self is obligated to make sense of the moral-demandingness of an infinite responsibility to, and for the Other.

6.5 Conclusion This chapter was dedicated to restating the problems of supererogation and moraldemandingness, and the purported solutions offered to those, in a Levinasian register. This marks the first step in reconceptualising supererogation as a supererogatory attitude. The assimilation strategies of Kantianism and utilitarianism, investigated in the first half of the study, that attempt to reduce supererogation to obligation can now be understood as the types of totalisation that Levinas warns against. These assimilation strategies, such as the Kantian positing of imperfect duties and utilitarianism’s LSA, were rejected because of their impartialism and their concomitant distortion of moral autonomy. However, rejecting assimilation strategies in this way fails to capture the way such strategies exhaust the subjectivity of supererogatory agents. Calling supererogation assimilation strategies totalising strategies underscores that what is unique about supererogation cannot be fully accounted for by analysing its constitutive components alone. 18 Atterton argues that one serious flaw of Derrida’s critique of Totality and Infinity is Derrida’s lack

of treatment of the third party and its implications for ontological language—Atterton notes that the third is mentioned only once in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, and then only in a footnote (1992, 67).

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The perspectival problem of supererogation, which results in an asymmetry of blame, dissolves when reinscribed into Levinasian terms. If there is a pre-originary asymmetry between the Other and the self in a face-to-face encounter, then any perspective outside of that relation becomes inconsequential. Levinas describes the asymmetrical relation which proceeds from the self to the Other (and which inflects distance into elevation) as the attitude of one person with regard to another [which] must be stronger than the formal signification of conjunction, to which every relation risks being degraded. This greater force is concretely affirmed in the fact that the relation proceeding from me to the other cannot be included within a network of relations visible to a third party. (1969, 120) (emphasis added)

Atterton argues that Levinas’s use of the term ‘attitude’, instead of ‘language’ or ‘discourse’, is because the third party who stands empirically outside the relation, while in a position to gauge what is said, cannot gauge the intention underlying what is said, which is structured on the basis of separation (the difference between the self and the Other) […] Beyond all theory, the ethical relation is invisible to an external observer, whose synoptic gaze would conceive of the relata as members of a genre, as participants in a totality. (1992, 66)

The upshot of this is that the attribution of blame or praise is misplaced. Asymmetry is not a problem to be solved through shifting perspectives, but a core feature of the face-to-face encounter. This attitude of the self toward the Other must be contrasted with the attitude of the purported supererogator, encountered in the first half of the study, who describes their actions as something they had to do.19 While such an attitude acknowledges the insufficiency of autonomy, it fails in that it perpetrates a transcendental violence on the Other as it arises from a primitive response to the Other which recognises their suffering as like my own. Such an attitude must be replaced with an attitude which can respond to the others suffering even as it cannot recognise such suffering. A supererogatory attitude will then circumscribe autonomy. However, Atterton also writes that “although the ethical relation is invisible to the third party, the third party is made visible from within the ethical relation, which may thus be said to include the third party” (ibid.). The third thus reconfigures the autonomy of the self because it is part of the ethical relation that circumscribes the autonomy of the self. The third will therefore play an important role in constituting the supererogatory attitude which will, in turn, constitute the basis of a reconceptualised supererogation.

References Alford, C. F. (2004). Levinas and political theory. Political Theory, 32(2), 146–171. Atterton, P. (1992). Levinas and the language of peace: A response to Derrida. Philosophy Today, 36(1), 59–70. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. 19 Chapter

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Bernasconi, R. (1989). Re-reading totality and infinity. In C. Scott & A. Dallery (Eds.), The question of the other: Essays in contemporary continental philosophy (pp. 23–24, 225–226). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Bernasconi, R. (2002). What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer? In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 234–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Critchley, S. (1999a). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Critchley, S. (1999b). Ethics-politics-subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas & contemporary French thought. London: Verso. Critchley, S. (2002). Introduction. In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 1–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Critchley, S. (2015). The problem with Levinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Violence and metaphysics. In A. Bass (Trans.), Writing and difference (pp. 97– 192). London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1988). Afterword. In G. Graff (Ed.), Limited Inc. (S. Weber, Trans.). Derrida, J. (1996). Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism. In C. Mouffe (Ed.), Deconstruction and pragmatism (pp. 79–90). London and New York: Routledge. Goud, J. F. (2008). What one asks of oneself, one asks of a saint: A dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, 1980–1981. Levinas Studies, 3, 1–34. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper Collins. Heidegger, M. (1988). The basic problems of phenomenology (Trans., introduction, and lexicon by A. Hofstadter). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Inwood, M. (2000). Heidegger. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenaan, H. (2011). Facing images. Angelaki, 16(1), 143–159. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1987). Collected philosophical papers (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1988). ‘The paradox of morality’: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas by T. Wright, P. Hayes and A. Ainley (A. Benjamin & T. Wright, Trans.). In R. Bernasconi & D. Wood (Eds.), The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the other. London: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1989). The Levinas reader (S. Hand, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Levinas, E. (1998a). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Levinas, E. (1998b). Of god who comes to mind (B. Bergo, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (2001). Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (J. Robbins, Ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morgan, M. L. (2007). Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Overgaard, S. (2007). The ethical residue of language in Levinas and early Wittgenstein. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 33(2), 223–249. Peperzak, A. (1993). To the other. An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Peperzak, A. (1995). Ethics as first philosophy: The significance of Emmanuel Levinas for philosophy, literature, and religion. New York: Routledge. Perpich, D. (2008). The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plant, B. (2003). Doing justice to the Derrida-Levinas connection: A response to Mark Dooley. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 29(4), 427–450. Visker, R. (2003). Is ethics fundamental? Continental Philosophy Review, 36, 263–302.

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Chapter 7

Levinasian Politics and Constructing Levinasian Normativity

Abstract This chapter examines, and builds on, Levinas’s move from ethics to politics which is inaugurated by the third party to the face-to-face encounter. The third party limits the infinite responsibility of the self by reintroducing themes and categories which ensure justice between incomparable equals and acts as the incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity. This incessant correction operates as the diachrony between the Saying and the Said. This movement can also be described as the recursive oscillation between the undecidability of ethics and politics. Following this, the autonomy of the self restored by the third is described as an autonomy of undecidability. The chapter then builds on this conception to construct a Levinasian normativity—a normativity without norms—a meta-ethical position which delineates the conditions any purported norm must satisfy. These norms must satisfy the imperative of provisionality, that is, they must be subject to an infinite revision. Provisional norms operate quasi-transcendentally: we follow them as if they had universal and immutable force. I then argue that Levinasian normativity is the recursive oscillation between ethics and politics, which operates in a quasi-transcendental manner in order to traverse the undecidability this oscillation produces. As such, Levinasian normativity incessantly limits and restores the infinite responsibility of the self to and for the Other. Concomitantly, the autonomy of the self under Levinasian normativity operates under an autonomy of undecidability that tracks these recursive oscillations. I also argue that if infinity can be approached through a series of infinite re/presentations instead of a re/presentation of the infinite, then the recursive modality of Levinasian normativity can also be grasped as series of infinite re/presentations that, in being incessantly corrected, achieve a greater fidelity to the representation of the alterity of the Other.

7.1 Introduction The previous chapter commenced with one of Levinas’s most cited remarks: “My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning” (1985, 90). This chapter considers what Levinas says immediately thereafter: “one can without doubt construct an ethics in function of what I have just said, but this is not my own © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_7

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theme” (ibid.). Levinas then, is not against such a project; indeed, as this chapter will show, Levinas considers it necessary that such a project be undertaken. The transcendental violence that accompanies a construction of ethics is necessary to avoid the deeper ethical violence of not responding to the face of the Other. Without this move, Levinas’s project to sensitise us to the ‘secret tears’ of the Other will have been in vain (1996, 23). Bernasconi writes that “the reorientation of thinking that is Levinas’s goal […] matters not at all unless it impacts on our approach to concrete situations so that we come to see them as ethical” (2002, 250). In this chapter, I will embark on the second leg of my project to reconceptualise supererogation as a supererogatory attitude. The first leg, undertaken in the previous chapter, involved reinscribing certain analytic terms used to delineate supererogation and moral-demandingness into Levinasian terminology, as well as adumbrating a Levinasian ethics and infinite responsibility. In this chapter I will ‘construct’ a Levinasian ethics, otherwise an operationalisation of a Levinasian ethics, which I will call a Levinasian normativity in order to distinguish it from Levinasian ethics. Such a normativity will track the passage from the Saying to the Said and then to the unsaying of that Said; or, alternatively the passage from ethics to politics and back again. Levinasian normativity, as the recursive oscillation between the Saying and the Said, will operate as the ‘incessant correction of proximity’. In positing a Levinasian normativity, I will be suggesting a way to approach the infinity of an infinite responsibility with the finite autonomy of a moral self. A ‘normativity’ implies a turn to norms; however, I will follow Perpich and argue that Levinasian normativity is a “normativity without norms” (2008, 126). Otherwise stated, Levinasian normativity will comprise a meta-ethical position whose content comprises no specific norms, but rather delineates the condition(s) any purported norm should satisfy. Levinasian normativity will be explicated as a quasi-transcendental imperative, or a provisional imperative that is able to limit infinite responsibility, and then restore that infinity, by recasting that infinity as an infinite representation of the alterity of the Other, rather than a unquantifiably large responsibility. The chapter proceeds by examining the third party to the face-to-face encounter and who raises the issue of justice. The third reconfigures the autonomy of the self by acting as ‘the incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity’. This incessant correction manifests as the diachrony between the Saying and the Said. It can also be understood as the recursive oscillation necessary to traverse the undecidability between ethics and politics. For this reason the autonomy of the subject of Levinasian normativity will be described as an autonomy of undecidability. I then consider Derrida’s notion of the quasi-transcendental as a means to traverse undecidability— enlisting norms as if they were singular responses in order to make decisions and act. I also trace how Levinas uses the quasi-transcendental1 through a brief examination of his use of skepticism—and its refutation—as a means to model the diachrony of the undecidable. Thereafter, I enlist a much more intuitive and user-friendly version of the quasi-transcendental—the ‘provisional imperative’—in order to flesh out how Levinasian normativity, as the incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity, 1 Levinas

does not himself use the term ‘quasi-transcendental’.

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operates in a quasi-transcendental manner to traverse undecidability. In the final section of the chapter, I demonstrate how the provisional imperative can be employed in attempts to represent the unrepresentable face through a not uncommon reading of responsibility as response-ability, and so give content to the provisional imperative as a meta-ethical position.

7.2 Politics and the Third One of Levinas’s central claims is that my infinite responsibility to and for the Other “does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness” (1969, 200). I have noted that the attractiveness of such a claim is undermined by other, more hyperbolic formulations, such as the claim that “I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility” (1985, 99). I have discussed Levinas’s justification of such hyperbole as ‘exasperation as a method of philosophy’.2 I now turn to an important qualification Levinas makes in these same remarks which I had previously not cited. Levinas writes that these “extreme formulas […] must not be detached from their context. In the concrete, many other considerations intervene and require justice even for me. Practically, the law sets certain consequences out of the way” (ibid.). Levinas argues that while “subjectivity as such is initially hostage”, that is, hostage to the face as transcendental event, the face in its concreteness demarcates a boundary to what can be demanded of such a hostage (100). The face in its concreteness demands justice: “It is not that there first would be face, and then the being it manifests, or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity” (1969, 213). The epiphany of the face as concrete face is the third party who “looks at me in the eyes of the Other” (ibid.). Critchley clarifies that while the self is initially hostage “autonomy comes back into the picture for Levinas at the level of another demand, namely the demand for justice, the just society and everything that he gathers under the heading of ‘the third party’” (2012, 57). Before going further, the evolution of the term ‘justice’ in Levinas’s writings must be noted in order to understand what he includes under that term. Levinas clarifies that In Totality and Infinity, I [Levinas] used the word ‘justice’ for ethics, for the relationship between two people. I spoke of ‘justice’, although now ‘justice’ is for me something which is a calculation, which is knowledge, and which supposes politics; it is inseparable from the political. It is something which I distinguish from ethics, which is primary. (1988, 171)

But calculation and comparison—politics—requires categories and themes and thus leads to the reduction of the other to the same. Has the Levinasian position arrived full circle only to nullify itself? Is the alterity of the Other only inviolable until the third arrives and then is allowed to be violated so that the need of the third can be 2 Chapter

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measured against the Other? No, because the third does not arrive after the Other in the face-to-face encounter. Levinas writes that if only the Other and I existed then I would have had nothing but obligations! But I don’t live in a world in which there is but one single ‘first-comer’; there is always a third party in the world: he or she is also my other, my fellow. Hence, it is important to me to know which of the two takes precedence. Is the one not the persecutor of the other? Must not human beings, who are incomparable, be compared? Thus justice here, takes precedence over the taking upon oneself of the fate of the other. (2001, 165–166)

In other words the third is already there in the encounter with the Other. Levinas also says that “t]he revelation of the third party, ineluctable in the face, is produced only through the face” (1969, 305). The Other and the third are contemporaneous and coterminous. As such, there is “always at least three people […and as] soon as there are three people, the ethical relation to the other becomes political” (Kearney in Wolff, 2011, 18). At this stage it is necessary to return to the Saying and the Said and the an-archy of proximity. Critchley argues that the “passage from the ethical to the political is not a passage of time, but rather a doubling of discourse” in which responding to the singularity of the Other’s face is, at the same time a response to a “community [as] a commonality” (1999a, 225). This double community is “a commonality among equals which is at the same time based on the inegalitarian moment of the ethical” (ibid.). My infinite (ethical) responsibility to and for the other is also a finite (political) responsibility for the third; or, rather, my political responsibility for the third is contained in my ethical responsibility for the Other. In which case, ‘political responsibility’ is a “pleonasm” argues Wolff (2011, 25). Critchley ventures that the double community of ethics and politics can be expressed as “the coincidence of coincidence and non-coincidence [of the Same and Other in the ethical relation]” (1999a, 227). The Saying and the Said do not coincide; the trace of the Saying in the Said can be understood as this coincidence of non-coincidence. The Other and the third do not coincide but in responding to the Other I necessarily respond to the third. McMurray et al. argue that this means that “the ethical subject is always as well the political subject” (2010, 557). Wolff writes that this necessary passage from ethics into politics that is also not a passage of time means that “ethics has always already passed into politics” (2011, 21). The I is always already under accusation, always already an election; the third opens up this accusation but also limits it. The third, argues Levinas “is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice?” (1998, 157). The third then restores a measure of autonomy back to the moral agent—to be able to compare and calculate who must be responded to first. However, this autonomy granted by the third is still in service of responding to an incomparable and singular Other: Critchley writes that politics without ethics is blind (2012, 120). What it would be blind to is the singularity of the Other. Critchley then writes that ethics without politics is empty (ibid.). That is to say, an infinite responsibility, if responsible for everything, would be responsible for nothing. What gives ethics content can only be said in politics; Levinas claims that the third “introduces a contradiction in the Saying” (1998, 157). The third, as the Said, which inaugurates the question of justice,

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or politics, contradicts the Saying through its use of categories and themes which make adjudication between competing, but singular demands possible. Comparing incomparable demands is a contradiction which must be corrected. The Saying keeps asserting the singularity and incomparability of the other, but the Said, like the scales of justice seeking balance, nonetheless keeps trying to make that comparison. The Saying keeps interrupting the Said from settling on comparisons that would make such incomparable comparisons comparable. Levinas writes that justice (politics), is “an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity” (158) (emphasis added). Politics corrects the asymmetry of proximity through expanding the autonomy of the self to posit images and themes that might be able to demarcate the alterity of the Other from the alterity of the other Other. This chapter will build on this “incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity” to construct what I will call a ‘Levinasian normativity’. Briefly stated, Levinasian normativity will offer a way to operationalise Levinasian ethics, or, which will amount to the same thing, a way to limit the moral-demandingness of an infinite responsibility. The next section will untangle the temporal dimensions of a Levinasian normativity as an incessant correction, which will be tied to the diachrony of the Saying and the Said and the an-archy of proximity. In postulating a Levinasian normativity I will also be postulating a particular type of autonomy which is tied to it. I will call this autonomy, the autonomy of undecidability. While I will explicate my reasons for this choice of terminology in more depth in what follows, I can for now say that the autonomy of undecidability circumscribes the autonomy of a moral agent acting within the bounds of an incessant correction of proximity—an autonomy operating as an oscillation between two undecidable decisions, the decision to respond to the other in front of me ethically or politically. I will also claim that the autonomy of undecidability reveals itself as a type of ethical attitude, which in the chapter to follow, will be described as the supererogatory attitude.

7.3 Levinasian Normativity and the Autonomy of Undecidability In this section I will be switching back and forth between using the pairs of terms Saying/Said and ethics/politics. This oscillation mirrors the incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity as what Dussel calls, the “pulsional perspective – a vital energy that impels and compels in an iterative way” (1999, 126 and FN 1). The undecidability that the diachrony of ethics and politics, that is, the simultaneity and contemporaneity of ethics and politics, leads to is captured succinctly by Jordaan: Every person I come across is both the other and the third to me. Every person I come across is both a general and equal other with whom I stand in a political relation as well as a specific other who summons me to responsibility in the ethical relation. When faced by the other, I can respond politically, seeing the other as my equal, restricting my responsibility to him, insisting on a reciprocity and equality between us, and asserting my rights against his; or I can respond ethically by being concerned and assuming responsibility for him beyond

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what is required by our political equality and reciprocity. Do I relate to the other ethically or politically? I am constantly faced with this choice. (2009, 97)

This decision is, however, undecidable, precisely because it is not an either/or choice but a both/and choice: I must respect the singularity of the Other (an ethical relation) and I must do so in such a way that demonstrates my respect for the alterity of all the Others (the political relation). I can only decide in the time of an-archy—the time of the always already of being hostage to the Other—but I must act in ‘real’ time. In ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Derrida maps out this diachrony of the undecidable: There is apparently no moment in which a decision can be called presently and fully just: either it has not yet been made according to a rule, and nothing allows us to call it just, or it has already followed a rule – whether received, confirmed, conserved or reinvented – which in its turn is not absolutely guaranteed by anything; and, moreover, if it were guaranteed, the decision would be reduced to a calculation and we wouldn’t call it just. This is why the ordeal of the undecidable that I just said must be gone through by any decision worthy of its name is never past or passed, it is not a surmounted or sublated (aufgehoben) moment in the decision. (1992, 24)

However, the urgency of justice obstructs the horizon of knowledge so that justice, however unrepresentable it may be, doesn’t wait […] A just decision is always required immediately, ‘right away’. It cannot furnish itself with infinite information and unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. (26)

There is a lacuna between the time of ethics and the time of politics and action. Raffoul writes that despite this hiatus between ethics and politics, “ethics calls for politics […] ethics and politics call for each other on the basis of their non-relation” (2008, 280). My autonomy is held hostage by the Other before me—I am obligated to the Other—but because I cannot decide how to discharge that obligation—as an ethical or as a political obligation—my autonomy (held hostage) is an autonomy of undecidability. I cannot base my decision on any particular norm and yet I will need to appeal to some manner of normativity in order to be able to make any decision at all—a “normativity without norms” as Perpich describes it (2008, 126). Putting this into the terminology of the Saying and the Said will demonstrate how this might be able to enact Levinasian ethics. We can say that any specific norm consists in a Said, which as per the interchangeability of terms argued for, is also a political calculation. Perpich writes that norms, are “a kind of thematization and sedimentation of the life of a people at a particular time in its history” (2008, 147). However, “new selfunderstandings, emerging or changing social and cultural practices, and ever varied forms of life” means that such norms can always be contested (ibid.). Normativity, or rather the contestability of norms, can be understood as a Saying, or rather the interruption of the Said by the Saying. Each Saying contests the Said by unsaying (which is also a Saying) the Said. Levinasian normativity, as a normativity without norms, is a meta-ethical position which does not comprise any specific norm, but rather delineates the condition(s) any purported norm should satisfy. The condition

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that any norm should satisfy, as a basis on which to decide an undecidable decision, is that it constantly corrects itself through a recursive oscillation between the ethical and political. Otherwise said, Levinasian normativity is the recursive oscillation between the Saying and the Said, between ethics and politics, which incessantly limits and then restores the infinite responsibility of the self to and for the Other. In turn, the autonomy of the self operates under an autonomy of undecidability that tracks these recursive oscillations of Levinasian normativity.

7.3.1 The Quasi-Transcendental and Skepticism Levinasian normativity as a meta-ethical position is, however, still unsatisfactory in that we still need to posit specific norms which can guide our decision-making, albethey contestable norms. One way of thinking about this is to turn to the notion of the quasi-transcendental. In ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Derrida posits the ‘quasi-transcendental’ as a means to navigate the undecidable (1992). Deconstructing the distinction between justice and law,3 Derrida argues that if an act consists merely of applying rules (or following norms) then, while this might be a conforming with the law, “we would be wrong to say that the decision was just” (23). Instead, for a decision to be considered just, it must not only follow a rule of law or a general law but [the judge] must also assume it, approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously existed of the law, as if the judge himself invented the law in every case. (Ibid.) (Emphasis added)

It is the ‘as if’ that is at the heart of the quasi-transcendental—the almost, but not quite transcendental. A quasi-transcendental moral imperative seemingly transcends time and contingency but not quite. Paul Cilliers, a complexity theorist whose work will inform the position in the section to follow, writes that quasi-transcendental ethical norms operate “as if they were universal rules” (1998: 139). Following Derrida, Cilliers argues that this means “we have to remotivate the legitimacy of the rule each time we use it” (ibid.).4 Reinscribing the quasi-transcendental into Levinasian terms, we could say the Said should operate as if it were a Saying, but it must be unsaid and resaid each time it is Said in order that it remain a Saying. Or, we have to act on the ethical demand of the Other now, as if that demand could be fully represented in the present; as if we had all the information impacting upon the decision. We have 3 In

the terms of this chapter, justice for Derrida would amount to ethics, or the Saying, while law would amount to politics, or the Said. 4 For example, turning to Kant’s most (in)famous example: if we claimed that breaking a promise is always wrong, then confronted with a person who had broken a promise, we could not just point to the existence of this rule and condemn them; we would have to motivate that enforcing this rule in this instance was legitimate because their reasons for breaking their promise—that it might lead to a person being physically harmed—were insufficient in this instance because the person would not actually have been harmed. As is well known, Kant rejects this reasoning.

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to act as if ethics had not already passed over into politics. The trace of the Saying in the Said is then the quasi-transcendental. The quasi-transcendental requires that I revisit impartialism discussed over the course of the first half of the study which, amongst other objections, makes morality too demanding and facilitates the assimilation of supererogation. Impartialism is transcendental in that impartialism requires the moral agent be able to transcend their attachments to special relationships and other life projects for example. Applying an impartial norm transcendentally can lead to injustice,but if it is not merely the application of that norm, but what Derrida (1992, 23) calls, a “fresh judgement” of that norm then even that impartial norm can give voice to the singularity of the Other. In the discussion of moral-demandingness and impartialism in Chapter 2, I wrote that there is a place for impartialism in morality, and cited Taylor and Crary in support of the claim that what we should reject in impartialism is its separation of affectivity from moral rationality.5 This affectivity is what underlies Taylor’s primitive moral responsiveness, but it is an affectivity corrupted by a consciousness that seeks to recognise the suffering of the other like my own.6 If affectivity is grounded in the sensibility (and not the consciousness) of the self, then quasi-transcendentalism offers another way to understand how affectivity can ameliorate impartialism. An affectivity starting from sensibility will seek to recognise the suffering of the other as if it could be like my own. This will allow the self to able to respond to the Other politically while still respecting them ethically. Before building on the quasi-transcendental to fill out the meta-ethical position of Levinasian normativity, I want to demonstrate how this concept operates in Levinas’s discussion of skepticism and its refutation, precisely because he does not use the term ‘quasi-transcendental’ in his work. Bernasconi writes that skepticism provides Levinas with “a potent illustration of a signification which signifies beyond synchrony” (1991, 151). What this means can be gleaned from rehearsing several claims already made: The Saying always signifies more than what is signified by the Said and signifies this excess diachronically. The assertion and refutation of skepticism signify diachronically—there is an alternating movement between skepticism and skepticism’s refutation. Levinas writes that “philosophy is not separable from skepticism” (1998, 167), by which he means that philosophy is always questioning its own assumptions and doubting its own foundations. Skepticism asserts that ‘nothing can be asserted’, but in asserting this it undermines itself: if the statement is true then skepticism is false; if skepticism is true then the statement is false. However, Levinas argues that because skepticism, which traverses the rationality or logic of knowledge, is a refusal to synchronize the implicit affirmation contained in saying and the negation which this affirmation states in the said […] It is though [or, as if ] skepticism were sensitive to the difference between my exposure without reserve to the other, which is saying, and the exposition or statement of the said in its equilibrium and justice. (168) (Emphasis added)

5 Section 6 Chapter

2.5.3. 4, Sect. 4.4.

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This sensitivity of skepticism to the difference between the Saying and the Said occurs because of a similar diachrony between skepticism and skepticism’s refutation. Philosophical reflection exposes the apparent contradiction at the center of skepticism and thus refutes it. However, what is affirmed in the knowledge gained from this reflection does not occur at the same time as the negation of that knowledge. Levinas talks about a ‘secret diachrony’ within skepticism which returns after it has been refuted, and in “refusing the present makes up the invincible force of skepticism” (ibid.). Skepticism ignores its own contradiction and continues “as if the affirmation and negation did not resound in the same time” (ibid.) (Emphasis added). To recall, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that ethics is language and that the face speaks (1969, 66, 171). So, when Levinas claims in Otherwise than Being that “language is already skepticism” he can be understood as saying the ethical relation operates in the same way as skepticism does (1998, 170). The face expresses the inexpressibility of itself as the truth of itself in the same way as skepticism expresses its inexpressibility. Morgan explains this congruence as the way “language about the face-to-face discloses, in its performance, the face-to-face, not by description but by calling to mind the way skepticism returns and the reason it does so” (2007, 313). Bernasconi warns that in modelling the oscillation of the Saying and the Said on the secret diachrony of skepticism, we should not understand Levinas as himself adopting a skeptical position—Levinas does not attempt to situate the debate around skepticism in any historical context (1991, 150). In light of this remark, I would like to distinguish this more general skepticism from a more particular type of moral skepticism that is best illustrated by the question ‘Why be moral?’ Levinas formulates this question as ‘Why does the other concern me?’. His answer from the previous chapter,7 to recall, is that this already assumes the egoism of the self. I will revisit this type of narrower moral skepticsim in the final chapter in a more explicit and detailed comparative analysis.

7.4 Constructing Normativity: The Provisional Imperative I have claimed that Levinasian normativity, as a normativity without norms, circumscribes a meta-ethical position. I also described Levinasian normativity as the recursive oscillation between the Saying and the Said, ethics and politics, which operates in a quasi-transcendental manner in order to traverse the undecidability this oscillation produces. I now want to expand on these formulations by describing the quasitranscendental manner in which undecidability is decided as following a particular moral imperative—the provisional imperative. It is because the decision is undecidable that any decision to respond to the Other either ethically or politically must be provisional. I will turn to the work of Preiser and Cilliers (2010), and Woermann and Cilliers (2012)—who work with complexity theory, more specifically critical

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complexity theory8 —and enlist what they call the ‘provisional imperative’. I believe that their provisional imperative offers a much more intuitive and workable version of the quasi-transcendental.9 Woermann and Cilliers argue that the basis for the provisional imperative rests on the contingency of all knowledge: All knowledge (including self-knowledge) is limited because, in order to generate meaning, we need to reduce the complexity through modelling. Our models are radically contingent in time and space because they are the product of the resources at our disposal, the choices that we make, and the influences that act upon us (including the influences of others). Since all knowledge is contingent, it is also subject to revision, and therefore irreducibly provisional. (2012, 451)

In order to bypass the technicalities with respect to complexity theory alluded to in the citation above, while still remaining true to Woermann and Cilliers’s project to circumscribe the complexity of ethics—I will reinscribe the above claim into Levinasian terminology: Knowledge of the other is limited because, in order to get at the meaning of the Other, we need to reduce their alterity through representation (modelling). How the face appears to us is radically contingent on the singularity of the Other, and the influences, which include the urgency of justice, that act upon us. Since our knowledge of the Other is contingent, it is also subject to revision. An imperative of provisionality would meet the contingency and provisionally of all knowledge by requiring the moral agent to respond in the following ways: 1. Justify your actions only in ways which do not preclude the possibility of revising that justification, 2. Make only those choices which keep the possibility of choice open, 3. Your actions should show a fundamental respect for difference [or alterity], even as those actions reduce it.10 (Preiser & Cilliers’s 2010, 275–276)

The provisional imperative would then require that the norms we rely on to justify our decisions should not just be open to revision, but that they remain radically so. In responding to the Other politically we necessarily reduce the alterity of the Other but in revising (or correcting) that response we demonstrate our respect for the alterity of the Other ethically. Woermann and Cilliers clarify that while the provisional imperative precludes “a substantive account of ethics […it] nevertheless constitutes a type of ethical strategy, similar to Kant’s categorical imperative, which urges us to adopt a certain attitude when taking ethical decisions” (2012, 448) (emphasis added). It is this attitude 8 Woermann

describes Complexity Theory as “an umbrella term covering many different understandings of, and approaches to, the study of complex systems” (2016, 2). She broadly distinguishes philosophical complexity from scientific complexity. While the latter focuses on complex physical, computational, biological and social systems with the aim to formalise and model them, philosophical complexity seeks, inter alia, to “focus attention on the normativity that any serious engagement with complexity implies” (ibid.). For an account of complex systems and complexity, see Cilliers (1998). 9 Preiser and Cilliers specifically indicate that the provisional imperative can be understood with reference to Derrida’s notion of the ‘quasi-transcendental’ (2010, 275 FN 140). 10 A fourth injunction is stated that concerns, very specifically, the technical operations of complex systems. It is, on that account, excluded here.

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demonstrated by the provisional imperative which is also demonstrated by Levinasian normativity. In the chapter to follow, I will bring this attitude together with all the other formulations of ethical attitudes—the face as discourse and discourse as an attitude11 ; a primitive moral response as an attitude toward a soul12 —described in this study to finally and fully flesh out a supererogatory attitude that will form the basis of a reconceptualised supererogation. So while the categorical imperative cannot generate any norms, what it does do is provide a test for determining whether any particular norm is ethical or not. That test is, of course, the test of universalisability. Similarly, the provisional imperative cannot generate any particular norms, but can apply the test of provisionality to determine if any one norm is ethical or not. The provisional imperative is quasitranscendental because it exhorts us to act as if the norms and rules we turn to, to justify our actions are not provisional! Woermann and Cilliers acknowledge that the idea of a provisional imperative is contradictory, which suggests that the imperative itself is subject to change and thus no longer remains an imperative—an impossible position (2012, 451). Nonetheless, they argue that this is precisely their intention: we cannot do away with moral imperatives, but […] we should also realise that our imperatives are the outcome of […] ways of thinking about the world, and are thus necessarily exclusionary. Thus, the provisional imperative stipulates that we must be guided by the imperative, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the exclusionary nature of all imperatives. (Ibid.)

The necessity of moral imperatives is simply the necessity of the Said, the necessity of the transcendental violence of language in order to avoid the deeper ethical violence of totalisation. The paradoxical and contradictory nature of the provisional imperative recalls other paradoxical Levinasian formulations—the ethical relation which is a ‘relation without relation’, the ethical resistance which is a ‘resistance which has no resistance’, and substitution which is a ‘passivity more passive than passivity’. These are all impossible positions which nonetheless provide the ground on which undecidable decisions must be decided. Woermann and Cilliers pare the provisional imperative down to its essence— “When acting, always remain cognisant of other ways of acting” (2012, 451). Reinscribing this into Levinasian terms, this would read: ‘when representing the alterity of the Other, always consider other ways of representing the alterity of the Other’; or, when responding to the other ethically, always remain cognisant that you could have responded politically. We can also characterise the first part of the imperative—‘when representing the alterity of the Other’—as a Said, while the second part—‘always be cognisant of other ways of representing the alterity of the Other’—as a way to interrupt this Said. The provisional imperative, reinscribed into Levinasian terms, is just another way to describe the recursive oscillation between the Saying and the Said, which as the incessant correction of the ethical by the political, is just Levinasian normativity. 11 Chapter 12 Chapter

6, Sect. 6.3.2. 4, Sect. 4.4.1.

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In outlining Levinasian normativity as the recursive oscillation between the Saying and the Said, I also indicated that Levinasian normativity limits, and then restores, the infinite responsibility of the self to and for the Other and does so incessantly. In order to develop this claim and also to demonstrate how the provisional imperative, as the recursivity of Levinasian normativity, might operate in practice, I will revisit the notion of infinite responsibility as explicated in the previous chapter.13 I will argue for an understanding of infinite responsibility, not just as a type of accountability to and for the Other, but also as the ability to respond in infinitely many different ways to the Other—an infinite response-ability. In so doing, I heed Perpich’s warning to not overstate the link between response and responsibility, such that responsibility is understood as excluding, or discounting accountability. She argues, Levinas’ account of responsibility “is deeply parasitic on the ordinary sense [of responsibility as accountability, and] draws its rhetorical force precisely from its inversion of our expectations and perceptions about responsibility” (2008, 87). The inversion she refers to is the inversion of the standard account of responsibility, which is limited, dischargeable and reciprocal, to one in which responsibility is infinite, irrecusable and asymmetrical. My reading of responsibility to include responseability will stay true to Levinas’s understanding of responsibility as a “moral rather than a causal force” that is to say, responsibility as the election by the Other (ibid.).14 I will however try to show that responsibility as response-ability allows the moral force of the face of the other to be channelled in such a way that the self can remain infinitely responsible to the Other even as it limits that responsibility.

7.5 Infinite Response-Ability as Infinite Representation It is the infinity of Levinasian responsibility that threatens to overwhelm us—infinite responsibility is just too morally demanding a responsibility. However, as Derrida writes, if you give up the infinitude of responsibility, there is no responsibility. It is because we act and live in infinitude that the responsibility to the other is irreducible […] if responsibility was not infinite, you could not have moral and political problems. (1996, 86)

To this, Critchley adds, “it is because responsibility is infinite that the decision is always undecidable” (1999b, 108). And yet, as Derrida says, we must decide, the cry for justice is urgent. I have argued that undecidability requires us to incessantly correct ethics with politics, to recursively oscillate between the Saying and the Said, but how does that lessen the infinity of an infinite responsibility? To answer this, I will claim, following Wood, that it is a matter of understanding that “responsibility is not quantifiably (or even unquantifiably) large [that is, infinite] and, therefore, not 13 Chapter

6, Sect. 6.4. (1999, 127) decomposes ‘responsibility’ into ‘re-sponsibility’ and notes that the root derives from the Latin spondere, which is ‘to take something into one’s charge’. My subjectivity is taken in the charge of the Other when I am held hostage by the Other in re-sponsibility.

14 Dussel

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a basis for guilt through failure to live up to it. It is rather a recursive modality, an always renewable openness” (1999, 117). In what follows, I hope to demonstrate that the recursivity, or provisionality, of Levinasian normativity, while it does not lessen infinite responsibility, allows us to limit it by navigating us through its undecidability. In the previous chapter I used the term ‘epiphanic re/presentation’ as a means to capture how Levinas describes the ‘appearance’ of the face. The face, strictly speaking, cannot appear in the consciousness of the self, but is sensed as an epiphany.15 The sensibility of the face is the basis of the ethical relation. However, in order to be able to respond to the face, the self must be able to represent the alterity of the Other, and the attempt to do so is the movement to politics. While the Other presents their alterity epiphanically as face, it is I who must represent that epiphany to myself, in order to be able to respond to the Other, to compare the Other with other Others. In the formulations employed in this chapter, we can say that the (epiphanic) presentation of the face has always already passed into the (epiphanic) representation of the face by the self; the epiphanic presentation of the alterity of the Other necessarily passes into the representation of that alterity; the face is representable by the self as if it could present itself to the self. The shorthand epiphanic re/presentation then, captures this necessary movement from (epiphanic) presentation to representation, from ethics to politics. To recall also from Chapter 6, epiphanic re/presentation follows from an understanding of the alterity of the Other as infinite. The face, as an appearance of that which exceeds itself, like the idea of infinity, must however also be able to signify within immanent being, that is to say, the face must also appear in its concrete form of composite of eyes, nose and mouth. In order for the face to appear in its concrete form, my suggestion is that the epiphanic re/presentation of the face must be read as the ability of the face to re/present itself in an infinite number of ways, rather than only the (in)ability to re/present itself as infinite. If my claim is correct, then the epiphanic re/presentation of the face can be understood as a series of infinite representations and not just the re/presentation of something unrepresentable. Perpich argues that “[i]nfinity on Levinas’s view is not a static and completed state […] but the infinitely repeated production with being of a break within being that nonetheless accomplishes being” (2008, 38). My claim is that this can be achieved through a series of infinite re/presentations as opposed to a re/presentation of the infinite. The recursive modality of Levinasian normativity is also better grasped as series of infinite re/presentations that are incessantly corrected so as to achieve greater fidelity to the alterity of the Other in order to ensure justice. To be sure, the alterity of the Other can never be recognised as such, because it never appears; but that only means that the ethical relation with the Other is not dependant on such recognition.16 However, the attempt to recognise alterity, in a series of infinite re/presentations, is a political move, which allows for a comparison between the Other and the third, in order to approach an infinite responsibility to the Other. 15 Chapter

6, Section 6.3.

16 Another way of understanding this point, as an anonymous reviewer of this monograph helpfully

put it, is that “the ethical response is not premised on epistemic accuracy” (of the representation of the Other).

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The idea of a series of infinite re/presentations, or infinite series of re/presentations, incessantly correcting its own re/presentations (a series of infinite sayings incessantly correcting its saids) can be discerned in the following example: I present myself as feminine, but I am neither a fussing homemaker nor a doting mother, contrary to Levinas’ valorisation of the feminine as a paradigm for the selfless being for the other (in 1969, 154–156 and 1998, 75). That does not mean that I cannot be a ‘homebody’, eschewing social engagements for ‘hygge17 ’, nor that I do not cherish strong familial bonds. I can choose to present my femininity violently—as do professional female boxers and soldiers—or anachronistically, by enjoying my car-door being opened for me by my partner. As Walt Whitman rhapsodises in Leaves of Grass, “I contain multitudes” (1855, 1959, 85). The Other’s re/presentation of themself is obviously not always, or necessarily, as overt as might be inferred from these examples. Neither the Other nor the self have full mastery over how and what they re/present to the world. Indeed—the epiphanic re/presentation of the alterity of the face is not a conscious event but, a sensible event. However, the sensibility of epiphanic re/presentation is an ethical event, whereas the consciousness of concrete re/presentation is a political event. The self and Other are incessantly and recursively oscillating between these two forms of re/presentation (the one sensible, the other conscious) because settling on either is undecidable. Perpich sums up these shifting re/presentations of the face of the Other—“‘I am this’, the face says, ‘but not only this’. And even as it refuses representation in one sense, the face demands it in another” (2008, 194). The face attempts to re/present the alterity of the Other in an infinite amount of ways—as this, as that, as both this and that—“the whole of singularity’s desire and demand is that it be affirmed”; but “every affirmation of it is the beginning of its betrayal” (ibid.). That is, every concrete re/presentation is a totalisation, every Saying ushers in a Said. At this point it is necessary to recall the Levinasian reinscription of the provisional imperative: when representing the Other, always consider other ways of representing the Other. Each re/presentation of the Other is provisional because each re/presentation is only one of an infinite number of ways in which the Other can be re/presented. Each re/presentation of the Other is radically contingent on the context of our face-to-face encounter: do I first encounter the female pugilist on the canvas of a boxing ring for example, or stuck by the side of the road with a flat tyre? In the first scenario, she represents an independent and dangerous opponent; in the second, a dependant and vulnerable woman. If I meet her for the first time at a boxing tournament, then I will need to revise my understanding of who she is when I encounter her again at the animal shelter fundraiser. Such an understanding will be provisional still, and in turn subject to further revision and refining when I encounter her browsing the aisles at the local comic bookstore. In each subsequent encounter, at the limit, an infinite number of encounters, she will appear in a different light, either a slightly different, or drastically different light. Even in a familiar setting, the 17 Hygge

is a Danish word whose closest English approximation is ‘cosy’. Hygge has trended globally in the last few years as a lifestyle choice which basks in the simple enjoyments centred on ‘hearth and home’. (See, for example, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-yearof-hygge-the-danish-obsession-with-getting-cozy, accessed 4 November 2019.)

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other people present will vary, or she will be in a different mood, with concomitant effects on how she appears. Levinasian normativity drives this incessant correction of her appearance—each appearance is one provisional appearance is an infinite series of appearances. Any one appearance will elicit both an ethical and political response from me, a ethical response which is also necessarily a political response— an ethico-politico response—a response that will limit my infinite responsibility to her and also, then, restore that infinite responsibility back as I respond in a different way. I now want to tease out this imbrication of infinite representation and infinite responsibility more extensively, by recapitulating with Perpich’s remarks on the appearance of the face which appears, “in the moment of my response to an other whom I do not ‘know’ is there; it consists in a ‘response-ability,’ or a response given before I could know myself to be called” (2008, 8). In other words, the concrete appearance of the face manifests once I respond to the transcendental appearance— epiphany—of the face, and this response-ability of the self, ties the self to an infinite responsibility to and for the Other. I now want to claim that because the face appears in an infinite number of forms, or that the singularity of the Other can be re/presented in an infinite number of ways, the self is obligated to respond to the summons of the face in a correspondingly infinite number of ways. My response-ability to the Other is an infinite response-ability to the infinite ways in which the face can appear concretely and in which the Other can re/present their singularity. As the face can manifest in an infinite number of ways, my response to those manifold appearances will be undecidable. As per the caveat at the end of the previous section (that the link between responsibility and response-ability must not be overstated so that the importance of accountability is lost) this infinite response-ability must not be understood circularly as creating infinite responsibility. Rather, response-ability to the other just is responsibility for the other, where responsibility is understood as accountability. Infinite response-ability to the epiphanic re/presentation of the face is infinite responsibility for the Other; also: the self’s infinite response-ability to the infinite representations of the alterity of the Other is infinite responsibility. I can now use this reading of an infinite responsibility, as including also an infinite response-ability, to elaborate on Levinas’s claims that “infinity of responsibility denotes not its actual immensity, but a responsibility increasing in the measure that it is assumed” (1969, 244). As against a responsibility that is unquantifiably large (Wood, op cit.) or “an innumerable collection of duties”, Perpich takes Levinas’s remarks on infinite responsibility to mean that the better I accomplish my obligations, the more demands I find addressed to me. It is not a matter of the actual number of demands increasing, but a matter of my sensitivity increasing so that the demands and injustices of which I was formerly unaware now come to press and weigh on my conscience. (2008, 89)

I now want to put it that the subject’s increasing sensitivity results from their ability to correct their response to the Other in accordance with the shifting re/presentations of the alterity of the Other. While the number of demands made by the Other on me does not increase, the number of ways in which these demands can be re/presented does,

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at the limit, in an infinite number of ways. The ‘better’ I respond to any particular re/presentation of the demand of the Other, or the more faithfully I can re/present that demand, the more different re/presentations of the demand are offered up to me, which in turn require still further responses from me. I can never fully discharge my responsibility to the Other, because the responsibility can always be represented in one more form. However, it is the same responsibility and as such it is a limited responsibility. Before recapitulating and tying together all the argumentative strands and different formulations of a Levinasian normativity in the chapter’s conclusion, I want to contrast a recursive representation of an infinite demand as postulated in this section, with an iterated moral demand described in relation to fair-share approaches and the LSA (life-saving analogy) discussed in Chapter 3.18 A morally iterative demand requires the agent to fulfil the same moral demand over and over such as when we are obliged to donate to different charities even if we have already donated to others. The moral force to donate to one more charity is not lessened by one more donation. Moral iteration can transform even small costs into a great sacrifice and then they can become too morally-demanding. An infinite responsibility may appear even more morally demanding if it is understood as a moral demand that is infinitely iterated. However, if an infinite responsibility is understood as an infinite process to arrive at a true representation of what a demand requires, then that is not a morally-demanding position, but an ethically responsible position which seeks to respect the singularity of that demand.

7.6 Conclusion Critchley remarks that for Levinas, “ethics is ethical for the sake of politics—that is, for the sake of a new conception of the organization of political space” (1999a, 223). This chapter has offered a Levinasian normativity as a means to think about how such a reimagined political space might work. The Other takes my autonomy hostage in an ethical relation which obligates me with an infinite responsibility. The third restores a measure of autonomy back to me—to compare incomparables and determine which demand is more urgent. The third opens up a political space in which justice can be done and limits my infinite responsibility. However, to recall Critchley: “it is because responsibility is infinite that the decision is always undecidable” (1999b, 108). It is to traverse this undecidability that Levinasian normativity constructs a bridge, building on justice/politics as “the incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity”. It can, however, only be a provisional solution. Levinasian normativity is a normativity without norms, and as such it circumscribes a meta-ethical position which can be articulated in a variety of nested formulations: Levinasian normativity is the recursive oscillation between the Saying and the

18 Section

3.3.1.2.

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Said, between ethics and politics, between the concrete and transcendental appearance of the face; which operates in a quasi-transcendental manner to traverse the undecidability this oscillation produces. In this way Levinasian normativity limits and then restores the infinite responsibility of the self to and for the Other. The quasitranscendental is the employing of the fiction that the concrete can appear as if it were transcendent; that a relative moral injunction could operate as if it were universal. The quasi-transcendental then, allows us to keep what is useful in impartialist moral theory without rejecting such approaches wholesale. Levinasian normativity, operating quasi-transcendentally, allows the Said to operate as if it were a Saying; as if the alterity of the Other could be fully re/presented in the present; as if infinite responsibility could be limited, as if the undecidable decision could be decided. Drabinski writes that “politics […] disturbs the intimacy of the face-to-face pair by interjecting the universal between a relation of singulars” (2000, 51). However, the intimacy of the face-to-face must always be restored, and so a Levinasian normativity, operating quasi-transcendentally, would argue that the intimacy of the face to face pair requires the singularity of the Other to manifest as if it were universal. The quasi-transcendental manner in which undecidability is traversed can be also be described under an imperative of provisionality. It is because the decision is undecidable that any decision to respond to the Other either ethically or politically must be provisional. By marking all representations of the ethical—the face of the Other—as provisional, and thus in need of revision, the provisional imperative ensures that the ethical is incessantly corrected by the political—the recursive oscillation of Levinasian normativity. In delineating the provisional imperative, it was argued that following this imperative manifested in a certain ethical attitude—that alterity be respected, that knowledge be revised—an ethical attitude that is also reflective of a Levinasian normativity. In the previous chapter I argued that Levinas’s claim that discourse is an attitude could be restated as the claim that ethics—the primordial ethical relation of the self and the Other in the face to face encounter—is a type of attitude. This chapter has traced the claim that ethics necessarily passes into politics (the third is already there in the face-to-face—the third and the Other are contemporaneous). This chapter then also establishes how the ethical relation signified in the face of the Other encounter and which appears as an ethical attitude in an epiphanic re/presentation, is also, diachronically the ethical attitude which appears when that face is given concrete form in a political calculation. Finally, Levinasian normativity allows us to limit infinite responsibility responsibly: by turning from the magnitude of that responsibility to the infinite re/presentations of that responsibility. My autonomy is held hostage by the Other before me—I am infinitely responsible to the Other—but because I cannot decide how to re/present that responsibility from among an infinite series of re/presentations—my autonomy is an autonomy of undecidability. The autonomy of the self is an autonomy of undecidability that tracks the recursive oscillations of Levinasian normativity— an autonomy operating as the oscillation between two undecidable decisions, the decision to respond to the other in front of me ethically or politically. As such, the autonomy of undecidability also reveals itself as a type of ethical attitude.

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In the next chapter I will enlist this autonomy of undecidability, which describes a subject operating under a Levinasian normativity and with a certain ethical attitude, in order to reconceptualise supererogation as a supererogatory attitude. In doing so I intend to dissolve the manifold problems of supererogation discussed in the study’s first half.

References Bernasconi, R. (1991). Skepticism in the face of philosophy. In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), Re-reading Levinas (pp. 149–161). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bernasconi, R. (2002). What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer? In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 234–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. London: Routledge. Critchley, S. (1999a). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Critchley, S. (1999b). Ethics-politics-subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas & contemporary French thought. London: Verso. Critchley, S. (2012). Infinitely demanding. Ethics of commitment, politics of resistance. London: Verso. Derrida, J. (1992). Force of law: “Mystical foundations of authority” (M. Quaintance, Trans.). In D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, & D. G. Carlson (Eds.), Deconstruction and the possibility of justice (pp. 3–67). New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1996). Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism. In C. Mouffe (Ed.), Deconstruction and pragmatism (pp. 79–90). London and New York: Routledge. Drabinski, J. (2000). The possibility of an ethical politics. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26(4), 49–73. Dussel, E. (1999). “Sensibility” and “otherness” in Levinas. Philosophy Today, 43(2), 126–134. Jordaan, E. (2009). Cosmopolitanism, freedom, and indifference: A Levinasian view. Alternatives, 34, 83–106. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1988). ‘The paradox of morality’: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas by T. Wright, P. Hayes and A. Ainley (A. Benjamin & T. Wright, Trans.). In R. Bernasconi & D. Wood (Eds.), The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the other. London: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1996). Basic philosophical writings (A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, & R. Bernasconi, Eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Levinas, E. (2001). Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (J. Robbins, Ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McMurray, R., Pullen, A., & Rhodes, C. (2010). Ethical subjectivity and politics in organizations: A case of health care tendering. Organization, 18(4), 541–561. Morgan, M. L. (2007). Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perpich, D. (2008). The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Preiser, R., & Cilliers, P. (2010). Unpacking the ethics of complexity: Concluding reflections. In P. Cilliers & R. Preiser (Eds.), Complexity, difference and identity (pp. 265–287). London and New York: Springer. Raffoul, F. (2008). Derrida and the ethics of the impossible. Research in Phenomenology, 38, 270–290. Whitman, W. (1855/1959). Leaves of grass. Middlesex, UK: Penguin. Woermann, M. (2016). Bridging complexity and post-structuralism: Insights and implications. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International. Woermann, M., & Cilliers, P. (2012). The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics. South African Journal of Philosophy, 31(2), 447–463. Wolff, E. (2011). Political responsibility for a globalised world. After Levinas’ humanism. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. Wood, D. (1999). The experience of the ethical. In R. Kearney & M. Dooley (Eds.), Questioning ethics: Contemporary debates in philosophy (pp. 105–119). London, New York: Routledge.

Chapter 8

Supererogation Reconceptualised as Levinasian Normativity

Abstract This chapter reconceptualises supererogation as the diachronic movement of Levinasian normativity. More specifically, supererogation is described as the ethical attitude which recursively imagines the alterity of the Other as an infinite series of re/presentations of that alterity in order to navigate the undecidability of the ethical and political responses to those re/presentations, so that infinite responsibility to and for the Other can be limited and then restored back again. This is, and can only be, a provisional formulation—a formulation that operates as if it were a definitive formulation of supererogation. I then reformulate this provisional formulation to argue that supererogation as Levinasian normativity can also be understood as the (im)possibility of sacrifice, and concomitantly, the provisionality of saintliness and heroism. I also claim that a major result of this reconceptualisation of supererogation is that it dissolves the perspectival problem of supererogation. However, the recursivity of Levinasian normativity, and the autonomy of undecidability that marks it, means that the problem of supererogation reconstitutes itself. In light of these findings, the problems of moral demandingness raised by moral iteration and moral aggregation together with the duties to rescue and duties of justice, are revisited and found to constitute a false dichotomy. The chapter concludes by considering several objections to supererogation reconceptualised as a Levinasian normativity and manifesting as a supererogatory attitude. I dismiss the claim that Levinasian normativity makes the concept of supererogation redundant and argue that the term ‘supererogation’ should be retained as a reminder of the undecidability that demarcating the limits of a morally-demanding infinite responsibility encompasses.

8.1 Introduction Part two of this study, which turns to the continental tradition for ethical resources with which to approach the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness, saw key terms from the part one of the study, conducted primarily from within the analytic moral tradition, reinscribed into Levinasian terms. Thereafter, in the preceding chapter, a Levinasian ethics was operationalised as a Levinasian normativity in order to put these reinscribed terms to work in service of a reconceptualised © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_8

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supererogation. Levinasian normativity was itself reinscribed into various formulations as a means to describe the recursivity and provisionality that are its central characteristics. To that end, the recursive modality of Levinasian normativity was also described as a series of infinite re/presentations that are incessantly corrected so as to achieve greater fidelity to the alterity of the Other. Levinasian normativity was also characterised as an ethical attitude encapsulated in an autonomy of undecidability that while it cannot lessen infinite responsibility, allows for its limitation by navigating through the undecidability of re/presentation. Before finally offering a Levinasian reconceptualisation of supererogation, which will necessarily be a provisional reconceptualisation, I will draw on Levinasian normativity to reinscribe, or rather, ameliorate, one last important concept from the first half of the study—Taylor’s primitive moral responses. Taylorian responses proceed from recognising the other’s suffering as like my own. This reinscription will however proceed quite quickly as the Levinasian framework has already been established, and the problem with, and purported remedy to, Taylor’s primitive moral responses already outlined.1 The reconceptualisation of supererogation offered here will, like a Taylorian primitive moral response (conceived of as a Wittgensteinian attitude toward a soul), be described as a particular type of attitude, an attitude based in, and following from, the recursive modality of Levinasian normativity. The first section of this chapter will offer a brief summary of the discussion in Chapter 4 of Taylorian primitive responses and its shortcomings. This will segue into outlining a Levinasian moral response, which because it is grounded in an affective and sensible recognition of the Other, does not turn primitive moral responses into deliberative responses which totalise the suffering of the Other. I will argue that Levinasian normativity ensures that Taylorian primitive responses remain primitive—that is immediate and unthinking—so that the alterity of the Other can be recognised in its own terms. In the section thereafter, after recapitulating the manifold problems of supererogation and moral demandingness mapped in the study’s first half, I offer my (provisional) definition of supererogation as the diachronic movement of Levinasian normativity which manifests as an attitude directed at overcoming the undecidability of the recursive oscillations between the ethical and political representations of the Other. Section 8.4 has me reformulating this conceptualisation of supererogation by returning to the terms used in the appeal to cost approaches which centred around sacrifice and saints and heroes. I suggest that sacrifice is an (im)possible concept because determining what constitutes a sacrifice is undecidable and so any determination of cost, and a concomitant limit to responsibility should remain a provisional determination. Similarly, any descriptor of a moral agent as a saint or hero must remain provisional. I also unpack one implication of Levinasian normativity which follows these formulations: every moral action is also a supererogatory action. In light of these findings, I revisit the conflation of duties to rescue and duties of justice, and the problems of moral iteration and moral

1 Chapter

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aggregation associated with these duties discussed in the analysis of the LSA (lifesaving analogy) in Chapter 3. The final section addresses possible objections to the reconceptualisation of supererogation I offer.

8.2 Reinscribing Taylorian Primitive Moral Responsiveness into the Moral Responsiveness of Levinasian Normativity I will start by recapitulating the discussion from Chapter 4 by reminding the reader what the introduction of Taylor’s primitive moral responses was meant to address, the workings of such responses, and also what I took as the shortcomings of such responses. Taylor’s primitive moral responsiveness—Taylorian responsiveness, or a Taylorian response, for short—was introduced as a corrective to Bernard Williams’s notion of a moral incapacity because moral incapacities follow from moral deliberation and thus miss a crucial, non-deliberative aspect of such incapacities. Moral incapacities in turn, were ventured because they offered a plausible explanation of the reluctant saint and heroes’ claim that they could do no other but perform a purportedly supererogatory act. These moral incapacities highlighted the perspectival problem of supererogation which in turn placed the autonomy of the agent as a necessary component of supererogation in doubt. A Taylorian response, as an immediate and unthinking response to the suffering of the other person, offered a means to sidestep the autonomy of the agent with respect to supererogation. I argued that a Taylorian response, as a type of ethical attitude (a Wittgensteinian attitude toward a soul) which recognised the others’ suffering, was a means to solve the problems of supererogation by conceptualising supererogation as a supererogatory attitude. Despite the promise of Taylorian responsiveness, I argued further that it came unstuck because the recognition at its centre was based on a recognition of the Other’s suffering as like my own. The trouble this qualification raises was brought into sharper focus when a Taylorian response was considered as sympathy and contrasted with empathy. To reiterate the point made there, my concern was not, and is not, to become entangled in an interminable debate as to what distinguishes sympathy from empathy, although one aspect on which the debate turns—what imagining the other feels or thinks consists in—is useful to my own project. Is moral imagination driven by cognition and knowledge or by non-deliberative emotion? A Taylorian response undoes itself as an immediate and unthinking response when it collapses into a deliberative response. This can be traced back to tying that response with a recognition of the others suffering as like my own—in other words, Taylor’s response devolves into consciousness—a rationality. Moral imagination then, as a means to imagine the offers’ suffering, must proceed in a non-deliberative way. Levinas’s idea of the sensibility of the face as against the consciousness of the face gives us a way to frame this type of moral imagination. However, such a sensibility can only arise in a relationship with the other (the ethical relationship of the face to face) and this is what is missing in Taylor’s account. A

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Taylorian response can only recognise another’s suffering as like their own because that recognition flows from the self to the other, and that, on a Levinasian account is not an ethical relationship. Levinas is better placed to explain how the recognition of the others suffering (whether that is a sympathetic or empathetic recognition) as a non-deliberative (non-conscious) and affective (sensible) response to the Other can move me to respond in a certain way and with a certain attitude—a supererogatory attitude. Such a non-deliberative and affective response is a truly immediate and unthinking response—in other words, a Levinasian response to the suffering of another is a Taylorian response in the true and strict sense that Taylor defines that response. Grounded in an affective and sensible recognition of the Other, moral imagination operates in the manner of a Levinasian normativity: as a recursive and continuous revision of the my representations of the Other’s suffering which, because they are not like my own, I fail to recognise, but which nonetheless still shape my moral (political) responses to the Other in the process of revising those representations. A final way to formulate the distinction between a Taylorian and Levinasian response would be to characterise both as a Saying, but that a Taylorian response eventually slides back into a Said, while Levinasian normativity does not—it unsays that Said in its recursive oscillation. I want to demonstrate how the above discussion plays out in practice by revisiting Taylor’s example of his friend’s response to a bag-lady whom he has just offered a loaf of bread to. The friend does this because he recognises her suffering as hunger. However, this is not a suffering like his own because, surely, he is not suffering hunger himself (at least not debilitating hunger); perhaps he would suffer such hunger if he were reduced to the bag-lady’s circumstances. It is a primitive moral response, but it is the wrong response insofar as the bag-lady rejects the offer and throws it back at him. The friend’s response expresses an attitude toward a soul in that it is an acknowledgement that the bag-lady is human with thoughts and feelings and who is suffering. However, it turns out that his attitude is misplaced, insofar as he misinterprets that suffering. Following the provisional imperative of Levinasian normativity, the friend needs to correct his understanding of the bag-lady’s suffering. Taylor suggests that the suffering of the bag-lady might be understood not as physical hunger, but as psychological humiliation. He writes that this conclusion might be arrived at by way of ‘a good deal of reflection’, that is, conscious deliberation. Supposedly then, my sympathising with the bag-lady’s suffering as humiliation would be because I recognise such humiliation as like my own. But the bag-lady’s alterity thwarts my attempt to recognise her suffering, whether that suffering consists in hunger or humiliation, as like my own. My reflection in this case amounts to a reduction of the other to the same; in attempting to represent the ethical demand of the bag-lady, I am totalising her within a system of representation (of suffering). My ability to respond ethically to the bag-lady, my response-ability, has been compromised by the limits of my representation of her suffering. Taylor might argue that recognising the bag-lady’s suffering as humiliation is an appropriate revision, and thus heeds the provisional imperative. However, because such revision is driven by reflection, such a revision will always run up against the limits of representation. Such a revising of the bag-lady’s suffering will fail, because

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each revised response is limited by a deliberation that is trying to recognise the revised representation as like my own. Take the notion of humiliation and consider what it might consist in: one might suppose humiliation is connected to pride—considering yourself sufficiently independent to be able to pay rent and buy groceries. The baglady’s suffering as humiliation then, might consist in not being able to afford to buy a loaf of bread and being too proud to ask for, or accept, money to do so. Once again, I can recognise such a wounded pride as like my own and can respond in the appropriate way to meet such a representation of suffering. However, such a representation is provisional still. If the bag-lady was born into a poor home and forced onto the streets at a very early age, then her notion of pride and self-sufficiency will be markedly different from a lady from a privileged background who had ‘fallen from grace’ and lost her home and job due to a drug addiction. In the former case pride may consist in not backing down from some fisticuffs with another bag-lady, whereas the latter may consist in not wanting to ask for money. Each revision of our representation of the bag-lady and her suffering is likely to introduce more complexity, such that further deliberation will be less and less likely to produce a response from us that recognises such suffering as like our own. Deliberation will eventually run up against the limits of representation and, at some point, we will not be able to recognise the substance of the suffering at all. To recall, the recursivity of Levinasian normativity is an incessant correction—an infinite correction of infinite re/presentations—that is bounded by sensibility and affectivity, not consciousness. There is another way to frame the recognition of the other’s suffering in Levinasian normativity—as a quasi-transcendental recognition: a Levinasian moral response is an attitude towards the Other which imagines the suffering of the other as if it were my own, and not like my own. Woermann and Cilliers argue that the provisional imperative arises because our representations (models) of the Other are radically contingent in time and space.2 Our representations of the bag-lady’s suffering consisting in humiliation is contingent on several factors, for example: although she has no fixed home, she has access to homeless shelters; although she is homeless, she is not without possessions (as a bag-lady, she possesses bags in which to keep the odds and ends she collects on the streets); and, although she is hungry or undernourished, she has some access to food from soup kitchens or from rummaging in dust-bins. Within that context, it is not egregious to represent her suffering as hunger, and not humiliation. Consider however, an emaciated mother of five stranded in an overcrowded refugee camp for several years. Our representations of what her suffering consists in will be contingent on almost opposite conditions: she cannot choose what her next meal will be, whether it be bread or soup—if she does not eat, she will die; and although she may be able to move within the camp, she cannot walk away precisely because she needs to consider her children’s survival. In this case, we are unlikely to recognise the mother’s rejection of bread (or any food) as stemming from humiliation, but rather from despair. Whether I can recognise such suffering as like my own is questionable, especially since I have had three meals a day every day of my life. I certainly will not 2 See

Chapter 7, Sect. 7.4.

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be able to reach an answer by reflecting on the matter. I can imagine such suffering as an intellectual moral exercise but, because I cannot recognise such suffering as like my own, such an imagining can only operate recursively if it is to recognise any suffering at all. This moral imagination, like a Levinasian normativity, will be driven by a continuous correction of the infinite re/presentations of the Other (and the Other’s suffering) presented to me. This infinite re/presentation will in turn serve to correct my provisional responses to her. With a Taylorian response ameliorated as a Levinasian normative response, I can now proceed to reconceptualise supererogation as Levinasian normativity.

8.3 Supererogation Reconceptualised as Levinasian Normativity At this juncture it is necessary to return to the original ‘twofold’ problem of supererogation with which this study started in order to make sense of how the reconceptualisation of supererogation I propose addresses that problem in particular, and the wider problem of moral-demandingness in which it is situated more generally. The problem of supererogation bifurcates into a meta-ethical and normative problem (or so Heyd claims): the meta-ethical problem presents a paradox because a theory that circumscribes the boundaries in which a moral agent has duties cannot talk about actions outside of those boundaries as being duties; the normative problem concerns how to demarcate the limit of those duties, however those duties are defined—whether as the duty to to maximise happiness, or as the duty to follow the categorical imperative. However, these supposedly two distinct problems are in fact just two different ways of describing one problem—this becomes clear when we turn to the fundamental asymmetry that marks supererogation and what was called the perspectival problem of supererogation.3 From the perspective of the agent they regard their (purportedly supererogatory) action as just their duty. In terms in which the problem of supererogation is posed, what this amounts to is that if a moral theory designates a limit to duty (at the point of marginal utility for example) then the agent does not regard their purportedly supererogatory action as going beyond that limit, but as an action that falls within that limit. From the perspective of the spectator they regard the purportedly supererogatory act as falling outside the boundary which the moral theory has designated as its limit. In either case, whether from the perspective of the agent, or the spectator, what is involved is tantamount to saying, ‘this act is, or is not supererogatory because it falls within prescribed boundaries.’ What the perspectival problem of supererogation underscores is the role autonomy plays in this problem—whether that problem is broken down as a separate normative and meta-ethical problem or not. This is because autonomy and duty implicate each other: the further out the limits of duty are drawn, the more they potentially encroach upon the autonomy of the moral agent. It is this imbrication of autonomy and duty 3 See

Chapter 2, Sect. 2.3.1 and Chapter 4, Sect. 4.3.

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that is at the heart of the problem of supererogation, and which raises the spectre of an overdemanding and overweening morality. While one possible solution to the perspectival problem in particular, and to the problem of supererogation in general, is to argue that only the agent can hold themselves responsible (and not a spectator) and holds themselves so responsible precisely by saying that the action in question does indeed fall within a certain limit, this view of the autonomy is problematised if moral incapacities, and a fortiori, Taylorian responses, are understood as superseding that autonomy. Taylor argues that the reason moral incapacities fail is that they are deliberative—because they are ultimately grounded in the rationality of the agent. It is this rationality which allows the agent to discover that they are under the sway of a moral incapacity in the first place, and which obligates them to perform certain actions—purportedly supererogatory actions they (rationally) believe fall within certain limits and thus make them obligatory. However, I have demonstrated that Taylorian responses are also ultimately grounded in deliberation and rationality because the recognition of the Other they draw on is based on their recognition of the Other as like themself. It is this recognition on which the agent decides to respond in a certain way, which may include performing a purportedly supererogatory action. The autonomy of a Taylorian agent manifests itself in the agent’s ability to decide—an autonomy of decidability. However, Levinasian ethics demonstrates that rationality and deliberation cannot help an agent to overcome their undecidability as to what action might be the appropriate response to the suffering of the Other, and this is because it is impossible to ever recognise the Other’s suffering as like my own as the Other is radically other. The autonomy of a Levinasian agent thus manifests itself in an autonomy of undecidability. In terms of the problem of supererogation: the autonomy of undecidability means that neither the agent nor the spectator is able to decide where to draw the limits of an obligation to ease the suffering of the Other and as such, neither can say that that any action goes beyond that limit. In other words, undecidability means that neither an agent nor a spectator can call an action supererogatory or not. This means that the perspectival problem of supererogation dissolves! The perspective from the agent and from the spectator is no longer asymmetrical but symmetrical— both have to regard the determination of an action as being required or not within certain limits as undecidable. If the twofold problem of supererogation is just one problem whose essence is the perspectival problem, then on Levinas’s account the problem of supererogation also dissolves! However, the agent must decide and must act! And so the problem of supererogation reconstitutes itself. But whatever this decision—that a particular (political) action falls within the limits of my obligation and is thus not supererogatory—that decision can only be provisional. Only by operating under a Levinasian normativity can an agent’s (political) decision remain ethical. Levinasian normativity thus dissolves and reconstitutes the problem of supererogation incessantly; or alternatively, in Levinasian normativity the problem of supererogation oscillates between its saying and its unsaying

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The problem of supererogation then, can be restated as the problem of overcoming the undecidability of demarcating the limits of obligation. Supererogation can then be reconceptualised as the diachronic movement of Levinasian normativity. More specifically, taking Levinasian normativity as an attitude directed at the recursive oscillations between ethics and politics, Supererogation is the ethical attitude which recursively imagines the alterity of the Other, as a infinite series of re/presentations of that alterity, by traversing the undecidability of the ethical and political responses to those re/presentations, in order to limit infinite responsibility to and for the Other and then restore that infinity of responsibility back again.

As should be expected, this formulation is a provisional formulation, and can only be stated provisionally! This formulation then, states itself as if it could stand as a definitive formulation of supererogation. In the section to follow I will offer further reformulations of this provisional definition by attempting to resay it using the concepts of sacrifice and saintliness used in delineating the problem of supererogation and moral demandingness in the first half of the study.

8.4 Saints and Sacrifice 8.4.1 The (Im)Possibility of Sacrifice This study commenced by tracing the genesis of the contemporary supererogation debate in Urmson’s (1958) ‘Saints and Heroes’, in which he argued that the actions of saints and heroes are praiseworthy because they constitute a sacrifice voluntary undertaken.4 However Urmson later recanted this position, arguing that everyday acts such as kindness are also voluntary and praiseworthy (thus ostensibly supererogatory acts) and yet do not involve sacrifice at all. Both Urmson’s initial position and subsequent volte-face confirm an appeal to cost approach to supererogation—trivial costs to the moral agent do not amount to sacrifice and so do not amount to supererogation.5 Appeals to cost also place the autonomy of the agent at the centre of supererogation— only an agent can decide that an action constitutes a great cost to them, and so counts as supererogation. By reconceptualising supererogation as Levinasian normativity, the error in positing saintly and heroic acts as supererogatory can now be elaborated upon. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes that “the passage of the identical to the other […] makes possible sacrifice” (1998, 117) [emphasis added]. In other words, it is not actual sacrifice, but the possibility of sacrifice that establishes the ethical relation of proximity. Bernasconi confirms that Levinas “is not saying one should sacrifice oneself. He merely wants to account for its possibility” (2002, 245). How is sacrifice possible? Or what are the conditions for the possibility of sacrifice? The moral agent 4 Chapter 5 Chapter

2, Sect. 2.2. 2, Sect. 2.3.

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must be able to decide that an act constitutes a sacrifice, that is, whether it costs them a great deal to perform. However, in performing the act, the agent demonstrates that they do not consider the act a great cost after all—so, sacrifice is impossible. To use a Derridean stylisation—sacrifice is (im)possible. Sacrifice is (im)possible because it is rooted in the autonomy of undecidability—the agent cannot decide the moral cost of performing an action because that calculation requires a comparison with an incomparable Other. Sacrifice and the determination of moral cost brings us back to politics—Critchley confirms: “for Levinas, politics begins as ethics, that is, as the possibility of sacrifice” (1999, 225). In the terminology of Levinasian normativity I have developed, we can say that the (im)possibility of sacrifice is the traversing of the undecidability of choosing to sacrifice, by recursively reimagining the cost of responding to the alterity of the Other as by turns both trivial and very costly. The boundary between a trivial cost and a great cost, or sacrifice, is a provisional boundary, a boundary that must be incessantly revised. Furthermore, if one reads the (im)possibility of sacrifice to mean what Derrida calls the “space or risk of absolute sacrifice” (1995, 68), then the (im)possibility of sacrifice also indicates a certain ethical attitude—what I have called above, a supererogatory attitude. In confirming that every moral action, no matter how trivial and banal, is fecund with the possibility of sacrifice, we can also state that every moral act is also a supererogatory act, or rather a provisionally supererogatory act which manifests in a supererogatory attitude, an attitude which is circumscribed in a Levinasian normativity. Similarly, every moral actor that responds to the Other, however trivially is also a saint, also a hero; or rather, again, a provisional saint, a provisional hero. Levinas is notoriously vague on how we can demonstrate an ‘attitude of the same with regard to the Other irreducible to the representation of the Other’—an infinite responsibility—but he does say that in can be discerned in even the slightest of everyday gestures, “the little there is, even the simple ‘after you sir’” (1998, 117). The simple hand gesture that signifies to another to enter a building before oneself demonstrates our recognition of the Other’s alterity—even if that recognition is weighed down in the polite norms of social etiquette, those norms find their origin in the signification of the face. Perpich clarifies: “[t]he events we recognize as ethical, from the polite gestures of social commerce to the selfless lives of saints, and everything in between, are predicated upon or find their condition in the unconditionality of being hostage [to the demands of the other]” (2008, 135). The unconditionality of being hostage goes further—we cannot escape it even if we decide to ignore the Other and knock them aside so that we can proceed before them into an entrance. Our irritation at having to pause so that the Other can proceed is itself a confirmation of the Other’s alterity, and at the very least an acknowledgement that a justification is required to establish why they are not worthy of going first—not to them of course, but to ourselves at the very minimum. Levinas is aware that the face can arouse irritation and even violence—“violence can only aim at a face” (1969, 225). Our irritated or violent responding to the alterity of the Other is proof of our sense of responsibility towards them—an acknowledgement of the normative force the face exerts over us. Eisenstadt concludes that “at the core of Levinas’s philosophy we do not find simple responsibility, but a responsibility that can, and perhaps often does,

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manifest as hostility” (2012, 53). The face exerts a normative force over us, and our hostility is a misguided attempt to meet that normative force with a causal force. In one interview, Levinas (in Goud 2008) says that “what one asks of oneself, one asks of a saint”. However, we can only ever respond to this request in a provisionally saintly fashion: in another interview Levinas writes that we cannot not admire saintliness. Not the sacred, but saintliness: that is, the person who in his being is more attached to the being of the other than to his own. I believe that it is in saintliness that the human begins; not in the accomplishment of saintliness, but in the value. It is the first value, an undeniable value. (1988, 172) (emphasis added)

In other words, in the value, but not the accomplishment, of saintliness, the subjectivity of the self manifests as the (im)possibility of saintliness; and also the (im)possibility of heroism. I will elaborate on this by returning first, to Urmson’s hero who jumps on an activated grenade and is killed but, in so doing, saves the lives of his comrades, and second, to Wolf’s moral saints.6 While jumping on an activated grenade can be characterised as ‘unthinking and immediate’, that is, a Taylorian primitive moral response, there is still a small window for deliberation. Cowley speculates that the grenade-jumper may believe he will be killed by the explosion anyway and so calculates that he has nothing to lose and may as well try to spare his comrades the worst of the blast (2015, 5).7 But, imagine another scenario: just before he leaps, the grenade-jumper is reminded of a childhood friend which shifts the manifold re/presentations of his comrades in the moments before the blast, and so he revise’s his response such that their being saved is not a by-product of his action but its very aim. The revision of such a response can only manifest as an attitude—he has already propelled his body on an irreversible trajectory to land upon the live grenade. Thereafter, the grenade goes off and the grenade-jumper can no longer revise his response, can no longer change his attitude in relation to what has unfolded. The limited duration in which the action takes place, its vey urgency, stops any further representations of the Others in that situation. The recursive oscillation of Levinasian normativity stops in the Said of the response of the grenade-jumper. If the grenade goes off, the (im)possibility of sacrifice is actualised, if not, the (im)possibly of sacrifice remains. Either way, the grenade-jumper’s response manifests as an attitude of openness to the possibility of sacrifice. Another way of formulating this supererogatory attitude, the ethical attitude manifested in Levinasian normativity, comes from Wood, who remarks that “[o]penness does not require that one leaves the door open, but that one is willing to open the door. Responsibility is the experience of that openness” (1999, 117). Responsibility then, does not require us to go in search of situations in which to demonstrate our heroism—there is “something unseemly about longing to be a hero” as Cowley says (2015, 9). The hero is not the one who necessarily sacrifices, but the one who demonstrates their openness to the possibility of sacrifice in the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity. 6 Chapter 7 Chapter

2, Sect. 2.5.4. 2, Sect. 2.3.

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While (provisional) heroism is typically called upon in once-off or emergency situations (provisional), saintliness is usually a response to recurring and persistent states of affairs. These differences map the differences between duties of justice and duties to rescue outlined in Chapter 3.8 The former will be concerned with poverty relief and hunger prevention, while the latter outlines the obligation to save children drowning in ponds for example. In the case of a recurring situation, the agent will need to correct their responses more often, because the situational contingencies will shift the (infinite) re/presentations of the Others’ demands more often too. As there is more opportunity to revise these re/presentations, the possibility of sacrifice will also need to be revised more frequently. I return to Wolf’s moral saint examined in Chapter 2 to elaborate on this point.9 To recall, Wolf’s moral saint is a person “whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be” (1982, 419). However, how is it possible to know which actions are as morally good as possible? A categorical answer which establishes a universal criterion will not do, as this study’s critique of impartialism has shown. Instead we can offer a provisional answer which seeks the Good in a recursive imagining of the alterity of the Other. Wolf equates moral sainthood with moral perfection—“moral perfection, in the sense of moral saintliness” (ibid.). Perfection does not require that the good should be revised, because it is perfect. Levinas argues that rather than perfectionism, saintliness should be equated with utopianism: “there is no moral life without utopianism – utopianism in this exact sense that saintliness is goodness” (1988, 178). Utopianism can then be understood as an imperfect perfectionism—to coin a phrase in Levinas’ manner— perfectionism that is revisable because it is always provisional. The equation of saintliness with perfection (in place of utopianism) serves to discourage us from aiming for it. MacFarquhar recounts the life of ‘Baba’ who founds a leper colony in India and notes his rejoinders when people start to call him a saint: “he knew that the idea of saintliness was an alibi: to call him a saint was to suggest that he was a different order of creature, so ordinary people need not try to emulate his work” (2015, 133). Wolf argues that a necessary condition of moral sainthood is a life “dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole”, so that pursuits such as fashion and literature will have to be sacrificed (1982, 420). In keeping with the metaphor employed above to characterise the purported hero’s attitude, such a position should be seen as not just holding the door open but standing at the threshold, directing others through one’s open front door. In seeking saintliness, I mistake the embracing of infinite responsibility—the supererogatory attitude—for the assumption of infinite responsibility. I cannot assume infinite responsibility even if I wanted to; it is thrust upon me by the signification of the face. Wolf’s rejection of the moral saint is based on the conclusion that such dominating commitment to morality robs us of our autonomy to pursue other life-projects. Wolf goes as far as equating such loss of autonomy with the loss of self: “[t]he way in which morality, 8 Section 9 Section

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unlike other possible goals, is apt to dominate is particularly disturbing, for it seems to require either the lack or the denial of the existence of an identifiable self” (424). It is then no wonder that Wolf’s moral saint is such an unattractive figure. However, for Levinas, the domination of morality—an overdemanding morality, an overweening morality, a saintly morality—is not the evisceration of the self but the very foundation of the self: “willingness to serve is actually freedom, namely election. In the place of autonomy, I put election based on untransferable responsibility” (in Goud, 2008, 21). However, we have seen that this autonomy bound to the face of the Other is tied to the autonomy of undecidability which emerges in the political and public dimension of that same ethical relation. As such, as Morgan writes, there is “room for life spent on other things: art, music, sports, hobbies, and so forth […] which take time, effort and resources away from […] aid to the poor” (2007: 293). Morgan also argues persuasively that “it is very one-sided to look at art, music, poetry, and such activities as exclusively self-satisfying and self-serving. They are, after all, in their very creation a gift to others, a communication and a sharing, an act of the self for others” (295). The arts and fashion limit our infinite responsibility to the Other, insofar as such pursuits are necessarily political decisions. Regardless of whether I choose to do charity work on the weekend or teach my child to play the guitar, Levinasian normativity is incessantly calibrating those decisions so that they default back to an infinite responsibility to and for the Other. Consider again Peter Singer’s rejoinder to Wolf in which he imagines a scenario in which a doctor encounters a hundred injured victims of a train crash but chooses only to treat fifty of them because he is on the way to the opera.10 Singer argues that a commitment to the pleasures of opera should not override treating the other fifty injured passengers. Singer is undoubtedly correct on this point. However, his reasoning is flawed—I argued in Chapter 3 that he here conflates duties to rescue with duties of justice.11 I can now restate that conflation in Levinasian terminology. Firstly, we can say that indulging in the pleasures of opera follows a series of political choices in which I myself am a third party, but that that series of choices will need to be revised and corrected, and corrected very quickly, when I am faced with a hundred injured victims. Every decision to enjoy a non-moral pursuit carries the within it the possibly that I might need to sacrifice its enjoyment. Stopping to help victims of a train crash or any other emergency situation is a response to a rescue situation and gives rise to a duty to rescue—the situation a purported hero finds themselves in. In contradistinction, it is claimed that unjust situations give rise to duties of justice—a recurring situation a purported saint finds themselves confronting. I can now refine the charge against Singer: it is not that Singer conflates duties to rescue with duties of justice (and as a reminder, Singer does not state the difference in these terms), but rather that the division between the two duties is a false dichotomy. If heroes honour duties to rescue and saints honour duties of justice, then the rescue/justice dichotomy is only meaningful if the saint and 10 Chapter 11 Chapter

2, Sect. 2.5.4. 3, Sect. 3.3.1.2.

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the hero exemplify two distinct values—justice and courage respectively. However, what underpins both these values is the value of saintliness—‘being more attached to the being of the other than to his own’ (Levinas op cit.). That is to say, the purported saint and hero are both provisional descriptors of the same moral subject, the subject who acts with the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity. There is then, no duty to rescue to contrast with a duty of justice; there is just duty. Or better stated, there is no ethical responsibility to contrast with political responsibility; there is just responsibility.

8.4.2 False Dichotomies: Moral Iteration and Aggregation The (im)possibility of sacrifice which reveals a false dichotomy between duties to rescue and duties of justice also reveals a false dichotomy between iterative and aggregative moral approaches.12 To recall, within the context of the LSA (life-saving analogy), the iterative approach does not allow the moral force to save another drowning child to be diminished by already having saved one drowning child. In the context of saving drowning children, this iterable demand is uncontroversial. However, saving drowning children is a response to a rescue situation. The problem with the iterative approach emerges when it is extended to the second part of the analogy in the LSA, and we are required to help starving children by donating to charities and aid agencies. The analogy claims that just as the moral demand to save drowning children is iterable and not diminished by saving one drowning child, so too is the moral demand to help starving children. The moral requirement to donate is an iterable demand and is not diminished by previous donations to charity. The duty to donate to charity, otherwise a duty of justice, arises from recurring situations which are unjust. However, I have argued that duties to rescue and duties of justice are just the same duty. To develop the next part of my claim—that iterative and aggregative moral approaches amount to the same moral approach—recall that an aggregative approach considers the aggregate of an agent’s moral actions and the associated costs over the course of that agent’s whole life. If the demand to donate to charities is iterated enough times then the cost, while each small on their own, can add up to a very large aggregate cost. The aggregative approach would not require you to do anything beyond this aggregate cost, even if doing so could prevent a great harm. The problem is that while the aggregative approach, as against the iterative approach, might be morally justifiable in the case of donating to charities, in the case of saving drowning children it is monstrously absurd. Moral iteration can be defended when approaching either rescue or unjust situations, when we need to save drowning children and/or need to donate to charity. However, moral aggregation is justifiable only when applied to unjust situations. The LSA breaks down because Singer is conflating aggregative

12 See

Chapter 3, Sect. 3.3.1.2.

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and iterative approaches across the rescue and unjust situations which constitute his analogy. An aggregative approach which excuses us from making another donation, however small, may seem justifiable if your donations over a period of time amount to a considerable sum. Part of this justification can be explained as the difficulty (if not impossibility) of tying any one donation to a particular starving child saved from hunger. However, if someone were to say ‘Well, I have saved several children from drowning over the years which, taken together, has exacted quite a toll on me, and so I will not even try to save this drowning child now, even though I could, and even though considered by itself it will not exert me much’, then we would rightly call such a person a moral monster. The analogy between saving drowning children and donating to help starving children falls apart because the dichotomy between an aggregative and iterative approach is false. It is neither the magnitude nor the frequency of the sacrifice required by the agent that is at stake; rather both moral iteration and moral aggregation call for the (im)possibility of sacrifice. Both approaches are provisional and must be revised according to the contingencies of the situation. Calculating whether an iterated or aggregate cost is greater is (im)possible because it runs up against the undecidability of how to re/present the Other’s suffering. The decision which approach to follow must oscillate recursively between an iterative and aggregative approach. Moral aggregation relies on the agent’s previous responses to particular representations of the Other’s suffering in order to determine how they should respond in the present case. Moral aggregation fails when it forecloses a fresh judgement in response to a demand being represented in another way. The demand of the Other cannot be represented by aggregating all previous representations of the Other’s demand. Moral iteration fails on the same account in trying to decide undecidability and pin down provisionality. To elaborate this, I will return to Singer’s claim that “if we accept any principle of impartiality, universalisability, equality, or whatever, we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us” (1972, 232). I posed my response to this claim as the question ‘if we do not accept any principles of impartiality or universalisability, can we discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us?’13 Answering this requires considering how iterability and proximity tie up in Levinas’ claim that “[j]ustice only remains justice in a society where there is no distinction between those close and far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest” (1998, 159). An iterative approach to saving drowning children who are close by allows me to discharge my responsibility to other drowning children: I save one drowning child close by, continue, and then come across another child drowning in another pond close by. While in the second, third, and fourth iteration of this scenario I cannot pass by the drowning child without being obligated to rescue them, after enough iterations I will be excused from having to save another drowning child—I will be allowed to ‘pass by the closest’ because marginal utility will eventually kick in so that the moral calculus will justify such an omission. For example, after saving the 13 See

Chapter 3, Sect. 3.3.1.1.

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fourth drowning child I might be so physically exhausted that going in after the fifth drowning child would present a very real risk of me drowning. Both aggregative and iterative moral approaches allow the agent to be ‘let off the moral hook: moral iteration after marginal utility kicks in, while moral aggregation allows this exemption from the beginning of a confrontation with a series of drowning children (assuming that the agent had saved many other drowning children in the past and had incurred a very high aggregate moral cost as a result). A Levinasian approach on the other hand, never allows the agent ‘off the moral hook’ because the agent remains infinitely responsible to the series of drowning children—right from the start and even after marginal utility has been reached. However, this does not mean that the agent has to keep running into the water to save one more drowning child—Levinasian normativity circumscribes the (im)possibility of sacrifice, not the prescription of sacrifice. Levinasian normativity lets the agent off the moral hook, but then places them right back on it again. In light of this analysis, whether the LSA turns on an iterative or aggregative approach—or a duty to rescue or a duty of justice—is neither here nor there; this is a false dichotomy insofar as both approaches attempt to evade provisionality and undecidability. This evasion hinges on limiting the possibility of sacrifice. Singer limits the sacrifice required by the sacrifice principle up to the level of marginal utility—the level at which further sacrifice causes as much suffering to me as it relieves in the other. Marginal utility relies on the mistaken notion that I can know the suffering of the other as like my own, and can determine at what point marginal utility kicks in. Marginal utility attempts to fix the representation of the Other’s demand so that the agent is able calculate their response to the Other and so discharge their responsibility. By limiting the sacrifice required of the moral agent in advance, sacrifice becomes impossible, because in choosing to be bound by this demarcation, the agent demonstrates that this is no sacrifice at all. The possibility of sacrifice can only arise if sacrifice is not limited. Limiting the possibility of sacrifice then, is a way to avoid correcting the failures in both iterative and aggregative moral approaches. Responsibility cannot be measured with a principle that limits my sacrifice, but rather by asking, ‘How much more could I have sacrificed?’ Instead of claiming that I discharged my responsibility by following an aggregative approach which allows me to offset any further costs against my aggregate cost, I should ask: ‘How else could I have discharged my responsibility?’ In asking these questions, I reveal the supererogatory attitude which requires me to keep revising my responses to the Other by recursively imagining their alterity through an infinite series of re/presentations of that alterity. The LSA fails and allows passing by the closest and the furthest because Singer’s sacrifice principle is an impartial and universalisable principle and not a provisional principle. I have extensively covered the objections against impartialism in the first half of the study and tied these to the problem of moral-demandingness. I now want to juxtapose these objections with Levinasian normativity. Impartialism risks morality being too morally demanding because it infringes upon the autonomy of the agent— to favour special relationships, to pursue life projects, to decide the boundaries of the space where morality (as a impersonal and universal set of injunctions) is sovereign,

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and to decide what counts as a sacrifice and thus what counts as a purportedly supererogatory act. Impartialism leads to a moral presumptuousness and a hobbled moral rationality. Insofar as Levinasian normativity allows the agent to favour special relationships and to pursue their life projects, Levinasian normativity is not too morally-demanding. The autonomy of the agent under Levinasian autonomy is not so much infringed, or effaced, as it is conditioned by the undecidability that accompanies special relationships and life projects which take place within the space of infinite responsibility. The supererogatory attitude that constitutes Levinasian normativity does not slide into a moral presumptuousness, because the agent is constantly revising their assumptions of what constitutes a more faithful representation of the alterity of the Other. Rationality, which is at the heart of impartialism, cannot overcome undecidability, while the sensibility and affectivity of the agent under Levinasian normativity allows the agent to act as if they can. The (im)possibility of sacrifice is grounded in the undecidability of what constitutes sacrifice and which no rational impartiality can decide. Before I defend Levinasian normativity against the charge that it is too morallydemanding from another angle, as well as another interrelated objection, a brief recapitulation of the chapter so far. I returned to Taylorian primitive moral responses as immediate and unthinking responses to the suffering of the Other which promised a means to solve the perspectival problem of supererogation. However, because Taylorian responses are based on recognising the Other’s suffering like my own, they fail to address how autonomy is complicated in that perspectival problem. Taylor’s account of recognition of the Other fails because the agent’s revisions of how to represent the other’s suffering slides back into moral deliberation, which cannot overcome the limits of representation. As a remedy to this, I posited a Levinasian moral response which is grounded in an affective and sensible recognition of the Other as other. This response operated as the recursive re-imagining of the Other and followed from a Levinasian normativity: a recursive and continuous revision of the representations of the Other’s suffering which, because they are not like the agents own, they fail to recognise, but which nonetheless still shape the agents moral (political) responses to the Other in the process of revising those representations. I then returned to the two-fold problem of supererogation and argued that the problem of supererogation was in essence just one—the perspectival problem. The perspectival problem demonstrates the imbrication of autonomy and duty in conceptualising supererogation and which raises the spectre of an overdemanding and overweening morality. Undecidability dissolves the perspectival problem by making the perspectives of the agent and spectator to a purportedly supererogatory act symmetrical. In place of autonomy, the agent only has recourse to an autonomy of undecidability that operates under the recursive oscillations of a Levinasian normativity. I then offered a provisional definition of supererogation as an ethical attitude which recursively imagines the alterity of the Other, by traversing the undecidability of the ethical and political responses to those re/presentations, in order to limit and then restore back again infinite responsibility to and for the Other.

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A reconceptualised supererogation as a Levinasian normativity was also explicated as the (im)possibility of sacrifice, which implied that every moral act, however trivial, is supererogatory. Resting on an imperative of provisionality, Levinasian normativity also means that every moral actor is also provisionally saintly, or provisionally heroic. Following this, the distinction between duties to rescue and duties of justice made in the analytic debate on supererogation, and analysed in Singer’s LSA, were shown to be a false dichotomy—there is just duty, or rather there is just infinite responsibility. The dichotomy between aggregative and iterative moral approaches was similarly shown to be false—there is just the approach of the Other in the face to face encounter.

8.5 Objections to a Reconceptualised Supererogation 8.5.1 Supererogation as Levinasian Normativity Is Banal One rejoinder to the claim that every moral act is supererogatory is that calling an act supererogatory becomes redundant—supererogation becomes banal. One might still want to distinguish ‘truly’ saintly acts from quotidian moral acts. This criticism, however, gets Levinasian ethics backwards: saintliness is required of everybody, including the saint. Infinite responsibility is required of the saint, but also of the everyman and everywoman. The saint, the hero, the everyman and everywoman all find themselves hostage to the demand of the Other. Levinas writes that “it is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be pity, compassion, pardon and proximity in the world—even the little there is, even the simple ‘after you sir’” (1998, 117). Every response, no matter how grandiose or small, as a responding to the Other, demonstrates the attitude of the one-for-the-Other. I will elaborate on this point by drawing on the actions of so-called ‘righteous gentiles’ during World War II, who risked their lives to protect and save persecuted Jews. Their actions do demonstrate a supererogatory attitude to the (im)possibility of sacrifice. However, what would have prevented the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust was not more saints saving Jewish lives by risking their own. Instead, if more ‘ordinary’ Germans had treated Jews with common courtesy and consideration, then the Holocaust might not have happened. If more Germans had said to a Jewish person, ‘After you, sir’, fewer Jews would have died. Murdering another person after you have recognised their humanity makes little sense. Why be courteous to a person you intend to kill? Why let someone ‘go before you’, if you intend to execute them? In such cases, courtesy is irrational and superfluous. In Nazi Germany, hiding Jews was saintly because there was the very real and ever-present danger that one would have to make the ultimate sacrifice. However, in such a milieu, being ‘nice’ to Jews encountered in public (not all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were separated into ghettos) was also saintly, insofar as such actions also contained the possibility of

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sacrifice; if not to one’s life, then at the very least to one’s reputation or property. Vogel argues that the holocaust would never had happened if individuals […] had not only been able to acknowledge the face of the Other beyond the stereotypes imposed by Nazi ideology, but also been willing to jeopardize their own comfort and even survival for these Others in spite of the fact that shutting them out conformed with Nazi justice. (2008, 203)

The example of the Holocaust recalls Hannah Arendt’s characterisation of the tragedy and horror as demonstrative of the ‘banality of evil’ (1963). Arendt opined that Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi who was responsible for the operations and logistics of the death-camp machinery that sent millions of Jews to their death, “personified neither hatred nor madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood” (Elon, 2006, xiii). Eichmann’s defence was that he was simply following orders from his superiors and that, within the framework of the Nazi legal system, he was acting in accordance with the law. Besides a diligence in advancing his career, Arendt ascribes to Eichmann “no motives at all” and that “he merely […] never realized what he was doing” (1963, 287). It was Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and lack of imagination, manifesting in his efficiency and obedience to the Nazi code, leading to the murder of millions of Jews, that prompted Arendt to characterise the evil of the Nazis as ‘banal’. Inverting and adapting Arendt’s description of the banality of evil captures the essence of Levinas’s understanding of saintliness: the simplicity of goodness. It is this simplicity which marks supererogation as Levinasian normativity.

8.5.2 If Levinasian Normativity Dissolves the Problem of Supererogation Why Retain the Concept? Another formulation of the above objection can be stated in terms of the Kantian and utilitarian supererogation assimilation strategies, delineated in the first half of this study.14 While the Kantian and utilitarian assimilation strategy would reduce supererogation to obligation, Levinasian normativity operates in a seemingly inverse manner so that obligation is assimilated into supererogation. If both saintly and everyday morality spring from the same source—the unconditionality of the being hostage to the Other—so that the ethical and the supererogatory come to occupy the same conceptual space, then the concept of supererogation should be foregone altogether. However, it is incorrect that the ethical and supererogatory occupy the same conceptual space. Rather, the space between the ethical and the supererogatory is provisional and is constantly being re-represented; or, the space of the ethical operates as if it overlapped with the space of the supererogatory. To say that the ethical is supererogatory means that the ethical is manifested through the supererogatory. To substitute the correlate terms of Levinasian normativity—ethics and politics—we can, following McMurray et al. say that “politics is the machinery through which the ethical demand can be responded to” (2010, 546). 14 Chapter

3.

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In the discussion of impartialism and saintly morality in Chapter 2 I cited Wolf as arguing that “any plausible moral theory must make use of some conception of supererogation” (1982, 438).15 Can Kantianism and utilitarianism’s (failed) attempts to assimilate supererogation be understood as a ‘use of some conception of supererogation’? Can we use a conception of supererogation without using the term ‘supererogation’? Morgan addresses and dismisses Wolf’s claim very quickly, and remarks that this is only a problem for moral theory, and as such it “is a problem at the level of ‘ontology’ for Levinas […] and not a problem about the face-to-face as a ‘social fact’ about human existence (2007, 298 Fn.254). Granted that Levinas’s account of the primordial ethical relation is not a theory, I do not however, want to dismiss Wolf’s claim as quickly as Morgan does. Levinasian normativity circumscribes a certain ethical theory and so it operates as if it were a theory. The quasi-transcendental cannot do without the transcendental: while we may no longer use universal principles as universal principles, we still need to retain those universal principles so that we can describe what the ‘as if’ is in reference to when we use those principles as if they were universal. A similar dynamic is at play in retaining the concept of supererogation which, as Levinasian normativity, can be understood as a quasi-transcendental concept. While supererogation just is the ethical attitude circumscribed in Levinasian normativity, retaining the term ‘supererogation’ serves as a reminder of the undecidability of demarcating the limits to a morally-demanding infinite responsibility. A reconceptualised supererogation reinscribes ‘supererogation’ as that which ‘goes beyond duty as if duty and beyond duty could be demarcated’.

8.5.3 Supererogation as Levinasian Normativity Is Too Morally Demanding The flipside of the criticism that supererogation as Levinasian normativity is banal, is that it is too morally demanding. The argument is that if we are always required to act in a supererogatory way, then such a requirement is too onerous. How can I be expected to sacrifice my own interests and desires repeatedly in order to facilitate further donations to charity? How can I be expected to act as a saint or hero in every situation? In light of the argument above, one simple answer is immediately evident: Levinasian normativity requires us to act in a provisionally, not permanently, heroic or saintly way. An extended reply to the charge that supererogation as Levinasian normativity is too morally demanding, turns on Bernasconi’s remark that “either one is infinitely responsible, or one has refused responsibility” (2002, 239). This should be read together with two citations from the previous chapter16 : Levinas’s claim that “infinity of responsibility denotes not its actual immensity, but a responsibility increasing in 15 Section 16 Chapter

2.5.4. 7, Sect. 7.5.

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the measure that it is assumed” (1969, 244); and Perpich’s explanation of this to mean that the better I accomplish my obligations, the more demands I find addressed to me. It is not a matter of the actual number of demands increasing, but a matter of my sensitivity increasing so that the demands and injustices of which I was formerly unaware now come to press and weigh on my conscience. (2008, 89)

What all this comes down to is that in embracing the smallest and least onerous of responsibilities, the moral agent is committed to embracing the largest and most demanding responsibilities that might follow. I want to explore these claims within the context of apartheid South Africa. In so doing I am offering another illustration of how the re/presentations of the Other require us to constantly revise our responses to them. If I, a privileged white person in apartheid South Africa, had said to a black person, ‘After you sir’, I would have realised that it is unjust (as well as absurd) that such a black person could not enter any building from the same entrance as I did.17 In light of this epiphany, I then decide to sneak them in through the ‘white entrance’, which is more convenient than the ‘black entrance’ around the block. This small gesture contains the possibility of sacrifice—a zealous receptionist might not only call a security guard to throw out the black person, but also have me questioned for facilitating such a legal infraction. Driving home later that evening, I see a black person walking in my white suburb and, after the previous incident earlier in the day, it occurs to me that it is unfair that they have to make their way back to the black township on such a dark and cold night, or face arrest.18 So, I stop and offer them a lift. Once again, there is the possibility of sacrifice. If I was stopped by the police, in addition to the arrest of my passenger, I would also be risking my arrest. While this is an obvious simplification, what I am trying to capture is the increasing sensitivity to injustice that Perpich alludes to. The black individual under apartheid did not incrementally increase their demands in the expectation that the apartheid government would similarly meet those incremental demands. That is to say, the black individual did not demand that they first be allowed to share an entrance with a white person, to be followed (once that demand had been met) by a demand to be allowed to move freely in the city and so forth, until they finally arrived at the demand for equality, encapsulated in the revolutionary slogan ‘one person, one vote’. The black individual’s demand under apartheid was always for equality and respect; each time a white person defied the pettiest of apartheid laws, they became more sensitive to that demand and how they might be responsible for meeting that demand. Naturally, they might have refused such responsibility—and most white people under apartheid 17 So-called ‘petty apartheid’, which sought to prevent any social interaction between different race

groups, was enforced through such legislation as the 1953 Separate Amenities Act which required separate park benches and designated beach areas for black and white citizens, as well as separate entrances to bars, shops, and all other public buildings. 18 Some of the more egregious injustices of apartheid were enacted under the so-called ‘pass laws’, which restricted the movements of black people, especially within white designated areas, and required them to carry ‘pass books’ indicating permission to do so.

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did—but once they met the least onerous demand of the black individual, they could no longer deny that they might have a greater responsibility to help achieve racial equality. This does not mean that the force of the greater responsibility relied upon the force of the smaller responsibility first being met: the infinite responsibility was already there before. The above examples of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa are not everyday examples, but they do illustrate how the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity functions. By examining how normativity operates in such ‘extraordinary’ societies, where the possibility of sacrifice is more likely to be realised, we come to understand how it operates in ‘ordinary’ societies where actual sacrifice is less likely. I want to complete the discussion of the demandingness of a Levinasian normativity by briefly turning to Critchley’s critique of Levinasian infinite responsibility in Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2012) which is neatly summarised in The Problem with Levinas (2015). Critchley argues that to become a moral subject is to subject oneself to a demand, for me an infinite demand, but that demand demands approval [a demand that is recursively constituted by its approval]. Approval is absent in Levinas’s work. What you get is a wonderfully rich description of the demand […] but no account of the approval that would bind a subject freely to that demand. If ethics does not include some dimension of conscious agency, then it risks becoming sheer coercion. (88)

On Critchley’s account what is too demanding about infinite responsibility comes down to the autonomy of the subject. However, the autonomy of undecidability does not foreclose a dimension of conscious agency: it is in the agent’s consciousness, of the undecidability of how to limit infinite responsibility and then restore that infinite responsibility without violating the alterity of the Other, in which the agent’s freedom lies. The infinite demand that the subject of Levinasian normativity approves is the demand that that infinite demand be subject to incessant correction. The demand is infinite because how to represent that demand is undecidable, and because the demand is undecidable, the agent can approve its infinite demandingness on them.

8.6 Conclusion This chapter represents the final stage in my project to reconceptualise supererogation within a Levinasian ethical framework and as a supererogatory attitude. The first part of that reconceptualisation required a shift from duty and/or obligation to responsibility as the grounding concept, as well as a Levinasian reinscription of other analytic moral concepts used in the first half of the study such as proximity and asymmetry. Secondly, because Levinasian ethics is not circumscribed in an ethical theory, such an ethics needed to be operationalised, which was done through postulating what I called a Levinasian normativity—‘a normativity without norms’, otherwise a quasi-transcendental normativity. Only then can supererogation be reconceptualised as a certain type of ethical attitude, which manifests in an autonomy of undecidability circumscribed by a Levinasian normativity.

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Settling on supererogation as an attitude represents a certain continuity with the position reached at the end of the first half of the study which explicated Taylor’s primitive moral responses as a type of attitude—an attitude toward a soul that recognised the suffering of the Other. However, the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity does not follow from a rationality which recognises the Other’s suffering as like my own—a totalisation of the alterity of the Other. The supererogatory attitude is encapsulated in the autonomy of undecidability which recursively imagines the alterity of the Other, as an infinite series of re/presentations of that alterity, by traversing the undecidability of the ethical and political responses to those re/presentations, in order to limit infinite responsibility to and for the Other and then restore that infinity of responsibility back again. The various examples I have used—the female pugilist in the previous chapter, the provisional saints and heroes in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa in this chapter—also demonstrate how Levinasian normativity calls us to constantly offer fresh re/presentations of the Other. In the next chapter, I will go much further than these rudimentary examples and present a richer and more extensive examination of an ethical subject who exemplifies the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity—the whistleblower.

References Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. London: Penguin Classics. Bernasconi, R. (2002). What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer? In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Levinas (pp. 234–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowley, C. (2015). Introduction: The agents, acts and attitudes of supererogation. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 1–23. Critchley, S. (1999). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Critchley, S. (2012). Infinitely demanding: Ethics of commitment, politics of resistance. London: Verso. Critchley, S. (2015). The problem with Levinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. (1995). the gift of death (D. Wills, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elon, A. (2006/1963). Introduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. London: Penguin Classics. Eisenstadt, O. (2012). Eurocentrism and colorblindness. Levinas studies: An annual review, 7, 43–62. Goud, J. F. (2008). What one asks of oneself, one asks of a saint: A dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, 1980–1981. Levinas Studies, 3, 1–34. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1988). ‘The paradox of morality’: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas by T. Wright, P. Hayes and A. Ainley, Trans. A. Benjamin and T. Wright. In R. Bernasconi & D. Wood (Ed.), The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the other. London: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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MacFarquhar, L. (2015). Strangers drowning: Voyages to the brink of moral extremity. Bristol, UK: Allen Lane. McMurray, R., Pullen, A., & Rhodes, C. (2010). Ethical subjectivity and politics in organizations: A case of health care tendering. Organization, 18(4), 541–561. Morgan, M. L. (2007). Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perpich, D. (2008). The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. Urmson, J. O. (1958). Saints and heroes. In A. I. Melden (Ed.), Essays in moral philosophy. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Vogel, L. (2008). Emmanuel Levinas and the judaism of the good samaritan. Levinas Studies, 3, 193–208. Wolf, S. (1982). Moral saints. The Journal of Philosophy, 79(8), 419–439. Wood, D. (1999). The experience of the ethical. In R. Kearney & M. Dooley (Eds.), Questioning ethics: Contemporary debates in philosophy (pp. 105–119). London and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 9

The Whistleblower as Subject of Levinasian Normativity

Abstract This chapter turns to the figure of the whistleblower in order to illustrate how certain features of Levinasian normativity might find practical application. The chapter traces the origin of whistleblowing to the conflicting loyalties the whistleblower faces—to an organisation that must be given the opportunity to correct its wrongdoing; or to a society which will be harmed by such wrongdoing and has no way to discover such wrongdoing. The chapter follows Andrade who argues that the whistleblower should be understood as the ethical, and flexible boundary of the organisation, which requires that who qualifies as a recipient of a disclosure of wrongdoing remain flexible (2015). It is then shown how the flexibility of organisational boundaries illustrate the provisionality of Levinasian normativity. On this reading, the whistleblower is better understood as the ethico-politico boundary of the organisation. The retaliation that the whistleblower suffers as a result of their disclosure also demonstrates that, like the (im)possible sacrifice of the provisional saint and hero, the whistleblower’s sacrifice also amounts to an (im)possible sacrifice. I then turn to a reading of Alford’s (2007) paper on whistleblower narratives to argue that ‘choice-less choice’ and ‘narratives stuck in static time’ illustrate a whistleblowing subjectivity that already reveals an affirmation of a supererogatory attitude. The autonomy of undecidability, I argue, makes better sense of whistleblowing autonomy understood as choiceless choice, while the recursive oscillation of Levinasian normativity offers a way to escape the prison of static time.

9.1 Introduction This chapter begins by once again citing Levinas remark, “My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning. One can without doubt construct an ethics in function of what I have just said, but this is not my own theme” (1985, 90). The work done in the previous chapters, and especially Chapter 7, has offered a way to construct such an ethics in the form of a Levinasian normativity. Such a normativity offers provisional norms with which to traverse the undecidability between ethics and politics so that justice can be affected; ethics here meaning the primordial ethical relation between the self and the Other in the face to face © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_9

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encounter, and politics meaning, inter alia, normative ethics and morality. One important aim of normative ethics, at least since the 1960s, is their application to ‘real-world’ problems (Winkler & Coombs, 1993). The field of applied ethics has since rapidly expanded and fragmented into increasingly narrower and more specialised domains: environmental ethics, animal ethics, information ethics, data ethics, biomedical ethics, business ethics etc. These domains frequently align along professional lines to explore ethics dilemmas specific to a profession—engineering ethics or accounting ethics for example. The novelty and force of Levinas’s work has proved irresistible for applied ethicists searching for fresh ideas with which to approach seemingly intractable problems within specific contexts. This despite Richard Cohen’s comment that “issues raised regarding computer ethics are at bottom the issues of ethics simpliciter” (2000, 34), which may well be said of any other applied ethics discipline. Cohen’s ‘Levinasian reflections’ on information ethics locate the move from an ethics simpliciter, to a normative ethics able to address the issues raised by the ubiquity and power of information technology, in the movement between the Saying and the Said (31).1 I have described this movement as the recursive oscillation that drives Levinasian normativity. I take the field of business ethics as one example of how the attempt to ‘apply’ Levinas proceeds within a specialised discipline; and turn to the specific example of the special edition dedicated to Levinas entitled ‘Levinas, Business, Ethics’ in the journal ‘Business Ethics: A European Review’ (2007, Volume 16(3)). Each paper in the journal (and all other good papers in the literature) come with disclaimers outlining the risks that accompany using Levinas to rethink the core challenges facing business ethics—corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) for example. Forstorp warns that “applied ethics and its imperative of application can be regarded as an example of the ‘totalizing’ attempts in philosophy” (2007, 300). Introna writes that “Levinas’s ethics cannot solve cases” and that attempts to do so risk “enter[ing] into the economy of the category and the instance to be covered by the category” (2007, 271). Karamali argues that reinscribing Levinas into the language of business “will always involve a homogenisation of his thought” (2007, 317). Bevan and Corvellecc reject any notion of a Levinasian ‘corporate ethics’ outright, offering instead a Levinasian managerial ethics which is “propositional, rather than assertively normative” (2007, 11). The “tentative tone” adopted by Bevan and Corvellac (ibid.), and Mansell’s advocacy of more flexible corporate codes and regulations which align with a responsibility for the Other (2008) operate in the provisional way that drives the Levinasian normativity I have argued for. In other words, Levinasian normativity offers a way to ‘apply’ Levinas to business ethics while still heeding the caveats and cautions that preface all such attempts. 1 The

typical reader of an information ethics paper in particular, and other applied ethics papers in general, is usually unfamiliar with the complexities and nuances of Levinas’s work. Perhaps this is why Cohen turns to the Levinasian face as a means to illustrate the significance and implications of the oscillation between the Saying and the Said. So, Cohen writes that “the ‘face’ can be an email message. The computers themselves, like alphabet letters and telephones, like pencils and books, however, are neither good nor evil. The ‘face’ ruptures them, pierces them with the alterity of the other (2000, 34).

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In this chapter I will turn to the topic of whistleblowing which is an important theme within business ethics and organisational studies.2 I will turn to the challenge whistleblowing presents, both within an organisational context and more generally, less as a means to demonstrate how to apply Levinas to these challenges than as a means to illustrate how the whistleblower can be understood as the subject of Levinasian normativity.3 Avishai Margalit offers a neat clarification of my intentions through his distinction between what he calls i.e. philosophers—explicators—and e.g. philosophers—illustrators (2002, ix). He writes that illustrators rely on striking examples to make their case, while explicators rely on definitions and principles, although they may use examples on occasion, but then, stylised examples. He warns that illustrators “run the risk of using examples as little anecdotes that serve no philosophical purpose” but also writes that “when the examples are apt, they are illuminations, not just didactic illustrations” (ibid.). It is my contention that the example of the whistleblower illuminates the autonomy of undecidability that characterises Levinasian normativity with stark clarity—captured in the phrase Alford uses to characterise the autonomy of the whistleblower: ‘choiceless choice’ (2007). Alford also describes the whistleblower who discloses ‘externally’, that is, to a recipient on the outside of the organisation, as a ‘boundary-violator’ (2001, 99). I will follow Andrade’s argument that the whistleblower should be understood as the ethical boundary of the organisation as a means to posit the subject of Levinasian normativity as similarly constituting a boundary—the provisional boundary between the ethical and the political (2015). I will also claim that the whistleblower exemplifies the value of saintliness that is contained in the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity; that is to say, the whistleblower exemplifies the provisionality of saintliness and heroism. As with Urmson’s saints and heroes, what is salient in the plight of the whistleblower it is the cost and sacrifice that typically accompanies whistleblowing. In shifting from sacrifice to the (im)possibility of sacrifice that marks the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity, there is hope that the retribution that the whistleblower often faces can be mitigated. Understanding the whistleblower as the subject of Levinasian normativity also offers a way to temper the ambivalence whistleblowers elicit, as evidenced by a sample of titles of papers in the literature: ‘The Whistleblower: Patriot or Bounty Hunter?’ (Singer, 1992); ‘Whistleblowers: Saint or Snitch?’ (Anonymous, 1992); ‘Whistleblowers: Heroes or Stool Pigeons?’ (Fiesta, 1990); ‘Whistleblowing: Subversion or Corporate Citizenship?’ (Johnson, 1996). This ambivalence also marks our attitudes towards saints—George Orwell once remarked, in relation to Gandhi, that “saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent” (in Hamilton, 2015, 188).4 MacFarquhar tries to capture the ambivalence saints evoke by employing the colloquial pejorative ‘do-gooder’: “if 2 For

a critical overview of whistleblowing within legal and political philosophy see Santoro and Kumar (2018). 3 Papers addressing whistleblowing from a Levinasian angle are almost unheard of in the literature. I could find only one noteworthy example of one that does—Loumansky and Lewis (2013). Even then, their focus is on the legal aspects of whistleblowing. 4 See Chapter 2, Sect. 2.5.4.

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do-gooders are always thinking of how the world is unjust and needs to be changed – if they want to replace our world with another, better one – then do they love the world that we know, which is the world as it is?” (2015, 12). This penultimate chapter will prove this ambivalence, toward both the whistleblower and saint, misplaced. The chapter will commence by situating the challenge of whistleblowing in the conflict between loyalty to ones’ s organisation and to a wider public that might be harmed by organisational wrongdoing. I outline Andrade’s argument that the whistleblower constitutes the ethical boundary of the organisation which emerges from the dissent of the whistleblower (2015). I then make the case that the flexibility of organisational boundaries, and the concomitant determination of who is eligible to receive a disclosure of wrongdoing, should be understood as illustrating the provisionality of organisational boundaries and the concomitant provisionality of any representation of the organisation’s relationship with a particular stakeholder. In the section thereafter I turn to Alford’s characterisation of whistleblowing autonomy as ‘choiceless choice’ and the habit of whistleblowers to retell their stories over and over (2007). I argue that the autonomy of undecidability can transform the compulsion of ‘choiceless choice’ into a positive investiture of the whistleblowers’ freedom. I also argue that in the constant retelling of their stories, the whistleblower demonstrates the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity.

9.2 Whistleblowing Ethics Whistleblowing cuts across diverse disciplines—psychology, sociology, law, organisational studies, and ethical and political philosophy—and as a result, definitions abound. One concise definition of whistleblowing is offered by Rothschild and Miethe: “The disclosure of illegal, unethical, or harmful practices in the workplace to parties who might take action” (1994, 254). While this definition will suffice for the purposes of this chapter, the definition also glosses over two crucial aspects—the non-obligatory nature of disclosure, and the status of the recipient of that disclosure. Peter Jubb’s more restrictive definition, which has over the course of the last twenty years come to be the most cited in the literature (with more than 450 citations), makes these two aspects explicit: whistleblowing is “a deliberate non-obligatory act of disclosure […] to an external entity having the potential to rectify the wrongdoing” (1999, 83)5 (Emphasis added). Jubb also says that his definition “is constructed from an exclusively ethical perspective” (81). It is these two aspects of whistleblowing that I will focus on in order to illustrate whistleblowing subjectivity as the subjectivity of Levinasian normativity: the non-obligatory nature of disclosure will be examined through the lens of the autonomy of undecidability, while the external nature of 5 The full citation of this definition is “A deliberate non-obligatory act of disclosure, which gets onto

the public record and is made by a person who has or had privileged access to data or information of an organization, about non-trivial illegality or other wrongdoing whether actual, suspected or anticipated which implicates and is under the control of that organization, to an external entity having the potential to rectify the wrongdoing”.

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disclosure will be interrogated at the hand of the recursive oscillation of infinite and provisional representation. I start with the latter first and turn to the former in the section to follow.

9.2.1 The Whistleblower as Ethical Boundary of the Organisation Andrade writes that at the heart of the decision to blow the whistle or not are conflicting loyalties: the employee’s loyalty to his/her organisation, which might require the employee to ignore or overlook actual or potential wrongdoing committed by the organisation, versus their loyalty to society which might require the employee to alert the public of organisational wrongdoing which might harm it. (2015, 322)

Andrade describes these conflicting loyalties as whistleblowing’s “essential aporia” (328). These loyalties typically manifest themselves in the decision of who to disclose to: disclosing to an internal recipient allows the organisation opportunity to correct the wrongdoing before it is subjected to the critical scrutiny of the public—this demonstrates loyalty to the organisation; while disclosing to an external recipient is usually an indication that the whistleblower regards loyalty to the social good as overriding—Andrade calls this the ‘internal/external dichotomy’ (322–323). In practice, disclosing internally refers to the set of reporting channels and procedures designated by the organisation to receive, and act upon, concerns raised (Jubb, 1999). These will typically require that an employee first raise their concern with a manager and then escalate that concern up a management hierarchy if the concern is not acted upon or implicates the recipient. Jubb argues that what these internal procedures miss is a crucial element of dissent (79). Andrade writes that this dissent can be distilled into the disagreement between the discloser, and the recipient of that disclosure, over what constitutes corporate wrongdoing and “whether particular acts or omissions did in fact harm the public interest, as well as what responses, if any, these disputed acts should elicit from the organisation” (2015, 324). Rothschild and Miethe confirm that whistleblowing and the organisation’s response to that disclosure are political acts because the former, “from the start … is intended to change the way that the work gets done in the organization,” and the latter, “… is intended to discredit the whistleblower … [and] neutralize the power of any information they may release” (1994, 255). Alford writes that in listening to the whistleblower the organisation would have to acknowledge “the whistleblower as an individual with a political or ethical claim on the organisation. To listen would be to recognize the whistleblower as a political actor. It is this that must be denied in the first place” (2001, 105). Without the dissent of the whistleblower there would be no basis on which a conflict between loyalty to one’s organisation and society could arise in the first place. It is this necessary dissent that motivates Jubb to argue that only disclosure to an external entity can count as whistleblowing proper (as against a mere raising of concerns).

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Dissent can then also be recast as disagreement over who is inside, and who outside, the organisation and therefore able to receive a disclosure of wrongdoing; or, who constitutes the boundary of the organisation (with society). On this account, because external disclosure “attacks and accuses the organization”, the whistleblower is very often retaliated against (Jubb, 1999, 91). These retaliatory measures include demotion, dismissal and industry blacklisting—great costs borne by the disclosers which I will return to in the section to follow. The terrible toll on societal wellbeing that follows recurring corporate malfeasance, such as the Enron debacle of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008–2009, has led to the acknowledgement that, in return for the whistleblower’s warning, protection against the more egregious forms of organisational retaliation must be extended to them. The series of whistleblowing laws, regulations and organisational best practice that have emerged over the last 40 years or so, and which include whistleblower protection measures, in short, the institutionalisation of whistleblowing, has been described by Vandekerckhove as an attempt to “eliminate the conflict between organisation and society” by containing the conflicting loyalties of the whistleblower within the organisation (2006, 304).6 One way of achieving this goal has been to expand who can count as a recipient of a disclosure by drawing ‘proxies of society’ into the organisation in a ‘tiered approach’. By proxies of society, Vandekerckhove includes “governmental control agenc[ies] such as a law enforcement agency, a specially designed investigation agency or an agency under parliamentary control such as an ombudsperson” which the discloser can turn to when “organisations refuse or are unable to solve problems regarding their own practices” (2006, 284).7 It is only when both the first tier of the organisational hierarchy, and the second tier of proxies of society designated by the organisation, have failed to address the complaint that recourse to the third tier of the media kicks in, “where society can judge the organizational practice in question”, allowing “disclosures in the public interest to be made but not or only indirectly to the public” (ibid.). In effect, a tiered approach to whistleblowing widens the organisational boundary to include agents ostensibly external to it. This has important implications—because protection against organisational retaliation is dependent on certain procedures and channels being followed, that is to say, designating which recipient counts as internal to the organisation, widening organisational boundaries is usually detrimental to the whistleblower. Andrade argues that while a tiered approach may appear to give the whistleblower greater scope in choosing who they are able to disclose to, because the organisation “retains the prerogative to specify which proxies of society count as the second tier of disclosure, as well as stipulating what extra requirements are needed to move up to that level”, the internal/external disclosure dichotomy remains

6 Within

this conflict between society and the organisation, Vandekerckhove describes whistleblowing as an ‘political-ethico’ concept (2006, 304). 7 Subsequently, Vandekerckhove has also included trade unions and professional bodies in this second tier of disclosure recipients (2010, 24).

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(2015, 332). As such, contra Vandekerckhove, the tiered approach fails to eliminate the dilemma of conflicting loyalties whistleblowing raises. Andrade locates the failure in Vandekerckhove’s understanding of the organisation as an operationally closed system (an autopoietic system) which results in the fixing of organisational boundaries at the point of the proxy of society even as it widens its boundaries to include that proxy within the organisation (ibid.). Following Woermann’s (2010) understanding of the organisation as a radically open system, that is, as a complex system, Andrade is able to argue that the boundaries of an organisation must remain flexible (2015, 332). What this amounts to with respect to disclosure is that the designation internal/external disclosure remain flexible, so that an “organisation may decide that a particular proxy of society counts as a legitimate recipient of disclosure on this occasion but not on another […] dependant on what response was required to a particular stakeholder”(ibid.) (Emphasis added). Different stakeholders to an organisation require different responses from the organisation—for example labour may demand more female representation in middle management and the organisation could respond by providing on-site child-care facilities; the shareholders may demand a more generous annual dividend and the organisation may respond by foregoing staff bonuses. Being able to respond to these conflicting demands requires what Painter-Morland calls ‘normative congruence’, which she describes as the organisation’s “ability to accommodate difference and dissensus, without losing its functional unity of purpose or sense of identity” (2008, 224). Normative congruence is relationally constituted, which means that accountability in an organisational context should be recast as ‘relational responsiveness’ (225). What this means is that organisational wrongdoing should be seen less as failure for something than as failing someone (ibid.). Organisational wrongdoing is a failure to be relationally responsive to some stakeholder. Andrade reimagines the dissent of the discloser of organisational wrongdoing, argued above to constitute the foundation of whistleblowing’s conflicting loyalties, as this relationally constituted normative congruence. He then ties these various strands together to argue that the whistleblower should be understood as “the ethical boundary of the organisation, [which] forc[es] the organisation to keep the demarcation of its boundaries flexible, thus staying relationally responsive to its stakeholders” (2015, 334)8 (Second emphasis my emphasis; first emphasis in the original). The dissent of the whistleblower which marks this boundary then “represents the limit of acceptable transgression [by the organisation] that will be tolerated by society in general, and a specific stakeholder in particular” in the ongoing “trade-off between business activity and societal welfare” (ibid.). In other words, the dissent of the whistleblower as to what amounts to organisational wrongdoing can 8 Andrade labels the whistleblower as organisational boundary the ‘whistleblower-as-parrhesiastes’

(2015, 333–334). The parrhesiastes speaks truth to power—practices ‘parrhesia’, which following Michel Foucault (2001), is translated as ‘fearless speech’. Andrade writes that the whistlebloweras-parrhesiastes engages in “ethics as practice” which is not about following rules and codes of conduct but about “remain[ing] fully engaged with the concrete contingencies and dynamics of the world” which requires “participation, relationships and responsiveness” (Painter-Morland, 2008, 87 in Andrade, 2015, 334). Ethics as practice can thus be understood as a type of Levinasian normativity.

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be recast as dissent over what response is required to a particular stakeholder. This dissent determines where the boundary of the organisation will be drawn in the case of that stakeholder; and hence the boundary of the organisation is manifested in the whistleblower.

9.2.2 Provisional Organisational Boundaries and Relational Responsiveness The importance of boundaries in constituting whistleblowing subjectivity allows for a felicitous homology with the purported constitutive boundaries of supererogation. Levinasian normativity makes the boundary between purportedly supererogatory and obligatory acts redundant—either one is infinitely responsibility, or one is not responsible. The subject of Levinasian normativity can be understood as constituting this boundary—the boundary between the ethical and the political. The basis to develop this homology further—the whistleblower as the ethical boundary of the organisation and the subject of Levinasian normativity as the boundary between the ethical and political—lies in the discovery of the organisation as a complex system. In Chapter 7 I argued that an imperative of provisionality offered another way to grasp the quasi-transcendental dynamic which drove the recursive oscillation of Levinasian normativity.9 I also indicated that the provisional imperative emerged from an engagement with critical complexity theory—which describes how to model complex systems and the ethical implications of such modelling—although I did not elaborate what that entailed beyond a footnote. There is no reason to do so now. However, the commonality of complexity allows us to understand that the flexibility of organisational boundaries, and the concomitant flexibility of designating who counts as a recipient of disclosure, operates in the same manner as the provisionality of Levinasian normativity. Furthermore, because Levinasian normativity traces the recursive oscillation between the ethical and political representations of the alterity of the Other, together with the finding that whistleblower dissent is political dissent, a better formulation of the whistleblower as the ethical boundary of the organisation, is that the whistle-blower is the ethico-politico boundary of the organisation. In addition to this, because the whistleblower just is the flexible boundary of the organisation, the one who discloses organisational wrongdoing can be said to be a provisional whistleblower. This last statement will however require elaborating upon, which I will do in Sect. 9.3.2—for the moment it involves the common finding in whistleblower study groups that there is great reluctance among those who raise concerns to use the label ‘whistleblower’ to describe themselves. The requirement that the organisation keeps its boundaries flexible has been taken to mean that who counts as a legitimate recipient of a disclosure of wrongdoing should also remain flexible. What follows from designating someone or some group a legitimate recipient of a disclosure? In designating that a particular stakeholder 9 Section

7.4.

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can receive a disclosure, the right of that stakeholder to contest the nature of the relationship the organisation claims it has with it, and thus what responses can be expected from it, is affirmed. In other words in contesting what its relationship with the organisation amounts to, the stakeholder is claiming that it should be represented in a particular way, and that being represented in that way requires certain responses from the organisation.10 Different stakeholders require different responses from the organisation because they are in different relationships with the organisation. However, the same stakeholder will also require different responses from the organisation because its relationship with the organisation is constantly changing. So for example, while the relationship between a corporation and its workforce was once understood in terms of an exchange of labour for wages, the demand for meaningful and purposeful work has changed that relationship. In the former arrangement the company responds by considering higher wages, in the later, the company might respond by offering wellness programmes and creative spaces. As such, any representation of what the relationship with a stakeholder amounts to can only be provisional, and concomitantly, any response by the organisation must also be provisional. In Chapter 7 I argued that the recursive modality of Levinasian normativity might better be grasped as a series of infinite re/presentations that are incessantly corrected in order to achieve greater fidelity to the representation of the alterity of the Other.11 Similarly, the organisation can be more relationally responsive, and thus achieve a greater normative congruence, by constantly correcting its representations of its stakeholder relationships. Any designation of who counts as a legitimate recipient of a disclosure of wrongdoing should remain a provisional designation. We can also say that any designation of a particular stakeholder as a legitimate recipient of a disclosure is a way to treat that stakeholder as if it were internal to the organisation. The whistleblower’s dissent then, as relationally constitutive normative congruence, operates as if it were not dissent, because their dissent marks the limit of dissent that the organisation can accommodate. The whistleblower’s dissent is an (im)possible dissent that is the (non)boundary of the organisation, which constantly corrects how the organisation responds through revising its representations of its stakeholder Other. This concludes the first part of my intention to illustrate whistleblowing subjectivity as the subjectivity of Levinasian normativity—focusing on the purported internal/external dichotomy of disclosure. This section concerned itself with the structure of organisational boundaries and how these circumscribe disclosures of

10 While the language of moral-demandingness might receive a hostile reception in an organisational setting, one could argue that in refusing a particular stakeholder’s representation of its relationship with it, the organisation would regard the responses attendant upon such a relationship as being too morally-demanding. The organisation might argue that while it has a certain social responsibility to its stakeholder set—to ensure that it doesn’t irreversibly degrade the natural environment in which it operates for example—beyond a certain point, requiring it to do more than this—by building libraries and recreational facilities in the community in which it is based for example—is too morally demanding a responsibility, because it has to deliver a certain financial return to its shareholders for example. 11 Chapter 7, Sect. 7.5.

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wrongdoing. The dissent of the whistleblower, as the ethical boundary of the organisation, can also be understood as how the organisation corrects its representations of its stakeholder relationships. I will now turn to illustrate whistleblowing subjectivity as the subjectivity of Levinasian normativity by turning to the second salient aspect of whistleblowing disclosure I identified above: its non-obligatory nature. I will argue that this characterisation is incomplete by examining whistleblowing subjectivity through the lens of the autonomy of undecidability. In so doing, the supererogatory attitude that marks Levinasian normativity will once again reveal itself.

9.3 The Choiceless Choice of Whistleblower Sacrifice 9.3.1 The (Im)Possibility of Whistleblowing Sacrifice The dissent of the whistleblower usually provokes a retaliatory response from the organisation. This retaliation is common enough to warrant assigning it as an “organizing concept in the literature [which] encompasses research on the methods by which whistleblowers are punished for disclosures” (Kenny et al., 2018, 1). Alford goes further, and argues that “in practice, the whistleblower is defined by the retaliation he or she receives … if there is no retaliation, she is just a responsible employee doing her job to protect the company’s interests” (2001, 18). This retaliation runs the gamut from being ostracised in one’s community, side-lined in one’s job, industry blacklisting, harassment, imprisonment and also, tragically death (Alford, 2001; Perry, 1998). The literature on whistleblower retaliation also recounts the toll on the mental health of the whistleblower: depression, PTSD-like symptoms, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, which in turn often results in substance abuse and marital breakdown (Kenny et al., 2018). Exploiting the stigma of mental illness in society, the organisation “weaponises mental health discourse against the whistleblower” in order to silence their dissent (ibid.). Alford captures this underhandedness in the phrase, ‘nuts and sluts’ strategy—“referring to the way those who raise ethical issues are treated as disturbed or morally suspect” (2001, 61). More troubling, this retaliation occurs even if the whistleblower follows designated channels and procedures (and which are necessary to claim the protection offered by legislation) and does not disclose ‘externally’. In disclosing organisational wrongdoing then, the whistleblower bears a great cost to their welfare. In this chapter’s introduction I noted a selection of paper titles in the whistleblowing literature which included the terms ‘saint’ and ‘hero’ in relation to the whistleblower, albeit this was in service of illustrating the ambivalent attitudes whistleblowing provokes. There are many papers, however, which display their allegiances firmly on their sleeve—Grant calls whistleblowers “saints of secular culture” (2002). Grant goes on to motivate this ascription of saintliness by directly tying the “radical self-sacrifice” that accompanies “significant instances” of whistleblowing (ibid., 396). This study has already critiqued sacrifice in relation to saints

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and heroes as a problematic marker of supererogation. To recall the discussion from Chapter 2, in examining appeal to cost approaches to supererogation, requiring an agent to sacrifice—a great cost to themselves—is too morally-demanding a requirement, and as such, a saintly or heroic action should be non-obligatory.12 Sacrifice was in turn tied to the autonomy of the agent—to choose to bear the cost or not, and as such, to perform a purportedly supererogatory act or not. However, in Chapter 8, because the subject of Levinasian normativity—the provisional saint and provisional hero—acts within an autonomy of undecidability, sacrifice is (im)possible.13 That is to say, it must be possible for the agent to choose to bear the great costs that an act demands, but in performing that act, the agent demonstrates that they do not consider the costs too great after all. If this is correct then the retaliation the whistleblower faces constitutes an (im)possible sacrifice for them, and consequently, they can only be understood as a provisional whistleblower. In order to make sense of what a ‘provisional whistleblower’ might mean in practice, it is necessary to briefly return to the perspectival problem of supererogation and what I called in Chapter 4, ‘reluctant’ saints and heroes.14 To recall, these reluctant saints and heroes considered the (im)possible sacrifices they bore as unremarkable, an attitude captured in one citation as: “I don’t think I did anything that special. I think what I did is what everybody normally should be doing. We all should help one another. It’s common sense and common caring for people” (Horgan and Timmons, 2010, 40). A recurring theme in the whistleblowing literature is that most whistleblowers do not regard their actions as praiseworthy—to them they were ‘just doing their jobs’. One of the most celebrated whistleblowers of twenty-first century, Cynthia Cooper, who was named alongside Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins as Time Magazine’s persons of the year in 2002, was quoted as saying: “We don’t feel like heroes. I feel like I did my job” (Layco and Ripley, 2002). In a whistleblowing study conducted by Kenny, Fotaki, & Vandekerckhove, the authors found that the study-participants did not refer to themselves as a ‘whistleblower’, or at least not at the start of the study, and then only after some time had passed in their struggle with the organisation, and being called as such by other parties (2018, 10). Instead, the participants slotted themselves into four broad subject categories: professional, outsider, loyal employee and involuntary discloser (10–14). The authors describe the participants as “fractured, diverse subjectivities” who were reluctant to identify themselves as whistleblowing subjects ‘speaking truth to power’, or as autonomous agents reinventing themselves, and fully aware of the risks, and scope of retaliation they faced. We might say that the participants acted as they did—disclosing incidences of organisational wrongdoing—with the belief that they would be regarded as if they were acting as loyal employees. Once they reluctantly agreed to use the label ‘whistleblower’ to describe themselves, they could be understood as believing that such a label was only a provisional label—Kenny, Fotaki, & Vandekerckhove report

12 Section

2.3. 8.4.1. 14 Chapter 2, Sect. 2.3.1 and Chapter 4, Sect. 4.3. 13 Section

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that their study participants remained “passionately attached” to their organisations despite the ordeal they were put through, and even years later (2018, 17). The reluctance of saints and heroes and whistleblowers to regard themselves as such, and as having done nothing more than what was required of them, brings the question of autonomy back into focus, or rather, the undecidability of autonomy. I argued that the provisional hero and saint, as subjects of Levinasian normativity, operate under an autonomy of undecidability—an undecidability as to what constitutes a sacrifice and where the limits of responsibility to the Other should be drawn. That undecidability, in turn, emerges from the undecidability between ethics and politics.15 The isomorphism between the saint/hero and the whistleblower means that the whistleblower also operates under an autonomy of undecidability. While my conception of an autonomy of undecidability is a positive conception—it underpins the supererogatory attitude which allows us to navigate morally-demanding infinite responsibility after all—the descriptions of whistleblowing autonomy in the literature reveal debilitating and counterproductive attitudes. In what follows I will trace Alford’s attempts to make sense of whistleblowing autonomy—what he calls ‘choice-less choice’ (2007)—and argue that the autonomy of undecidability is better positioned to meet the challenges the whistleblower faces. These challenges are contained in the choice of the phrase ‘choiceless choice’, and what Alford believes that phrase, offered by one whistleblower, reveals about both the whistleblower’s attitude and society’s attitude to them.

9.3.2 The Undecidability of Choiceless Choice Alford answers the rhetorical question ‘Why did you do it?’ (blow the whistle), by patching together several responses from whistleblowers questioned: I did it because I had to … because I had no other choice … because I couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t done anything … because it was speak up or stroke out, What else could I do? I have to look at myself in the mirror every morning? (226)

Alford comments that “this type of freedom comes frighteningly close to compulsion, so we blink and call it choice”—choice-less choice (ibid.). Why do we blink? Because, Alford argues, the idea of a choiceless choice which causes one to “lose everything one cares about after being seized by an overpowering principle, almost as though it were a god” (emphasis added), threatens our standard views of autonomy, and is also a way to avoid responsibility for the consequences of our actions (228). The standard view of autonomy has been explicated throughout this study in delineating the problems of supererogation and moral demandingness: if the agent is required to make a great sacrifice—to lose everything they care about, their job, their marriage—when performing a particular act—to blow the whistle on organisational wrongdoing—then that is a too morally-demanding requirement on their autonomy, 15 Chapter

7, Sect. 7.3 and Chapter 8, Sect. 8.4.

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and so should be non-obligatory. The problem with that understanding of autonomy (which the second half of this study has turned on its head) is revealed in the location the last citation chooses to place the source of the normative force that compels the agent—principle. The standard view of autonomy is grounded in normative principles that are impartial—objective, immutable and universal. However, the second half of this study has located the source of normative force that compels the agent in principles that are provisional, and hence undecidable. Those provisional principles in turn, draw their normative force from the face of the Other whose epiphanic re/presentation can only be responded to with provisional, and hence, undecidable representations. Alford’s essay attempts to show that the choiceless choice of whistleblowers offers sufficient grounds to overturn the standard view of autonomy. While I support his project, I believe that his method of ‘narrative analysis’ which purports to give “an account of the structure of whistleblower stories” leads to an unsatisfactory conclusion and some loose ends that require tying up (224). In offering an analysis of whistleblower narratives Alford hopes that the whistleblower might find a resolution to, and meaning in, their experience. He writes that ‘choiceless choice’ is “as close as many whistleblowers’ get to evaluating their own narratives” (229). Despite this, most whistleblower narratives lack a resolution, a failure that Alford claims, is not because “the whistleblower lacks the narrative skills to bring his story to an end, but because the resources of common narrative are insufficient” (243). Alford argues that this insufficiency is not only a cultural failure but also a political failure. This political failure can in turn be traced, not to the interruption of the whistleblower narrative, but because that interruption results from certain “experiences that cannot be framed within the resources of common narrative” (245). My claim now, is that the resolution whistleblowers seek, can be found by affirming the supererogatory attitude which Levinasian normativity circumscribes. The meaning of whistleblowing narrative vests in the very interruption of that narrative—no experience, whether a whistleblowing experience or otherwise, can be completely framed within a narrative, common or otherwise. This is because every experience, as experienced by the Other, is singular and any attempt to represent it is a totalisation of the Other. Whistleblowing narrative, like the narrative of saints and heroes, finds expression is the inexpressibility of all narrative. Every interruption of whistleblowing narrative is a necessary and incessant correction of that narrative. After interviewing many whistleblowers and attending several whistleblower support groups, Alford acknowledges the conflict between “the whistleblower [who] wants his or her story told in his or her terms” and his own increasing interest in “the form of the story, the subject of narratology” (224). He confesses that as his research progressed, he began to feel that he might be betraying some of the whistleblowers who wanted their stories to be told verbatim (225).16 I would like to offer a reading of 16 Against

this discomfort Alford recounts that after sharing the proofs of the manuscript and resulting book (Alford, 2001) with a dozen whistleblowers only one whistleblower indicated that ‘she felt used’, while the rest described the result as “helpful to them in understanding their experiences” (2007, 225).

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Alford’s feeling of betrayal as that of a Levinasian betrayal—a necessary betrayal, a betrayal that is necessary whenever we try to tell another’s story, or try to do justice to their story, which amounts to the same thing. In Chapter 6, I cited Levinas claim that “the philosophical speaking that betrays in its said the proximity it conveys before us still remains, as a saying, a proximity and a responsibility” (1998, 168) (Emphasis added). To this, Chanter writes, “there is betrayal, and there is a reduction of betrayal” (1997, 67). The trace of the Saying in the Said is the reduction of the betrayal of the Saying by the Said. In Chapter 7 I explicated the move from the Saying to the Said, or rather the recursive oscillation between the Saying and the Said, as Levinas’s move from ethics to politics, which however, always returns back to ethics. The question of justice requires us to represent the Other’s story in a language that can be understood by all those party to the encounter, but in doing so we betray them. We can only reduce that betrayal by correcting how we represent their story. So, when Alford talks about the structure or the form of the whistle-blowers’ story, what he is talking about is the need to categorise and thematize the whistleblowers’ stories so that he can do justice to each individual whistleblower story. The whistleblowers wish to have their stories told verbatim is a quixotic attempt to ensure that the singularity of their whistleblowing experience is faithfully represented. Alford chooses to categorise the whistleblower stories into three themes—‘choiceless choice’, ‘stuck in static time’ and ‘living in the position of the dead’. I will only discuss the first two themes (225).17 Alford turns to narratology—the theory of narrative18 —in order to set up an internal psychic division within the whistleblower: he divides the self into a ‘sender’ who stands in for the whistleblower’s character and values, and the ‘subject’ who stands in for the whistleblower in his role as organization man (227). Alford argues that choiceless choice “happens when the sender speaks to the subject in a voice the subject cannot resist”, or, when the whistleblower becomes “overwhelmed” by their own beliefs (ibid.). Alford also writes that the relationship between sender and subject “is a contract between unequals” (ibid.). (This asymmetry brings to mind the asymmetry of the self and Other in the face to face encounter, although it is not quite clear whether it is the sender or subject that ‘comes from a dimension of height’. To my mind, it is this equivocation that gives rise to whistleblowing’s essential aporia of conflicting loyalties). Alford then considers Arendt’s claim that “freedom is acting from a principle” (228). Alford takes Arendt to mean by ‘principle’ “an idea or value that inspires us from ‘without’, from the outside in” (ibid.). Alford identifies this sense of Arendt’s principle with his ‘sender’. While Alford concedes that Arendt’s notion of freedom as “a surrender to principle” is better than the standard view of freedom as “having and making choices”, he also believes that Arendt’s account 17 Alford (241) says that living in the position of the dead, living “as if

one were already dead, is to live free of self-watchfulness, self-surveillance, and constant concern with what other people think” (my emphasis). 18 In an endnote Alford cites Genette’s definition of narratology as “respect for the mechanisms of the text”, which includes verbal texts, tales and stories (246). Alford remarks upon the achievement of narratology to demonstrate the “sophistication of everyday narratives, which share almost every mechanism of the classic text” (ibid.).

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misses something in the choiceless choice whistleblowers are confronted with. Part of what is missing is the whistleblower’s realisation that “freedom does not last”, a conclusion that Alford draws from quoting one of his interviewees, Jim Bower: “Once I blew the whistle, I was free […] I was free to say what I thought was right, and now I am not free to work in my career. When was I more free, then or now?” (ibid.). However, Alford offers no resolution to this seeming impasse. The resolution lies in understanding that the reason why freedom, as the whistleblower understands it, does not last, is because all freedom is provisional, and provisional because we are faced with the undecidability the alterity of the Other presents us with. Freedom does not last, because it is grounded in the alterity of the Other, not because it is grounded in a principle. I was as free then as I am now; as free as I ever was and ever will be. Freedom does not last—yes, but it always returns; oscillating between the decision to blow the whistle because a stakeholder’s relationship to the organisation has been inadequately represented, and the decision not to blow the whistle because such representations can be corrected by comparing them to the organisation’s relationship with its shareholders. Alford writes that choiceless choice makes “whistleblowing an agony”—a ‘struggle’ in which “comparing alternatives is pointless” (230). The language of ‘agony’ and ‘struggle’ recalls Levinas characterisation of the self’s subjectivity hostage to the Other as a persecution and a trauma. However, to recall from Chapter 8, Levinas’s use of these seemingly oppressive terms “is a negative language that becomes positive”; an ethics which is “back to front” (Critchley, 2015, 68).19 Getting the whistleblower to view their ‘agony’ back to front is to effect a change in their ethical attitude—to adopt the supererogatory attitude. Understanding whistleblowing as an agony is a means to evade responsibility, but in the affirmation of the supererogatory attitude which vests in the autonomy of undecidability, our freedom is invested as goodness. The supererogatory attitude also reveals that the comparing of alternatives is not only not pointless, but the very necessity on which our autonomy rests. Alford’s second whistleblower narrative theme is “narratives stuck in static time” (230).20 This narrative emerges from the whistleblower feeling that their experience is meaningless—there is no plot, just chronology. Chronology claims Alford, “is the defence against time that has lost its meaning […and…] time loses its meaning because the present no longer holds” (234). Alford writes that if stories are defined 19 Section

6.4.1. writes about the ‘paranoid’ narrative that is a subtheme of this second theme. While I won’t examine this further, Alfords remark that there is some substance to the paranoia a lot of whistleblowers often succumb to is illuminating: “[the] organization is not just out to fire him, but to obliterate him or her (232). Alford quotes one whistleblower relative who recounts that after her mother was fired, the organization “wanted to make it as if she had never existed, that everything she said had never happened. That’s a type of murder too” (ibid.). To recall from Chapter 6 (Sect. 6.3), the face signifies the command ‘You shall not kill’ which was taken to be not just a literal injunction against murder, but the normative violence of categorising and thematising the Other. The organisation’s retaliation against the whistleblower is also the normative violence of attempting to totalise their identity by representing them as a disloyal employee. Levinas would approve of the stark and hyperbolic language the whistleblower uses to try to represent this violation. 20 Alford

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by their ending, then what this defence amounts to is a retelling of one’s story so that they can avoid facing an end that might not bring meaning to that experience (235). Alford quotes one whistleblower who described his years in exile as “the turbulence of stagnant motion” (ibid.). Alford comments that while evaluating the whistleblower experience as a narrative imprisoned in one place, he sometimes suspected that the whistleblowers were more often than not comforted by these narrative forms (240). My conjecture is that the narrative of static time was comforting because the whistleblower grasps that time, and meaning, doesn’t only emerge from chronology. Time experienced as diachronological offers a way to reframe static time as meaningful: the turbulence of stagnant motion as the dynamism of recursive oscillating motion. In each retelling of the story, the whistleblower is representing the singularity of the whistleblowing experience in one more way, at the limit, in an infinite number of ways. The whistleblower retells their story and in so doing incessantly corrects the ethico-politico meaning that attaches to their whistleblowing experience. The whistleblower experience is made meaningful in the very retelling of their story, in retelling it as if it might have an ending. Tying this finding to the conclusions arrived at in the previous section, we can also say that in retelling their story, the whistleblower marks where the organisational boundary provisionally lies in the present retelling; or that in retelling their story, they are representing the relationship the organisation should have with a particular stakeholder in a particular (but) provisional way. In being comforted by the notion of static time, the whistleblower reveals an attitude that is not too far removed from the supererogatory attitude. The supererogatory attitude recasts static, chronological time, as recursive, diachronological time. As the supererogatory attitude follows the autonomy of undecidability, which in turn vests in the subjectivity of Levinasian normativity, whistleblowing narratives are most meaningfully understood from within Levinasian normativity.

9.4 Conclusion The whistleblower offers a compelling demonstration of how Levinasian normativity operates in practice. While dramatic whistleblowing cases do dominate the news headlines from time to time, the effort to maintain a good conscience while negotiating the rough and tumble of organisational life is a daily struggle. The struggle of the individual within organisational life reaffirms the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity, transforming all the small gestures of organisational interaction into supererogatory acts, or, rather, the reaffirmation of every small moral act as a provisionally supererogatory act. Alford writes that “it is not the acts of heroes that will save the republic. It is the acts of citizens, men and women who remember the public when they are acting in private” (2001, 34). Consider that remark together with Critchley’s remark, cited in the conclusion to Chapter 7, that for Levinas “ethics is ethical for the sake of politics – that is, for the sake of a new conception of the organization of political space” (1999, 223). We can then say that an ethical politics requires

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an ethico-political subject—a subject who remembers the public in their ethical attitude which orientates their private actions. The provisional whistleblower can be this subject. Recasting the whistleblower as the subject of Levinasian normativity offers a way for both the whistleblower and the public to make sense of whistleblowing experience. In this way, the moral ambivalence that surrounds whistleblowing might hopefully be dispelled. Alford remarks that “the fate of the whistleblower is not the worst problem our society faces, but it illuminates many others” (2001, 35). I would venture that those problems arise from the undecidability between ethics and politics, between the undecidability of public and private boundaries. If so, then the fate of the whistleblower, as the subject of Levinasian normativity, represents the best solution to the problems facing society.

References Alford, C. F. (2001). Whistleblowers: Broken lives and organizational power. London: Cornell University Press. Alford, C. F. (2007). Whistleblower narratives: The experience of choiceless choice. Social Research, 74(1), 223–248. Andrade, J. A. (2015). Reconceptualising whistleblowing in a complex world. Journal of Business Ethics, 28(2), 321–325. Anonymous. (1992). Whistleblowers: saint or snitch? Credit Union Executive, 32, 30–34. Bevan, D., & Corvellecc, H. (2007). The impossibility of corporate ethics: For a Levinasian approach to managerial ethics’. Business Ethics: A European Review, 16(3), 208–219. Chanter, T. (1997). The betrayal of philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas’s otherwise than being. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 23(6), 65–79. Cohen, R. A. (2000). Ethics and cybernetics: Levinasian reflections. Ethics and Information Technology, 2, 27–35. Critchley, S. (1999). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Critchley, S. (2015). The problem with Levinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fiesta, J. (1990). Whistleblowers: Heroes or stool pigeons? Nursing Management, 21, 16–18. Forstorp, P. (2007). Fundraising discourse and the commodification of the Other. Business Ethics: A European Review, 16(3), 286–301. Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless speech. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Grant, C. (2002). Whistleblowers: Saints of secular culture. Journal of Business Ethics, 39, 391–399. Hamilton, C. (2015). Religion, forgiveness and humanity. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 77, 185–205. Horgan, T., & Timmons, M. (2010). Untying a Knot from the inside out: Reflections on the “paradox” of supererogation. Social Philosophy & Policy, 27(2), 29–63. Introna, L. D. (2007). Singular justice and software piracy. Business Ethics: A European Review, 16(3), 264–277. Johnson, D. (1996). Whistleblowing: Subversion or corporate citizenship? Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 49(4), 766–767. Jubb, P. B. (1999). Whistleblowing: A restrictive definition and interpretation. Journal of Business Ethics, 21, 77–94. Karamail, E. (2007). Has the guest arrived yet? Emmanuel Levinas, a stranger in business ethics. Business Ethics: A European Review, 16(3), 313–321.

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Kenny, K., Fotaki, M., & Scriver, S. (2018). Mental health as a weapon: Whistleblower retaliation and normative violence. Journal of Business Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3868-4. Kenny, K., Fotaki, M., & Vandekerckhove, W. (2018). Whistleblower subjectivities: Organization and passionate attachment. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618814558. Layco, R. & Ripley, A. (2002, December 12). Persons of the year 2002: Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins. Time Magazine. Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Loumansky, A., & Lewis, D. (2013). A Levinasian approach to whistleblowing. Philosophy of Management, 12(3), 27–48. MacFarquhar, L. (2015). Strangers drowning: Voyages to the brink of moral extremity. Bristol, UK: Allen Lane. Mansell, S. (2008). Proximity and rationalisation: The limits of a Levinasian ethics in the context of corporate governance and regulation. Journal of Business Ethics, 83, 565–577. Margalit, A. (2002). The ethics of memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Painter-Morland, M. (2008). Business ethics as practice: Ethics as the everyday business of business. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perry, N. (1998). Indecent exposures: Theorizing whistleblowing. Organization Studies, 19(2), 235–257. Rothschild, J., & Miethe, T. D. (1994). Whistleblowing as resistance in modern work organizations. In J. M. Jermier, D. Knights, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), Resistance and power in organizations (pp. 252–273). London: Routledge. Santoro, D., & Kumar, M. (2018). Speaking truth to power—A theory of whistleblowing. Dordrecht: Springer. Singer, A. (1992). The whistleblower: Patriot or bounty hunter? Across the Board, 29, 16–22. Vandekerckhove, W. (2006). Whistleblowing and organisational social responsibility. Burlington: Ashgate. Vandekerckhove, W. (2010). European whistleblower protection: Tiers or tears? In D. Lewis (Ed.), A global approach to public interest disclosure (pp. 15–35). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Winkler, E. R., & Coombs, J. R. (Eds.). (1993). Applied ethics: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Woermann, M. (2010). Corporate identity, responsibility and the ethics of complexity. In P. Cilliers & R. Preiser (Eds.), Complexity, difference and identity (pp. 167–192). London and New York: Springer.

Chapter 10

The Analytic-Continental Divide as Chiasmus

Abstract This concluding chapter revisits the turn to continental philosophy in general, and Levinas in particular, as a means to solve the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. In light of my exegesis of a Levinasian ethics and subsequent construction of Levinasian normativity, I elaborate on my argument that analytic moral philosophy fails to solve these problems because of its impartialism, an impartialism rooted in a rationality which excludes affectivity and sensibility. This unfolds in two parts; first, through narrowing Levinas’s use of skepticism and its refutation into a discussion of moral skepticism, using Peter Singer as interlocutor and exemplar of the analytic tradition’s impartialism; second, by emphasising how the subject of Levinasian normativity, as an ethico-politico subject, can address the political dimensions of supererogation and moral-demandingness which the analytic tradition struggles with.

10.1 Introduction The first part of this study interrogated the conceptualisation of supererogation as action which goes ‘beyond duty’. This makes supererogation too morally demanding for the moral agent, which is why it is praised when undertaken, but not considered blameworthy when not. If duty is what morality can demand of us, then morality should not require us to do more than that duty. In positing limits to what duty can demand of us, there should also be a boundary that protects us from costly moral demands that no group of rational agents would agree to. In questioning these boundaries we are also questioning the limits of our moral autonomy. In place of autonomy grounded in rationality which can circumscribe the extent of morallydemanding duties (which might extend beyond duty), this study has instead argued that our autonomy is grounded in an affective sensibility which is circumscribed by an infinite responsibility. It is an affective sensibility that emerges from a face-to-face encounter with a radical other—a relationship of proximity in which the alterity of the Other obligates us. The Other is infinite and so the encounter with the Other produces a responsibility that is infinite, but because it is an infinite responsibility, there can be nothing beyond this responsibility; or rather, representing the infinity © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Andrade, Morally-Demanding Infinite Responsibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61630-4_10

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of an infinite responsibility is beyond representation in the moral language of obligation and autonomy. This infinite responsibility can only be represented by the trace this infinite responsibility leaves when we use the language of obligation and autonomy. This study has argued that following the trace of the infinite—the trace of the ethical Saying in the political Said—can be understood as a supererogatory attitude which follows an autonomy of undecidability which marks the subject of a Levinasian normativity. The recursive oscillations of Levinasian normativity—which create the undecidability that the subject must face—represent the unrepresentable representations of infinity responsibility, by representing the demands of the Other to represent their singularity faithfully, in an infinite number of ways. Or, in practice, as Jordaan writes, by “expressing the task of ethical politics in terms of presenting a fuller and more nuanced representation of the other” (2009, 100). We can also say that a morally-demanding duty must be provisionally infinite if it is to remain a responsibility at all. In Chapter 5 I outlined why I believed that turning to continental philosophy in general, and Levinas in particular, offered more fruitful possibilities to solve the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness than analytic moral approaches. However, some might still claim that my reinscription of analytic moral concepts into a Levinasian ethical framework leaves an unacceptable ethical remainder— what Lyotard referred to as the ‘differend’—the “untranslatability from, one mode of discourse in a dispute to another” (Spivak, 1988, 300). This claim can be discerned in the objections I considered against supererogation reconceptualised as a Levinasian normativity at the end of Chapter 8, which included doing away with the concept of supererogation as a result.1 After my exegesis of Levinasian ethics and construction of Levinasian normativity in the second half, I can now return to the argument presented in chapter five which of necessity could not have been presented in full before completing that work, in order to address the above claim. Following that, my hope is that the analytic-continental divide could be described not as divide, but as chiasmus. One way to characterise the untranslatability of discourses is as a betrayal—there are ideas or concepts that cannot be captured in terms other than in the language from which they arose, and the attempt to do so betrays what is lost in that translation. This notion of translation as betrayal is captured in Levinas’s claim of the betraying of the Saying in the Said, of “the philosophical speaking that betrays in its said the proximity it conveys before us” (1998, 168) (Emphasis added). Every reinscription of an analytic moral term into a continental moral term is a betrayal. However, as Chanter, justifying Levinas’s position, reminds us: “there is a necessary betrayal involved in the very attempt to do philosophy […which…] concerns the very function of language as thematization. It is the task of language to betray what it expresses” (1997, 67). Levinasian normativity is a betrayal of the idea of an infinite responsibility to a singular Other whose alterity cannot be represented in any language, but the language of that Other—the singular discourse of the face. However, Levinasian normativity is a necessary betrayal. It is also a justifiable betrayal because it is a 1 Section

8.5.

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provisional betrayal—every translation is only ever a provisional translation that must be incessantly corrected, which must be retranslated again and again. A provisional betrayal is a quasi-betrayal—almost a betrayal, a seeming betrayal, but not quite. Every reinscription of an analytic moral term into a continental moral term is a betrayal, but it is a necessary betrayal if we are ever to make progress in solving the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. In this concluding chapter I reflect on the necessary betrayal involved in my reconceptualisation of supererogation as a Levinasian normativity by returning to Levinas’s use of skepticism and its refutation but, narrowing the discussion from philosophical skepticism to moral skepticism.2 I will take Peter Singer as my interlocutor is this discussion because he exemplifies the impartialism I have argued is so problematic in utilitarianism in particular, and much analytic moral philosophy in general. In the section thereafter, I expand on Chapter 5’s claim that analytic moral philosophy struggles with the problems of supererogation and moral demandingness because of its reluctance to consider the important political questions these problems raise. I argue that Levinasian normativity is able to do so because it postulates an ethico-poltico subject.

10.2 The (Im)Possibility of Moral Skepticism Boundaries and limits present intractable problems for supererogation in particular, and moral-demandingness in general. The introduction to this study posed the questions, ‘Where does moral obligation end and supererogation begin?’ and, ‘At what point does a moral obligation become too demanding?’ I have demonstrated that these questions can also be reformulated as the questions, ‘At what point does a moral cost become a sacrifice?’ and ‘At what point does a person become a hero or a saint?’ Levinasian ethics does not so much answer these questions as dissolve them—because there is no end to obligation, supererogation never begins, or rather, supererogation has always already begun. Our moral obligations are infinite from the very beginning of our encounter with the Other and so, they are too morally demanding from the very beginning, or rather, our obligations are always already too demanding. These findings also show that every cost borne by the moral subject is an (im)possible sacrifice—that every cost, however small, is always already a sacrifice—a sacrifice of our autonomy. Every subject is always already a saint and hero, a provisional saint and hero. While Levinasian ethics dissolves ethical boundaries (which Levinasian normativity then provisionally reconstitutes), or, transforms everything into ethical limits, the point around which these oscillations turn remains fixed—the face of the Other. But what if the self were to refuse the authority of the face? In the language of boundaries, that would be tantamount to saying that the subject refused to situate themself within the space where the face had normative force. From that point, outside of 2 See

Chapter 7, Sect. 7.3.1.

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the ethical jurisdiction of the face, the subject would not need to concern themself with how it might restore their autonomy, taken hostage by the face, by navigating the ethical limits the face represented (through the autonomy of undecidability for example). However, the study’s findings demonstrate that the authority of the face cannot be refused—there is no boundary which the self can choose to cross which then subjects them to the normative force of the face. I briefly touched upon this point in chapter eight, in the discussion of the (im)possibility of sacrifice, where I noted that while we can refuse to respond to the demand of the Other, what this demonstrates is that the face is not a causal force, not that the face is normatively impotent. I will now explore this idea further in order to demonstrate that Levinas offers a much more convincing argument than that presented in the analytic tradition to the inter-related challenges of moral skepticism and ethical egoism.3 My aim in doing so, is to support and strengthen the reasons given in chapter five why I believe the continental tradition in general, and Levinas in particular, is better placed to solve the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. Moral skepticism is just an extreme position against these problems—if we deny the existence of morality, or that the Other can exert a normative force over me, then the problem of moral demandingness, and ipso facto, supererogation disappears. I will use Peter Singer as my interlocutor in this discussion because Singer is one of the best representatives of contemporary utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, as I have argued in this study, exemplifies an impartialist moral theory, which in turn, is a hallmark of much analytic moral philosophy. In demonstrating that the moral skeptic’ s question, ‘Why should I submit to the face?’ (A question posed in a Levinasian register) can be rejected, I will show that its reformulation in the analytic tradition as the question ‘Why be moral?’ cannot be so easily rejected. As such, this gives us one more reason to be ‘for Levinas’ in addressing the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness. In the final chapter of Practical Ethics, Singer poses the question, ‘Why act morally?’ (2011). He notes that this question is a different type of question to questions such as ‘Why should I donate to aid agencies who help the poor?’. He writes that the former question is “not a question within ethics, but a question about ethics” (277). Singer argues that the question ‘Why act morally?’ can be dismissed in the same manner as the question ‘Why should I be rational?’ because both questions try to answer something that is normally presupposed (278). Singer observes, in answering the question ‘Why should I be rational?’, I am already giving reasons and so I must necessarily presuppose rationality (ibid.). This question and answer follow the more general model of skepticism and its refutation. However, the question ‘Why should I act morally?’, so formulated, does not presuppose morality. Singer claims that the moral question ‘Why should I act morally?’ cannot be reduced in the same manner as the rational question ‘Why should I be rational?’; and must, therefore, be approached 3 In

Chapter 7, I examined Levinas’s use of skepticism and the refutation of skepticism, as a model for the diachrony of the Saying and the Said. Levinas’s use of the model of skepticism and its refutation involves a more general skepticism, which is concerned with the problem of knowledge more broadly. I will be narrowing that type of skepticism to consider the more specific problem of ethical knowledge. I also repeat Bernasconi’ s cautionary remarks that while Levinas uses skepticism as a model of diachrony, Levinas does not, in so doing, adopt a sceptical attitude.

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in moral terms. In other words, the model of skepticism and its refutation are not useful when considering moral skepticism. Singer then argues that if the ‘should’ used in the above questions, are understood as a moral ‘should’, “then the question would ask for moral reasons for being moral”. Singer regards the question formulated in this way as absurd. He writes that ‘should’ need not mean ‘should, morally’ and “could simply be a way of asking for reasons for action, without any specification about the kind of reasons wanted” (ibid.). In addition to moral reasons for action, Singer suggests self-interest and aesthetics as other possible reasons for action, that is, a self-interested ‘should’, and an aesthetic ‘should’. (He also considers etiquette as a possible reason for action. However, he doesn’t go further in exploring etiquette or aesthetics as a type of ‘should’, focusing instead on self-interested reasons, as a contrast to moral reasons for action.) In deciding which reason (or ‘should’) to adopt, Singer says “we must ask it from a position of neutrality between all these points of view, not of commitment to any one of them” (ibid.). Without such neutrality, Singer continues, our practical choices would be ‘beyond reason’ and arbitrary. Singer believes that in order to avoid this undesirable conclusion, whilst keeping open a commitment to any particular viewpoint, that the question—‘why should I be moral?’—could be made less confusing by regarding it as being about “the ethical point of view, asked from a position outside it” (279). The ‘ethical point of view’ has it that “ethical judgements are universalisable [which …] requires us to go beyond our own personal point of view to a standpoint like that of the impartial spectator” (ibid.). Singer then concludes that because it is possible to act only in one’s self-interest, the question ‘Why act morally?’ can only be properly asked by a moral agent who subscribes to the view that moral reasons for action must be universally acceptable (ibid.). In other words, for Singer, only universalisability, or impartialism, can defeat the problem of ethical egoism, and a fortiori, answer the moral sceptic’s question ‘Why act morally?’ However, this solution is circular—they only way to avoid acting in self-interest is to accept reasons against self-interest—reasons that are not selfinterested reasons, that is, universal reasons. But what reasons does the self-interested agent have for abandoning their self-interested reasons? These reasons can only be self-interested reasons. Universalisability and impartialism then, cannot answer the question ‘Why be moral?’ if morality is understood as a set of universalisable and impartial imperatives without begging the question. Levinasian ethics shows that the moral skeptic can be defeated without recourse to impartialism and universalisability. Singer’s skeptic can evade morality by denying universalisability, whereas the Levinasian self cannot, on pain of denying their own ethical subjectivity. The empirical fact that people do sacrifice demonstrates that reasons for action other than self-interested reasons for action exist—these reasons, because they are not reasons for the self, are reasons for the Other—ethical reasons for action. The (im)possibility of sacrifice shows that any self-interested reason is also simultaneously a reason for the Other, and so, we are always already acting for the Other. To ask, ‘why be moral?’ is already to concede that there are reasons that supersede self-interested reasons. Perpich writes that in asking for reasons to act for the Other, the self

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implicates herself in the very practices of reflection that indicate just the sort of relation she would like to deny. That is, the sceptic uses a faculty or practice granted to her by the social or ethical relationship in order to question whether such a relation could really be attributed to her. Her question thus involves her in a performative contradiction and is in this sense self-defeating or self-refuting. (2008, 134)

Levinas argues that moral scepticism is the very enactment of the ethical relation of the face-to-face: “it is as though scepticism were sensitive to the difference between my exposure without reserve to the other, which is saying, and the exposition or statement of the said in its equilibrium and justice” (1998, 168). Each Said is a norm which offers itself as a moral reason to act. Each and every norm can be contested by the moral sceptic; that is to say, every Said is open to interruption by the Saying because the Saying is sceptical of all norms as instantiations of the Saying. However, because the sceptic requires the Saying in order to express their scepticism—the face is discourse—the sceptic cannot be sceptical with respect to the requirement of normativity itself. Perpich clarifies that the skeptic “cannot claim to be deaf to the fact that a demand has been registered” even as they “try to dismiss it as wrong-headed or pernicious […] I cannot claim that such demands are literally meaningless nonsense or none of my affair” (2008, 147). Self-interested reasons can only emanate from a self whose subjectivity is separate and independent from the Other. To ask, ‘Why be moral?’, then, only makes sense if the self is able to constitute itself before the face-to-face encounter with the Other. To recall Levinas’s (1989, 107) claim these questions have meaning only if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned with itself, is only a concern for itself. In this hypothesis it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute outside-of-me, the other would concern me.4

However, in Levinasian ethics the self is hostage to the Other; and in Levinasian normativity, the autonomy of the self can only manifest in the recursive oscillation of the supererogatory attitude. Every reason for an action then, can only be given after this constitution of the self. Because I can never close myself off to the Other, my reasons can never exclude a consideration of the Other. The simultaneous and contemporaneous existence of self-interested reasons and reasons for the Other are the simultaneous and contemporaneous existence of the Other and the third, the ethical and the political which constitute the poles of Levinasian normativity. Let us return to Singer’s above claim that the question ‘Why should I be rational?’ must presuppose rationality, whereas presupposing morality with respect to the question ‘Why should I act morally?’ leads to absurd questions which ask for moral reasons for being moral. Singer argues that this absurdity arises only if we regard the ‘should’ as a moral should and sets a self-interested ‘should’ against this moral should. On the analysis above, a self-interested ‘should’ is self-defeating, and so the ‘should’ in ‘Why should I act morally?’ can only operate as a moral should. In order to show that this does not lead to absurd questions, I take up another of Singer’s formulations of the question ‘Why act morally?’—“a request for an ethical justification of 4 See

Chapter 6, Sect 6.4.1.

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ethics” (2011, 278). Formulated in this way, the request recalls Derrida’s characterisation of Levinas’ project as an ‘ethics of ethics.’ In the introduction to chapter six, I submitted that Derrida’s formulation may be taken to mean ‘evaluating whether a particular way of discovering the good is itself a good, that is, ethical, way to proceed in the matter’. There are many ways to proceed in discovering the good—some ways are more ethical than others: for example, one can proceed to discover the good in a categorical way—the Kantian way. However, we can also proceed in a provisional way—the Levinasian way; or, rather, in the way of a Levinasian normativity. The question of asking for an ethical justification of ethics is, therefore, not redundant or absurd. Singer’s view of morality as universalisable means that his formulation of ‘moral reasons for morality’ is better expressed in the formulation ‘universalisable reasons for morality’. This formulation shows the sleight of hand involved in saying that ‘moral reasons for morality’ is absurd. I want to offer another possible answer to the question ‘why be moral?’ which segues into the next sections’ discussion of why Levinas is better placed to address the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness than the analytic tradition. Although, strictly speaking, it is an answer to the question, ‘why be ethical?’ and not ‘why be moral? In chapter five I noted the distinction between a moral subject and an ethical subject.5 The former situates the autonomy of the subject in the rationality of the subject—the way Kant does—while in the latter, autonomy derives from a non-rational source—in Levinas, in the sensibility of the face. In turn, this distinction between morality and ethics revealed a distinct approach between the analytic and continental traditions to the concerns of politics. I have argued that the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness cannot be neatly pigeon-holed as just ethical problems—the contestation of boundaries and limits requires thinking about these problems politically. Levinasian normativity as the solution to, or dissolution of, these problems is the recursive oscillation between ethics and politics. Williams writes that “the continental approach to ethics and politics [establishes] a quite different animal to that pursued by the combination of morality and politics” (2009, 111). It is only this ethico-political animal, in which the “ethical motivation of the subject […] is critical: the sensibilities, affective comportment, the attunement to the Other and otherness”, that is capable of answering the question ‘why be ethical?’ by answering, ‘for the sake of politics’.6

10.3 Provisional Ethico-Politico Solutions to Supererogation and Moral-Demandingness The failure of Peter Singer’s LSA (life-saving analogy), as a type of supererogatory assimilation strategy, brings the shortcomings of attempts to address the problems 5 Section

5.2. take inspiration for this answer from Critchley, whose comment, “Ethics is ethical for the sake of politics” (1999, 223), I have cited on two previous occasions. 6I

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of supererogation and moral-demandingness solely through a moral lens, into sharp focus.7 The entry of fair-share approaches and considerations of duties of justice into this debate, underscores the political dimensions than inevitability emerge from such discussions. Singer acknowledges that poverty and aid need to be addressed within wider political concerns, but his efforts to quarantine the moral considerations from these concerns only serve to make the individual’s efforts quixotic and impotent. In Chapter 5 I noted the analytic traditions’ tendency to focus on specific and detailed problems, to the detriment of the bigger whole within which those problems are situated, as a reason for the strict demarcation between morality and politics in the analytic tradition. I also noted the preoccupation of the analytic tradition with morality, as against ethics. Finally, if morality is defined as universal and impartial imperatives that are grounded in the agent’s rationality, then, we can say that morality must necessarily exclude politics. A fortiori, morality will not be able to solve the problems of supererogation and demandingness because politics is irretrievably lodged inside those problems. Or rather, only a subject who is both ethically and politically constituted is able to face these problems. That subject is the subject of Levinasian normativity, who faces the problems of supererogation and moraldemandingness with the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity—as if those problems were not problems, or, as if those problems could be separated into ethical problems and political problems. After these claims, I want to cite Ernst Wolff at length, who captures compellingly and succinctly what I believe is at stake in understanding Levinasian normativity as the recursive ethico-politico attitude of the (infinitely) responsible subject: [T]here is no relation to the other that is not politically mediated, since all relations to the other involve relations to the plurality of others. For this reason, if Levinas is a philosopher of ethics, of [infinite] responsibility, he is so by being a philosopher of justice: the only thing that one could responsibly do out of responsibility for the others in the plural, is to relativize the responsibility for each one of them, by the call for justice. […] responsibility without justice is irresponsible […] it is only by taking the political dimension of responsibility seriously that justice can be done to responsibility. (2011, 29)

The supererogatory attitude of the subject of Levinasian normativity takes the political dimensions of the LSA seriously, takes the boundaries and limits of obligations seriously. In that supererogatory attitude, the subject can limit their infinite responsibility to and for the Other, but still ensure that that limited responsibility remains a just responsibility by safeguarding the alterity of the Other who is owed that responsibility. If, as Critchley claims, “politics provides the continual horizon of Levinasian ethics” (1999, 223), then, as McMurray et al. argue, politics does not imply “ethics [as]necessarily a restraint on power – i.e. one where politics comes first and then ethics evaluates it later – [rather] politics is the machinery through which the ethical demand can be responded to” (McMurray et al., 2010, 546). 7 Chapter

3, Sect. 3.3.

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What drives that machinery is the supererogatory attitude of the subject of Levinasian normativity. That attitude, described above, as being grounded in “the sensibilities, affective comportment, the attunement to the Other and otherness” (op cit.), is a non-rational attitude. In chapter five I remarked on the ‘scientism’ that marks the analytic traditions’ allergy to not only the political, but also the non-rational.8 But the non-rational is not the irrational; in the continental tradition in general, and Levinas in particular, non-rationality is the rationality of sensibility and affectivity. This way of putting things recalls Alice Crary’s rejoinder to critics of impartialism who in their critique of impartialism, rely on a moral rationality understood as “an abstraction from everything affective [as] necessary to attaining it” (2007, 204).9 By ‘everything affective’ Crary includes moods, feelings, and attitudes, which are not always amenable to rational deliberation and articulation. Crary’s solution is not to throw out impartialism wholesale, but rather, the notion of impartialism which draws strict boundaries between affectivity and rationality. In Chapter 7, in explicating the mechanisms of quasi-transcendentalism, I claimed that the provisionality of Levinasian normativity also offered a way to keep what was useful in impartialism. I argued that transcendental moral imperatives—impartial moral imperatives—could be used responsibility to ensure just outcomes if they were used with fresh judgement in response to a plurality of singular Others. So for example, in a situation where there is a very limited budget, we might need to enlist the impartial imperative to maximise utility and welfare in order to ensure that the singular suffering of each victim can be acknowledged, if not eliminated. In that situation, we will use the impartial imperative to maximise welfare as if it could calculate that welfare by summing up partial considerations, as if the singular sufferings of each victim in that situation could be quantified. However, Levinasian affectivity and sensibility goes further than just regarding emotions and moods as considerations that should inform rationality. While affectivity and sensibility underly Taylor’s primitive moral responsiveness, it is an affectivity undermined by a consciousness that seeks to recognise the suffering of the other like my own.10 Taylor argued that morality should be concerned with knowing how to respond to a particular situation, and not only with knowing that something is the case, that is, a moral judgement that X is right or wrong. I argued that this distinction unravels in Taylor because knowing how ultimately devolves into knowing that. It is the knowing that causes the problem, not the knowing how or knowing that. Knowing always runs up against the limits of re/presentation of the alterity of the Other. Knowing is necessary, but knowledge is always provisional, and provisional because determining how to re/present the Other is undecidable. Furthermore, I can never recognise the Other’s suffering as like my own, because 8 See Chapter 5, Sect. 5.2. Scientism is the “the view that the natural sciences provide the model for explanation and understanding in other fields, including philosophy” (Beaney, 2017, 109). 9 Chapter 2, Sect. 2.5.3. 10 Chapter 4, Sect. 4.4.

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who I am is also unknowable—the subjectivity of the self is hostage to the alterity of the Other. The autonomy of the self is an autonomy of undecidability which recursively oscillates between a series of provisional representations and responses to the face of the Other. Crary’s invocation of moral presumptuousness illuminates this point. Moral presumptuousness follows from impartialism, or rather, impartialism that operates by excluding affectivity from rationality. Moral presumptuousness risks stunting the self’s moral development because, argues Crary, such a narrowly-focused moral agent is unable to tap into the “kinds of refinements of sensibility that explorations of different modes of responses to the world promise to foster” (2007, 196). Moral presumptuousness then, betrays a certain ethical attitude. This attitude reflects the self’s belief that there is a range of fixed moral responses to the complexity of the world and that all that will ever be required of them is to judge which of those responses apply to the present situation. In making these judgements the self believes it exercises moral autonomy. In refining their sensibilities—by including affectivity into rationality—the self expresses an ethical attitude which recognises how moral autonomy might be constrained by affectivity. However, while Crary’s affective and sensible rationality might mitigate moral presumptuousness, it cannot eradicate it. This is because, like Taylor’s primitive moral responsiveness, Crary’s sensibility and affectivity runs up against certain representational limits—in the process of refining sensibility, sensibility is transformed into a knowing, which is then able to make definite decisions. The affectivity and sensibility of the self do not originate in the self, but in the response of the self to the alterity of the Other. Affectivity and sensibility then, do not merely inform, or refine rationality and so ground the subject’s decisions to act morally or not; rather the affectivity and sensibility of the self just are the rationality of the self. This rationality in turn is grounded in undecidability, which drives the recursive oscillation of Levinasian normativity, allowing the agent to act ethically. The rationality of the sensibility and affectivity of Levinasian normativity can then be understood as a recursive ethico-politico rationality. While I have argued strongly for a turn to the continental tradition with which to approach the problems of supererogation and moral-demandingness because that tradition contains theoretical resources not present in the analytic tradition, my discussion in this section has revealed certain continuities between Levinas and analytic moral philosophy—as such, the analytic-continental divide should be understood as more akin to chiasmus, than divide. My study hopes to demonstrate a fruitful exchange between the two traditions: the concept of supererogation and its problematics as it emerges in my analysis of the LSA (life-saving analogy) for example, is useful to Levinasian scholarship, particularly in the move from ethics to politics, by providing extended concrete situations in which to explore and illuminate Levinas’s oftentimes abstract ideas. Flowing in the opposite direction, I believe that Levinasian thought is useful to (re)conceptualise supererogation because it provides philosophical resources with which to tackle limit concepts that bog down in paradox when trying to articulate them.

10.4 Conclusion

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10.4 Conclusion The term ‘supererogation’ is never used by Levinas in his work. Even Morgan’s comprehensive study of the Levinasian oeuvre, in which he places Levinas in conversation with the chief protagonists of twentieth century Anglo-American moral philosophy, avoids the term, settling instead for the more anodyne ‘single-mindedness’ (2007).11 Nonetheless, my exegesis of Levinas’s work has demonstrated that his ethics is fundamentally supererogatory. In chapter two I cited, with approval, Wolf’s remark that “any plausible moral theory must make use of some conception of supererogation” (1982, 438). In the first part of this study, I demonstrated that analytic moral theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism fail on this account—they cannot offer a coherent conception of supererogation and so attempt to assimilate supererogation without moral remainder. If this is the case, then, following Wolf, these accounts of morality are implausible. Their implausibility is rooted in their too morally demanding impartialism, which is in turn, rooted in an autonomy that excludes sensibility and affectivity from its rational exercise. Levinasian normativity not only makes supererogation plausible but transforms it into the source from which all responsibility and autonomy derive their legitimacy and justification. The supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity establishes the subjectivity of the self—in an autonomy of undecidability, which though undecidable, is not irrational, and not irrational because it allows the self to navigate the passage from the ethical imperative of infinite responsibility to the political requirement to limit that responsibility. I want to conclude this study with Levinas’s remark, in the preface to Totality and Infinity, that “the state of war suspends morality” (1969, 21). By war, Levinas means politics, and by politics, Levinas means “the very exercise of reason”, that is, calculation and thematisation (ibid.). Consider Levinas’s follow-up question to this— “Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?”—together with a question posed by MacFarquhar: Why shouldn’t people be spurred to action as much by the existing shame of their country’s injustices as they are threatened by the shame of conquest? […] Why shouldn’t the commitment and fellowship and urgency of war be grafted onto the morality of ordinary times? (2015, 298)

In war-times heroism is common—Urmson’s 1958 essay ‘Saints and Heroes’ was informed by his personal experiences during World War II, in which he was awarded a MC for his bravery during the Tunisia campaign.12 In war-times the smallest acts of kindness often demand the greatest sacrifice. In peace time actual sacrifice is rare, but the possibility of sacrifice is ever-present. In peace time we are all provisionally saints, all provisionally heroes. War only makes this implicit state of being in the 11 Calling

this ‘Levinas’s obsession’, would have been a more faithful representation of Levinas’s meaning, following the importance attaching to this term as another signifier of Levinasian proximity. 12 See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9186962/Professor-James-Urmson.html. Accessed 8 May 2019.

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world with Others explicit. What MacFarquhar and Levinas are urging upon us, is an attitude toward the Other as if it were war-times, because, argues Levinas violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance. (1969, 21)

This study has aimed to show that the actions which will not “destroy every possibility for action” (ibid.), are grounded in the supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity, which recognise the saintly and heroic within the everyday encounter with the Other. The supererogatory attitude of Levinasian normativity reveals an infinite responsibility as if it were not a too morally-demanding responsibility.

References Beaney, M. (2017). Analytic philosophy: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chanter, T. (1997). The betrayal of philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas’s otherwise than being. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 23(6), 65–79. Crary, A. (2007). Beyond moral judgment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Critchley, S. (1999). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jordaan, E. (2009). Cosmopolitanism, freedom, and indifference: A Levinasian view. Alternatives, 34, 83–106. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1989) The Levinas reader (S. Hand, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. MacFarquhar, L. (2015). Strangers drowning: Voyages to the brink of moral extremity. London: Allen Lane. McMurray, R., Pullen, A., & Rhodes, C. (2010). Ethical subjectivity and politics in organizations: A case of health care tendering. Organization, 18(4), 541–561. Morgan, M. L. (2007). Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perpich, D. (2008). The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Singer, P. (2011). Practical ethics (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Williams, C. (2009). Politics and ethics. In J. Mullarkey & B. Lord (Eds.), Continuum companion to continental philosophy (pp. 109–126). New York: Bloomsbury. Wolf, S. (1982). Moral saints. The Journal of Philosophy, 79(8), 419–439. Wolff, E. (2011). Political responsibility for a globalised world. After Levinas’ humanism. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript.