Responsibility for another person › Freedom put in question

An account that begins with an autonomous agent can ask which obligations that agent chooses to accept. Levinas asks how the other person can call the exercise of freedom itself into question. The ethical relation is not adequately described as a contract whose force depends entirely on prior agreement between independent parties.

He uses the language of height and asymmetry to describe the other's claim. The other is not simply my equal in a reversible exchange of viewpoints. From the standpoint of responsibility, I am addressed and called to answer. I cannot make the force of that call depend solely on whether the other has first offered me an equivalent benefit.

This is a claim about the structure of ethical responsibility, not a recommendation that every demand from another person should be obeyed. A request can be harmful, inconsistent with another person's needs, or based on a mistaken account. The fact that someone addresses me does not turn their particular instructions into an infallible moral law.

Asymmetry nevertheless raises a serious question. If I describe responsibility without making reciprocity its foundation, how do I account for my own needs and for limits on what others may ask? A careful interpretation cannot avoid this difficulty by praising generosity. It needs to explain how the ethical priority of the other relates to concrete judgments about harm, refusal, and responsibility to more than one person.

The language of priority also needs care. Ethics being prior to comprehension does not mean that every person first has a distinct ethical experience and only later begins thinking. The claim concerns philosophical dependence and justification. Levinas is arguing that knowing and freedom cannot provide their own final justification without the relation to the other being brought into view.