ABSTRACT
Among his Talmudic writings, Levinas’s text “Envers Autrui” takes up themes which, although in very different modes of expression, are also to be found among the concerns of analytic moral and political philosophy. These include the nature of the responsibilities which members of any speech community all bear to each other for the maintenance of common norms of conceptualising communication: the question of whether moral judgment is ever justified in the cases of people unaware of the deeper motivations of the own actions: and – most notably – that of the fundamentally incompatible moral demands of universal justice and those of especial consideration for particular individuals to whom one may be bound by ties of a common identity. This tension lies at the very heart of morality and the human situation as such.
