ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that certain analytic moral philosophers, such as Blackburn, who may be thought to have nothing in common with a philosopher like Levinas, in fact advocate a distinctively Levinasian idea (“ethics as first philosophy”), according to which ethics can and must be judged only by its own lights—that there is no external, non-ethical (ontological) standpoint from which fundamental ethical notions can be explained, undermined, or vindicated. Moreover, it is suggested that what underlies this stance in analytic philosophy is the sharp Humean distinction between factual and ethical content.
