ABSTRACT
Bernard Williams has criticized especially utilitarianism for being unable to provide room for anything like leading a good human life. In this chapter, I confront Levinas with Williams’s challenge. To put the problem in simple terms: If an ethical subject is described as “living for the other,” then how can such a subject possibly find room to lead a comfortable life of its own? I briefly review some strategies for defending Levinas against this challenge but argue that they are unsuccessful. Instead, I suggest that the proper Levinasian response would be to turn the tables on Williams. From Levinas’s point of view, there is something unsettling in Williams’s idea that the way in which a moral philosophy should avoid letting morality “dominate life altogether” is by leaving room for a great number of “morally indifferent actions.” This seems designed to allow most of us to feel satisfied with ourselves, assured of our moral virtuousness, by construing most of our aims, projects, and actions as being ethically indifferent. Thus, it opens the door for a moral self-righteousness or self-complacency that Levinas finds potentially dangerous.
