ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Levinas’s vindication of morality within recent arguments for the importance of first-person answerability as a basic feature of morality. I argue that most defenders of moral answerability implicitly assume its legitimacy on the basis of the presupposed authority of reason or the moral community. Levinas, however, offers a critique of moral answerability as ordinarily conceived. He does not assume the moral legitimacy of the claims of reason or the claims of the community but attempts to ground such claims directly on the moral sense of the second-person standpoint. The attempt to ground moral answerability without presupposing the antecedent authority of reason or community motivates Levinas’s novel “defense of subjectivity,” which I propose amounts to an account of first-person answerability to valid meaning-claims in general. The chapter then attempts to explain how Levinas’s defense of subjectivity entails a vindication of the moral sense of the second-person standpoint. It does so by showing how the possibility of answerability to meaning-claims is grounded and maintained by first-person answerability to the Other.
