ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an overview of Levinas’s phenomenological ethics of difference and singularity and then explores a Levinasian approach to the ethical dimension of climate change. Dale Jamieson argues that climate change and other collective action environmental problems pose a challenge to our traditional conceptions of moral responsibility, which are grounded in an intention to harm, and in clear causal relations between a perpetrator and a victim. Levinas’s phenomenology of moral consciousness as responsibility, in contrast, is grounded in the suffering and vulnerability of the other, regardless of my intention or role in that suffering; for this reason it offers a useful alternative for thinking about the suffering that arises from a changing climate. According to a Levinasian approach, this suffering discloses both my own responsibility and my resources to work for mitigation and adaptation. Moreover, Levinas’s understanding of the work of ethics as a service for a time in which I do not benefit, provides a framework for conceptualizing my responsibility to future generations. And grounding justice in the ethical relation, as Levinas does, motivates collective agreements aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change while simultaneously resisting the ways in which these agreements inevitably justify some suffering. Thus, I argue, Levinas’s work provides an apt description of ethical life in the Anthropocene: I have infinite and inescapable responsibilities that increase with my awareness and attention and are always beyond my capacities to meet.
