ABSTRACT
Green’s chief objection to reading the book as a contribution to ethical debate is that doing so ‘produces a serious tension and even a degree of incoherence in the text’.74 This is because for Johannes, if there is to be any justification of Abraham, such justification must be external to the ethical. Abraham’s behaviour ‘lies entirely outside the sphere of universal concepts or values to which ethics belongs; it cannot be rationally explained and justified – “mediated” – in any way; and it cannot be expressed in language’.75 But this simply assumes that ‘the ethical is the universal’ is a position to which Johannes is unequivocally committed, rather than a dominant view of the ethical that he is placing under the microscope to test its adequacy. Our account of Mooney above is enough to show that at least some ‘ethical’ readings of the text read it as making space for an alternative conception of the ethical. Green mentions Mooney’s reading in a footnote, but dismisses it on the grounds that it ‘openly defies Fear and Trembling’s repeated assertion that Abraham’s conduct does not reside within the ethical’.76 But this will not do: Green is simply assuming, without argument, that ‘the ethical is the universal’ is Johannes’ actual view. Moreover, Green seems to limit the possible range over which the term ‘ethics’ can be applied. In another footnote critical of Merold Westphal, he argues that the latter’s claim that the conception of the ethical under scrutiny in Fear and Trembling is Hegelian can be countered by ‘equally compelling evidence’77 that the text has Kantian features. But from this Green concludes that this ‘shows that it is not just the limits of one or other theory of ethics but the moral life in its most comprehensive sense that Fear and Trembling proposes to transcend’.78 This is surely a non sequitur: it seems, inexplicably, to suppose that Kant and Hegel exhaust the range of possible views of ethics or ‘the moral life’. In short, Green does not succeed in justifying his dismissal of all ‘ethical’ readings of the text: some, such as Mooney’s, can escape his objections.
