Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility

According to the French-Jewish thinker Levinas (1905–1995), ethics begins with the appearing of the other person, or, as he calls it in his first major work, Totality and Infinity (1961), with his or her “face.” Let us follow Levinas in his attempt to describe this central ethical phenomenon. In this way, we will be led to pay special attention to the problem of violence, hate, and murder, since every ethics is ultimately concerned with the difference between moral good and evil. Through this analysis—which of course can explain only some aspects of Levinas’s many-sided and at the same time single-minded thinking—we still hope to make clear the power and importance of his ethics for, among other things, the contemporary discussion on racism.