DE Weekly: Values, Moral Relativism, & Existential Ethics

Last week, I introduced Emmanuel Levinas, the twentieth-century French philosopher who posited ethics as “first philosophy.” To him, this meant that the force fundamentally underpinning all of philosophy is our ethical responsibility.

Before anything else, Levinas argued, we are first of all called into existence to be unconditionally obligated to serve others. Our first act as a Self, then, should be to consider the Other.