Levinas and Analytic Philosophy

Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life

Michael Fagenblat, Melis Erdur, Michael Fagenblat, Melis Erdur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429870064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often disparately pursued, Levinas's account of "ethics as first philosophy" affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises and showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity.

In metaethics, the volume shows how Levinas's moral phenomenology relates to recent work on the normativity of rationality and intentionality, and how it can illuminate a wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect, conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, dependence, gratitude and guilt. The volume also tests Levinas's innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological identity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the metaphysical significance and sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally, the volume connects Levinas's second-person standpoint with analogous developments in moral philosophy.

Part I
Second-Person Normativity

1 Second-Person Reasons

Darwall, Levinas, and the Phenomenology of Reason

Steven G. Crowell

§1 What Are Second-Person Reasons?

According to Stephen Darwall, second-person reasons are valid normative claims that we make on “one another’s conduct and will.”¹ Though such claims can be embedded in attitudes like resentment or codified in particular laws or prescriptions, their pragmatic force is that of a command. But not every command makes a normative claim in Darwall’s sense. When you tell me to “open the window,” this command purports to give me a reason and can be formulated as the prescription “You ought to open the window.” But such a command works on my conduct and will only by means of side-considerations: I “ought” to open the window because I, too, feel that the room is too warm or because you desire to be cooler, and I desire to satisfy your desire. In short, my reasons for acting are what Darwall calls “state of the world regarding” and “agent-neutral”:² I have reason to obey because it will make the world a better place. The command itself does not provide the reason, as is clear from the case in which I think the room is too cold already or when I have no desire to satisfy your desire, and so the command is really a request: “Please, open the window.”

Such commands, then, make no claims on me; that is, they are not normative. A command that addresses a normative claim—one that can be expressed as an obligation—addresses itself “directly to [another’s] will” and, if the claim is “successful,” it provides the other with a second-personal reason for acting. Such a reason is “agent-relative”; it “simply wouldn’t exist” were it not for a specific sort of “relation to one another” in which you and I stand.³ If you step on my toe and I say “Get off my toe!” I have addressed a claim to you that is meant to determine your will directly, apart from any of your desires or evaluative beliefs. It can be formulated as “You (normatively) must get off my toe,” and this normative “must” is a putative second-personal reason. Darwall’s question is this: What conditions must be in place with respect to our relations to one another in order for second-person reasons to exist? As a first approximation, he writes: “What makes a reason second-personal is that it is grounded in (de jure) authority relations that an addresser takes to hold between him and his addressee.”⁴ Second-person reasons thus depend on the “presupposition” that you have the authority to order me to get off your toe. What can give you that authority?

Darwall’s analysis of the second-person standpoint is meant to answer this question. Quite generally: addressing a claim to another can give the other a “valid” second-person reason only if the addresser and addressee “share a common second-personal authority, competence, and responsibility simply as free and rational agents.”⁵ The normative authority to issue binding commands, then, and to hold someone accountable for carrying them out, must be shared. A command issued by someone who possesses an authority that the other does not possess—such as a sergeant’s order to a private—has no validity unless it rests upon a deeper normative ground where authority is shared: “However hierarchical, … any address of a second-personal reason also implicitly presupposes a common second-personal authority as free and rational.”⁶ Asymmetrical authority relations have the power to constitute second-person reasons only because they rest upon symmetrical authority relations in which we stand toward one another as free and rational agents.

The demand for symmetrical authority arises from Darwall’s focus on the validity of second-person reasons. If second-person reasons exist (i.e., are valid), then a whole set of conditions must obtain—which Darwall, following J. L. Austin, calls “normative felicity conditions” for the success of a second-person address or claim⁷—without which a command lacks the power to constitute a valid agent-relative reason for me to act here and now. But even if this is true, it does not rule out that a command addressed to me could have other kinds of power, other ways of binding me, that do not depend on what I want or need. Darwall considers such a situation in the case of coercion, i.e., a command that rests upon some non-normative power. But are all asymmetrical commands instances of coercion? And if not, might such a command itself be a condition for being able to entertain second-person reasons?

These questions lie at the heart of Levinas’s phenomenology of the face, which I will take up in the second half of this essay. I do so not to challenge Darwall’s account of second-person reasons itself, his Kantian picture of moral normativity. Rather, I want to show that Levinas’s phenomenology uncovers a command that is both normative and asymmetrical, one that addresses an important point only touched on by Darwall: namely, how it is possible to enter the second-person standpoint, how we become sensitive to the normative force of reasons as such, second-person or otherwise.⁸ Before we can appreciate the consequences of this point for the question of validity, however, we must explore Darwall’s picture in somewhat more detail. How should we think of the normative felicity conditions that must be presupposed if second-person reasons are to be valid? Such conditions make up what Darwall calls the “second-person standpoint.”

§2 The Second-Person Standpoint: Performative and Objective Attitudes

Here I want to focus on two main points: the holism of the second-person standpoint and its character as a performative attitude of persons. Let us begin with the latter.

Since second-person reasons are agent relative in the sense of being practical prescriptions that guide the will directly, they can appear only to one who occupies what Jürgen Habermas calls the “performative attitude of a person taking part in interaction.”⁹ This is contrasted with the “objectivating attitude” of a “nonparticipant observer” (which could be the agent herself, reflecting herself out of the interaction to consider things agent neutrally), a “third-person” attitude which “annuls the communicative roles of I and Thou, the first and second persons,” thereby causing “this realm of phenomena,” second-person reasons, “to vanish.”¹⁰

Both Darwall and Habermas appeal to the moral phenomenology of what P. F. Strawson calls “reactive attitudes” to illuminate this point. My indignation at being trod upon differs from anger at your being the cause of my pain because indignation includes the consciousness of “the violation of an underlying normative expectation that is valid,” not only for the two of us but, ultimately, “for all competent actors.”¹¹ If one tries to account for the normative character of indignation with an approach that does not make reference to this second-person aspect—say, by appealing to the social desirability of such norms—one violates what Darwall calls “Strawson’s Point”: Desirability and the like are “reason[s] of the wrong kind to warrant the attitudes and actions in which holding someone responsible consists in their own terms.”¹² The relevant moral “intuitions” are available only if one remains in the second-person standpoint, “the perspective one assumes in addressing practical thought or speech to, or acknowledging address from, another … and, in so doing, making or acknowledging a claim or demand on the will.”¹³

That this is a performative attitude is indicated by two things. First, “the second-person stance is a version of the first-person standpoint”—that is, a version of the “I” ’s performative character, which Darwall explicates in terms of Fichte’s notion of “self-positing.”¹⁴ Second, “what the second-person stance excludes is the third-person perspective” in which one regards oneself agent neutrally or objectively, rather than as the addresser or addressee of a normative claim.¹⁵ This point illuminates the matter of the second-person standpoint’s holism. The performance in question can best be thought of as belonging to a kind of game whose rules are already in place and to engage in which one must be “second-person competent.”

What makes the second-person standpoint game-like is the fact that it consists of an “interdefinable circle” of roles (addresser, addressee), skills (competence), standing (authority), and so on, each of which “implies all the rest,” a circle into which there is no way to “break” from “outside it”—that is, each of whose concepts “can be justified” only within the circle.¹⁶ An account of moral obligation (second-person reasons) thus cannot provide a ground for the game but can only identify the rules of the game, the “presuppositions” that make second-person reasons possible within it.¹⁷

The idea that second-person reasons entail symmetrical relations of authority thus arises within the circle of concepts that define the second-person standpoint. For Darwall, these concepts include “second-person authority, valid claim or demand, second-personal reason, and responsibility [accountability] to,” and together they define the kind of entity who can play the game: the player must possess “second-person competence”—i.e., second-personal freedom as the ability to be moved by second-personal reasons—and dignity, i.e., the authority to make normative demands on, and require accountability of, others.¹⁸ In Darwall’s terms, the players must be free and rational agents, i.e., persons. Indeed, “the very concept of person is itself a second-personal concept.”¹⁹

We will return to this circle in a moment, but first we would do well to consider Darwall’s argument for the necessary symmetry of the authority possessed by players in such a game. Second-personal reasons exist only from the second-person standpoint—that is, only from the standpoint in which I am either the addresser or the addressee of a normative claim. The validity of such a claim, according to Darwall, depends on the addresser and the addressee sharing a certain “second-personal competence”—namely, “that those we address can guide themselves by a reciprocal recognition of the second-personal reasons we address and our authority to address them.”²⁰ In this sense, autonomy is a presupposition of the second-person standpoint; indeed, “second-person competence is a ‘law to itself’ since it is the basis of second-person authority.”²¹ How so?

The answer lies in what Darwall calls “Fichte’s Point”: “We can be held morally responsible only for what we can hold ourselves responsible for by making moral demands of ourselves from the perspective of one free and rational agent among others.”²² If that is so, the symmetrical authority of addresser and addressee of a normative claim arises within the game because these roles are interchangeable: a person cannot demand of another person anything that they could not demand of themselves, or rather, I am not accountable to another for anything that I cannot demand of myself.

Now, if “the very concept of person is itself a second-personal concept”²³—that is, if the players in this game are defined by the interlocking circle of concepts that comprise the game—the essential features of personhood are also so defined: “free” and “rational.” I cannot have a second-person reason to do something if my will is responsive only to cause...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Analyzing Levinas
• Part I Second-Person Normativity
• Part II Ethical Metaphysics
• Part III Ethics and Moral Philosophy
• Contributors
• Index