Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will

Abstract

Many suppose some form of free will is required to make moral responsibility possible. Levinas thinks this is backward. Freedom does not make moral responsibility possible. Moral responsibility makes freedom possible. Free will is not a condition for morality. Free will is an aspect and expression of our moral condition. Key to Levinas’s argument is his rejection of free-will individualism: the idea that free will is a power a single being could possess. A “contradiction” extracted from standard accounts and troubles with the autonomy found in Kant and Korsgaard motivate Levinas’s counterclaim: Freedom cannot be by nature mine. For my own nature is something I can freely change. So my own nature is something I am somehow freed from. Traditional freedom over one’s self thus presupposes a prior liberating “inner distance” from one’s self. And this initial detachment or un-self-centering is an ethical distancing only another person can effect. Free-will individualism is mistaken. Other persons play an indispensable role in making us free. The chapter concludes that free will is best thought of as Levinas suggests: Not as an individual power, but as a social process like love: An ongoing second-personal responsiveness wherein we face and free one another.