Self, Other, and Moral Obligation

Abstract

James Mensch has recently claimed that an ethics must at a minimum guard against "the moral collapse that accompanies genocide."1 As a crime not merely against human individuals but against humanity as such, genocide, on Mensch's view, has as its condition that one adopt a standpoint outside humanity. Only from such a standpoint, Mensch argues, can one make the judgment that whole groups of humans should die while others live (2). What makes this ubermenschlich perspective possible, according to Mensch, is the combination of modern science and modern philosophy with its new conception of the self. This conception of the self, which affords the self a perspective both universal and normative (26), finds its culmination in Kant's practical ego as autonomous (6). The Kantian moral agent, emphasizing the universalizability of maxims to the exclusion of the inclinations that characterize particular agents and their situations, is detached from the world in which her actions occur, that is, she is detached from "all the particular conditions-such as sex, age, and social position-that might affect [her] observations" (4). The idea at work in this detachment is to gain "access to what holds independently of the particularities of our situation" (5). On Mensch's view, this so negatively affects the self's observation of and understanding of its circumstances that the self is, as Mensch puts it, "cut off from the resources required to make ethical decisions" (4), and from "the context that is essential to [autonomy's] sense" (7). It is just this feature of the modern, detached, ubermenschlich standpoint that, according to Mensch, allows for the possibility of genocide. We should not, however, conclude that an appropriate view of the self would see it simply as "immersed" in the world. Rescuers of Jews in World War II were called upon not merely to put aside their own interests and desires in favor of the persecuted victims arriving at their doors, but also to put aside the conventions or laws of their own society, conventions or laws that were permissive of such persecution. Those who fail the test of rescue, we might say, have an untermenschlich conception of the self, represented in Mensch's account chiefly by Aristotle and Mill. Those who fail the test of rescue cannot see beyond the individual and local. Such an untermenschlich perspective fails to gain the critical distance necessary for the critique of one's own conception of the good and of the mores, conventions, and laws of one's own society that have shaped that conception. In his critical discussions Mensch criticizes both the ubermenschlich moral theories that fail to appreciate the particularity of agents and their situations and the untermenschlich moral theories that fail to achieve any critical distance from this same particularity. He seeks a middle ground between these perspectives, a ground capable of "preserving the context that permits moral judgment" (8). What is needed, he argues, is a notion of self-separation and self-alterity that provides through the internalized presence of the other a critical perspective from which to judge both one's own desires and actions and those of one's community, while preserving one's situatedness in the human condition. This notion of alterity grounds his positive account of obligation. I have a number of questions about Mensch's middle ground and the phenomenology of obligation he ties to it, but these questions begin from the fact that I believe Mensch's "phenomenological history of ethics" has mischaracterized the extremes. The first part of my essay, therefore, considers and criticizes Mensch's characterizations of the ubermenschlich and untermenschlich selves. The second part considers Mensch's notion of "inherent alterity" (12) as a middle ground between these conceptions, and the third offers an alternative phenomenology of obligation. Recasting the Alternatives Mensch's phenomenological history of ethics identifies two main strands in the tradition. …