What are the responsibilities of a good host? This is the question at the heart of Megan Dean’s examination of the moral challenges that accompany a dinner invitation for host and guest alike. As Dean’s essay nicely demonstrates, a host’s ability and willingness to make omissions and adjustments on a dinner menu face greater scrutiny now that food allergies and intolerances are increasingly diagnosed and accommodated in both domestic and professional settings. This awareness seems to place greater moral demands on the host, bringing the limits of what can reasonably be accommodated into greater relief, and consequently, into areas of greater dispute. Dean’s essay is an insightful model of applied philosophy because it interrogates, rather than simply enacts, a set of principles that guide the host’s behavior; moreover, like a good host, she has invited into the discussion the support and clarity of expertise from other disciplines, encouraging a discussion across forms of knowing and, in the end, inspiring a lively debate where we might typically find incongruence.When the focus is on hospitality during planned occasions, such as a dinner party, a certain measure of success (and undoubtedly the pleasures of food and drink) might obscure a host’s unwitting or even purposeful omission: there is always the possibility that something has been overlooked or someone excluded from the table. At the risk of being a bad guest, I want to push the limits of the author’s thesis beyond the precincts of knowledge and toward ontology. What if hospitality were to be understood as a fundamental way of being and interacting with others, and most importantly, those who are not invited or who might arrive unexpectedly? In the latter cases, being the host would require one to improvise and above all to interpret the situation where no simple solution presents itself. As Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests, “hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness” and finds its true locus in the “in-between” (Gadamer 2004: 295) of interpretation where the demands of hospitality resist easy formulation. My response thus assumes the challenge that accompanies all hospitality: to welcome the other without reducing them to one’s own terms, to understand that knowledge will never be enough for the good host, and to accept the ontological weight of a host’s duty to protect the well-being of others.Dean’s essay focuses on certain risks faced by the guest who often is not taken seriously, or even believed, by the host: the guest’s particular issues with food could range from mild intolerance to severe discomfort and, in the worst case, death. The argument, which draws upon philosophical, empirical, and anecdotal sources, suggests that despite the severity and veracity of the guest’s condition, the host is obliged to accommodate the requests of the guest, whether they are verbalized directly or simply acknowledged. The host’s duty rests on a certain trust—namely, to believe in the implicit veracity of a guest’s claims about food allergies and intolerances despite the various obstacles to empirical proof. Those obstacles can be technical but are more often social, cultural, and psychological, manifesting as forms of testimonial injustice when the needs of the guest are not taken seriously or even ignored. But the answer to the moral challenge of hosting is not a better or more verifiable epistemology: a good host does not simply know and enact a set of principles or skills; to open up one’s home to another, particularly to the stranger, is at the deepest level to risk one’s own well-being to attend to the well-being of the guest.By remaining within the realm of what can be known, the author reduces the existential well-being of host and guest to matters of exchange that can simply be negotiated or avoided through an appeal to evidence, when available, or an appeal to faith when it cannot be provided or simply is not appropriate. The responsibilities to guests are, quite simply, limited to what can be measured as a form of harm and remain ones that are defined, explicitly or implicitly, by a certain economy that allows the host to set the “rate of exchange”—who is invited, what is served, and ultimately what sacrifices guests might have to make in order to be accommodated. To put it another way, epistemic justice in the context of Dean’s essay relies on an exchange economy that reflects the duties suggested by the ancient Greek notion of oikonomia—household management—rather than the moral obligation to the stranger’s well-being suggested by the ancient Greek notion of xenia—hospitality toward the other.The paragon of xenia—the care for the stranger—is recounted in the myth of Baucis and Philemon (Ovid 2004: 8.629–724), an elderly couple who provide shelter and hospitality for two strangers. The couple prepares a modest but sumptuous feast for the strangers that includes their only animal, a goose, which also guards the couple’s property. In these preparations, the well-being of the strangers and the obligations of hospitality take precedence over the existential well-being of the hosts and their property, which is necessary for their survival. The strangers reveal themselves to be the gods Jupiter and Mercury—stopping the hosts just before they slaughter the goose—suggesting that while the obligations of being a good guest can be measured by reciprocal exchange, the duties of the host exceed the quantifiable margins of household economy and are rooted in the unknowable and incommensurable obligation to the stranger—an excess outside the bounds of any standard accounting. If one takes this unbounded obligation seriously, the starting point for a moral reflection on hospitality is not the host’s acknowledgment of potential life-threatening conditions the dinner might precipitate for the guest but instead the very possibility of hospitality itself—the life and well-being of the host. This ultimate obligation to the unexpected guest motivates more recent philosophical reflections on hospitality.Emmanuel Levinas provides one of the twentieth century’s deeper reflections on the demands of hospitality, revising Heidegger’s ontology into an ethics of the Other. In Totality and Infinity, a book that considers the very basis of human subjectivity “as welcoming the Other, as hospitality” (Levinas 1996: 27), Levinas examines the obligations that the encounter with the face of the Other places upon an individual. Such an encounter pulls the individual out of its self-absorption and forgetting so that it comes to realize its original relationship with the world: namely, that being itself is originarily a being with others. But such a relationship to the Other is, at its core, “a certain form of economic life. No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home” (Levinas 1996: 172). Here Levinas does not reduce ethics to a calculable economic relation but rather emphasizes that hospitality—which takes place within the bounds of the oikos, inside the domestic threshold—is grounded in and yet bears the marks of a domestic separation from the originary relation to the Other as an unknowable figure of infinity. If one’s own home represents the isolation and walling-off, a closed economy that defines the modern subject, then the stranger or Other who crosses the threshold into a home, often unannounced, reckons all accounts by the measure of an infinity that threatens the very solvency of the household.Jacques Derrida (1999, 2000, 2005) provides perhaps the most extensive treatment of hospitality in recent Continental philosophy, refashioning Levinas’s encounter with the Other into a more developed, yet still incommensurable, exchange between guest and host. Derrida proposes a dialectic that, on the one side, presents a more typical, conditioned hospitality governed by customs, laws, and the accepted economy of gift exchange between guest and host, and on the other side, an unconditional hospitality that welcomes the other or the stranger without asking “to give anything back, or even to identify himself or herself,” an obligation even when “the other deprives you of your mastery or your home” (Derrida 1999: 71). Derrida anchors the relationship of guest and host within this dialectic “not for speculative or ethical reasons…but in order to understand and transform what is going on today in our world” (Derrida 1999: 70) outside of the more accepted economy of simple exchange. Derrida—invoking Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace—suggests that we need to think universally, in terms of a global totality, to address and counterbalance the demands of conditional relations. The purity of unconditional hospitality, while not actual, undermines the demand for validation and places the obligation firmly upon the host to act despite measurable limits. A host is not truly open to the other unless everything is placed at risk.The work of Lisa Heldke and Raymond Boisvert (2016)—central to Dean’s essay—also places the ethical question of hospitality within an existential register, particularly through its focus on the dangers that might befall the guest. But Heldke’s more recent work on parasitism delivers a profound ontological reflection on the host—albeit regarding the human body and its biological symbiosis with microorganisms—that adds a biological dimension beyond the insights of Levinas and Derrida. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres (2007), Heldke rethinks human individuality on the basis of a thoroughgoing parasitism: “To be a human individual is to be vulnerable to parasitic relationships. To be is to be chomped on. To be is to be vulnerable to being chomped to death” (Heldke 2018: 255). For Heldke, this is not simply a possibility but an aspect of our very existence given the complexity of microorganisms hosted within the human body that allow us to live and flourish, and at times, that threaten our very existence. As host, the human body is not simply a permeable fortress tending the gates to keep good things in and bad things out; rather, Heldke notes that “at the core of our being is…the outside world” (Heldke 2018: 248). The “inside”—our alimentary canal—is in fact a passage through the “human donut” that we are, a threshold through which the outside world passes in beneficial and potentially threatening ways. To be is to allow the other to pass through us, to dwell in us, and even at times to threaten our very existence.These ontological considerations might seem a bit hyperbolic in the face of the more pragmatic and measured tone of Dean’s essay, and they certainly do not provide a direct answer to the immediate challenges faced by guests who have been overlooked, ignored, or deemed dishonest. The demands of epistemic justice remain necessary ones for the host—but they are not sufficient for hospitality. To respond in a solely epistemological register suggests that knowing, rather than being, provides the ultimate criterion for a justice where social relationships are measured and balanced accordingly. I am not suggesting that a certain way of being—that some mode of well-being—offers an alternative criterion to the epistemic model of justice; rather, what the myth teaches, and what a radical indebtedness to the other encourages, is a step away from the measures of exchange and economic balance and a leap—albeit of a certain faith—toward the incommensurability of the other who each of us always, somewhere, potentially is.