Abstract

As the title of my article has probably made clear already, this will be an essay on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and John Rawls—and while I might not be the first person ever to compose a paper about Levinas and Rawls together, I'll probably be the second or third if not. There's no question, in any event, that a gulf of sorts separates the thought or work of these two thinkers, yet however much I believe that it would be worthwhile to bridge this chasm for its own sake, that won't be my motivation in these pages; rather, my present purpose will be more "practical," for I'm going to try to bring together the thought of Rawls and Levinas in order to resolve an unsettled difficulty plaguing each of their accounts...