Abstract

Recent analytic philosophy often explains our responsibility to one another in terms of normative reasons. Emmanuel Levinas thinks this is backwards. We are not responsible to one another because we have reasons to be. For reasons are themselves something we are responsible to one another to have; and it is only because we are responsible to one another for them that we are able to have our own reasons. Put broadly: Reasons-responsiveness is a form of responsiveness to persons. Standard reasons-first explanations of interpersonal responsiveness miss this point, marginalizing the very relationship our reasonings enact or express. And the steady failure to recognize this yields a picture of reasoning, reasons, and reason itself that is abstract, impersonal, "de-faced". This essay reconstructs Levinas’s reorientation of reasons and responsibility, and motivates Levinas's "re-facing" of reasoning, reason, and reasons. The result is an “ethical metaphysics” of reasons that responds well to familiar analytic problems with how reasons exist. Reasons do not, like objects, exist and then happen to be something for which we are responsible. Rather, reasons exist like assurances or promises—as exchangeable expressions of ongoing relations of responsibility.