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What must I do (and why me)? 195
fundamentally ethical relation connected to the Other and whose
sensibility belongs at the same time to the order of nature (in Lévinas’
words: an event of being), the silent call of nature can also contain a claim
to a response which gives him/her something to answer? Simply put,
can it be a source of obligations?”
However, though the urge to respond, recognised in the look of the
Other and entrapping us, can be a motive from outside the ethics that
grounds moral acts, our answer can nevertheless only be justified by its
correspondence to a law and by the existence of such a law, according
to which the various answer-options can be measured. My answer
requires justification, because it does not belong to the two of us only:
there are always Others affected who are present in the situation. Their
claim for a response relativises the absolute justification of the Other’s
claim: “do not kill!” Or even: “give!” (Should I not kill you even if I can
save Him/Her/Them by doing so? Should I give it to you - i.e., deny it
to others?) But can one compare alien claims that are incomparable by
their essence? Is it not rather the case that, as claimed by Bernard
Waldenfels, the pioneer of responsive ethics, “when we subject the alien
claim to a general law and thereby make equal that which is not, justice
will always contain an aspect of injustice”?°1
Eco-ethics has radically expanded the circle of Others who appear
with a claim to a response and demand just treatment, thus increasing
to breaking point the tension between law and the necessity to answer,
between measurable and immeasurable. Following Lévinas, it is hard
to exclude our non-human fellow beings from the group of those who
% Christian Diehm, among others, draws similar conclusions in his study Natural
Disasters, though through different reasoning. What he appeals to is that though Lévinas
links the ethical connection to Speaking, what addresses one in it is the Other’s
vulnerability. In so far as the basic principle of ethics is, for Lévinas, caring for others’
suffering, then in a vulnerable world full of suffering beings we cannot, in the spirit of
Lévinas, exclude non-human beings from the circle of those whose suffering is a source of
an unconditional ethical obligation. Nonetheless, Diehm’s reasoning is, in my opinion,
resonant rather of Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not: can they reason? Nor: can they
talk? But: can they suffer?” If it were this easy, we could have settled for the utilitarian
reasoning and all the further efforts made for the foundations of eco-ethics would have
been superfluous.
*! Bernard Waldenfels: Responsive Phenomenology of the Alien. Gond 20. 16.0. 1996. In the
same place Läszlö Tengelyi justly points out that "Levinas is right; the alien claim for a
response imposes a responsibility on us even if its justification remains questionable. For
this, however, we must add, along with Waldenfels, that the responsibility to nature justly
poses a challenge to the law of order, but this challenge is by no means indispensable for
the responding actor”. (Laszlé Tengelyi: Torvéeny és felelethényszer (Law and the Compulsion
to Answer. Ibid. p.38.)