Abstract

This study examines the problem of moral considerability and the Other and from two basic standpoints, namely, a phenomenological analysis of alterity and a hermeneutical-comparative encounter between the continental tradition and its "Other." This hermeneutical-comparative engagement places the phenomenological tradition in dialogue with the East Asian tradition concerning the intersection of knowledge and "moral disclosure." ;I argue that we confront the moral considerability of the Other horizontally, which is to say that the presence of knowing shades into the irreducible difference of the situation occupied by the Other . Sincere attempts to identify with the Other realize a morally transformative confrontation with absolute alterity , namely, the direct phenomenological experience of the Other's autonomy, which constitutes the concrete sense of the Other as morally considerable. Moral relationships with the Other, therefore, are defined as those modes of comportment that allow the Other to be disclosed qua absolute alterity and not merely in terms of relative alterity. For example, relationships of intimacy, solidarity, and compassion, optimally disclose and shelter the absolute alterity of the Other. Hence, "intimation," rather than intentionality, defines the proper mode of directedness by which the Other qua Other is disclosed. ;The fundamental ethical question thus becomes the question of moral disclosure, i.e., the clarification of the domain of moral considerables, and, only secondarily, the question of "correct" moral action, i.e., the regulation of the domain of moral considerables. The project of ethics is thereby reconceived as an "inconceivable devotion" towards the Other, namely, a cultivated attention to alterity that situates us within a field of excessive moral obligation. In the end, an ethics of alterity requires an understanding of moral obligation as a commitment to a process of continually enacting new possibilities of intimacy, solidarity, and moral relation, which are rooted in the maturation of moral skill rather than in the refinement of moral theory.