Levinas, Darwall, and Løgstrup on second-personal ethics: Command or responsibility?

This paper considers the relationship between Levinas’s ethics, and the ‘second-personal’ approach adopted by Stephen Darwall and K. E. Løgstrup. Darwall’s ethics treats the second-personal relation as one of command as an exercise of authority, while K. E. Løgstrup treats the second-personal relation as one of responsibility rather than command. It is argued that Løgstrup raises a fundamental difficulty for any command view, namely that the reason to act on a command is because one has been commanded to do so, where this cannot provide the right reason for a moral action. The paper considers where Levinas should be located in this debate between the two models of second-personal ethics represented by Darwall and Løgstrup. It is suggested that while Levinas’s position reflects elements of both accounts, he is perhaps closer to the command approach, in a way that then makes him vulnerable to Løgstrup’s objections.