Volume 14, Issue 2, Fall 2007
Stephen Minister
Pages 143-152
The Obligated Subject
A Comparative Study of the Ethical Theories of Kant and Levinas
In recent years, a growing number of thinkers have criticized the use of human rights as an international standard. It is the thesis of this essay that by addressing these critics from a Levinasian ethical framework, rather than a Kantian one, we can formulate a conception of human rights that is viable for a pluralistic, international community. Though Levinas’s ethics retains an affinity to Kant’s, the divergence of Levinas’s theory from Kant’s on the issues of autonomy/heteronomy and the role of reason in ethics opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing human rights. By exploring these two divergences, I will
show that a Levinasian framework prioritizes the ethical demands of others in a way that invites both a fallibilistic commitment to and an ongoing critique of
human rights.