This book examines ethics at the intersection of law and justice. If law and justice are concerned with collectively establishing the general terms on which the plurality called "we" share the earth as social beings, then ethics concerns the individual Self’s particular moral relationship with the Other. Law, the acknowledged offspring of politics, represents the kind of might that most people accept as legitimate, at least most of the time. Justice, on the other hand, is supposed to vigilantly stand guard over law: to protect us against its biases and excesses, or, at the very least, to rise up and reproach the law whenever it permits or encourages injustice. But what if the belief that a particular legally-authorized state of affairs is "just" – a common enough feeling, especially amongst the privileged – or even "unjust" and in need of correction, were itself in need of a vigilant guardian? This book argues that ethics can and should stand guard over whatever image of justice and/or just law one happens to believe in. The book thus attempts to steer a perilous course between two looming moral hazards: ethics interpreted as the rational production of ethically correct behavior (as in Kant) and ethics interpreted as the spontaneous eruption of pre-rational compassion for the suffering of the Other, come what may (as in Levinas). In the end, the book characterizes ethical life in the law as the more-or-less constant experience of the paradoxical nature of this choice – a feeling of inescapable personal responsibility for the fate of the Other. Based on the author’s well-established expertise in the area, this book will appeal to students, scholars and others with interests in legal theory and moral and political philosophy.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
- Towards an Ethics Writ Large
On ethics writ small
Introducing the possibility of an ethics writ large
Telling and urging
In the beginning was the deed
Beginning at the ending
2 From Ethōs to Ethics
From custom to character to duty
The codependency of Is and Ought as an elective affinity
The untranslatability of metaphysical statements in ethics
Three cases: compassionless reason, reasonable compassion, and
reason versus compassion
3 The Burden of Caring
The leading question
Towards a phenomenological interpretation of reason and compassion in ethics
"Gninnigeb eht ta nigeb" – George Oppen
Responsibility versus presponsibility : herein of Levinas
The politics of ethics writ large
4 Ethical Doubts about Justice
The hope for justice
The force of law
Justice’s guardianship over law
The shabbiness of law compared with the wonderfulness of justice
The problem of fidelity to law in a relativistic age
The customary agreeableness of justice
The suspicious wordiness of reason
5 Concluding Anecdote about the Difference between Ambiguity and Treachery
"But this is a pipe": a law professor’s anecdote
The indeterminacy thesis
Deconstruction
The treachery of ambiguity versus the ambiguity of treachery
The ethics of self-treachery
References
Index
Biography
Louis E. Wolcher is the Charles I. Stone Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington Law School.
