Face to Face: A Call for Radical Responsibility in Place of Compassion

The article has two primary purposes. The first is to critique compassion as an ethical response to the person who is in need or suffering. Because of the problems associated with compassion's imaginative dwelling, its basis in equality, and the lack of any moral duty associated with it, I argue that we must be wary of thinking that compassion can be the caring response that many of us believe has a legitimate role in questions of law and social policy. Compassion has the potential to discount, devalue, and ignore people who are in need. I argue that compassion is not enough, and that it also misses the mark. The second purpose of the article is to discuss what might replace compassion as the proper ethical (and in certain contexts, legal) response to someone who is suffering. In this vein, I argue that the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a prominent philosopher of the 20th century, poses compelling challenges to our current thinking about law and social policy, especially in relation to issues of suffering and need, but also in relation to people who are not suffering, but commonly thought to be so, such as people with disabilities. As explained in the article, Levinas's writings provide for an orientation of welcome, alterity, rupture, and responsibility. His "ethics of radical responsibility" offers a compelling interruption to the traditional egocentric foundations of American law and the dim impulse of compassion that sometimes softens it.