Solidarity and Responsibility

Abstract

The paper focuses on the prominent and influential, but nevertheless highly problematic project of meeting the challenge of open societies by conceiving solidarity in terms of an absolute responsibility for the ‘Other’. I call this project the ‘ethics of absolute alterity’. The first section motivates the view that the various ethics of absolute alterity can be understood as an answer to several challenges to open societies. Section two reconstructs the basic line of argument of the project in question: The subject’s absolute responsibility is based on a quasi-socio- ontological structure of belonging to the other person. The third section discusses the political implications of the account in question among which the conceptualization of an unconditional hospitality is most prominent. Section four critically assesses the merits and problems of various ethics of absolute alterity in order to work out to what extent they present a useful conception of solidarity in open societies. The main criticism will be that these ethics have fatal consequences with regard to the subject’s possibility of keeping a critical distance from the demands made either by the Other herself or in her name and that the ethically relevant Other is permanently fixed to the role of the victim. Finally, in order to illustrate that the ethical project of absolute alterity is not without connection to public opinion and reasoning, section five refers to a proposal recently made in the context of the so-called migration crisis.