Levinas, Feminism, Holocaust, Ecocide

Abstract

Levinas's central moral intuition -- that we are infinitely obligated to an other who is essentially different from us -- makes sense only against the moral cataclysm of the Holocaust. Only against that background does his inability to integrate the cultural feminist accounts of mutuality and connection in psychology and ethics have any plausibility. Yet the environmental crisis renders cultural feminism -- and its deep ecological extension into environmental philosophy -- the historically and psychologically adequate ethical stance for a world in which humanity is destroying the conditions of its own survival.