Levinas believed that moral obligation is born at the moment when we encounter what he called ‘the face of the other’. His view was that some basic act of recognition takes place when we make eye contact with another human being: here is a person to whom I have duties because he or she is a person, even if, in the biblical phrase, they are an orphan, a widow or a stranger. In this immediate, pre-reflective encounter, morality is born. ‘The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation’, he wrote.26 ‘The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.’27 It is only
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