Inquiry

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Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward

Other Animals

Peter Atterton

To cite this article: Peter Atterton (2011) Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other
Animals, Inquiry, 54:6, 633-649, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2011.628186

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Inquiry,
Vol. 54, No. 6, 633–649, December 2011

Levinas and Our Moral

Responsibility Toward Other Animals

PETER ATTERTON
San Diego State University, USA

(Received 11 October 2010)

ABSTRACT In this essay I show that while Levinas himself was clearly reluctant to
extend to nonhuman animals the same kind of moral consideration he gave to humans,
his ethics of alterity is one of the best equipped to mount a strong challenge to the tradi-
tional view of animals as beings of limited, if any, moral status. I argue that the logic of
Levinas’s own arguments concerning the otherness of the Other militates against inter-
preting ethics exclusively in terms of human interests and values, and, furthermore, that
Levinas’s phenomenology of the face applies to all beings that can suffer and are capable
of expressing that suffering to me. Insofar as an animal has a face in Levinas’s sense
through which it is able to express its suffering to me, then there is no moral justification
for refusing to extend to it moral consideration.1

I. Introduction
Levinas has been rightly acclaimed as one of the most original and important
thinkers of ethics in the last century. His work combines a penetrating inves-
tigation into the notion of radical otherness as the foundation of rights and
responsibilities with a new and rich phenomenology of the face, while offer-
ing a genuinely illuminating critique of the Western philosophical tradition
as ontology. Yet there is one particular area where Levinas would appear to
come up palpably short, namely his treatment—or nontreatment—of nonhu-
man animals (hereafter simply, “animals”). Like so many philosophers before
him, Levinas believed that animals are inferior to humans, that their suf-
fering counts for little in comparison with human suffering, and that any
moral consideration given to animals is outweighed by our “infinite” duties
to each other. Not surprisingly critics of Levinas’s anthropocentrism, such
as Derrida,2 have been puzzled by the fact that an ethics that defines itself

Correspondence Address: Peter Atterton, Department of Philosophy, San Diego State University,
5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-6044, USA. Email: atterton@mail.sdsu.edu
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/11/060633–17 © 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2011.628186
634 Peter Atterton

in terms of “the welcome of the Other” (Levinas, 1969, p. 254) should have
been so unwelcoming to animals on no other basis, it would seem, than their
being other than human. Few critics, however, have attempted to show in a
clear and detailed way what the logic of Levinas’s thought implies for animals
when stripped of its speciesist biases. It is not my intention in this paper to
answer all of the foundational questions. I shall, however, try to reveal what
I take to be the underlying structure of the argument, first, for the claim that
certain animals are at least as much plausible candidates for being considered
other as are other human beings, and, second, for the claim that many animals
have what Levinas calls a face which is capable of making a strong moral claim
on us. I finish with a look at some candid remarks Levinas made about ani-
mals in an interview that took place near the end of his career, in 1986, which
clearly shows the tension between Levinas’s thinking, which is speciesist in the
extreme, and the Levinasian concern with suffering, be it human or animal.

II. The Other/Others (Autrui): humans and nonhuman animals

Some years ago, in a lecture given on subject of animals at the third Cerisy
conference devoted to his work, in 1997, entitled “The autobiographical ani-
mal”, Derrida criticized Levinas for his anthropocentrism to the neglect of
animals, since “a thinking of the other, of the infinitely other who looks at
me, should, on the contrary, privilege the question and request of the animal”.
Derrida said:

That can be a surprise, coming from a thinking that is so “obsessed”

(I am purposely using Levinas’s word), so preoccupied by an obsession
with the other and with his infinite alterity. If I am responsible for the
other . . . isn’t the animal more other still, more radically other, if I
might put it that way, than the other in whom I recognize my brother,
than the other in whom I identify my fellow or my neighbor? If I have a
duty . . . toward the other, wouldn’t it then also be toward the ani-
mal, which is still more other than the other human, my brother or my
neighbor? (2008, pp. 106–107)

There can be no doubt that the question is rhetorical. Derrida earlier in the
lecture spoke of “the wholly other, more other than any other, which they call
an animal” (p. 11). The argument sounds plausible: if it is the otherness of the
Other that makes me responsible for him or her, which according to Levinas
is the case, and if the animal is “more radically other” than the other human
being, then I must a fortiori be responsible for the animal too. This dou-
ble reading is, of course, stock-in-trade deconstructionist strategy for which
Derrida is famous. The first reading serves to place Levinas firmly in the tradi-
tion of philosophers, from Descartes to the present, for whom the “experience
of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at them, has not been taken in
 Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals 635

the philosophical and theoretical architecture of their discourse” (p. 14). This
disavowal is interpreted as evidence of an implicit “logocentrism”, which is
“first of all a thesis regarding the animal, the animals deprived of the logos”
(p. 27). The second reading serves to extrapolate Levinas’s discourse of ethics
beyond the anthropocentric limits he intended for it by arguing that it is the
very exclusion of animals, i.e., the fact that they have been treated so differ-
ently from human beings, that is sufficient to justify the ascription of “the
wholly other” to them.
But upon closer examination I think it can be shown that Derrida’s position
will not suffice for the following reasons. First, Derrida’s argument begs the
question. For, if indeed, one assumes that the animal is “radically other”, then
clearly I am responsible for it, at least according to Levinas’s theory. So the
argument rests on a particular assumption about animality. Furthermore, the
term “more radically other” is confusing, for, if the otherness of a human
being is already radical, as it clearly is for Levinas, who speaks of “the alterity,
the radical heterogeneity of the other” (1969, p. 36), then the otherness of an
animal cannot be “more other”, since the otherness of something cannot be
shared by something else. The otherness of this human being is not and can-
not be the otherness of that horse over there, and vice versa, at least not prima
facie. Simply put, nothing can be more other than which is already radically
other. This brings to the fore the inadequacy of Derrida’s conception of other-
ness in general, for it covertly turns it into an extrinsic relation. The expression
“more radically other than” serves to make radical otherness dependent on
something other than itself and thus reduce its absolute alterity by relativiz-
ing it, whereas Levinas insists “the Other [Autrui] is not other [autre] with a
relative alterity as are, in a comparison, even ultimate species, which mutu-
ally exclude one another, but still have their place within the community of a
genus” (p. 194). To say that otherness is not relative (it is precisely the “abso-
lute otherness” of the Other that Levinas is talking about, which means that
the expression “X is other” is not merely elliptical for “X is other than Y”) is
to say that it cannot be characterized in terms of distinction. Levinas writes:
“The alterity of the Other does not depend on any quality that would dis-
tinguish him from me, for a distinction of this nature would precisely imply
between us that community of genus which already nullifies alterity” (p. 194).
Distinction requires identification of what makes something different, and
as such cannot be used in the analysis of something like otherness, which
is intrinsic to those things that have it, and which given its radically individ-
ual character, is impossible to explain. One has only to imagine a universe
in which there is only one Other—you, for example—and thus a universe in
which there is nothing from which you could be distinguished, to realize that
otherness is not distinction for Levinas.
There are clear advantages to this view that are absent from Derrida’s read-
ing. The most obvious is that since the Other is not to be understood in terms
of the standard pattern of genus plus differentia definition, he or she (or it)
636 Peter Atterton

has no place in a hierarchical classification that reveals evolutionary related-

ness of organisms at various taxon levels. The Other is radically individual
and not merely a specimen of a species like humanity subsumable under a
common genus (Homo). This is why I am not able to explain the Other, for
all explanations require appeal to general or common features, whereas the
Other qua Other cannot be analyzed into general terms. Still, there is an
important difficulty that must be resolved if the foregoing view is to be main-
tained. The difficulty arises when one considers the problem of determining
just what is to be included under Levinas’s concept of the Other and what
is not. No one wants, of course, to say that any possible being is a being for
whom I am responsible. Just as Socrates is obliged to exclude “hair and mud
and dirt, for example, or anything else which is utterly worthless and trivial”
from the realm of Forms if the theory is not to appear “ridiculous” (“geloia”)
(Parmenides 130c–d), Levinas must grant that there is a whole range of beings
that cannot count as the Other short of absurdity.
Now to determine what it is to be the Other as opposed to something else
is not to be confused with an inquiry into “the nature of the Other” for the
obvious reason that if nature is understood in the Aristotelian sense in which
all members of the same species have a common nature, and each individual
is that nature, plus various properties and attributes, which are its accidents,
then the Other cannot be a nature since otherness should not be shared by
something else. True, there is no denying that each individual human being,
for example, though he or she is other, is also an instance of a “human being”
considered as universal. Levinas says, “There does indeed exist a human race
as a biological genus, and the common function men may exercise in the
world as a totality permits the applying to them of a common concept” (1969,
p. 213). Nevertheless this is simply an ontological determination; it conceals
the essential fact that there is in each person qua the Other something that
is “incommunicably” hers and not to be confounded with the humanity of
her neighbor. Levinas does not use Boethius’ term “incommunicability”3 to
speak of what is fundamental to the Other, and which cannot made com-
mon to (“communicated to”) others, but the term “secrecy”: “Only on the
basis of this secrecy is the pluralism of society possible. It attests this secrecy.
We have always known that it is impossible to form an idea of the human
totality, for men have an inner life closed to him who does, however, grasp
the comprehensive movements of human groups” (p. 58). It is “inner life”,
then, that separates what is to be included under Levinas’s concept of the Other
from what is not. The Other does not have this interiority as an attribution,
or accidentally, “as though everything that was existence in the first person in
it, subjective existence, were but the aftereffect of its animality” (p. 242), but
rather as something that is the Other and nothing else besides. It is because
there is no being of the Other that may go unactualized in subjectivity that
“I who have no concept in common with the Stranger, am like him, without
genus” (p. 39).
 Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals 637

It is the idea that the human qua the Other is both singular and individual
because he or she lives what Levinas calls a “separated existence” (p. 164), i.e.,
has a subjective mode of existence in the sense that he or she exists only as a
conscious or experiencing subject, that is relevant to the problem of animal-
ity; and as I shall point out below, makes possible the inclusion of animals
that can suffer within the framework of Levinas’s ethics. Before moving on,
however, we need to discuss in contrast to the logical and metaphysical issues
above, the epistemological issue of how we discern the Other qua the Other.
Levinas insists that the Other has a subjective or “inner life” that remains
“closed” to me in that I cannot directly share or experience what the Other is
experiencing. In Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks of “the radical impossi-
bility of seeing oneself from the outside and of speaking in the same sense of
oneself and others” (p. 53). If the Other’s interiority were immediately acces-
sible to me it would merely be a moment of my own essence or included in the
regime of identification of the self that Levinas calls the “play of the same”
(p. 27). How then do I discern that you, for example, are the Other? To be sure,
Levinas is not so much interested in the question of how to answer the skep-
tic about “other minds,” as he is in the question of what are the criteria that
serve to identify the Other as such. Or rather, since the fundamental relation
with the Other for Levinas is ethics, not epistemology, the real question he is
interested in, as Overgaard indicates, is “how other minds can be directly per-
ceivable and yet retain a certain inaccessibility” (2005, p. 249). How can the
Other appear to me qua Other, i.e., while retaining her status as a separated
being?
Needless to say, Levinas, a phenomenologist, totally rejects the traditional
(i.e., empiricist) solution to the problem of other minds according to which I
infer on the basis of the similarities between the Other’s body and mine that
the Other has, as I do, a mental life that accompanies her bodily behavior.
Levinas would agree with Scheler that in our perceptions of each other we do
not relate to each other as a material body in the philosophical sense. What
we experience, not by inference, but directly, is the person’s self , i.e., his or her
psychophysical unity which is given to us through certain forms of expression
by which we originally and immediately perceive the behavior of the Other
not merely as physical movements but as themselves the presence to us of an
experiencing subject. As Scheler puts it: “that ‘experiences’ occur there [i.e.,
in others] is given for us in expressive phenomena . . . not by inference, but
directly, in a sort of primary ‘perception.’ To say that ‘our’ initial datum is
the body is completely erroneous. This is true only for the scientist, i.e., for
that man insofar as he abstracts artificially from the expressive phenomena”
(1973, p. 10). Levinas calls this primary expressiveness “the face”:

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the
other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring
as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities
638 Peter Atterton

forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and
overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own mea-
sure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea. It does not
manifest itself by these qualities, but kath’auto [i.e., in person, per se].
It expresses itself. (1969, p. 51)

This capacity that the Other has to express herself in the manner of the face
does not, of course, give me direct access to the Other’s inner life as such.
As Levinas himself points out, “Expression does not consist in giving us the
Other’s interiority” (p. 202). “The presentation of the face, expression, does
not disclose a world previously closed, adding thus a new region to compre-
hend” (p. 212). Though the face reveals the subjectivity of the Other in the
sense that it tells me that the Other has experiences, it does not allow me to
enter into the Other’s experiencing. The face is an indispensable element in
my relating to others as the Other; it allows for a relating while maintaining
the separation between us.
It is important to note that though Levinas claims to be doing phenomenol-
ogy (e.g., 1969, pp. 28–29) the description of the face is not “transcendental”
phenomenological in the Husserlian sense. Transcendental phenomenology
aims to give a detailed account of subjective processes that suffice for any pos-
sible object of consciousness to be an object for me. The face is not an object
of consciousness at all if by that one means a noema whose meaning is the
result of Sinngebung (p. 122). Levinas’s insistence that the face is irreducible to
comprehension and knowledge is in part aimed at idealism that would make
the meaning of the face something that comes from me, i.e., which I think,
whereas the face is characterized by its “refusal” to lend itself to transcen-
dental operations of consciousness. “The face is present in its refusal to be
contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed.
It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of
the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content”
(p. 194). The alternative here is not some merely empirical inquiry, for strictly
speaking the face is nothing entitative at all; it is not a thing. Nor is it sim-
ply a bundle of physical properties (“the color of the eyes, the shape of the
nose, the ruddiness of the cheeks, etc.” Levinas, 2000, p. 232). Lingis’s ren-
dering of manière as “mode” in the passage just quoted is felicitous inasmuch
as in philosophy a mode can be predicated of something, determining its way
of being, without constituting a new or separate being. To be sure, the face
typically has certain features, eyes, nose, etc., but these features are not what
make a face a face in Levinas’s sense: “You turn yourself toward the Other as
an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe
them” (Levinas, 1985, p. 85). In a certain sense one does not “see” the face
at all if all perception means, as it did for Husserl, an intuitive grasping of an
object through an act of constitution of meaning.
 Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals 639

How then is the face given to me? Or what is “expression”? The reader
familiar with Totality and Infinity will know that Levinas commonly uses the
word “speech” (parole) to refer to the “way” in which the face expresses itself.
“The transcendent . . . cuts across the vision of forms and can be stated nei-
ther in terms of contemplation nor in terms of practice. It is the face; its
revelation is speech” (p. 193). “The life of expression consists in undoing
the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated.
The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse” (p. 66).
Here we come to the real crux of the matter concerning the moral status
of animals in Levinas’s work. It has been almost a dogmatic assumption
among readers of Levinas that animals are faceless because they are lan-
guageless. This reasoning would banish them from Levinas’s ethics entirely.
But this wrongly conflates what Levinas calls “expression” with some form
of linguistic behavior. This is a serious error that has the potential not only
to exclude nonparadigm humans who are unable to talk (“wolf children”,
infants, the severely mentally retarded, comatose, catatonics, aphasics, etc.)
from Levinas’s ethics but also to undermine its theoretical foundation. We are
gravely mistaken if we identify “speech” in statements like “This attestation of
oneself is possible only as a face, that is, as speech” (p. 201) with what philoso-
phers call a “speech act”, i.e., a genuine linguistic act, having illocutionary
force, etc., etc. Levinas’s insistence in Totality and Infinity and elsewhere that
the expression of the face is able to dispense with signs altogether shows just
how prepared he was to underplay the role of (human) language in matter
of ethics: “every social relation leads back to the presentation of the other to
the same without the intermediary of any image or sign, solely by the expres-
sion of the face” (1969, p. 213). A failure to appreciate the fact that the face
does not require language, at least what we normally think of as language, to
express itself, it seems to me, seriously blurs the pivotal distinction Levinas
makes between the “saying” and the “said” and which finds itself at the fore-
front of his thinking post-Totality and Infinity. The “saying”, synonymous
with what Levinas in Totality and Infinity calls “expression”, corresponds to
the addressing of the Other at the foundation of ethics itself. The “said”,
which has no straightforward equivalent in the earlier work, corresponds to
language understood as linguistic behavior, which is ontological to the extent
that it comprises the propositional content or meaning expressed by an utter-
ance corresponding to what is literally asserted (asked, etc.) and not merely
conversationally implicated. That the two are nonsychronizable is indicated
by Levinas when he speaks of the possibility of a “saying without a said”:
“Saying opens me to the other, before saying something said, before the said
that is spoken in this sincerity forms a screen between me and the other. It is a
saying without words . . . silence speaks” (1998, p. 74). Perhaps the most out-
standing manifestation of the addressing of the Other that is “without words”
is the eyes, which Levinas in Totality and Infinity correctly conjectures have no
auditory or tactile analogues inasmuch as they are impossible to dissimulate.
640 Peter Atterton

“The eyes break through the mask—the language of the eyes, impossible to
dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks” (1969, p. 66); “The face, preem-
inently expression, formulates the first word: the signifier arising at the thrust
of his sign, as eyes that look at you” (p. 178).
These considerations lead to the supposition that if it should turn out that
animals have powers of expression (e.g., “eyes that look at you”)—an issue
that cannot be settled a priori—then presumably we ought to be willing to
concede to them the status of the face of the Other for whom we are responsi-
ble. This is obviously not the place to examine the question about animal con-
sciousness, including the question whether the capacity of “having thoughts”
can properly be attributed to animals in the absence of linguistic behavior. But
from a Levinasian point of view I evidently do not need this type of knowledge
in order to consider myself responsible for this animal confronting me. The
inference one must draw from Levinas is that I am responsible for the Other,
whether human or animal, insofar as the Other has the expressive capacity, or
face, to address me by calling me into question in the manner of what Levinas
calls “ethics”: “We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the
presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility
to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a
calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics” (p. 43).
As a possible illustration of this consider the reaction of the Swiss animal
psychologist Heini Hediger, Director of the Zoological Gardens of Zurich,
upon his first encounter with the dolphin “Flippy”. After noting the dolphin’s
“exaggerated human eyes”, Hediger said:

Flippy was no fish, and when he looked at you with twinkling eyes
from a distance of less than two feet, you had to stifle the question as
to whether it was in fact an animal. So new, so strange and extremely
weird was this creature, that one was tempted to consider it some kind
of bewitched being. But the zoologist’s brain kept associating it with the
cold fact, painful in its connection, that it was known to science by the
dull name Tursiops truncatus. (1968, p. 138)

It seems to me that we can account for the zoologist’s bewilderment as to

what to call this “new, so strange and extremely weird” animal if we connect
it with what Levinas says in Totality and Infinity about two types of questions:
“what?” and “who?” Levinas asserts: “To be sure most of the time the who is
a what . . . The answer presents itself as a quiddity; it refers to a system of rela-
tions. The question who? answers the non-qualifiable presence of an existent
who presents himself without reference to anything, and yet who distinguishes
himself from every other existent. The question who? envisages a face” (1969,
p. 177). Arguably, the zoologist in Dr. Hediger asks “what?” and sees only
a specimen of Tursiops truncatus; the non-zoologist in him asks “who?” and
encounters the face of Flippy.
 Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals 641

This is not to insist, of course, that every animal is like Flippy, or has what
Levinas calls a face. It is important to keep in mind that this discussion con-
cerns only those beings that have an “inner life”, not all life. Recall that for
Levinas only a being that has a first person or subjective mode of existence
counts as the Other. Not only does this exclude plants, fungi, bacteria, and
microfauna, but probably also insects, spiders and other invertebrates that
clearly lack the neurological structures that as far as we can tell are necessary
for consciousness or mental life.4 But what about cold-blooded vertebrates,
including fish, amphibians, and reptiles? I think we can say that as a rough
and approximate guide for determining which animals count as the Other we
need only be clear in our minds about which animals from among the one
and a quarter billion or so species on earth actually have the capacity to feel
pain, or can suffer. I say this for two reasons. First, there seems to be general
agreement that an animal that cannot suffer or enjoy has no interests to harm
or promote, and thus nothing I can do to it that can possibly take away from
its welfare or do it any good. As Singer puts it: “The capacity for suffering or
enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be
satisfied before we can speak of interests in a meaningful way” (2001, p. 34).
Only inasmuch as an animal has the capacity for suffering (or enjoyment) can
it possibly matter to it how it is treated. Thus I can be responsible only for a
being that suffers. Secondly, if as Levinasians we assume that ethical responsi-
bility is a direct response to suffering in the sufferer, then I can be responsible
only to a being that is capable of suffering. Since, then, the capacity for suffer-
ing and enjoyment is a prerequisite for my being responsible to and for that
being, only beings capable of suffering can be said to be capable of provoking
a response (and responsibility) that is Levinasian.
That certain animals—though by no means all—have the capacity to suffer,
which they are able to communicate to us, I take to be an incontrovertible fact.
As Derrida insists: “No one can deny the suffering, fear or panic, the terror or
fright that can seize certain animals and that we humans can witness” (2008,
p. 28).5 The reason we cannot deny it is the Schelerian argument as follows:
“we can understand the experience of animals, though even in ‘tendency’ we
cannot imitate their manner of expression; for instance when a dog expresses
its joy by barking and wagging its tail, or a bird by twittering . . . We have here,
as it were, a universal grammar, valid for all languages of expression, and the
ultimate basis of understanding for all form of mimes and pantomime among
living creatures” (1973, p. 11). Accordingly, to say, phenomenologically, that
an animal is in pain, for example, is to say that I do not have to infer that
it is so by comparing its body or pain behavior with mine (which typically
will not suffice when dealing with an animal whose outward appearance is
very different, e.g., a bird), but that I can know of it directly, through what
Scheler calls “phenomena expressive of psychic experience” (ibid.). It is in its
movements, in its yelps, etc., etc., that we directly perceive that the animal is
in pain.
642 Peter Atterton

This is not to imply that everyone “witnessing” an animal in pain is liable

to feel sympathy and compassion. An obvious way in which I could enjoy
the spectacle is if I were a sadist; an obvious way I could become inured to
it is if I were a meat packer or scientist exposed on a daily basis to the rou-
tine suffering of animals. But if we are to deny animals moral status because
their suffering does not provoke the requisite response in all humans, then the
same argument could be used to show that human beings do not have faces as
clearly not everyone cares about their suffering, and that, from a Levinasian
point of view, would be absurd. (In any event, how is it to be determined
whether in the light of how something is treated we are to revise our con-
ception of its moral status or whether we are to consider the treatment itself
immoral?) I think we can say that relatively few individuals are impassive to
the sight of an animal in pain, and that displays of animal cruelty appall most
human beings. This explains why most people witnessing, for the first time,
the routine mutilations of animals that take place in factory farming—such as
unanaesthetized debeaking, dubbing (surgical removal of combs and wattles
of chickens and turkeys), tail docking, branding, dehorning, ear clipping, and
castration, which are some of the standard procedures on factory farms—are
liable to be scandalized by what they see, which they are likely to regard as
straightforwardly ethically wrong.

III. “One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal”

Rather than persevere with a phenomenological analysis of the face the
animal, I want to turn to what Levinas himself actually says about our respon-
sibility toward animals in the course of an interview that took place in 1986.
The interview is striking for in it Levinas makes two claims concerning ani-
mals that, to my knowledge, are not to be found anywhere else in his work.
The first is that an animal—a dog—has a face; the second is that moral con-
siderability extends to the nonhuman realm. Not that Levinas in the interview
is committed to the view that animals are our moral equals. This is not the
case at all. Indeed, during the course of the interview one cannot help but
notice Levinas’s schizophrenic tendency to give to animals with one hand
what he takes back with the other. This is because Levinas sometimes encour-
ages us to view animals as having a face like ours—which is without precedent
in the main body of his work—and at other times, when it becomes a matter
of defending the moral superiority of humans, he speaks of them as though
animals were deficient in the face.
As an illustration of this ambiguity, consider Levinas’s reply to the question
of whether there is something distinctive about the face of the human that sets
it apart from the face of an animal:

One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal. It is via the face that
one understands, for example, a dog. Yet the priority here is not found
 Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals 643

in the animal, but in the human face. We understand the animal, the
face of an animal, in accordance with Dasein. The phenomenon of the
face is not in its purest form in the dog. In the dog, in the animal, there
are other phenomena. For example, the force of nature is pure vitality.
It is more this which characterizes the dog. But it also has a face. (1988b,
p. 169)

It would perhaps have been better had Levinas concentrated on explaining

why the dog has a face and postponed his judgment that the human face has
“priority” until some criterion had been established that would enable us to
compare them. What grounds are there for saying that the face of the dog
does not show itself in its “purest form”? The superlative clearly suggests a
comparison between faces, with each face occupying its place in a continuum
ranging from the purest expression (the human) to the least pure (?). But is not
every face, precisely because it presents the Other, a singular and unique face,
and thus incomparable? It might be thought that Levinas is talking about the
presence or absence of non-expressive features. The purer the face the fewer
non-expressive characteristics associated with it. This at least sounds plausi-
ble. But in that case there may be grounds for drawing the opposite conclusion
regarding animals to the one Levinas actually draws. Consider the following
remark made by Levinas later in the interview:

But there is something in our attraction to an animal . . . In the dog,

what we like is perhaps his childlike character. As if he were strong,
cheerful, powerful, full of life. On the other hand, there is also, even with
regard to an animal, a pity. A dog is like a wolf that doesn’t bite. There
is a trace of the wolf in the dog. In any case, there is here the possibility
of a specific phenomenological analysis . . . Children are often loved for
their animality. The child is not suspicious of anything. He jumps, he
walks, he runs, he bites. It’s delightful. (p. 172)

The sentiments expressed here are similar to those found in an interview given
by Levinas five years earlier. Describing the child as “a pure exposure of
expression insofar as it is pure vulnerability; it has not yet learned to dissem-
ble, to deceive, to be insincere”, Levinas went on to say: “What distinguishes
human language from animal or child expression, for example, is that the
human speaker can remain silent, can refuse to be exposed in sincerity. The
human being is characterized as human not only because he is a being who
can speak but also because he is a being who can lie, who can live in the
duplicity of language as the dual possibility of exposure and deception. The
animal is incapable of this duplicity; the dog, for instance, cannot suppress its
bark, the bird its song” (1984, p. 65).6 Now, if the nonlinguistic child has the
purest face, or expression, of all, and this precisely because unlike paradigm
human beings (i.e., those who can speak) it is incapable of being insincere,
644 Peter Atterton

wouldn’t this also make the nonhuman animal a pure face? But Levinas, curi-
ously, draws the opposite conclusion: the dog, if it has a face, is an “impure
face”. This may be so. But it is difficult to maintain this claim while calling the
child a “pure exposure” for the very same reason (its inability to dissemble, lie,
etc., etc.). At any rate I don’t know how we could test such a claim. How
are we, as phenomenologists, to decide whether there really is more expres-
sion in the child’s face or whether it merely appears to be so as a result of
our maturing sensitivity to the reality of those beings with which we are most
familiar?
Returning to the 1986 interview, when asked whether or not the prohibition
against “killing” is revealed in the face of an animal as it is in the face of
humans, Levinas gave this response:

I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called “face”. The
human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover
the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer
that question. A more specific analysis is needed. (1988b, pp. 171–72)

It is difficult to know what to make of Levinas’s claim not to know when the
right to be called “face” begins. On the one hand, it might seem an incredibly
damaging admission that threatens to undermine the whole of his enterprise.
This is how Derrida reads it: “For . . . [it] means confessing that one doesn’t
know at bottom what the face is, what the words means, what governs its usage
. . . Doesn’t that amount, as a result, to calling into question the whole legit-
imacy of the discourse and ethics of the ‘face’ of the other?” (2008, p. 109).
But a far more charitable interpretation may also be given, one that makes
use of Sorensen’s distinction between absolute and relative borderline cases:
“Relative borderline cases arise from incompleteness in the available resources
for answering the question. Absolute borderline cases arise from incomplete-
ness in the question” (2001, p. 35). An absolute borderline case involves a
kind of ignorance that is not relative to any thinker but has to do the intrinsic
uncertainty of the concept itself (e.g., baldness); a relative borderline case, by
contrast, is a case of vagueness that is only prima facie indeterminate in the
absence of certain “answering resources” (experts, investigative techniques,
etc.) that would resolve the issue once and for all. When Levinas suggests
that “a more specific analysis” would tell us whether something like a snake
has a face, it is seems that he is saying that indeterminacy here is due not to
any intrinsic uncertainty but merely to the ignorance of the observer (Levinas
himself). But while this perhaps saves Levinas’s theory from the kind of dev-
astating consequences that Derrida believes follow from Levinas’s nescience,
it raises the question of Levinas’s ingenuousness. If Levinas really did believe
that a snake might have a face, would it not have behooved him to undertake
the analysis (presumably phenomenological) just in case? The fact that Levinas
altogether neglected to interrogate the animal question during the forty years
 Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals 645

he spent talking about the ethical significance of the human face probably
goes to show that he really did not believe that an animal like a snake could
have a face. Basically to have a face is to be human.
But even if the assumption that an animal does not have a face as we do
was granted Levinas, there remains the question of whether we would still not
have obligations to it, and why. This was the final question posed to Levinas
on the subject of animals in the interview. This is what he said in reply:

It is clear that, without considering animals as human beings, the eth-

ical extends to all living beings. We do not want to make an animal
suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is human ethics.
Vegetarianism, for example, arises from the transference to animals of
the idea of suffering. The animal suffers. It is because we, as human,
know what suffering is that we can have this obligation. (1988b, p. 172;
emphasis added)

When Levinas concedes that “the ethical extends to all living beings” there
are two things that he might be taken as saying, which I shall contrast as the
“biocentric” and “sentience-centered” readings. According to the biocentric
reading, Levinas is claiming that every living organism is owed moral consid-
eration. Thus I ought to respect not only human and nonhuman animals, but
also plants, fungi, amoebae, and bacteria. If this were indeed what Levinas is
claiming it would constitute a strong environmental ethical claim indeed, and
place him alongside thinkers like Schweitzer (1929) and Taylor (1986). The
problem with the biocentric reading, however, is that there is absolutely no
basis in Levinas’s philosophy on which the literal truth of the claim “the ethi-
cal extends to all living beings” might be justified. On the contrary, Levinas’s
deep-seated distrust of what he calls “the eternal seductiveness if paganism”
(1990, p. 232) that treats Nature as an object of veneration and awe, makes it
seem very unlikely that he would have considered that a mere natural entity,
a tree, for example, as anything other than what Kant called a “thing”, and
thus capable of provoking ethical transcendence. More in keeping with the
context in which the remark was made, and far easier to defend given the
fundamental tenets of Levinas’s philosophical ethics, the sentience-centered
reading suggests Levinas intended to say that moral considerability applies
to all living beings that are sentient and thus capable of feeling pleasure and
pain. That would explain why Levinas immediately goes on to talk about ani-
mal suffering: “The animal suffers. It is because we, as human, know what
suffering is that we can have this obligation.”
But what precisely is Levinas saying when he says “It is because we, as
human, know what suffering is that we can have this obligation”? It seems that
Levinas is offering an account of how we come to show pity or compassion
for animals. He is saying that we first develop a concept of suffering from our
own case, via self-awareness, and then come to apply it to animals by some
646 Peter Atterton

sort of “transference of feeling”. If this account has plausibility, however, it

has it only as an account of how we come to understand the malignancy of
pain in all sentient beings—not just animals, but humans too. It does not tell
us why the “prototype” of ethics is the interhuman relationship.
Even if we can agree that the human beings have an important mental
capacity that cannot be attributed to animals, the ability to “transfer feel-
ings”, it still leaves unanswered the question why animals that lack this ability
but which are sentient beings anyway, do not have full-fledged moral status.
Again a very natural way of attacking a claim like this is the marginal case
argument. No Levinasian is going to consider obligations any less stringent
just because the recipient is unable to reciprocate due to mental incompetence.
Indeed, it would make no sense to require the Other to be responsible for me,
when in fact “what I permit myself to demand of myself is not comparable
with what I have the right to demand of the Other” (1969, p. 53). Why, then,
should an animal’s inability to show empathy—even if it were true7 —matter
for an ethics that prides itself on the “asymmetry” (p. 215) (“irreversibility”
(p. 37) and “nonreciprocity” (p. 298)) of the relationship?
Finally, Levinas’s speciesism is never more on show than when he says:
“We do not want to make an animal suffer needlessly and so on”. Could we
ever imagine him having such a nonchalant attitude toward human suffer-
ing, and saying: “We do not want to make a person suffer needlessly and so
on”? Not at all. Attacking theodicy in a moving essay about the Holocaust
entitled “Useless suffering”, appearing in 1982, Levinas writes: “The justifi-
cation of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality” (1988a,
p. 163). According to Levinas, then, it is never morally justifiable to make
an (innocent) human being suffer, whereas it is sometimes morally justifiable
to make an animal suffer. Under what circumstances would Levinas say that
are we morally justified in making an animal suffer? I think the answer to
this question must be: When it is the indirect voluntary consequence of an
act that seeks to prevent human suffering. This is not a mere application of
the doctrine of double effect, for the obvious reason that the benefit to the
human being does not have to be proportionate to the suffering undergone
by the animal. This is also what distinguishes it in the main from utilitarian
reasoning according to which it is morally permissible to make an animal suf-
fer, whether intended or not, if and only if through the act of doing so one
actually minimizes suffering overall—for humans as well as animals. Clearly,
Levinas’s position appears to be the more speciesist insofar as it draws a dis-
tinction in kind between human suffering, which is always “useless” when it
is the neighbor’s, and animal suffering, which is sometimes “necessary” to
benefit humans. Here any putative rights animals may have are to be inter-
preted as prima facie, and thus subject to being overridden by competing and
compelling human rights and duties.
 Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals 647

IV. Conclusion
Whether you agree with this claim or not, I hope at least to have made
clear how inadequately Levinas’s remarks in the interview support it, and
how the features of his work that are most likely to impress us concerning
the unknowability of the Other and the potential of the face to call us eth-
ically into question actually serve to undermine it. If interiority, specifically
the capacity to suffer, is the most obviously morally relevant characteris-
tic that the Other possesses, and if the capacity to express that suffering is
what qualifies a being as having a face in the broad sense, then, granted that
every such face is a unique face that cannot be compared with any other
face without committing a violence, such as the kind we find in totalitar-
ian politics, for example, there can be no blanket justification for prioritizing
human interests simply on account of the fact that humans possess language
or have superior mental attributes. My conclusion is that in order to over-
come this kind of speciesism in Levinas’s ethics, we should (pace Derrida)
concern ourselves less with the task of establishing an essential identity
or difference between human beings and animals, and more with thinking
through the ways in which Levinas’s ethics subordinates ontological ques-
tions about the nature of the singular individual to whom we owe obligations
to the ethical demands already placed upon us by the face of the Other—
be it an animal or a human. Insofar as an animal has a face in Levinas’s
sense through which it is able to express its suffering to me, there is no
moral justification for refusing to extend to it moral consideration. If I am
right, it should be possible to apply what Levinas said about the victims of
anti-Semitism, racism, and totalitarianism—described in the dedication to
Otherwise Than Being as “victims of the same hatred of the other man”—
to the victims of speciesism, i.e., animals whose interests have hitherto been
sacrificed, neglected, or discounted because they are members of a species
other than man.

Notes
1. I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
2. Derrida (2008). See also Llewelyn (1991); Clark (1997); David (1999); Atterton (2004);
Davy (2007), Guenther (2007), Calarco (2008), and Plant (2011).
3. See the illuminating discussion of this in Gracia (1988, pp. 45–46).
4. Cf., however, Scheler (1973), who argues that “all forms of life” (lebendiger Formen über-
haupt)—including the “lower animals” (p. 262) (niederen Tieren)—have a psychophysical
unity that it is immediately graspable through expression. Scheler cites “the wrigglings of
a severed worm” as expressive of “pain”, though he seems unaware that such wriggling no
more requires the presence of a painful sensation than do comparatively simple reflex with-
drawal responses. It exceeds the scope of this essay to inquire how the phenomenologist is to
determine whether a specific type of behavior belongs to expression or whether it is nothing
but some purely mechanical behavior.
5. Just before invoking Bentham’s famous sentience criterion for moral consideration in place
of the traditional criterion, namely, the aptitude for the logos, Derrida draws attention to
648 Peter Atterton

the “unprecedented” (2008, p. 25) subjection of animals by humans since the Enlightenment
and the rise of commercial animal agriculture in the West:
I don’t wish to abuse the ease with which one can overload with pathos self-evidences
I am drawing attention to here. Everybody knows what terrifying and intolerable pic-
tures a realist painting could give to the industrial, mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and
genetic violence to which man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries.
Everybody knows what the production, breeding, transport, and slaughter of these ani-
mals has become. Instead of thrusting these images in your faces or awakening them in
your memory, something that would be both too easy and endless, let me simply say a
word about this “pathos”. If these images are “pathetic”, if they evoke sympathy, it is also
because they “pathetically” open the immense question of pathos and the pathological,
precisely, that is, of suffering, pity, and compassion; and the place that has to be accorded
to the interpretation of this compassion, to the sharing of this suffering among the liv-
ing, to the law, ethics, and politics that must be brought to bear upon this experience of
compassion. (2008, p. 26)
When Derrida says that “images” of animal suffering evoke “sympathy”, “pity”, and
“compassion”, raising the question of “the sharing of this suffering”, and the need for
a legislative, ethical, and political response, he leaves the reader in little doubt that he is
extending the fundamentally Levinasian argument about the power of the face to provoke
my conscience, disrupt my egoism, and call forth my responsibility to animals.
6. It is noteworthy that Schopenhauer too was impressed by the inability of the face of the dog
to dissemble: “It is just on this account that so many men of the better kind have four-footed
friends: for, to be sure, how is a man to get relief from the endless dissimulation, falsity
and malice of mankind, if there were no dogs into whose honest faces he can look without
distrust? [wenn die Hunde nicht wären, in deren ehrliches Gesicht man ohne Mißtrauen schauen
kann?]” (2006, p. 7).
7. For an account of the clear tendency among certain animals, primates in particular, to show
empathy, see De Waal (2009).

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