THE CONTRIBUTION OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS TO CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND BUSINESS ETHICS IN THE POST-MODERN ERA

Abstract

Abstract:Emmanuel Levinas developed an ethics of inter-subjectivity and responsibility. According to phenomenology of Levinas, moral impulse and intuition are elicited by encounter with Other. Encounter with Other, particularly face and voice of Other, gives rise to a sense of responsibility for that Other. Business leaders are challenged by Levinas' approach, to move from a way of doing business that insulates corporations and its constituent members from customers and other stakeholders to engagement with other(s) in ways that enhance their wellbeing, by creating positive social effects from work of corporation and engagement with corporate stakeholders.Keywords: alterity, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, ethics of responsibility, inter-subjectivity, Emmanuel Levinas, Levinas, Other (Autrie), phenomenology, stakeholder, stakeholdersIntroductionWe live in Post-Modern era.1 Post-Modernism is a developed in reaction to experience of World War n. Those who reflect on human condition, namely philosophers, were disillusioned by experience of World War n. Immanuel Kant's reliance on human reason and rationality became distrusted. Rule-based imperatives were discredited with rise of Phenomenology and Existentialism.2 Most of these intellectual developments occurred in Europe, grounds of World War II. Phenomenologists and Existentialists were profoundly affected by fact that Germany, one of most intellectually and industrially developed nations, a home of industrial revolution and of development of bureaucracy, committed human atrocities of Holocaust. Emmanuel Levinas emerged in that context. Levinas was a Jewish Philosopher who was bom in Russia (now Lithuania) and who migrated to France. Levinas was a student of Martin Heidegger, a leading philosopher of Phenomenology. Although Levinas was fully engaged intellectually with of Heidegger, Levinas became disillusioned with Heidegger because of latter's affiliation with Nazis: Heidegger served as chancellor of Freiburg University under Hitler's ruling National Socialist German Worker's Party, Nazis. In Levinas' view, Heidegger's cooperation with Nazis demonstrated his lack of authenticity and failure of metaphysics, an intellectual concern for Being (Dasein) divorced from ethics.3 Levinas developed an approach based on encounter with Other (Autrie) and responsibility for Other.Levinas' Ethics of Inter-Subjectivity and ResponsibilityEmmanuel Levinas developed an approach wherein he rejected a Heideggerian analysis of being, or a subject-object analysis as first philosophy. In Is Ontology Fundamental? Levinas understands that he breaks with the theoretical structure of Western thought when he articulates that [t]o think is no longer to contemplate, but to be engaged, launched-the dramatic event of being-in-the-world...4 Levinas considered ethics to be first philosophy. Ethics is concerned with relationship of self to other (autrui), but ethics is other than knowledge. The Other is not an object of one's comprehension, and fundamental being-ness of Other is not reducible to one's comprehension.5 Levinas was particularly concerned that otherness (alterity) of other (autrui) would be diminished through intellectual comprehension of universal human condition.6 Levinas understands that categorization and generalization, an inquiry of ontology and epistemology, whereby being and objects are classified as the same, contains risk that ego seeks to reduce all alterity/ otherness to itself.7Furthermore, and a reason that Levinas argues that ethics is first philosophy is that moral impulse and intuition are pre-rational and are elicited by encounter with Other.8 The encounter with Face of other elicits a sense of responsibility of self for Other. …