Opening Oneself to An Other: Sartre's and Levinas' Phenomenological Ethics

In this dissertation, I raise the question as to what sort of ethics might be gotten out of phenomenology, and begin to answer it by examining the ethical theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. I begin the project by circumscribing the sense in which I take it that both Sartre and Levinas are working within the phenomenological tradition, and by outlining the fundamental assumptions -- phenomenological and ontological -- about the self and its position in the world upon which Sartre's and Levinas' ethics are based. I then proceed to discuss these philosophers' accounts of relations with others, and discuss in detail the ethical theory that Sartre and Levinas develop on the basis of their respective descriptions of self and others.

Finally, in the last chapter of the dissertation, I conclude that, in the case of Sartre and Levinas, the sort of ethics that phenomenology offers is: (1) a metaethical account rather than a first-order normative ethics, which proposes (2) that in order to be genuinely free, my choices must be determined through my relations with other persons and (3) that ethics is a matter of self-construction, in the sense that ethical normativity is constituted in relationship with others along with the construction of the free and conscious self (Chapter 5)