Social Relations and the Givenness of Moral Reasons: A Phenomenological Account

Traditional ethics typically grounds moral obligations in universal features of the moral agent, yet fails to explain why obligations to those close to us differ in kind from obligations to strangers. Drawing principally on Alfred Schutz's social phenomenology, in dialogue with Levinas's ethics, this paper argues that different modes of social relation exhibit qualitative differences at the phenomenological level, and that these differences internally shape the form and type of corresponding moral reasons. The concrete other directly present in the Umwelt, the typified other of the Mitwelt, and the abstract other of the universal world are each given in irreducibly distinct ways, generating correspondingly distinct forms of ethical demand. Moral reasons are therefore not interchangeable across these structures but are rooted in them; moral pluralism thus receives a phenomenological grounding.