Ethics of Alterity as an Extra-Moral Foundation for Politics in Times of Hatred

Abstract

This article deals with the relationship between ethics and politics. For this, it approaches ethics from the perspective of alterity and politics from the perspective of the search for hegemony. Its purpose is to demonstrate the importance of ethics as a necessary presupposition of political debate. In this sense, it adopts two fundamental premises: (i) not everything is political. Conceptions that totalize political relations also reduce human relations. Abandoning people exclusively to the political domain implies a tyranny of politics; (ii) the ethics that will be invoked does not concern the debate about the values and principles that should guide political action, nor about the conceptions of good or evil present in comprehensive doctrines. It is about ethics in the deepest sense of the search for humanity that arises from the encounter with the other and the responsibility that results from it, according to a Levinasian perspective. If politics implies a search for hegemony, it is necessary to recognize that it is also a place of plurality. So that the search for hegemony does not suffocate plurality or deny differences, it is argued in the sense of extending the responsibility, characteristic of the ethics of alterity, to politics, thus producing an ethically based policy, albeit in an extra-moral sense, i.e, without defining concepts of good or choosing values and principles.