Publication Date
2024
Document Type
Book
Description
Recent scholarship on the ethics of volunteerism has emphasized a structural critique, highlighting the ways in which geopolitical prejudices and volunteer organizations may replicate the very stigmas and oppressions volunteers seek to alleviate. In such work, any hope for an ethically tenable volunteerism looks bleak. In an attempt to salvage it, this research contends that scholarship on volunteerism has focused too narrowly on an ‘ethics of sameness’ and ignored the capacity of alterity to foster ethical relations. Through a reading of Emmanuel Levinas’ work, this research shows how ethical volunteerism can only be realized when our experience of moral responsibility arises directly from Levinas’ face-to-face encounters. Most other stimuli to moral behavior tacitly reduce the humanity of those they aim to help. Departing somewhat from Levinas, however, this project argues that face-to-face encounters must be more fully contextualized through a recognition of the ways volunteers benefit from the conditions in which host-communities live.
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Recommended Citation
Schafer, Cade, "Serving the Other: Levinasian Alterity and a Reconceptualization of Volunteer Ethics" (2024). Research Days Posters 2024. 153.
https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2024/153