And Justice for All – when Rules are not Enough

in most of the worlds big cities with vast diversified population), they didn’t experience enough interracial contact to move beyond this denial of what happened.

If we go back to the consultant’s story, the sense of moral distance suddenly changed now that these white leaders were faced with the opposition—when they finally experienced interracial contact. And they did not only face the non-white opposition, they actually had to cooperate with them; to become a team. They suddenly saw them as people and faces and not only as numbers and names, and that made a big difference. They suddenly felt guilty, as they realized the harm they had caused other people, and that was, according to the consultant, exactly the reason why it was the black group that started to open up at the very first meeting at the ranch. The white group simply felt too guilty and needed time to ‘digest’ the faces they saw. They had probably never felt this guilt before facing their injustice. As Levinas says “consciousness of my injustice is produced when I incline myself not before facts, but before the Other” (Levinas, 1987a: 57). By facing these people as faces, the white leaders became conscious of their acts; the before anonymous number suddenly became an Other.

And this agenda was all about dictating South Africa what they internationally thought was right and wrong, and not considering the specific South African context. That is, they in fact wanted to fund projects that benefited the international community and not necessarily South Africa nationally.

This is a good example of implementing an ethics based on utilitarian principles. This story shows that bureaucrats can be placed somewhere in the world and make calculations about what project would benefit the world most.

And by ‘the world’ usually only western interest are considered. It seems like that they sometimes forget about the country at hand; forget to view a country as an Other, and treat it as a goal in it self, and not just as a mean to international approval. Formally, their actions are ethical; they donate money to the poor, but they do it in the interest of their own and not in the interest of the Other. And in this sense their acts would never count as ethical in a Levinasian sense. In order to be ethical, in a Levinasian sense, the moral self has to be dislocated from reason and calculation, and that is not the case here.

The international community expects to get something in return. They will only donate the money if it is spend on their specific formulated projects. In the view of a Levinasian ethics, this qualifies only as an act of responsibility swapping—it is not inherently ethical (Levinas, 2000: 175). When responsibility is calculated with the expectation of a return, it is compared, totalized and homogenized (Levinas 2007: 204), which is not ethical. For an act to be ethical, it must be carried out without expectation of a return. The funding must therefore be non-intentional to qualify as ethics. The wish to fund South Africa should come out of respect and acknowledgement for what is done in South Africa and not for the purpose of reaching higher international political goals.

The team from the Danish Institute of Human Rights, on the other hand, acted according to Levinasian ethical principles. They were a small team located in the context itself and not a large bureaucratic organization far away from the context. This made the difference; this made it possible for them to act according to a Levinasian ethics, instead of the bureaucratic dictated utilitarian principles used by the larger international community. They communicated to the international community that they would only run projects that fitted the strategy they were building up. And if the projects did not fit, they would not run them. What was truly amazing about this decision was, that it was, as far as the consultant knows, the first time these powerful international people had experienced that they from a developing country said ‘no thank you’ to money. And as he told in the story it caused both the justice department and the planning unit including the Danish team a major international pressure, and made them very unpopular. But the fact that they even down prioritized the international community makes this an even greater case of a personal ethics. They saw South Africa as an Other and ignored the international pressure. In this way, they treated South Africa as a goal in it self and had no alternative agenda, was not expecting a specific return from their actions in the country.

It then turned out to be beneficial for the team to act in this way, but it was nothing they had anticipated. This fact, that they handled the international situation as they did, gave them a rather significant impact on the situation in South Africa. As I earlier quoted the minister of justice for saying, this was one of the actions, which made the South Africans trust in the Danish team, trust in the fact that they—unlike much of the international community they cooperated with—had no alternative agenda. But it was not for that reason they did what they did, their actions were non-intentional and their decisions

had arisen in the face of the Other, in the pain and struggles they saw in South Africa and in the wish for a better society.

The team therefore ended up not only implementing justice, but implementing a sense of justice, which in Levinasian terms had originated in the responsibility for the Other. The basic principle was human rights and the singular respect for the individual. The universality of justice came from the singularity of the respect for another human being as Other. To be legal was not enough. So instead of ‘And Justice for All’, maybe a more appropriate title for the vision would perhaps have been ‘Responsibility for the Other’.