Naked humanity beyond the inevitable ceremonial

This chapter aims to awaken awareness of and appreciation for the root of intelligibility in moral responsibility. It understands moral responsibility as beginning in the singularizing response of me, I, myself, to the vulnerability and suffering of you, the other person, the singular other, as a being for-the-other before being for-oneself, as a disinterestedness before self-interest-this "before" serving also as the root significance of all priority, all value, the very importance of importance. It thereby defends a "cosmopolitanism," the solidarity of all humanity, oriented by such a priority, by moral responsibility, in contrast to the rapacious nihilist greed and self-interest promulgated by globalized capitalism and its governmental allies. To effect such awakening, the chapter illustrates the character and priority of moral responsibility by invoking and commenting upon selected passages from Vasily Grossman, Aristotle, Antonio Gramsci, Heinrich Heine, Herman Melville, Emmanuel Levinas and Socrates.