Face-to-face: Ethical asymmetry or the symmetry of mutuality?

Emmanuel Levinas's insistence on the ethical priority of the other is vulnerable to being misread as a plea for selflessness and self-sacrifice. The author suggests an alternative ethics of non-hierarchical mutuality in which "substitution" and self-sacrifice are seen not as the heart of ethics, but as an emergency compromise ethic because of the breakdown of mutuality.