The Ethical Demand and Its Basis

This chapter covers the ‘Introduction’ to K. E. Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand, and the first two chapters of the book. These provide the foundation for Løgstrup’s account of the ethical demand, by relating it to Jesus’s proclamation to love our neighbour, while showing how the demand grows out of the interdependence of human beings, an interdependence that can be illustrated through the key example of trust. Løgstrup also defends the claim that the demand to care for the other is ‘unspoken’ or ‘silent’, and begins to contrast the demand to social norms, while also responding to the worry that the demand might encourage us to ‘encroach’ on the lives of others, arguing in the second chapter of his book that we cannot escape this problem by seeking relationships that involve an intimacy which somehow does away with any mediation between individuals.