Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Side 26

demand arises from becoming a fellowship in which we lose ourselves com-
pletely. It would become such a fellowship if the demand were to come to us as
a spoken or implied demand from the other person him or herself. (45).
L^gstrup’s own expression here is ‘fællesskab’, which would normally be trans-
lated into ‘community’. The ethical demand, then, does not seem to ground
any ethics for a community. In this sense the ethical demand is not of a so-
cial-ethical character. By a social ethics I would understand an ethics for social
units such as the family, the working place, society as a whole and for the
political order. Social ethics can both be an ethics for the individual agent as
member of a social order, and for a collective of persons. The moral agent in
social ethics can both be ‘I’ and ‘we’.
Of course every reader of The Ethical Demand knows that Logstrup does
not ignore social-ethical questions in that book. But it seems as if he makes a
clear division within the field of ethics, to the effect that the demand does not
cover the social part at all, but that this is rather the domain of a different kind
of ethics, viz. the ethics of what Logstrup calls the social norms.
However, the picture I just sketched would be a misunderstanding of Log-
strup’s argument. I think that the demand, even if it isolates the agent as a
Kierkegaardian individual, also has a social-ethical dimension. That is what
I will try to show in this article. First, I shall say something about the social
norms; second, I will deal with the necessity of the demand in the domain of
the norms; third I will present a political misconception of the demand; then
I am going to discuss social responsibility as a compromise with the demand;
and finally, I deal with two issues that leads to an outlook into Logstrup’s eth-
ics afterThe Ethical Demand, viz. economic equality and reciprocity.1
The Structure of Social Life
First of all we should ask: how does Logstrup understand the character or
structure of social life? One could read his remarks in this respect as a rejec-
1 At the celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Ethical Demand November 27, 2006, the main lecturerer was
Zygmunt Bauman. It was therefore decided to focus on the relationship between ethics and the social sciences.
This is why I at the end of the article deal with the welfare state and the concept of reciprocity.