Ethics: the sensitive responsibility

Julia Romanowska

Chapter 19 in Leadership, Art, and Responsibility, 2026, pp 184-215 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Ethics is approached as a sensitive responsibility awakened by the presence of the Other. It is not a code, a value system, or an external regulation, but a lived obligation that precedes morality and binds the leader before any role, ambition, or institutional logic. The question, Where is Abel, your brother?, abolishes innocence. The suffering of the Other forbids indifference. Against managerial attempts to regulate ethics through value statements, compliance rhetoric, and abstract moral systems, the chapter exposes how distance, self-preservation, and the cold language of rational justification can sever action from its human consequences. Historical reflections on genocide illuminate how moral collapse becomes possible when abstraction replaces encounter and when destruction is reframed as duty, necessity, or even care. Ethical leadership unfolds in concrete relation. Responsibility is asymmetrical, irreducible, and cannot be delegated. It takes form through seven acts intrinsic to leadership: acknowledging responsibility; listening as nearness; responding with courage; refusing to stand by in the face of harm; refraining from causing suffering; preserving human distinction; and assuming responsibility for the future. Ethical life remains tragically ambivalent. No calculation secures innocence; every decision exposes. In dialogue with Jonas, vigilant fear is reclaimed as restraint on behalf of the absent – those not yet born. Leadership appears as difficult freedom: to resist self-preservation when it conflicts with human dignity, to refuse moral alibis, and to remain answerable even when justification seems complete – especially when power, necessity, or collective survival are invoked as excuses.

Keywords: Ethical Responsibility; Asymmetrical Responsibility; Ethical Leadership; Levinasian Ethics; Moral Ambivalence; Ethical Judgement; Ethics of the Future; Heuristic of Fear (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781049403991
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