It’s not so hard to imagine that you might owe something, say, kindness, deference, or reciprocity, to your fellow human beings. However, the history of thinking about ethics and morality is fraught with the kinds of disagreements human beings can fall into over just what is owed, why it is owed, and how far the obligation extends. As if things weren’t confusing enough, along come the animal-rights theorists and activists with their suggestion that human beings also bear responsibilities toward animals. You may or may not agree. And what about things? Do I owe kindness to a chair? As philosopher Silvia Benso admits, “to speak of the ethical demand of a chair or a spoon sounds crazy.”

And yet she is here to tell us that it is not crazy, and, what’s more, that conceiving of the ethical demands made on us by things is essential to any successful account of human ethical commitment. In other words, a world in which “things” are relegated solely to the status of objects is a world where the field of ethics cannot be understood for what it is. Ethics is about “the other,” that which is different from us. And what is more “other” to a thinking human being or a breathing animal than an inanimate chair? Thinking through what matters about difference must include an openness to the ways in which difference exceeds our capability to recover everything about it into our preconceived categories of reason. Thus, Benso, author of The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics and professor of philosophy at Siena College in upstate New York, suggests that we need an ethic of things. This interview arose out of some conversations that took place at what the interviewer likes to call “philosophers’ summer camp” but which many others prefer to call “Collegium Phaenomenologicum,” a yearly three-week retreat in the beautiful Umbrian countryside of Italy. The bulk of the dialogue was conducted over email between San Francisco, California, and Loudonville, New York.

—Jill Stauffer

I. THE ETHIC OF MISFIT TOYS

THE BELIEVER: You argue in your book The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics that things—not just persons or animals—make ethical demands on us. How is that so?

SILVIA BENSO: It is somewhat easy to imagine that persons and animals make ethical demands on us (even if we have difficulties agreeing on the details of the formulation of such an ethic) because ultimately we recognize some similarity, some common ground between ourselves and other human beings, and between animals and ourselves. That this attitude guides us becomes clear when we consider how much closer we are in general to admitting...