In Kant the other is only considered in terms of her autonomy, as sharing something with me. Kant's ethics is perhaps the origin of the idea of an alter-ego - the other me who is the subject of his ethics. Further, perhaps it is the very starting point of a general idea of ego, an ego that can be generalized like in the categorical imperative: don't do to other what I don't want done to me – and not don't do to others what they don't want to be done to them. Hence, it is moral to tell the truth to the murderer and enable him to kill because enabling someone to so something is an empirical consideration alien to moral issues. In other words, it is up to the murderer to be a moral agent. I should threat all the others in the same manner – the other is universal, they are universal mes. They are never other – I don't deal with the murderer as an other, not even as a murderer for that matter, but only as an autonomous moral agent like me.
I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
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