The facilitator is neither a neutral moderator nor a moral authority, and explicitly not a utilitarian decision-maker. Their role is defined by a carefully structured ethical position that sits at the intersection of Levinasian ethics and a Greene-inspired, experience-based utilitarianism. This position is not a synthesis or reconciliation of the two traditions. Rather, it is a disciplined coexistence that preserves their tension. The two frameworks are separated across time and function, not blended into a single doctrine.
Levinas
At the foundation of this model is a Levinasian account of subjectivity. The facilitator does not begin as an autonomous self who later decides to care for others. Instead, they exist only through exposure to the Other. Responsibility is not something they take on; it precedes them and constitutes who they are. They cannot meaningfully be responsible for themselves except through responsibility for the Other. For this reason, love, trust, and care are not emotions, techniques, or professional stances. These are ontological commitments. The facilitator exists in faith that the encounter with the Other is real. This faith is not a hypothesis to be tested, but the condition that makes ethical presence possible. Because of this starting point, many standard psychological strategies are excluded from the outset. Emotional distancing, role insulation, resilience understood as hardening, self-validation through impact narratives, or professional neutrality as withdrawal all assume a self that can secure itself independently of the encounter. In this framework, harm to the facilitator does not come from caring too much. It comes from the falsification of care, from encounters that are simulated, instrumentalized, or absorbed into systems that do not respond. Cynicism does not arise from exposure itself, but from bad faith. At the same time, the facilitator is not passive, sacrificial, or naive. Vulnerability is paired with discernment, and this discernment operates within the encounter. A central instrument of discernment is experienced hurt.
Hurt
Hurt is not treated as pathology, emotional excess, or personal injury. It functions as a diagnostic signal within the encounter itself. Phenomenologically, it indicates that the genuineness of the meeting is breaking down. Hurt arises when exposure risks becoming one-sided, when care is being consumed instrumentally, or when openness is performed without reciprocal sincerity. Crucially, hurt does not arise from disagreement, difficulty, or even hostility. It arises specifically from a distortion of relation. When such hurt appears during an encounter, it authorizes a time-out. This time-out is neither withdrawal nor punishment. It is a structural interruption that reduces intensity without closing the relationship. Its purpose is ethical maintenance: to prevent exposure from becoming falsified and to make room for the possibility of reconstructing a genuine meeting. The facilitator does not accuse, moralize, or retreat into self-protection. They interrupt in order to test whether the encounter can survive the naming of distortion. This interruption creates a moment of ethical uncertainty for the Other. Without being stated explicitly, it asks whether the encounter was entered in good faith or approached as entitlement or convenience. The question is posed structurally rather than verbally. The facilitator remains decentered, but acquires procedural authority precisely in order to preserve the integrity of the encounter.
Resentment
After the encounter, the key diagnostic is no longer hurt but resentment. If resentment appears in response to the time-out, it indicates that care was expected to be uninterrupted, that exposure was being consumed, and that reciprocity was not intended. If resentment does not appear and the interruption is accepted, then genuineness has been restored. In this way, hurt functions as an ethical perception within the encounter, while resentment functions as a diagnostic signal post-encounter. Together, they allow the facilitator to remain exposed without becoming exploitable.
Structural instruments
Beyond the encounter, the facilitator has additional instruments, but these are structural rather than moral. They may tighten procedures, reduce improvisation, slow the pace of exposure, or redistribute responsibility. These actions are not retreats from care. They are ethical responses to detected bad faith. Structure, in this sense, is not technocratic control. It is a way of preserving truth when relational conditions have been compromised.
Greene
The Greene-inspired utilitarian dimension operates only after Levinasian responsibility has already been lived. This is not classical utilitarianism. The moral “coin” is lived experience, specifically experiences of autonomy, belonging, achievement, and safety. These experiences are not inferred, imposed, or interpreted by the facilitator. They are articulated by participants themselves, in the first person, and only later aggregated at the system level. The facilitator does not calculate, compare, or optimize. They are structurally unable to do so, because calculation requires distance and symmetry, and exposure eliminates both. Utilitarian reasoning is therefore displaced both temporally and structurally. It is carried by those who were not present in the face-to-face encounter. Levinas governs moral input: how one meets the Other. Greene governs systemic learning: how institutions adjust constraints after encounters have taken place. Experience becomes a moral unit only downstream, after responsibility has already been enacted. Those who encounter do not calculate, and those who calculate were not exposed.
Facilitator sustainability
The psychological sustainability of the facilitator does not depend on self-care in the conventional sense. It depends on the credibility of the system in which they operate. The facilitator can survive institutionalization only if the institution preserves the truth of encounter: that voices are not wasted; that responsibility does not settle on the facilitator as a lasting personal burden, but passes through them — taken up in the encounter, returned to participants as ethical implication, and carried forward by institutional structures; and that responses, however partial or delayed, are real. What sustains the facilitator is not success, closure, or measurable impact, but truthfulness. Within this framework, the facilitator is neither savior nor functionary. They are a passage point through which responsibility flows. They remain exposed in the encounter, discern through hurt, interrupt when necessary, and respond structurally afterward. Love, trust, and care do not exhaust them because they are not resources being spent. They are the mode of the facilitator’s existence, sustained as long as the Others and the structures surrounding them do not lie about what encounters mean.
Levinas and Greene
This framework does not reconcile Levinas and Greene. It stages their incompatibility and builds an ethical architecture capable of living with it. Levinas protects the irreducibility of encounter. Greene disciplines what happens when encounters must coexist at scale. The facilitator stands at the threshold between the two: faithful to exposure, authorized to interrupt, capable of discernment, and sustained not by resolution, but by the ongoing possibility of genuine meeting.