Levinas said the human face makes a moral demand before you can even think

Emmanuel Levinas argued that encountering another person's face — not their ideas or their usefulness to you — is the origin of ethics itself: it silently says 'do not kill me' and holds you responsible before any reasoning begins. For Levinas this makes ethics 'first philosophy', prior even to logic and self-knowledge, and the responsibility it creates can never be fully discharged.

— Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority — 1961 (French); English translation by Alphonso Lingis, 1969
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