Thus far, the recognition approach as described in the works of Axel Honneth has not systematically engaged with the problem of poverty. To fill this gap, the present contribution will focus on poverty conceived as social exclusion in the context of the European Union and probe its moral significance. It will show that this form of social exclusion is morally harmful and wrong from the perspective of the recognition approach. To justify this finding, social exclusion has to fulfil three conditions: (...) (i) it has to be experienced as harmful by the socially excluded, (ii) it has to meet certain objective criteria, and (iii) it has to violate normative claims embedded within society. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a possible answer to the question of what professional athletes deserve for their sporting activities. I take two different backgrounds into account. First, the content and meaning of desert is highly debated within political philosophy and many theorists are sceptical if it has any value for social justice. On the other hand sport is often understood as a meritocracy, in which all prizes or wins should be solely awarded based on merit. I will distinguish three (...) possible goods that can be deserved for doing professional sport – money, social status and appreciation – and show that athletes deserve them according to their achievements and that this justifies certain inequalities in their distribution. These legitimate disparities have nevertheless been embedded within a broader framework of social justice, which limits them based on a strong understanding of social equality. (shrink)

This article explores Axel Honneth’s attempts to reconnect the struggles of workers with the normative content of modernity through Hegel’s intersubjective account of recognition. The importance of Honneth’s writings lies in his attempt to extend Habermas’ account of normative self-constitution to labor via the morally motivated struggles of workers to correct the modern maldistribution of social worth. To this extent, the expansion of ethical life is predicated on the struggles of excluded participants to gain inclusion within the normative content of (...) modernity. From this perspective Habermas’ attempt to legitimate the exclusion of labor (by the system) from the normative content of modernity appears unjust and unjustified. Unfortunately, Honneth shares with Habermas a tendency to locate the economic system beyond the (culturally defined) limits of ethical life. He thereby fails to acknowledge the extent to which workers play a major role in re-moralizing the former via the de-reification of the latter. (shrink)

This article argues that Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition offers a robust model for a renewed critical theory of society, provided that it does not shy away from its political dimensions. First, the ethics of recognition needs to clarify its political moment at the conceptual level to remain conceptually sustainable. This requires a clarification of the notion of identity in relation to the three spheres of recognition, and a clarification of its exact place in a politics of recognition. We suggest (...) that a return to Hegel’s mature theory of subjectivity helps specify the relationship between the normative demand for autonomous identity and its realization in and through politics. (shrink)

Despite a significant amount of literature debating the efficiency of high-risk pools in health insurance, dramatically less has been written about their normative implications. The present article takes the route less traveled by setting aside the question of efficiency to argue that the use of high-risk pools creates some serious normative concerns. The article explores these concerns by dividing them on two fronts. First, as regards the social-recognitional status of those who are forced into the high-risk pool. Second, as regards (...) a general concern of distributive justice, namely fairness in access to resources. The author argues that regardless of the veracity of arguments which laud the efficiency of high-risk pools, their use in health insurance is unjust because of the herein explained implications for social recognition and distributive justice. (shrink)

Recognition theory attempts to conceptualize interpersonal relationships and their normative political implications. British social philosopher Gillian Rose developed her own version of recognition rooted in the work of Georg Hegel. This article applies Rose's theory of recognition to care, arguing that its emphasis on lack of identity, the dynamic process of recognition and the existential risks involved accurately describes the relationship between nurse and patient. Rose's version is compared to both contemporary notions of the interpersonal in healthcare literature, other forms (...) of recognition theory and Emmanuel Levinas's vision of intersubjective relationships, a traditional philosophical basis for nursing care. In each case, I will argue that Rosean recognition is a fuller, more complex and ultimately more satisfying view of the relationships involved. (shrink)

For Maria Markus, a significant feature of ‘decency’ of a society is respect for the dignity of each person. Here I contemplate the notion of ‘respect’ in the light of Sennett’s (2004) inquiry into the role of respect in encounters between individuals and institutions. Underlying this question is the structure/ agency dynamic. As Markus points out, decent institutions do not necessarily presuppose decent individuals (and vice versa). Yet the separation of these entities is analytic; in life, they are intertwined and (...) the resulting fabric rarely loses its opacity under sociologists’ inquiring gaze. One task of this article is to consider Sennett’s approach to the problem. But methodology is not my primary concern. More important is Sennett’s investigation of the vicissitudes of respect in the context of sundry inequalities. With reference to Markus’s discussion of ‘decency’, this article elucidates Sennett’s views concerning the necessary conditions for the generation and maintenance of respect in the face of obstacles put in its way by both social arrangements and human nature. (shrink)

Researchers and managers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the topic of unethical consumer behavior. Where most studies view unethical behavior as something that is identifiable per se, the authors of the present article believe that it only exists because it has been constructed by people operating within a specific context. Hence the efforts made by this paper to explore, at the level of one specific organization, how interactions between employees and consumers might lead to the construct of unethical consumers. (...) Based on a case study of France’s AMDM—a mutual insurance company set up to serve a client base comprising motorcyclists—the paper addresses how one group of consumers ends up being categorized as unethical by revealing the existence of a sensemaking process within the target organization. This process develops in three main phases: the nurturing of a shared ethos; the protection of employees’ recognized status; and the demonization of any group of consumers threatening this status. Managers incorporating this sensemaking process can avoid or mitigate the negative effects befalling organizations when these kinds of unethical consumer behavior are constructed. (shrink)

In this article I present some implications for a concept of transitional justice through the comparison of two approaches: retributive vs. restorative theories. Notwithstanding their profound differences in perspective, both models are grounded upon a strong notion of the public sphere. Accordingly, after showing why neither of the two approaches exhausts the problems of transitional justice, I will demonstrate how a ‘complete’ justification requires a certain view of public reason based upon rights as truth-constraints of the public sphere.

In this article, I discuss cases in which moral grievances, particularly assertions that a moral injury has taken place, are systematically obstructed by received linguistic and epistemic practices. I suggest a social epistemological model for theorizing such cases of moral epistemic injustice. Towards this end, I offer a reconstruction of Lyotard’s concept of the differend, comparing it with Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, and considering it in light of some criticisms posed by Axel Honneth. Through this reconstruction and a (...) series of examples, I demonstrate that a basic formal structure recurs in cases of discursively repressed moral injury, namely, a particular kind of dilemma. I argue that appreciating this dilemma pushes us in the direction of a form of non-ideal ethical theory and I conclude by elaborating a conception of moral reflective judgement that begins from particular experiences of moral injury and moves towards the creation of new moral universals. (shrink)

Axel Honneth distinguishes between recognitive practices according to the social domain in which they occur and this allows him to theorise the relationship between power and recognition. 'Love-based recognition', which suggests the centrality of recognition to the relationships that nurture us in the first instance, is located in the family. Honneth argues that relationships encompassed by this category are pre-political, thereby repeating the distinction between the public and the private common to much political theory. This article explores the structure of (...) this delineation in his thinking. I argue that Honneth's analysis marginalises feminist concerns with how power functions through recognition in the private sphere. Honneth also robs himself of a rejoinder to recognition sceptics, who suggest that the desire for recognition is a condition of subordination. The article argues for an alternative approach to the analysis of 'love' within recognitive theory. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. (shrink)

Recent discussions in critical social epistemology have raised the idea that the concept 'knower' is not only an epistemological concept, but an ethical concept as well. Though this idea plays a central role in these discussions, the theoretical underpinnings of the claim have not received extended scrutiny. This paper explores the idea that 'knower' is an irreducibly ethical concept in an effort to defend its use as a critical concept. In Section 1, I begin with the claim that 'knower' is (...) an irreducibly normative and social concept, drawing from some ideas in Wilfrid Sellars. In Section 2, I argue that one's being a knower involves demands for various sorts of ethically-laden recognition. I develop this thought by arguing that Axel Honneth's threefold typology of recognition—love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socio-epistemic practice. I conclude in Section 3 by arguing that Miranda Fricker's proposed " analogy " between epistemic and moral perception should be modified to indicate a closer relationship than mere analogy. (shrink)

This paper explores the development of Honneth’s thought on work. It considers how his initial concerns with the embodied experience of labour and the absence of a contemporary and compelling class-specific lexicon with which to explore suffering at work have been surpassed and subordinated by his analysis of the social relations of recognition in civil society, which is distributed according to a contested and contestable achievement principle. I argue that despite the purchase of the criticisms offered by recent rejoinders, they (...) fail to engage with the strength of his analysis: that modern economics contains a normative order which works to justify the extant division of labour and income, even if its current formulation supports inequity, exclusion and exploitation. Feminist political economy is an ally in this analysis. The paper explores the points of intersection between these projects, but argues that incorporating feminist insights will require a fundamental revision to Honneth’s account of social rationalization in modernity. (shrink)

This paper develops two related theses concerning resentment. The first, which I label the ‘prior norm requirement’, holds that feelings of resentment are grounded in the resenter’s conviction that some portion of their existing normative expectations has been violated. The second holds that resentments can make a rational contribution to the development of new normative expectations, transforming the resenter’s existing normative outlook. Certain expressions of the prior norm requirement in recent theory clash with the notion of norm-creative resentments, portraying resentment (...) as essentially conservative of existing norms. Against this, I develop the notion of ‘emotional articulation’, according to which emotions like resentment can involve cognitively complex processes of working through the meaning of experiences of wrongdoing, in ways that give rise to genuinely new normative commitments. I develop this through critical comparison with Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive-evaluative theory of emotion and by drawing from Charles Taylor’s notion of articulation. (shrink)

This paper argues for the inclusion of a fourth order of recognition, pertaining to self-recognition, in Axel Honneth's critical theory of social recognition. I argue for the significance of this on the basis of examining the critical potential of the social psychology he has developed across his career as it pertains to autonomy, authenticity and agency. However, incorporating a fourth order of recognition into Honneth's internally differentiated account of recognition will not be easy given the architecture of his theory. To (...) remain consistent with Honneth's delineation between love, rights and solidarity, a fourth order of recognition would need to be capable of generating a practical relation to self and a normative attitude; it would require an institutional locale in which it could be articulated through social practices that admit conflict and thereby the possibility for further extension and/or reconstitution. Self-recognition fulfils three of these four criteria: it may lack for a specific institu.. (shrink)

Respectfulness is demanded of doctors and predicts more positive patient health-related outcomes, but research is scarce on ways to promote it. This study explores two ways to conceptualize unconditional respect from medical students, defined as respect paid to people on the basis of their humanity, in order to inform strategies to increase it. Unconditional respect conceptualized as an attitude suggests that unconditional respect and conditional respect are additive, whereas unconditional respect conceptualized as a personality trait suggests that people who are (...) high on unconditional respect afford equal respect to all humans regardless of their merits. One hundred and eighty-one medical students completed an unconditional respect measure then read a description of a respect-worthy or a non-respect-worthy man and indicated their respect towards him. The study found a main effect for unconditional respect and a main effect for target respect-worthiness but no interaction between the two when respect paid to the target was assessed, supporting the attitude-based conceptualization. This suggests that unconditional respect can be increased through relevant interventions aimed at increasing the relative salience to doctors of the human worth of individuals. Interventions to increase unconditional respect are discussed. (shrink)

The capability approach is one of the main contenders in the field of theorizing social justice. Each citizen is entitled to a set of basic capabilities. But which are these? Martha Nussbaum formulated a set of ten central capabilities. Amartya Sen argued they should be selected in a process of public reasoning. Critics object that the Nussbaum-approach is too perfectionist and the Sen-approach is too proceduralist. This paper presents a third alternative: a substantive but non-perfectionist capability theory of justice. It (...) presents a two-level concept of individual agency as connected to social practices. It then argues basic capabilities are those necessary to for the agency necessary to navigate freely and autonomously between different social practices. (shrink)

Many of the things we do in social and political philosophy, whether normative or critical, presuppose some understanding and evaluation of agency. To have a clear idea of our normative or critical enterprise, the underlying account of agency needs spelling out. This article begins with a descriptive account: human agency consists in power (or causal efficacy) organized as subjectivity (or selfhood), and such organization takes place through attributions of power informed by values. Some such descriptive account is useful for understanding (...) and comparing forms of agency. But as we move beyond it to construct an evaluative account of agency, we face problems that are symptomatic of our social and political condition. While quantitative assessment of agency does not work, qualitative assessment seems out of place in our modern world of pluralism and yet is unavoidable for those who, like Habermas, take issue with such phenomena as colonization of the lifeworld. (shrink)

Many of the things we do in social and political philosophy, whether normative or critical, presuppose some understanding and evaluation of agency. To have a clear idea of our normative or critical enterprise, the underlying account of agency needs spelling out. This article begins with a descriptive account: human agency consists in power (or causal efficacy) organized as subjectivity (or selfhood), and such organization takes place through attributions of power informed by values. Some such descriptive account is useful for understanding (...) and comparing forms of agency. But as we move beyond it to construct an evaluative account of agency, we face problems that are symptomatic of our social and political condition. While quantitative assessment of agency does not work, qualitative assessment seems out of place in our modern world of pluralism and yet is unavoidable for those who, like Habermas, take issue with such phenomena as colonization of the lifeworld. © 2011 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSellars’s relationship with Hegel is complex and itself ‘dialectical‘ in interesting ways. Sellars follows Hegel in recognizing that the normativity essential to intentionality and conceptu...

This paper motivates the idea that social robots should be credited as moral patients, building on an argumentative approach that combines virtue ethics and social recognition theory. Our proposal answers the call for a nuanced ethical evaluation of human-robot interaction that does justice to both the robustness of the social responses solicited in humans by robots and the fact that robots are designed to be used as instruments. On the one hand, we acknowledge that the instrumental nature of robots and (...) their unsophisticated social capabilities prevent any attribution of rights to robots, which are devoid of intrinsic moral dignity and personal status. On the other hand, we argue that another form of moral consideration—not based on rights attribution—can and must be granted to robots. The reason is that relationships with robots offer to the human agents important opportunities to cultivate both vices and virtues, like social interaction with other human beings. Our argument appeals to social recognition to explain why social robots, unlike other technological artifacts, are capable of establishing with their human users quasi-social relationships as pseudo-persons. This recognition dynamic justifies seeing robots as worthy of moral consideration from a virtue ethical standpoint as it predicts the pre-reflective formation of persistent affective dispositions and behavioral habits that are capable of corrupting the human user’s character. We conclude by drawing attention to a potential paradox drawn forth by our analysis and by examining the main conceptual conundrums that our approach has to face. (shrink)

While commentators recognize the centrality of the notion of Geist in Hegel’s philosophical project, there is no consensus about what the term exactly designates and what its role is within his system. One interpretation, which has appeared on the scene in recent years, overemphasizes the onto-theological connotations of the Hegelian term and understands it as a kind of supernatural or divine force determining the development of the system and guiding human history. Critically opposing this reading and showing its conceptual shortcomings, (...) the paper clarifies Hegel’s concept of Geist and discusses its real place in the philosopher’s system. (shrink)

In Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in his or her capacity as a knower. Fricker's examples of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit primarily involve gender, race, and class, in which individuals are given less credibility due to prejudicial stereotypes. We argue that children, as a class, are also subject to testimonial injustice and receive less epistemic credibility than they deserve. To illustrate the prevalence of testimonial injustice against (...) children we document examples of negative prejudicial treatment in forensic contexts where children frequently act as testifiers. These examples, along with research on the child's competence and reliability as a testifier, reveal widespread epistemic prejudice against children. Given that subjection to prejudice can have a detrimental impact on children we discuss ways to ameliorate this form of testimonial injustice. We argue that, both in formal and natural contexts, the child's testimony should be evaluated alongside the relationships that support her development as a testifier. The adult can play a central role in creating successful testimonial interactions with children by acting as a. (shrink)

Research seeking to explain the perpetration of violence and atrocities by humans against other humans offers both social and individualistic explanations, which differ namely in the roles attributed to empathy. Prominent social models suggest that some manifestations of inter-human violence are caused by parochial attitudes and obedience reinforced by within-group empathy. Individualistic explanations of violence, by contrast, posit that stable intra-individual characteristics of the brain and personality of some individuals lead them to commit violence and atrocities. An individualistic explanation argues (...) that the chief cause of violence is the perpetrator’'s lack of empathy with the victim. To offer the rudiments of a critique of the individualistic approach, I critically examine a model stating that violence is caused by empathy erosion. Specifically, the discussion of the empathy-erosion model is applied to the case of honour-based violence, a type of violence known for its communal character. Building from prior enquiries into violence and social cognition, I argue that an empathy-erosion explanation of HBV is defective because it does not consider important cultural and historical enablers of violence. Finally, as an alternative to individualism, I propose a psychohistorical approach to HBV in the migration context. This alternative combines psychological and philosophical enquiry with historical and ethnographical analysis. The psychohistorical approach hypothesises that distinct processes of cultural learning of honour codes both scaffold HBV and modulate the perpetrators’ emotions and empathy. (shrink)

My paper argues that Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology makes an important contribution to two central concerns of critical theory: the empirical analysis of the contradictions and conflicts of capitalist societies and the reflexive clarification of the epistemological and normative grounds of critique. I show how Boltanski’s assessment of the limitations of Bourdieu’s critical sociology significantly influenced his pragmatic sociology of critique and explication of the political philosophies present in actors’ practices of dispute and justification. Although pragmatism has revealed how social (...) life involves considerable uncertainty, Boltanski contends that critique needs to take into account how institutions generate semantic security, as well as symbolic violence. Boltanski’s endeavour to reformulate critique is compared with influential alternative conceptions, notably those of Habermas, Castoriadis, and Honneth. Despite its potential deficiencies and weaknesses, Boltanski’s reformulation of critique is found to be of considerable theoretical significance. In particular, Boltanski’s analysis of the role critique has played in the reorganization of capitalism can be extended, and his work is suggestive of how some of the intentions of critical theory can be pursued in new ways. (shrink)

Mutually adaptive interaction involves the robot as a partner as opposed to a tool, and requires that the robot is susceptible to similar environmental cues and behavior patterns as humans are. Recognition, or the acknowledgement of the other as individual, is fundamental to mutually adaptive interaction between humans. We discuss what recognition involves and its behavioral manifestations, and describe the benefits of implementing it in HRI.

Taking a psychological and philosophical outlook, we approach making as an embodied and embedded skill via the skilled artisan’s experience of having a corporeal, nonlinguistic dialogue with the material while working with it. We investigate the dynamic relation between maker and material through the lens of pottery as illustrated by wheel throwing, claiming that the experience of dialogue signals an emotional involvement with clay. The examination of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of habit, the skilled intentionality framework, and material engagement theory shows that (...) while these theories explain complementary aspects of skillful engagement with the material world, they do not consider the dialogic dimension. By way of explanation, we submit that the artisan’s emotional engagement with the material world is based in openness and recognition and involves dialogue with the material. Drawing on the intimate relationship between movement and emotion, it promotes an open-ended manner of working and permits experiencing with the material, acting into its inherent possibilities. In conclusion, we suggest that dialogue, whether verbal or nonverbal, constitutes a primary means for making sense of the world at large, animate and inanimate. (shrink)

J. M. Bernstein argues that to capture the depths of the harm of torture, we need to do away with the idea that we possess intrinsic and inviolable worth. If personhood is inviolable, then torture can inflict only apparent harm on our standing as persons. Bernstein claims that torture is a paradigm of moral injury because it causes what he calls “devastation”: The victim experiences an actual degradation of his or her personhood. Bernstein argues that our value is given to (...) us through mutual recognition and hence can be lost. In this paper, I argue that if our human value can be lost, then it first must be built up. If it must be built up, then the question of our status before the building begins must be answered. Bernstein faces a problem of human beings who fall outside relations of mutual recognition and hence are valueless. His best option for answering this problem is to point to the centrality of the body in his account of recognition, but doing so reveals a notion of intrinsic worth implicit in his account. I call for a revision of Bernstein's account that can hold on to devastation without eschewing intrinsic worth. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAxel Honneth’s theory of recognition has been criticised for presenting a deficient concept of work and the normative significance of work. In recent years Jean-Philippe Deranty, among others, has suggested that Honneth could overcome this deficiency by reintroducing into his mature theory the critical concept of work that first appeared in his 1977–1985 writings. My paper critically reconstructs and assesses Deranty’s position. I argue that Deranty has understated the extent to which his research direction diverges from Honneth’s. Rather than simply (...) nuancing Honneth’s existing philosophical system, Deranty’s work exposes some of its conceptual limits and points beyond it. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an account of the relationship between self-esteem and moral experience. In particular, drawing on feminist and phenomenological accounts of affectivity and ethics, I argue that self-esteem has a primary role in moral epistemology and moral action. I start by providing a characterization of self-esteem, suggesting in particular that it can be best understood through the phenomenological notion of “existential feeling.” Examining the dynamics characteristic of the so-called “impostor phenomenon” and the experience of women who are (...) involved in abusive relationships, I then claim that self-esteem fundamentally shapes the way in which self and others are conceived, and the ethical demands and obligations to which they are considered to be subjected. More specifically, I argue that low self-esteem—which in the experience of women may be rooted in particular assumptions regarding gender roles and stereotyping—can hinder autonomy, make it difficult to question other people's evaluative perspectives and behaviors, and attribute to others responsibility for their actions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Freedom’s Right, Axel Honneth articulates the social freedom of friendship with reference to its institutionalised norms. These action norms, however, are not specific to friendship; they apply to modern intimacy per se. Such non-specificity cannot adequately account for the experience of social freedom in friendship. Addressing this issue, I evaluate friendship as a form of recognition and identify a generative recognition deficit functional to its relational autonomy. Then, taking Honneth’s institutional approach to friendship as a point of departure, I (...) ascertain an institutional deficit that both sustains friendship’s autonomy and constrains the generalisability of its social freedom by way of institutional connectivity to heterosexuality. I suggest that only a differentiating approach to friendship that fathoms its extraordinary position among interpersonal relationships can yield new insights. That done, friendship can in turn provide a prism through which to assess the conceptual approach... (shrink)

I argue that Franz Fanon can usefully be situated in the tradition of German Idealism in the sense that he takes from Kant and especially Hegel the conception of agency as something to be achieved through struggle for the ideal of humanity as self-determining. Fanon sees the suffering cased by colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere as deriving from the systematic deprivation of agency by the colonial power. Using the work of Hegel, Fanon seeks to reconstruct the emancipatory project of (...) the black man in close analogy to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The violence which Fanon sees as unavoidable in such a struggle is not violence for the sake of violence but, following Hegel, the violence that constitutes the subject in the first place. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancière I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, in (...) other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. (shrink)

À peu près tout le monde a déjà fait l’expérience intuitive de l’authenticité, d’un moment qui semble révéler une lueur de sa véritable identité. Pourtant, en posant l’existence d’un «vrai moi», l’idée d’authenticité pose des défis métaphysiques qui mettent en lumière les complexités de l’individualité. J’avance que pour être bien examinée, l’authenticité exige une structure essentialiste qui tend à s’appliquer à l’identité personnelle. J’examine ensuite les trois types d’approches les plus influents dans les discussions philosophiques modernes contre cette position : (...) le romantisme et ses héritiers contemporains, l’existentialisme tardif et les conceptions de la vertu. Cette analyse met en doute la possibilité de générer une conception philosophique complète de l’authenticité. (shrink)

Abstract.The United Kingdom Department of Health initiative on “The Expert Patient” (2001) reflects recent trends in political philosophy, ethics and health services research. The overall objective of the initiative is to encourage patients, particularly those suffering from chronic conditions to become more actively involved in decisions concerning their treatment. In doing so there would be (perhaps) an expectation of better patient compliance and (arguably) a resultant improvement in quality of life. Despite these anticipated beneficial influences on health outcomes, there may (...) be a danger that such initiatives are being carried along by the general swell of enthusiasm for recognising and facilitating the claims of disadvantaged or discriminated against groups. What more attractive than that patients should be “liberated” from what might be seen as the oppression of medical paternalism? To a great extent the potential for success of the Expert Patient venture turns on:(a) whether and to what extent a patient can be considered truly to be an expert and (b) full acceptance by the medical and heath care professions of allowing patients a more equitable and positive role.Whilst clearly the patient is an expert in the hermeneutic sense – it is they and they alone who experience their illness – there is nevertheless a risk of confusing experience with expertise. Experience limited to an individual does not of itself give rise to the generalisations that underlie reliable clinical treatment. Neither do the vast majority of patients possess the physiological and pharmacological knowledge to fully appreciate the biological nature of their illness nor the basis, risks or limitations of therapeutic measures. Might the notion of “The Expert Patient” as informed co-decision maker become a well-meaning but rather vacuous aspiration similar to that of informed consent? Even worse, could patient “empowerment” have a deleterious effect? The paper reviews some of the major issues and concludes that the expert patient initiative could have benefits for both patients and health professionals if operated on the basis of concordance: an informed collaborative alliance that optimises the potential benefits of medical care. (shrink)

The concept of recognition has played a role in two debates. In political philosophy, it is part of a communitarian response to liberal theories of distributive justice. It describes what it means to respect others’ right to self-determination. In ethics, Stephen Darwall argues that it comprises our judgment that we owe others moral consideration. I present a competing account of recognition on the grounds that most accounts answer the question of why others deserve recognition without answering the question of what (...) is involved in recognizing them. This paper answers the latter. I argue that, in general, recognition is something that we do to others rather than something that we think about others. In particular, recognition is an intentional action to treat another individual as a legitimate, self-determining agent. I then show that recognition's realizability requires that agents understand their intentions as dependent on others for their satisfaction. Thus, relations of recognition are instances of collective intentionality. (shrink)

Recently, following the social and subjective consequences of the neoliberal wave, there seems to be a renewed interest in work as occupying a central place in social and subjective life. For the first time in decades, both sociologists and critical theorists once more again regard work as a major constituent of the subject’s identity and thus as an appropriate object of analysis for those engaged in critique of the social pathologies. The aim of this article is to present a succinct (...) analysis of Axel Honneth’s thoughts on the concept of work and to propose an approach granting it a more substantial role in social theory. To this end, this article will embark upon a reappraisal of the importance of the material and psychological dimensions of the subject’s interactions in the world of work. It aims to demonstrate that the normative demands associated with these dimensions are, like the normative demands of recognition, immanent and universal. In other words, it will argue that the normative ideals related to individuals’ bodily and psychic life (in the workplace and beyond) are not necessarily utopian in the negative sense (abstract and unrealistic). If this is indeed the case, theorists could take these normative demands for emancipation as a guide to analyzing the sociological, political and moral implications of the transition from the ‘Fordist’ to the ‘post-Fordist’ organization of labor. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the theoretical contributions of Axel Honneth, particularly in his works, The Struggle for Recognition and Reification, aiming at diving deep into the debate on the contemporary ideological expressions and their incidence in the process of subjective constitution in teenage years. This particular interest springs from the need to interweave the concepts of reification, forgetfulness and recognition within a fruitful theoretical field in order to interpret a project work called Hip-Hop: cultures and identities, developed with teenagers (...) in a public school in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. From our point of view, the concepts of reification and forgetfulness are fundamental to identify how the conservative ideological expressions are present in the imaginary of adolescents in the contemporary world. Although rereading the concepts of reification and forgetfulness, as proposed by the author, is regarded as essential for understanding the ideological expressions that are based on and guided by consumption. However, even though we acknowledge Honneth's efforts toward moving forward with the concept of reification, it is crucial to emphasize the mediation concept Lukács explored in his work, History and Class Consciousness, so as to elucidate how the forgetfulness of the primary recognition relations is processed. (shrink)

In this article, I locate the Critical Theoretic and Republican themes of misrecognition and domination in transnational democracy, viewed as an emancipatory project. Contrary to John Dryzek, I argue that transnational democracy requires an appropriate account of mutual recognition and personal integrity in order to ground the emancipatory dimension of this project, especially given Dryzek's analysis of transnational contests in forming personal identifications. Beyond this, I argue that the same themes are needed to supplement James Bohman's account of the normative (...) powers of dominated persons to initiate deliberation in circumstances of injustice. Primarily, my claim has been that the idea of personal integrity remains essential not only to motivating the project of transnational democracy, but also modifying the appeal to normative powers in the interest of enabling dominated persons to enter into communicative relationships and engage in public processes of critical self-examination. (shrink)

This present article takes an interest in the fairly new phenomena of social and emotional training programs in youth education. Prior research has shown that values and norms produced in these types of programs are supporting ethical systems that teachers may not always be aware of. This motivates the development of methods for analyzing these activities from an ethical point of view. An analysis model has been developed and piloted in the analyses of two different classroom activities. The model is (...) based on theories of communicative ethics and an ethics of dialogicity, drawing upon the work of Jürgen Habermas, Iris Marion Young, and Emmanuel Levinas. The analyses show that norms concerning whose perspective is prioritized and what ethical values are constituted in the classroom vary depending on how the program is organized and how the teacher chooses to use the program. The article also argues that the analytical model suggested might serve as a contribution to both teachers’ own professional,... (shrink)

Axel Honneth reconstructs Hegel’s social and political philosophy on the basis of the concept of recognition. For Honneth, recognition is a constitutive relation between individuals that is in principle symmetrical. By conceiving recognition through symmetry, Honneth effectively bans the inclusion of power within recognitive relation. He thus regards the relations of power as cases of non-recognition or misrecognition. In this paper, I develop an alternative theory of the constitutive relation between individuals for Hegel, one that is based on the asymmetrical (...) relation of power. To this aim, I focus on the chapter of “determinations of reflection” in the Science of Logic. Through a close analysis of Hegel’s Logic, I argue that the most fundamental form of relation between individuals is the relation of opposition, that individuals are solely constituted in and through the relation of opposition, and that the relation of opposition is essentially asymmetrical. Together, these claims establish... (shrink)

With reference to examples of violence during Apartheid, I argue that the socio-political contexts in which violence occurs significantly shape agents ideas about and responses to violence. As such, philosophers can only make sense of why perpetrators and bystanders alike may have judged violent acts morally justifiable or failed to challenge instances of violence against the backdrop of the particular characteristics of the socio-political context in which it occurs.

This article explores the promises of critical hermeneutics as an innovative method and philosophy within the human sciences. It is argued that its success depends on its ability to articulate a theory of meaning with one of action and experience as well as its capacity to renew our understanding of the problem of ideology. First, critical hermeneutics must explain how cultural messages ‘show and hide’; that is, how the ambiguity of meaning always allows for a group to represent itself while (...) opening the door for distortion and domination. Second, critical hermeneutics ought to show how action can be best understood as opposing performances driven by ideological-moral views. Through an analysis of social movements, for instance, it is shown that any attempt to do justice could also and easily create exclusion. Third, critical hermeneutics has to clarify how tension and dualism within meaning and action are not to be dissociated from the self-interpretation of concrete individuals. A theory of experience is thus required in order to explain why the autonomy of the subject is finally at stake with regard to the problem of ideology. (shrink)