Arto Laitinen

This paper discusses Rawls’s thesis that the social basis of self-respect is one of the primarysocial goods. While the central element of the social basis consists in the attitudes of others(e.g. respect or esteem) the social basis may include also possession of various goods. Further,one may distinguish, following Honneth, universalistic basic respect from differential esteem andfrom loving care. This paper focuses on esteem, and further distinguishes three importantvarieties thereof (anti-stigmatization; contributions to societal goods, projects of self-realization),which all differ from recognition of cultural identity. The normative implications will differ in these different contexts.

This paper is an introduction to the special issue on Pathologies of Recognition. The first subsection briefly introduces the notion of recognition and trace its development from Fichte and Hegel to Honneth and his critics, and the second subsection turns to the concept of a social pathology. The third section provides a brief look at the individual papers. The special issue focuses on two central concepts in contemporary critical social theory: namely ‘recognition’ and ‘social pathology’. For defenders of a theory of recognition, adequate recognition is itself a key normative criterion for analysing social wrongs and pathologies which fall short of the ideal. For critics, the focus on recognition – even at its best – rather conceals social wrongs. While the contributors in this collection represent slightly different approaches, the general consensus amongst them is that recognition as such is a good ideal but like all good ideals it can go wrong in various ways and take pathological forms itself. In this introduction we focus first briefly on the concepts of recognition and social pathology, and finally present the papers of this special issue.

This essay discusses Hegel’s theory of “abstract” respect for “abstract” personhood and its relation to the fuller, concrete account of human personhood. Hegel defines (abstract) personhood as an abstract, formal category with the help of his account of free will. For Hegel, personhood is defined in terms of powers, relations to self and to others. After analyzing what according to the first part of Philosophy of Right it is to (abstractly) respect someone as a person, the essay discusses the implications for private property and market. Then the paper turns to discuss pathologies of ideologies that stress these aspects only. Finally, the essay discusses the way inwhich Hegel’s full social theory aims to overcome such pathological tendencies; most notably in his theory of Family and the State.

This volume focuses on Hegel's philosophy of action in connection to current concerns. Including key papers by Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John McDowell, as well as eleven especially commissioned contributions by leading scholars in the field, it aims to readdress the dialogue between Hegel and contemporary philosophy of action. Topics include: the nature of action, reasons and causes; explanation and justification of action; social and narrative aspects of agency; the inner and the outer; the relation between intention, planning, and purposeful behaviour; freedom and responsibility; and self-actualisation. This book will appeal alike to Hegel scholars and philosophers of action. List of Contributors: Katerina Deligiorgi, Stephen Houlgate, Dudley Knowles, Arto Laitinen, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Mcdowell, Francesca Menegoni, Dean Moyar, Terry Pinkard, Robert B. Pippin, Michael Quante, Constantine Sandis, Hans-Christoph Schmidt Am Busch, Allen Speight, Charles Taylor, Allen W. Wood

In this chapter I discuss Charles Taylor's and Paul Ricoeur's theories of narrative identity and narratives as a central form of self-interpretation. Both Taylor and Ricoeur think that self-identity is a matter of culturally and socially mediated self-definitions, which are practically relevant for one's orientation in life. First, I will go through various characterisations that Ricoeur gives of his theory, and try to show to what extent they also apply to Taylor's theory. Then, I will analyse more closely Charles Taylor's, and in section three, Paul Ricoeur's views on narrative identity.

This essay defends a three-dimensional response-model theory of recognition of persons, and discusses the related phenomenon of recognition of reasons, values and principles. The theory is three-dimensional in endorsing recognition of the equality of persons and two kinds of relevant differences: merits and special relationships. It defends a ‘response-model’ which holds that adequacy of recognition of persons is a matter of adequate responsiveness to situation-specific reasons and requirements. This three-dimen- sional response-model is compared to Peter Jones’s view, which draws the distinction between status and merit recognition, and mediated and unmediated recognition. The essay discusses a number of questions related to how recognition of situation-specific reasons, and more general values and principles, is related to recognition of persons. The three- dimensional response-model of recognition of persons is in principle compatible with a constructivist view, which holds that the validity of values and principles is dependent on acknowledgement or endorsement. But even if one is a realist on that issue and thinks of validity as independent of acknowledgement, acknowledging relevant values, reasons and principles is a hugely important precondition of actual interpersonal recognition. The essay analyses these connections.

Maeve Cooke’s new book is about the nature and prospects of critical social theory in the broad sense of “any mode of ethically oriented reflection that looks critically at social arrangements from the point of view of the obstacles they pose for individual human flourishing, or that reflects on what it means to do so”. The book succeeds in its aims admirably. There are good reasons to agree with Cooke’s central arguments (contra Rorty et al.) that moral validity is context-transcending, and (contra Habermas) that moral validity is not reducible to consensus in justifi catory argumentation. I also fi nd her pragmatic views on the relation between theory and praxis quite sensible (she is opposed to grand explanatory theories), and the idea to approach the topic of utopias with the distinction between transcendent objects and fallible representations does not seem unreasonable. Centrally, her stress on the anti-authoritarian nature of openended, public justifications, and a view of personal autonomy that goes with it, are well grounded. Where I find myself hesitant to follow Cooke is the postulation of a “transcendent ethical object”. My central worry is: should not critical theorists focus on the normatively relevant (desirable and undesirable) characteristics of societies as they are, or could be, or should be, and not worry about any transcendent objects beyond our grasp?

A satisfactory theory of “strong evaluation” should manage to do two things: first of all, make sense of the distinction between impersonal ethical issues and personal orientation. Secondly, the deontic layer of reasons and norms should be taken into account, among other things because the central indicators of strong evaluation, namely praise and blame, presuppose norms and reasons as standards of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. These two desiderata seem to pull in different directions. The suggested analysis of the deontic layer in terms of external, value-based reasons for action may make it seem even more difficult to allow for reasons of one’s own. I argue that there can be reasons of one’s own, depending on one’s orientations, commitments and the actual shape of one’s affective-conative responses. First I discuss the general reasons that decisions and commitments create, and general (stance-insensitive) reasons for making a commitment to X. These suffice as a reply to MacIntyre’s worry (9.2). Yet the picture can be developed further. Drawing on the idea of exclusionary reasons (introduced in 9.1), I discuss the general reasons for having an orientation of one’s own and the difference between an orientation to the good and a commitment to a good. The difference is the role they have as reasons for action. Commitments play a stronger role in practical reasoning because they are exclusionary reasons (9.3). Then I turn to non-uniformity and stance-sensitivity of reasons, and ask whether different people have stance-sensitive reasons to make different commitments (9.4). In the last section I analyze more closely the nature of personal resonance and the difference it may make (9.5).

Misrecognition from other individuals and social institutions is by its dynamic or ‘logic’ such that it can lead to distorted relations-to-self, such as self-hatred, and can truncate the development of the central capabilities of persons. Thus it is worth trying to shed light on how mis recognition differs from adequate recognition, and on how mis recognition might differ from other kinds of mistreatment and disregard. This paper suggests that mis recognition (including nonrecognition) is a matter of inadequate responsiveness to the normatively relevant features of someone (their personhood, merits, needs etc.), and that if the kind of mistreatment in question obeys the general dynamic or ‘logic’ of mutual recognition and relations-to-self, then it may be called ‘misrecognition’. Further, this article considers the multiple connections between misrecognition and human fallibility. The capacity to get things wrong or make mistakes (that is, fallibility) is first of all a condition of misrecognition. Furthermore, there are two lessons that we can draw from fallibility. The first one points towards minimal objectivism: if something is to count as a mistake or incorrect response, there must accordingly exist a fact of the matter or a correct response. The other lesson points towards public equality: if our capacity to get things right on our own is limited, then public, shared norms will probably help. Such norms are easier to know and follow than objective normative truths, and they may contain collective cumulative wisdom; and of course the process of creating public norms embodies in itself an important form of mutual recognition between citizens.

In this chapter I argue that value realism or moral realism does not, pace Charles Taylor, need “moral sources” or “constitutive goods”, and that adding these concepts distorts the basic insights of engaged value realism. In section 7.1 I reconstruct the central points of Taylor’s theory of the first layer of such moral space, consisting of ordinary goods and values embodied in objects and situations, as experienced by valuers. In section 7.2, I discuss the notion of “ontological background pictures” implicit in the value-experiences. I defend Taylor’s suggestion that articulating such ontological features sheds light on our moral reactions. I hope to show that Taylor’s engaged value realism can stand on these notions alone, and that there is no further step that we need to take in asking about the constitution of goods. The trick is to drive a wedge between the concepts of ontological background pictures and constitutive goods. If one manages to do that, one does not really have to argue much more, one can almost observe the credibility of constitutive goods vanish into thin air. In section 7.3, I discuss Taylor’s second level notions of “constitutive goods”, “moral sources” and “manifestation”. I hope to show that such notions are not only superfluous but also harmful for the engaged value realism that the first-level notions support. The most pernicious effect that follows from postulating such “second-level” entities is that it makes it seem possible to question moral realism simply by questioning the point, or existence, of “constitutive goods”. I suggest abandoning these notions altogether. In section 7.4 I outline a theory without them, an engaged value realism which sees the evaluative and normative realms as sui generis. In section 7.5, I take a look at how such a sui generis moral realism is related to a more Kantian understanding of “subjectivity as a source” (Korsgaard, Habermas, Pippin) or to the idea that some individual norms, decisions and promises have sources (Raz). In section 7.6, I study five other roles that the notion of constitutive goods has in Taylor’s theory, apart from allegedly “constituting” the goods. These roles are related to motivation, modernity, the ontology of humans, and theism. I try to show that alternative understandings of these are available, if we drop the notion of constitutive goods.

After characterizing Taylor’s general approach to the problems of solidarity, we distinguish and reconstruct three contexts of solidarity in which this approach is developed: the civic, the socio-economic, and the moral. We argue that Taylor’s distinctive move in each of these contexts of solidarity is to claim that the relationship at stake poses normatively justified demands, which are motivationally demanding, but insufficiently motivating on their own. On Taylor’s conception, we need some understanding of extra motivational sources which explain why people do (or would) live up to the exacting demands. Taylor accepts that our self-understanding as members of either particular communities or humanity at large has some motivational power, but he suspects that in many cases the memberships are too thin to resonate deeply and enduringly within us. In Taylor’s view, a realistic picture of what moves people to solidarity has to account for the extra motivation, when it happens. We propose an alternative view in which morality, democracy and socio-economic cooperation can be seen as separate spheres or relations which are normatively justified, motivationally demanding, but also sufficiently motivating on their own

This paper approaches questions of collective intentionality by drawing inspiration from theories of recognition (e.g. Honneth 1995, Ricoeur 2005, Brandom 2007). After some remarks about recognition and groups, the paper examines whether the kind of dependence on recognition that holds of individual agents is equally true of group agents. In the debates on collective intentionality it is often stressed that the identity, existence, ethos, and membership-issues of the group are up to the group to decide (e.g. Tuomela 2007). The members collectively accept (recognize) status functions, goals and beliefs for the group. This paper asks whether this thesis of "forgroupness" should be re-evaluated: could the status functions, goals and beliefs be in some significant sense "for others" as well? Can the group be dependent on others’ takes?