worth 30%
Required Book: Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Debate
Respond to one of the prompts below with a paper of 7 to 10 pages, double-spaced. The claims made in your paper should be supported through careful engagement with the text. I welcome you to contact me if you have any questions.
Paper Topic:
Nancy Fraser discusses how the most prominent approaches to injustices in society has been either through the lens of a “politics of recognition” or a “politics of redistribution.” She promotes a “two-dimensional” approach in which neither redistribution or recognition becomes the sole model for evaluating and responding to social injustice. Ultimately, she calls for “participatory parity” and “democratic justice” to address the concerns of social problems that emerge from her “two-dimensional” approach. In your paper, consider a specific instance of social injustice and show how it can be understood in through the lens of the politics of redistribution and recognition, then evaluate Fraser’s two-dimensional approach that calls for participatory parity and democratic justice. In your evaluation, you should be show how these approaches would apply to the specific issue that you have chosen to address, providing an analysis of the best way to understanding the issue at hand.
Nancy Fraser “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics”
Class notes
Distributive claims – seek a more just distribution of resources and wealth (North to South, Rich to poor)
“Politics of Recognition” A difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norm is no longer the price of equal respect.
8: the widespread decoupling of the politics of difference from the politics of equality.
9: These, I maintain, are false antitheses. It is my general thesis that justice today requires both redistribution and recognition.
Theoretically, the task is to devise a two dimensional conception of justice that can accommodate both defensible claims for equality and defensible claims for the recognition of difference.
10:
“Redistribution” (Dworkin, Rawls) Seeking to synthesize the traditional liberal emphasis on individual liberty with the egalitarianism of social democracy, they propounded new conceptions of justice that could justify socio-economic redistribution.
The term “recognition,” in contrast, comes from Hegelian philosophy, specifically the phenomenology of consciousness.
In this tradition, recognition designates an ideal reciprocal relation between subjects in which each sees the other as its equal and also as separate from it.
This relation is deemed constitutive for subjectivity.
Unlike redistribution, moreover, recognition is usually seen as belonging to “ethics” as opposed to “morality,” that is, as promoting substantive ends of self-realization and the good elaborated by existentialist thinkers at mid-century…Taylor Honneth
Redistribution – usually related to class politics
Recognition – often related to “identity politics”
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Two paradigms of justice
Recognition- affirmation of group specificity
The redistribution paradigm focuses on injustices it defines as socio-economic and presumes to be rooted in the economic structure of society.
1st: The two paradigms assume different conceptions of injustice.
2nd: Each propose different remedies for injustice.
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3rd: the two folk paradigms assume different conceptions of the collectivities that suffer injustice.
Weberian status groups contra Marxian classes
Redistribution—seeks to abolish not recognize group differences.
- Exploited classes, despised sexualities, and two-dimensional categories.
16-19: Thought experiment: ideal recognition or redistribution models (gender/ class)
19: Matters become murkier, however, once we move away from these extremes. When we posit a type of social division located in the middle of the conceptual spectrum we encounter a hybrid form that combines features à two dimensional
19-22: Gender two dimensionality
22-26: Two dimensionality exception or norm
Considers Race Gender Sexuality
Perhaps list on board.
Integrating Redistribution and Recognition: Problems in Moral Philosophy
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In practical politics, finally, the task is to foster democratic engagement across current divides in order to build a broad-based programmatic orientation that integrates the best of the politics of redistribution with the best of the politics of recognition.
Considering redistribution and recognition as normative philosophical categories.
- Justice or Self-realization?
In [moral philosophy], questions of justice are usually understood to be matters of “the right,” which belong squarely on the terrain of “morality.” Questions of self-realization, in contrast, are considered to be matters of “the good,” which belong rather to the domain of “ethics.” In part this is a matter of scope. Norms of justice are universally binding; like principles of Kantian Moralitat, they hold independently of actors’ commitment to specific values. Claims about self-realization, on the other hand, are usually considered to be more restricted. Like canons of Hegelian Sittlichkeit, they depend on the culturally and historically specific horizons of value, which cannot be universalized. Thus, a great deal turns on whether claims for recognition are held to concern justice or self-realization.
Unlike Taylor and Honneth, I propose to conceive recognition as a matter of justice.
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One should say..”that it is unjust that some individuals and groups are denied the status of full partners in social interaction simply as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value in whose construction they have not equally participated and which disparage their distinctive characteristics or the distinctive characteristics assigned to them.
I shall call this the status model of recognition. On the status model, misrecognition is neither a psychical deformation nor an impediment to ethical self-realization. Rather, it constitutes an institutionalized relation of subordination and a violation of justice.
Misrecognition- institutionalized patterns of cultural value.
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They aim, that is, to deinstitutionalize patterns of cultural value that impede parity of participation and to replace them with patterns that foster it.
- Status subordination or impaired subjectivity?
Advantages of “status model”
- First, the status model permits one to justify claims for recognition as morally binding under modern conditions of value pluralism. Under these conditions, there is no single conception of self-realization or the good life that is universally shared, nor any that can be established as authoritative.
- Conceiving misrecognition as status subordination, it locates the wrong in social relations, not in individual or interpersonal psychology. à no need to police beliefs
One can show that a society whose institutionalized norms impede parity of participation is morally indefensible whether or not they distort the subjectivity of the oppressed.
- The status model avoids the view that everyone has an equal right to social esteem. ß view untenable. Does entail that everyone has the right to pursue social esteem under fair conditions of equal opportunity.
- *** By construing misrecognition as a violation of justice, it facilitates the integration of claims for recognition with claims for the redistribution of resources and wealth. Here, in other words, recognition is assigned to the universally binding domain of deontological morality, as distributive justice.
redistribution – Kantian Moralitat
Recognition – Hegelian Sittlichkeit
- Against reductionism: A two dimensional conception of justice
35: in general, then neither distribution theorists nor recognition theorists have so far succeeded in adequately subsuming the concerns of the other.
A two-dimensional conception treats distribution and recognition as distinct perspectives on, and dimensions of, justice.
36: The normative core of my conception is the notion of parity of participation. According to this norm, justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers.
Conditions of participatory parity:
- The distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participants independence and “voice.” This I shall call the “objective condition” of participatory parity.
- Requires that institutionalized patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem. This I shal call the “intersubjective condition” of participatory parity.
Both conditions together bring participatory parity within the purview of a single integrated normative framework.
4 Justifying Claims for Recognition
Participatory parity as the evaluative standard of claims for recognition
Redistribution claimants must show that existing economic arrangements deny them the necessary objective conditions for participatory parity.
Recognition claimants must show that the institutionalized patterns of cultural value deny them the necessary intersubjective conditions.
In both cases, therefore, participatory parity is the standard for warranting claims.
39: Considers gay marriage
42: sides with multiculturalist argument in Foulard incident
In general, then, the status model sets a stringent standard for warranting claims. Yet it remains wholly deontolotical. Unlike the self-realization model, it can justify claims for recognition under modern conditions of modern pluralism.
5 Decision Theory or Democratic Deliberation?
43: The norm of participatory parity must be applied dialogically and discursively, through democratic processes of public debate.
It represents the principle idiom of public reason, the preferred language for conducting democratic political argumentation on issues of both distribution and recognition.
This dialogical approach contrasts favorably, once again with alternative models of recognition. It precludes the populist view, held by some proponents of identity politics, that misrecognized subjects alone should determine whether and how they are adequately recognized, hence that those whose self esteem is at risk should have the final say as to what is required to secure it.
Involves a meta-level consideration of deliberation
Share of discourse ethics and democratic pragmatism
Recap:
- Recognition should be treated as a matter of justice, not self-realization.
- Theorists of justice should reject the idea of an eithr/or choice between the distributive paradigm and the recognition paradigm; instead, they should adopt a two-dimensional conception of justice premised on the norm of participatory parity.
- To justify their claims, recognition claimants must show in public processes of democratic deliberation that institutionalized patterns of cultural value unjustly deny them the intersubjective conditions of participatory parity and that replacing those patterns with alternative ones would represent a step in the direction of parity.
- Justice could in principle require recognizing distinctiveness, over and above our common humanity.
III. Social Theoretical Issues: On Class and Status in Capitalist Society
Must account both for the differentiation of class from status and for the causal interactions between them. It must accommodate, as well, both the mutual irreducibility of maldistribution and misrecognition and their practical entwinement with each other.
In contrast to traditional sociology – status represents an order of intersubjective subordination derived from institutionalized patterns of cultural value that constitute some members of society as less than full partners in interation.
Unlike Marxist theory, likewise, I do not conceive class as a relation to the means of production. In my conception, rather, class is an order of objective subordinaton derived from economic arrangements that deny some actors the means and resources they need for participatory parity.
50-54 Beyond culturalism and economism
56: the most basic principle of legitimacy in this society is liberal equality, as expressed both in market ideals, such as equal exchange, the career open to talents, and meritocratic competition, and in democratic ideals, such as equal citizenship ans status equality. Status hierarchy violates all these ideals.
In this model, social actors participate actively.in a dynamic regime of ongoing struggles for recognition.
Status recognition – undergoes qualitative transformation
- Argument for perspectival dualism
“poststructuralist anti-dualism” Butler, Marion Young – Claim that culture and economy are so deeply interconnected, so mutually constitutive, that they cannot meaningfully be distinguished at all.
“substantive dualism” treats redistribution and recognition as two different “spheres of justice” pertaining to two different societal domains.
Proposes “perspectival dualism” redistribution and recognition do not correspond to two substantive societal domains, economy and culture. Rather, they constitute two analytical perspectives that can be assumed with respect to any domain. These perspectives can be deployed critically, against the ideological domain.
- Countering unintended effects
No redistribution without recognition and vice versa– example “welfare mothers”
- Status injustices can be just as material as class injustices – gay bashing gang rape genocide
Historicize rather than ontologize distinctions
- Conceptual openness of this account.
- Decoupling of redistribution and recognition built into the structure of modern capitalist society.
- Political- Theoretical Issues: Institutionalizing Democratic Justice
What institutional arrangements can ensure both the objective and intersubjective conditions for participatory parity?
Philosopher king—largely insensitive to issues of context
Quest for democratic legitimacy is acquiring new urgency.
In this context, monodological approaches are counterproductive, while proceduralist alternatives gain plausibility. The latter, however, are vulnerable to a serious objection: precisely because of their democratic commitments, such approaches devolve easily into empty formalism.
72: seeking to avoid both the the Scylla of monologism and Charybdis of proceduralism, I shall adopt a modified version of democratic justice.
Goal: remedy impediments to participatory parity
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Affirmative strategies.. aim to correct inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying social structures that generate them.
Drawbacks:
Tend to reify collective identities
When applied to maldistribution, they often provoke a backlash of misrecognition.
Transformative strategies… aim to correct unjust outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework
Applied to maldistribution, transformative approaches are solidaristic
More preferable in principle, but more difficult to effect in practice.
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Hobson’s choice—They point to the possibility of a via media between an affirmative strategy that is politically feasible but substantively flawed and a transformative one that is programmatically sound but politically impractical.
What defines this alternative strategy is its reliance on “nonreformist reforms.” These would be policies with a double face: on the other hand, they engage people’s identities and satisfy some of their needs as interpreted within existing frameworks of recognition and distribution; on the other hand, they engage peoples identities and satisfy some of their needs as interpreted within existing frameworks of recognition and distribution; on the other hand, they set in motion a trajectory of change in which more radical reforms become practicable over time.
Reform may not be possible in an individual country. Start at 83..
