Abstract
The distinction between agents and recipients of justice1 that I have been using allows for discriminating, within the debate of distributive justice, between conceptions or approaches that can contribute to the development of critical social justice. I believe that agent-oriented approaches can provide some substantive elements of a conception of justice, one of the most important being a metric of justice. To do so, it is necessary to identify whether these approaches include some of the distinctive features of reciprocal recognition autonomy. Being relational and highly sensitive to vulnerability are the two features that make the theoretical connection possible between critical social justice and some of the approaches I will assess. In no case is reciprocal recognition autonomy explicitly assumed, but it is possible to reconstruct the importance of vulnerability and the relational contexts in those conceptions of justice. In this process, I will be able to identify an adequate metric of justice to ensure reciprocal recognition autonomy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See R. Arneson (1989), ‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophical Studies, 56 (1), 77–93; (1990), ‘Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19 (2), 158–194; Dworkin, ‘What Is Equality? Part II: Equality of Resources’; Daniels, ‘Equality of What: Welfare, Resources, or Capabilities’; Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’; Sen, Inequality Reexamined; Rawls, ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods’; Roemer, ‘Equality of Resources Implies Equality of Welfare’; Brighouse and Robeyns, Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities.
See R. Dworkin (2000), ‘What Is Equality? Part I: Equality of Welfare’, in Sovereign Virtue, pp. 11–64; A. Sen (1985), ‘Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984’, Journal of Philosophy, 82 (4), 169–221;
T. M. Scanlon (1991), ‘The Moral Basis of Interpersonal Comparisons’, in J. Elster and J. E. Roemer (eds), Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
See R. Nozick (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell).
In Rawls the possibility of revising a plan of life is a characteristic of a moral person; my position that this is a weak evaluation cannot be sustained by what Rawls explicitly supports, but by the consequences that his position entails. See G. Pereira (2007), ¿Condenados a la desigualdad extrema? (México: CESPVLP), chapter II.2.
I have presented this difficulty as a criticism of Korsgaard’s idea of practical identity; adaptive preferences are a paradigmatic example. See J. Elster (1983), Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme);
M. Nussbaum (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press).
See R. Dworkin (2000), ‘Equality and Capability’, in Sovereign Virtue, pp. 285–303, 293.
See K. Arrow (1973), ‘Some Ordinalist-Utilitarian Notes on Rawls’s Theory of Justice’, Journal of Philosophy, 70 (9), 245–263;
A. Sen (1980), ‘Equality of What?’ in S. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Moral Philosophy, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 195–220; Sen, ‘Well-Being, Agency and Freedom’.
See, Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 83ff.; (2000), ‘Justice and the High Cost of Health’, in Sovereign Virtue, pp. 307–319, 315–318.
See J. Rawls (1988), ‘The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 17 (4), 251–276; Dworkin, ‘Equality and Capability’, p. 302.
See A. Sen (1990), ‘Justice: Means versus Freedoms’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 19 (2), 111–121, 117–120, Inequality Reexamined, pp. 95–98.
The interpretation of the capability approach in intersubjectivist terms can be seen in J. Bohman (1997), ‘Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources and Opportunities’, in J. Bohman and W. Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 321–348;
M. Longshore Smith and C. Seward (2009), ‘The Relational Ontology of Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach: Incorporating Social and Individual Causes’, Journal of Human Development, 10 (2), 213–235;
S. Deneulin (2008), ‘Beyond Individual Freedom and Agency: Structures of Living Together in Sen’s Capability Approach to Development’, in S. Alkire, F. Comim and M. Qizilbash (eds), The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Application (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 105–124; Pereira, ‘Intersubjectivity and Evaluations of Justice’.
See A. Sen (2002), Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press), p. 245; (2006), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton), chapter 2.
See A. Sen (1999), Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf), p. 36.
See A. Sen (2009), The Idea of Justice (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), p. 261.
See T. Pogge (2002), ‘Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?’, Philosophical Topics, 30 (3), 167–228.
See among others R. Arneson (2010), ‘Two Cheers for the Capabilities’, in Brighouse and Robeyns (eds), Measuring Justice, pp. 101–123,
T. Pogge (2010), ‘A Critique of the Capability Approach’, in Brighouse and Robeyns (eds), Measuring Justice, pp. 17–60,
G. A. Cohen (1993), ‘Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities’, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds), The Quality of Life, (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 9–29.
E. Anderson (2010), ‘Justifying the Capability Approach to Justice’, in Brighouse and Robeyns (eds), Measuring Justice, pp. 81–100, 83–84.
See M. Nussbaum (2001), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 207–208.
See G. H. Mead (1934), Mind, Self & Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 152–158.
Rawls’s social bases of self-respect are not conceived as an attitude to oneself; that is, in the way I am concerned with. See Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 60. However, it is to be expected that guaranteeing the social bases of self-respect ends up improving one’s self-respect. Rawls’s remarks in A Theory of Justice about self-respect lead one to conclude that his conception of self-respect is closer to Darwall’s ‘appraisal self-respect’ than to Darwall’s ‘recognition self-respect’. Following Darwall’s arguments it is possible to affirm that a conception of recognition respect should acknowledge a certain interrelation with appraisal respect, because if any person is to preserve self-respect for the recognition of her general moral powers, a certain degree of appraisal respect must be present. See S. Darwall (1977), ‘Two Kinds of Respect’, Ethics, 88 (1), 36–49, 47–48;
G. Doppelt (2009), ‘The Place of Self-Respect in a Theory of Justice’, Inquiry, 52 (2), 127–154, 134–135. Therefore, I believe that Rawls’s conception of self-respect, though closer to appraisal self-respect and in some parts mistaking self-respect for self-esteem, assumes the recognition respect on which the condition of equal citizens lies.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Gustavo Pereira
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pereira, G. (2013). Conceptions of Justice and Reciprocal Recognition Autonomy. In: Elements of a Critical Theory of Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263384_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263384_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44255-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26338-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)