About “Recognition”
Dr. Giles’s preferred ethical construct (here in Medium)
For people unfamiliar with that ethical construct, the linked article might be a particularly helpful introduction because it is about the issues that are involved in the application of ‘recognition’ to relations among human beings. Encountering any new idea within a practical context can make it easier to understand than a purely abstract presentation of it might be.
I am not against recognition as an ethical construct. I do think, however, that it is a fine example of a typical academic exercise: finding a new way to express an old idea. More than forty years later, I still remember in a graduate class in education encountering the term “obliterative subsumption” in the latest explanation of how learning proceeds on the part of someone earning a Ph.D. in that discipline. It means ‘to forget’.
I can’t see any substantive difference between ‘recognition’ and ‘respect’. John Locke was writing about a form of mutual respect in 1689: people being required to respect one another’s “person and property” (easily expanded to ‘interests’). In the late 1700’s Immanuel Kant had a version of mutual respect in his ethics and so did G.W.F. Hegel. In all cases there is a requirement for each person to ‘respect’ all others, so ethical relations involve each person involved respecting all the other people involved in any relations among them: mutual respect. For that matter, the ‘Golden Rule’ is a version of an ethic ending in mutual respect.
To be clear, I do agree that mutual respect, expressed most generally as people taking one another into account as we live our separate lives together in this world, is what justice is. What is needed is an account of a requirement to respect others that is not itself arbitrary. As Locke famously, well, recognized, arbitrariness in human relations is injustice.
The above discussion tells us that ‘justice’ is universal ethical relations. It follows that justly governing relations among people in the context of a society, where people are thrust into relations of various kinds whether they like it or not — including the political process and the economy or just living next to one another — must have as its starting point an ethic that is itself undeniably universal. Otherwise, it is a matter of some imposing their arbitrary ideas about justice on others. So an approach to governing the governance of society (essentially another way of expressing the place of “authority” in Giles’s essay) that has as its starting point an arbitrary assertion of some ‘truth’ that can only be a purely personal conviction — be it the supremacy of any particular group or the moral equality of all people — cannot be ‘just’.
What all of those thinkers — and others — have tried and failed to do is to demonstrate successfully why respecting others is an undeniable ‘ought’, as David Hume would call it. It has always come down to arbitrarily privileging an arbitrary assertion that human beings are somehow ‘morally equal’. Locke got it from the Bible. Kant located it in the “noumenal realm,” in the given “autonomy” of all humans’ wills there. For Hegel it followed from the self-ownership of beings with wills (i.e., humans) in the given ontological context of human being (within the dialectical development of the “Totality”).
That ‘recognition’ follows in that tradition is revealed in a quote from Barbara Perry that Giles uses to buttress the case for it. According to Giles, the “white supremacist movement,” which is the antithesis of recognition, “reflects mainstream racist and gendered views that she calls asking ‘all Others to conform to an artificial set of norms and expectations’.”
Giles does not question or examine or even remark upon the inclusion of “artificial” there. To my mind, though, the whole argument rests upon it. Perry asserts that to believe in the supremacy of ‘white’ people is “artificial.” That implies that to believe in the moral equality of all people is . . . what? ‘Artificial’ can mean ‘not real’. It can mean ‘created by human effort’, as opposed to existing ‘in nature’. Both of those can be applied to a belief in ‘white’ — or any other inherent or intrinsic — supremacy. The problem is that they can be applied just as well to a belief in the moral equality of all human beings.
That refence to “‘in nature’” gets us on the right track. I have developed an ethic of justice that follows from an observation within the ‘real world’ — material existence. It therefore is not “artificial.” It is a form of mutual respect, but it is not an arbitrary assertion of some purely personal conviction. (Is ‘arbitrary’ what Perry was getting at with “artificial?”) Rather, it follows from information that is known to all human beings and is known by all human beings to be available to all human beings. In it all that matters is that the beings involved are humans: ‘equality’ is irrelevant.
For any person to assert the validity of any personal conviction or to accept or reject as valid any personal conviction of any other person will always be an arbitrary act from the point of view of any other person. It is all symmetrical, though: all such acts are equally arbitrary.
To accept as knowledge information gleaned from common experience of material existence is not arbitrary. To refuse to accept as knowledge information that is commonly known to follow from our common experience of that existence as human beings is an arbitrary act — an asymmetrical, one-sided, one-way-only arbitrary act. By obviating arbitrariness in its origin, this ethic makes denying the applicability of the ethic — its obligations or its protections — to any human being, to include oneself, an asymmetrically arbitrary act.
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if curious, the governance of governance through this ethic is related in “Alright, Already” (here in Medium, but not behind the paywall)
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A generalized rejoinder to Dr. Giles’s comments [3/11/24]
Giles gives a (pre)determined defense of recognition. His first sentence in the topmost Reply relates as much: “No need to question what is given.”
As Giles has made clear in other places, he accepts the validity of the major themes of Postmodernism. One of those themes is that there is no such thing as a “given” that is at all intersubjective: we can all have ‘givens’ that we recognize, but no given of any person has any necessary relevance for any other person. Everyone is free to decide for oneself what will count as such.
Beyond that, like all people with beliefs tend to do, Giles simply refuses to consider that an oppositional belief is — can be — sincere. ‘White supremists’ don’t — can’t — really believe in an inherent superiority/inferiority, but only espouse such a belief as a means to particular ends, such as (at its most benign) denying the full panoply of opportunities in society to non’white’ people in order to maximize opportunities for ‘white’ people. If we move from race to gender it is perhaps easier to recognize how sincere a belief in inherent hierarchies can be, particularly in certain religions.
Is it not the case that to take recognition seriously would be to recognize the equal validity for the believers of any alternative belief? After all, there is no way for human beings to evaluate the validity of any belief relative to any other. Beliefs are immaterial ‘things’ people ‘hold’ to be ‘true’ — ‘self-evident’: given.