Recognition as an Orientation: Moral and Intellectual Implications

Abstract

As social and interdependent beings, we have a minimalist expectation that we do not harm one another. Consistent with this expectation, we have some responsibilities to others for the sake of regulating our social and interdependent relationships. One of our most important responsibilities is to recognize people appropriately. In the dissertation, I develop an account of recognition and motivate it as an important normative/moral phenomenon with implications for our intellectual lives. Recognition is normative because when we recognize people, we orient ourselves to certain normatively significant properties they have, such as needs, rights, traits, abilities, achievements, and the like. Its moral importance stems from the fact that recognizing others’ evaluative qualities gives us reason(s) to behave in a specific way required for forming and sustaining our social relationships on which our individual and collective flourishing depend. Defining recognition as an appropriate orientation to others’ evaluative qualities required for our individual and collective flourishing, I argue, like Axel Honneth, that there are at least three types or ways of recognition: loving care, respect, and esteem. I also demonstrate that since social and cultural forces shape our interpersonal relations and responses, we should not think of the phenomenon of recognition as unaffected by them. Having explicated my generalized account of recognition, I illustrate that this account could be used to comprehend a crucial virtue of our epistemic life. I call this virtue intellectual recognition, which is a disposition to appropriately orient oneself to others’ evaluative qualities in the pursuit of intellectual goods at the right times, in the right ways, and about the right objects, overcoming or compensating for structural obstacles to parity of epistemic participation.