Ricoeur, Rawls, and Capability Justice

Civic Phronesis and Equality

Molly Harkirat Mann

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781472534194
• eBook ISBN: 9781441177575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Contemporary capabilities-based approaches to social justice, inspired by the Aristotelian emphasis on human well-being, have tended to separate and even oppose identity-based or recognitive justice from resource-based or redistributive justice. This book demonstrates that such a divorce risks further polarizing capable members of the political community from disabled or vulnerable members. In order to prevent this danger of legitimizing the growing stratification between rich and poor, or between capability and vulnerability in modern neo-liberal societies, Molly Harkirat Mann turns to the work of Paul Ricoeur. In so doing she develops the argument that our historical and institutionalized practices of sharing, articulated by the lexicographical configuration of the Rawlisan principles of justice, represent a method for public deliberation or civic Phronesis, the ethical aim of which is the non-exclusion of our most vulnerable citizens from public institutions of care. By developing his political philosophy in relation to class politics in modern liberal societies, this book shows how Ricoeur's political thought is more closely aligned to that of John Rawls than has previously been acknowledged.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Ricoeur’s Theory of Capability Justice

We now encounter a form of passivity which I will call the self-actualization of everyone by everyone. By this I mean that we can only act through structures of interaction which are already there and which tend to unfold their own history that consists of inertias and innovations, which in turn themselves are sedimented in their turn. In other words, there can be no history of freedom or of freedoms without the mediation of a neuter or neutral term endowed with its own inertia; in short, if I may put it in these terms, a freedom in the third person which is actually the nonperson between persons (Ricoeur, 1978: 181).

Ricoeur’s “philosophical anthropology” revolves around the development and the preservation of the capable subject. The juridical-legal-political question “who is the subject of rights?”, Ricoeur argues, presupposes an anthropological question, namely, who is the subject capable of moral and ethical self-designation (Ricoeur, 1992: 2000)? That is, the question “who?” is a question of recognition. When we ask the anthropological question—the question of “who?”— the responses we yield are narratives of a capable subject. This configuration or narrative of the capable subject precedes and mediates the juridical question. The anthropological configuration of the capable subject, on the other hand, is only completed on the institutional plane of a political community. It is this two-fold movement between the political-institutional configuration of the subject of rights and the philosophical anthropology of the subject capable of self-recognition as the author of her speech, action, narrative, and thus capable of ethical and moral responsibilities that conjoin these capabilities of speech, action, and narrative to their author that constitutes Ricoeur’s vision of liberal democratic politics.

Recognizing the subject of rights, then, implies the recognition of the capable subject. We recognize the capable subject by asking “who?”. In answering the question “who?” the subject reflexively recognizes himself or herself as the capable agent. Four distinct capabilities can be identified in the course of recognition that is initiated when we ask “who?”. The first, most primary capability is expressed in response to the question “who is speaking?” The subject must be capable of recognizing herself as the author, as the “focal point” of her many and diverse speech acts. The second recognitive question comes in the form “who is the author of an action?” The attribution of an action to author is often a difficult task, as attested to by the search for responsibility where the responsible agent will be required to compensate in some way the patient(s) of his action, and in the search for responsibility in historical conflicts. And yet, the importance of being able to recognize the author of an action cannot be emphasized enough in the designation of the subject of rights and duties. The third stage in the course of recognition underscores the configurative status of recognition. Questions about the authors of speech and of action lead us directly into the question of narrative identity, insofar as speech and action have a temporal quality, which is expressed in the narrative structure. Narrative identity is important too because it specifies what kind of recognition or identity we are seeking. We do not recognize persons or collectivities in the same way that we recognize unchanging structures, such as the genetic coding constitutive of the biological and chemical make-up of organisms. Rather, the narrative identity of the history of nations as well as of personal identity is configured, like all stories, by the emplotment of dramatic reversals of fortune, and this configuration confers meaning to the story of peoples and of actors. These contingencies, these reversals of fortune, give personal and collective identity a very different meaning than the identity of things or substances.

At the final stage of course of recognition, we recognize the capable subject through the application of moral and ethical evaluations. That is, we recognize the capable subject through the moral lens of obligation or the ethical lens of goodness. We see the political subject, to whom we impute rights and responsibilities, emerging very clearly at this stage of our recognitive investigation. It is the reflexivity of moral and ethical evaluations that make possible the recognition of the responsible subject: we are capable of recognizing ourselves as being worthy of esteem and respect because we are capable of recognizing our own actions and those of others as good or bad, just or forbidden. It should be noted that the ethical and moral predications of the capable subject is already presupposed in the capabilities for speech, action, and as the authors of our narratives. For we hold ourselves in esteem and respect ourselves insofar as we are capable of recognizing ourselves in our speech, action, and narration: “We esteem ourselves capable of esteeming our own actions, we respect ourselves in that we are capable of impartially judging our own actions. Self-esteem and self-respect are in this way reflexively addressed to a capable subject” (Ricoeur, 2000: 4). Taken together, then, the capability for ethical and moral predication constitutes the reflexive subject, capable of the imputation of social, political, economic and legal rights.

The subject’s capacity to recognize herself as the author of her conception of the good life presupposes yet another detour in the return path to the self, in the development of genuine self-reflexivity. For in order to realize its capabilities, and thus to become genuinely capable of self-recognition, the subject requires the dialogical and institutional mediation. In short, genuine self-reflexivity presupposes the mediation of otherness. Ricoeur’s argument is that there is a two-fold constitution to otherness itself: the dialogic plane, in which the other is a “you” and the institutional plane, in which the other is the third party (Ricoeur, 2000: 5). This dialogical and institutional mediation is an intrinsic part of Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology of the capable subject. It is Ricoeur’s emphasis on the solicitous mediation of the capable of subject by virtue of the dialogic and institutional planes that will inform his Aristotelian interpretation of Rawls’s distributive justice. By way of anticipation, we may say that the dialogical and the institutional mediation of the capable self is expressed by the solicitous aim of distributive justice. This solicitous aim of justice is characterized by the ethics of distribution, of sharing, because it is by virtue of this sharing that we establish the civic trust constitutive of the institution of language itself.

It is through language, at the most primitive stage of the anthropology of the capable subject, of speech, that we first encounter the mediation of dialogic and institutional otherness. In describing the capability for speech, we specifically emphasized the subject’s capability to recognize her singular authorship in the utterances of her many and diverse speech acts. But in emphasizing the subject’s capability for self-designation in this way, we ignored the context of interlocution that underwrites this self-designation. The singular speaker, the “I” presupposes a second person hearer, a “you”. The interlocutory positions may here be reversed: when you designate yourself as “I,” “I” hear “you,” and when “I” hear “you,” “you” are the “I” that is speaking. Everyone of course understands these basic rules of interlocution and “this mastery contributes in the following way to the emergence of the subject of rights: like me the other can designate himself as an I when he speaks. The expression ‘like me’ already announces the recognition of the other as my equal in terms of rights and duties” (Ricoeur, 2000: 6, original emphasis). While the interlocutory positions may be reversed, the subjects occupying these positions may not. At the same time, the singularity of the speaker and the listener itself depends upon the ethics of similitude governing our dialogic practices. In order to understand this, we need only appeal to our reliance on pronouns—even the direct appeal to “you,” the listener, is impossible, without reference to the third expressed in the pronouns he/she/it. In appealing to these pronouns, we are appealing to everyone included within a linguistic culture, and thus to the institution of language itself. Interlocution depends upon not simply these rules of interlocution which designates one linguistic culture from another, but to what this linguistic culture constitutes, namely, an ethics of sharing through which each member of a linguist culture recognizes himself or herself as being part of, as sharing in, that culture:

This recognition does not reduce to just the adoption of the same rules by everyone; it also requires the confidence each one of them places in the rule of sincerity, without which any linguistic exchange would be impossible. I expect that each will mean what he or she says. This confidence establishes public discourse on a basis of trust where the other appears as a third party and not just as a “you”. In truth, this fiduciary base is more than an interpersonal relation, it is the institutional condition of every interpersonal relation. (Ricoeur, 2000: 6, original emphasis)

The ethics of sharing underwrites the bond of trust constitutive of the institution of language. Without the sense of sharing within a community of language, the development of the capability of speech would be impossible. Our appeal to the pronouns he/she/it is an appeal to this shared trust in a community of language by virtue of which our capability for speech is confirmed and realized.

It is through the configuration of trust, in which self-recognition unfolds, that underlies the realization of the capabilities for speech, action, and imputation. Thus, our capability to recognize ourselves as the authors of our actions unfolds from within “inter-action,” in which my capabilities for action depends upon and unfolds within the context of my teachers, neighbors, friends, and ultimately, upon my political community. My personal initiatives are first recognized by others, and this interpersonal recognition is in turn mediated by educational, cultural, social, economic institutions within the democratic state by virtue of which my actions, undertaken in cooperation with others, may be extended to other communities and contexts, without being threatened by becoming limited to an overly personalized and thus overly moralized social community. On the plane of narrative self-recognition, the stories we tell in which we are the protagonists and in through which we hold ourselves in esteem are themselves intertwined with the stories of others, and in turn, in the societal practices of documentation or institutionalization in social time of the historical building up of cultures and institutions. These societal practices of documentation in turn support the vast detours through cultural, institutional, and historical processes and development genuine self-understanding must traverse. This triad of me/you/third person figurates self-esteem on the ethical plane as well. It is the other who first renders me responsible, and thus capable of self-esteem, by depending upon me: my very capability to recognize myself as worthy of esteem is itself grounded in the dependency of the other that I will, for instance, keep my word. My self-recognition as being capable of esteem develops within a context of trust. The legal-political signification of responsibility in the sense of the obligation to keep one’s word in contractual obligations already indicates that the capability for self-esteem is supported by a bond of social trust that exceeds the face-to-face relation in promise-making. It is the ethical “principle that agreements should be kept” that underwrites the political-legal designation of the responsible subject, and this ethical principle of promise-keeping configures the recognitive capability of the subject in the face-to-face relation within the bond of fellowship (Ricoeur, 2000: 7). This ethical principle of promise-keeping, then, receives its formal legal-political articulation in the laws of the community, of the state, and ultimately, to humanity as a whole, where “the other is no longer ‘you’, but the third party designated in a noteworthy way by the pronoun ‘everyone’ [chacun], an impersonal but not anonymous pronoun” (Ricoeur, 2000: 8). The French chacun may also here be translated as “each,” which in turn emphasizes the singularity in everyone.

The each in every-one signifies that it is to the plurality of persons that each of the capabilities—for speech, for action, for narration and for self-esteem—applies. In traversing the triadic figuration me/you/third person of each of the capabilities, we appreciate how the singularity of the listener and speaker, of the initiator of action, of the storyteller and of the promise-keeper is actualized and preserved through the inclusion of each person that the “face-to-face relation leaves out as a third party” (Ricoeur, 2000: 8). The capabilities for speech, action, narration, and self-esteem must be extended to everyone in order to be actualized. And we make the passage from the capability for selfhood to the actualization of selfhood through the ethical principle of plurality, expressed in the historical and social will of a people to live together in the historical and social commitment to extend the capabilities for personhood to everyone. This social and historical commitment to the inclusion of everyone in, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s language, in the public sphere, is irreducible to the interpersonal or face-to-face relation, and thus the “political institution confers a distinct structure on this will to live together. . .” (Ricoeur, 2000: 8). Ricoeur names this collective or shared will to live together political power. Political power is an extension of the powers of the capable subject for speech, action, and narration, embodied in our institutionalized practices of sharing, political power bestows upon our practices an historical perspective, inscribing them upon social time. By virtue of this configuration, capabilities endure.

From Ricoeur to Rawls: Justice as the Neuter or the Third Party

This institutional configuration of this capability for political power has, as each of the other powers we have discussed, an ethical signification. The ethical signification of political institutions is justice. Here Ricoeur quotes John Rawls’s opening lines from A Theory of Justice: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is to systems of thought” (Ricoeur, 2000: 8). Justice, as the horizon of the capable subject, applies not to the personal subject, not to the “you,” but to the third party, to “every-one.” As the philosophical anthropology of the capable subject shows us, the capabilities of the one, of you, depend upon similar capabilities for an-other : my capabilities for self-recognition as a moral actor capable of speech, action, narration, and self-esteem remains truncated and thus incomprehensible outside of the reference to the third party, and it is by virtue of the reference to the third that my capabilities develop and endure: “The application to human interactions of the rule of justice presupposes that we can take society as a vast system of distribution, that is, of the sharing of roles, burdens, tasks, well beyond the distribution that takes place on the economic plane of market values” (Ricoeur, 2000: 8–9). On the ethical-political plane of just institutions, distribution refers to the historical commitment—constitutive of political power—to act and live together, by virtue of the extension of the capabilities of selfhood to every-one.

Each side of this two-fold movement between the philosophical anthropology of the capable subject—distinguished by the question who?— and the realization of these capabilities by virtue of their mediation by historical and political institutions reflects two distinct traditions in liberal thought. The liberal tradition that emphasizes the capabilities constitutive of selfhood as such, that is, independently of political membership, correctly underscores the rights of humanity itself, and this tradition underwrites the philosophical anthropology of the capable subject. This respect owed to the rights of humanity as such, it is true, informs the positive rights of the subject. On the other hand, this tradition of liberal thought is governed by a serious misconception of the philosophical anthropology upon which it relies: it confuses our capabilities for action, speech, narration, and for self-esteem for the “accomplishments” of individuals (Ricoeur, 2000: 9). The anthropological response to the question “who is the subject of rights?” emphasizes the subject capable of recognizing herself as worthy of self-respect, corresponds to a tradition of liberal thought in which the autonomy of the individual precedes her membership in the state. The rights and liberties owed to persons capable of action, speech, narrative, and imputation is constitutive of the rights of humanity as such, of persons as ends in themselves. This is the “ultra-individualistic” tradition of social contractualism, in which the individual is the fully actualized subject of rights prior to entering into the social contract; she wagers these real rights, or what we refer to as natural rights, in exchange for social rights, characterized as the right to security in Hobbes or the right to citizenship or civil status in Rousseau and in Kant. The significance of this individualist interpretation of liberalism, represented by social contractualism, is that the subject’s relationship to other individuals is at best contingent and at worse revocable. In this way, the individualist interpretation threatens public institutions, which embody the ethics and the history of our practices of sharing.

There is another tradition in liberal thought, what we may call the civic tradition in liberal thought and to which we may appeal in answering the question “who is the subject of rights?” It is this civic tradition in liberal thought that configures the two-fold movement between the capabilities of selfhood and the actualization of selfhood, and it is to this civic liberalism that Ricoeur dedicates the essays in The Just, and in his work as a whole. What distinguishes the civic tradition from the “ultra-individualistic” tradition in liberal thought is its figuration of the capabilities for selfhood in the third party, that is, in the public culture of society—the fiduciary base—which funds every-one’s capabilities to recognize herself as an autonomous, self-determining moral agent:

Without institutional mediation, individuals are only the initial drafts of human persons. Their belonging to a political body is necessary for their flourishing as human beings, and in this sense, this mediation cannot be revoked. On the contrary, the citizens who issue from this institutional mediation can only wish that every human being should, like them, enjoy such political mediation, which when added to the necessary conditions stemming from a philosophical anthropology becomes a sufficient condition for the transition from the capable human being to the real citizen. (Ricoeur, 2000: 10)

The inviolable rights of humanity, of persons as ends in themselves, emphasized by neoliberalism are, by virtue of justice, rights that are distributed—shared—by everyone. The very principle of the inviolability of personhood—of the respect owed to persons as ends in themselves—is threatened and indeed becomes disfigured in its elitism—when its historical preservation in the solicitous mediation by the mediation of political membership is forgotten or repressed.

John Rawls: A Proceduralist Defense of the Civic Tradition in Liberal Thought

We find an articulation of the civic tradition of liberal thought in the work of John Rawls. It might strike the reader as more than a little strange that we appeal to Rawls at this juncture—whose social contractualism situates his theory of justice soundly within the deontological tradition—and conjoin him to the ethical tradition ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction:   The Course of Recognitive Phronēsis : Ricoeur’s Response to the Moralization of Inequality
• Chapter 1:   An Introduction to Ricoeur’s Theory of Capability Justice
• Chapter 2:   The Redistribution-Recognition Debate Revisited: The Ethical Intention in Redistributive Justice
• Chapter 3:   The Sacrificial Ethics of Constitutive Communitarianism
• Chapter 4:   Civic Phronēsis : Rawls’s Anti-Sacrificial Ethics for Capability Justice
• Chapter 5:   Hegel’s Philosophical-Historical Account of the Modern Interventionist State: The Social Figuration of Right
• Chapter 6:   The De-Penalization of Responsibility: A Genealogy of Enfranchisement in the Modern Welfare State
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index