Arto Laitinen

Analysing recognition : identification, acknowledgement, and recognitive attitudes towards persons

There is a wide consensus today that ‘recognition’ is something that we need a clear grasp of in order to understand the dynamics of political struggles and, perhaps, the constitution and dynamics of social reality more generally. Yet the discussions on recognition have so far often been conceptually rather inexplicit, in the sense that the key concepts have remained largely unexplicated or undefined. Since the English word ‘recognition’ is far from unambiguous, it is possible, and to our mind also actually the case, that different authors have meant different things with this word. In what follows, we will make a number of conceptual distinctions and clarificatory proposals that are intended to bring to more sharply focus the field of phenomena that are being discussed under the catchword ‘recognition.’ This is meant to serve a dual purpose: to suggest a number of distinctions that are of help in formulating rival views, and to propose what strikes us as the best overall position formulated in terms of those distinctions. Our proposals are meant to be, by and large, compatible with Axel Honneths work on recognition, which to us is the most ambitious and differentiated account of recognition available. Where we propose something that seems to us to be in compatible with Honneths explicit formulations, we indicate it in the footnotes.

Broader contexts of non-domination: Pettit and Hegel on freedom and recognition

This study compares Philip Pettit’s account of freedom to Hegelian accounts. Both share the key insight that characterizes the tradition of republicanism from the Ancients to Rousseau: to be subordinated to the will of particular others is to be unfree. They both also hold that relations to others, relations of recognition, are in various ways directly constitutive of freedom, and in different ways enabling conditions of freedom. The republican ideal of non-domination can thus be fruitfully understood in light of the Hegelian structure of ‘being at one with oneself (Beisichsein) in another’. However, while the Hegelian view converges with Pettit on non-domination and recognition, their comprehensive theories of freedom are based on radically different metaphysics. One key difference concerns the relationship between freedom and nature, and there is a further difference between Pettit’s (ahistorical) idea of the concept dependence of freedom, and the Hegelian (historical) idea of the conception dependence of freedom.

Philosophy and self-expression

When I bumped into Taylor’s Philosophical Papers, I had been to lectures on and studied texts by Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kuhn, Hegel, Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Walzer, Rorty, MacIntyre, some Heidegger, and I was struck by how these separate strands of thought suddenly formed aspects of a coherent picture. Each of those thinkers had seemed to be saying something important and true, and now Taylor – commenting these thinkers and others – provided a secure view of how it all hangs together; adding new equally important topics of his own. That then inspired me to write a dissertation and some other texts on Taylor’s work. One topic on which Charles Taylor’s work stands out is that of self-expression. He has captured both the importance of implicit background sense of things, orientation and “know-how” on the one hand and the role of articulations on the other, showing how the latter aim to be faithful to the implicit grasp and transform it at the same time. Taylor attributes this view to the Expressivists of the Romantic movement and to Hegel, but the most illuminating texts on this topic seem to be by no one else than Taylor himself. The model of expressive striving is an artist who starts with an inchoate sense of what she wants to achieve. She then struggles with getting a draft done, with “externalizing” the idea in an external medium. In the first draft, she perceives a partial realization of the idea – it falls short of being yet an adequate and faithful rendering of the idea, but on the other hand is more determinate and more detailed than the inchoate initial idea. Perceiving, “taking in,” that determinate version is a genuine learning experience, it alters, reshapes the initial grasp. It first of all has aspects which fall short of the original idea and which illuminate some sides of the original idea negatively: the artist can now see some details that will not do. Second, some details appear as faithful realizations of the compressed inchoate sense that was the starting point. It had not yet unfolded in any detail, so the draft makes the inchoate sense more determinate and detailed.

Kant and Hegel on purposive action

This essay discusses Kant and Hegel’s philosophies of action and the place of action within the general structure of their practical philosophy. We begin by briefly noting a few things that both unite and distinguish the two philosophers. In the sections that follow, we consider these and their corollaries in more detail. In so doing, we map their differences against those suggested by more standard readings that treat their accounts of action as less central to their practical philosophy. Section 2 discusses some central Kantian concepts (Freedom, Willkür, Wille, and Moral Law). In Section 3, we take a closer look at the distinction between internal and external action, as found in Kant’s philosophy of morality and legality. In Section 4, we turn to Hegel and his distinctions between abstract right (legality), morality, and ethical life, as well as the location of his account of action within his overall theory of morality. We discuss the distinction between Handlung and Tat, and non-imputable consequences. The overall aims of our essay are to shed light on some puzzles in Kant and Hegel’s conceptions and to examine where their exact disputes lie without taking a stand on which philosophy is ultimately the most satisfactory.

Four conceptions of social pathology

This article starts with the idea that the task of social philosophy can be defined as the diagnosis and therapy of social pathologies. It discusses four conceptions of social pathology. The first two conceptions are ‘normativist’ and hold that something is a social pathology if it is socially wrong. On the first view, there is no encompassing characterization of social pathologies available: it is a cluster concept of family resemblances. On the second view, social pathologies share a structure (e.g. second-order disorder). The last two conceptions are ‘naturalist’ and hold that something is wrong because it is pathological. The third view takes it that society is the kind of substance that can fall ill – an organism. The fourth view operates with the notion of a social life that can degenerate. The four conceptions are compared along six criteria: (1) is the view plausible?; (2) is it informative (if true)?; (3) does it help define the task of social philosophy?; (4) does it take naturalistic vocabulary seriously?; (5) does it hold that pathologies share a structure?; and (6) how does it see the primacy of being wrong and being pathological?

We-Mode Collective Intentionality and Its Place in Social Reality

This essay examines Raimo Tuomela’s Social Ontology studying the developed theory of we-mode collective intentionality and the ontological background picture it is embedded in. The first section characterizes the collective intentionality – approach to social ontology, distinguishing three forms of it (irrealism, perspectivalism, realism), and contrasting it with other realist views. Section 6.2 argues there is a tension between Tuomela’s view on the fictitiousness of group agency, and the reality of rights and responsibilities had by groups. Section 6.3 studies Tuomela’s we-mode/I-mode approach. It argues that that acting in the we-mode and in the I-mode are always relative to a group, so that people who belong to several groups typically act both in the we-mode relative to one group and in the I-mode relative to another group, simultaneously. In such contexts, people are best seen acting in an “overall mode” rather than I-mode or we-mode simpliciter.

Raimo Tuomela: Response to Arto Laitinen

Laitinen’s paper shows good understanding of many aspects of my theory. However, there are some points that he seems to have misunderstood concerning my we-mode/I-mode distinction. He makes some innovative remarks on how to expand the theory to encompass broad social contexts where several groups are taken into account at the same time (cf. his new notion of “overall mode”). His critical remarks are, however, based on a view that is not mine. Below I will comment on the most central parts and arguments of this paper, but because of its length I cannot discuss all the details of his developments.

Recognition and democracy – An introduction:

This is an introduction to a special issue on recognition and democracy. We outline the constitutive and enabling relations between democracy and recognition. We distinguish between pre-political and political forms of identity and recognition, between horizontal and vertical forms of recognition, and between democratic and other ways or arranging the vertical and horizontal aspects of political life. We also distinguish between the roles of a subject and a co-author of law. The intruduction also includes an overview of the individual articles in this special issue. The issue tries to fill some theoretical gaps in theories of democracy and recognition, with a special emphasis on feminist politics.

Taxation: Its Justification and Application to Global Contexts

The article focuses on the justification of taxation, in other words the principled rather than the technical aspect of taxation. We first show how, on the one hand, democracy is required for taxation to be legitimate, and how on the other hand democratic communities are dependent on taxation, and argue that this does not constitute a vicious circle. We then present a typology of ways of justifying taxation, according to which taxation can base its legitimacy on (1) meeting basic needs, (2) financing public goods, (3) redistribution, or (4) (dis)incentivising certain types of conduct. We then discuss the applicability of each of these types of justification, arguing that all of them do apply at a global level. The article further concludes that different normative justifications guide us towards different designs of taxation in practice, so the background justification has to be made clear, especially when designing new taxation systems.