Recognition, second‐personal authority, and nonideal theory

• Published in: European journal of philosophy 2021-09, Vol.29 (3), p.562-574
• Main Author: Darwall, Stephen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acknowledgment; Authority; Ethics; Function; Morality; Norms; Philosophy; Political philosophy; Political theory; Theory
• ISSN: 0966-8373; 1468-0378
• DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12674

I consider the relation between the role recognition plays in Axel Honneth's social theory and its function in a fundamentally second‐personal normative moral and political theory. I argue, first, that Honneth's social explanatory claims need not strictly depend on any normative propositions of moral and political philosophy. It may be sufficient for Honneth's explanatory purposes that the attitudes through which his explanations run have normative content, even fundamentally second‐personal normative content. And that can be true whether or not the propositions having this content hold as matters of normative moral and political theory. Even so, second‐personal moral philosophy may be able to vindicate these normative propositions. Perhaps more important, however, is the way in which second‐personal moral philosophy can draw on Honnethian recognitional social theory to provide a distinctive approach to nonideal moral and political theory. I argue that nonideal theory should be viewed as a distinctively second‐personal form of theorizing that aims to hold its addressees accountable for injustices that consist in failures adequately to recognize our equal second‐personal authority as persons.