Recognition, Conflict and the Problem of Global Ethical Community by Shannon Brincat

Author:Shannon Brincat [Brincat, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415738521
Google: nXLFoQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 23616677
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-04-07T13:11:32+00:00

Respect and disrespect

Over the years, ‘respect’ has become a buzzword used in all kinds of social contexts. In western democracies, ethnic or social groups increasingly demand respect from the government or mainstream society. When doing so, they express their dissatisfaction with their current treatment because it allegedly fails to reflect their actual rank or the social place they feel entitled to claim. Thus, by calling for more respect, people do not just utter their desire for a better treatment. Rather, they make a moral statement: they contend that they do not get what they truly deserve (Dillon 2007; Hudson 1980). Social respect can thus be seen as an attitude we expect others to show by the way they treat us. When striving for respect, actors seek adequate consideration of their social importance and worth. Specifically, they watch out for the due recognition of their ideas and values, physical needs and interests, achievements, efforts, qualities and virtues, and rights (Wolf 2011).

Of course, those who seek respect and those who are supposed to show it may profoundly disagree as to what should be regarded as adequate consideration. In the international sphere, there are especially wide disagreements concerning the appropriate standards for evaluating national importance, achievements or virtues (Wolf forthcoming). Though such differences may seem only natural (and thus unobjectionable) among people with diverse cultural backgrounds, the mere awareness of value pluralism will scarcely alleviate the social pain experienced by disrespected actors. Even when such behavior violates only the victims’ idiosyncratic norms, they will often experience it as an undeserved infringement upon their sense of self-worth or social importance. Inadequate consideration thus easily incites indignation, anger, and sometimes even violent reactions.

Conceptualizing ‘respect’ as an attitude expressing adequate recognition for another actor’s status draws attention to interlinkages with various strands of social research, especially with philosophical discussions of recognition, psychological research on respect, and a renewed focus on status among international relations (IR) scholars. Interest in the ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor) has been stimulated by the seminal contributions of Axel Honneth (1996) and Charles Taylor (1995). Their ideas have been taken up by numerous scholars with an interest in domestic struggles against the symbolic discrimination of disadvantaged groups (Fraser and Honneth 2003; Kymlicka 2001; Laden and Owen 2007; Tully 2004; Van Den Brink and Owen 2007). More recently, they have also inspired research on international interactions among collective actors with conflicting symbolic desires (Heins 2008; Lindemann 2010; Lindemann and Ringmar 2012; Ringmar 1996; Wendt 2003). However, most of these contributions assume that actors engage in these struggles to achieve social recognition of their specific identities (see particularly Taylor 1995). Hence, they tend to gloss over the fact that actors may not want to draw attention to particular aspects of their identities, for instance, aspects which they deem trivial or embarrassing. Moreover, most of these publications have little to say about actors’ desire to be treated as consequential members of society which deserve to be taken seriously irrespective of any specific identity claims based on individual traits or biographies.

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