Personhood and Recognition

Abstract

Personhood and Recognition Markus Rothhaar Introduction: The Ethical Dimension of Personhood It is characteristic for the concept of a "person" that it is not only an ontological or descriptive concept, that is, a concept that describes a certain mode of being (Seinsweise), but at the same time a normative concept: If a living being is experienced or identified as a person, this experience or identification carries with itself a normative claim: the claim to recognize it as a subject of rights or at least as a being with regard to which we have duties. This is even true, if we do not yet know what exactly these rights or duties consist in or how our ethical theory is further specified. Therefore the concept of a "person" is not just some concept of practical philosophy, but its very core concept. Every ethical theory, be it utilitarian, virtue ethical, deontological, contractarian or whatever must make two presuppositions: First, the anti-solipsistic assumption that there are other subjects at all; second, the assumption that these others—their lives, interests, needs, rights, freedoms—do somehow matter in a normative sense. Many ethical theories just presuppose these two assumptions without further justifying or addressing them (notable exceptions are, of course, Kant and Fichte, about whom I will speak later). This means that many, if not most, ethical theories have a blind spot which can be articulated by asking: "What obliges me to respect the lives, interests, needs, etc. of other people?" The concept "person" tries to give an answer to this question: "It is the fact that they are persons that obliges me to this kind of respect." Hence, "person" is one of those fundamental [End Page 473] concepts in practical philosophy that are meant to bridge the gap between "is" and "ought," between normativity and descriptivity. Notwithstanding the notorious charge of an "is–ought" fallacy, this is not something specific to a certain ethical theory, but something necessary to any ethical theory. Any ethical theory needs a systematic place for such a "bridging concept": For example in preference utilitarianism it is the concept of "interest"; in Kantianism, the concepts of "dignity" and "autonomy"; in virtue ethics, "eudaimonia"; and so on. However, this observation still does not answer the question of how the claim that personhood is the foundation of duties and rights can be explained without falling into some philosophical obscurantism (as we find it, in my opinion, in Levinas) or just giving "dry assertions" (as Hegel called them). This is even more so, because the concept of a "person" has a paradoxical structure that Robert Spaemann has pointed out: On the one hand, the experience of someone as a person is the foundation of duties and obligations toward him. But, on the other hand, there is also already some kind of fundamental duty to recognize another human being or another subject as a person. Spaemann writes: Duties of one to another are generated by the moment of recognition in which one person notices another. Prior to this moment there is no obligation. On the contrary, obligation follows from noticing the person, which is one and the same as recognizing another as "like myself." Yet to recognize a person is not to posit one, as if we owed our personal existence to someone else's recognition. I recognize, because recognition is due, yet I do not first know that it is due, then recognize. To know that it is due is no more and no less than to recognize.1 If that is true, we must ask Spaemann, how is it supposed to be possible that something that is the very foundation of moral obligations is in itself a moral obligation. Since Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "Foundations of Natural Right," a specific type of theory, usually called a theory of "recognition" (the term Spaemann himself uses here), tries to answer this question. This type of theory has become quite influential especially with Hegel's famous "Master–Slave" chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it has inspired a lot of contemporary thinkers as different as Jürgen Habermas, Axel [End Page 474] Honneth, Charles Taylor, Jean Piaget, Stephen Darwall, and Spaemann. Just recently psychologist...