The power of recognition

Twenty-five years ago, Charles Taylor graciously agreed to deliver the inaugural lecture for Princeton’s University Center for Human Values on Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” In creating the University Center, our vision was to enrich understanding of the most important ethical issues of our time and all time. What better way to initiate this than with Charles Taylor speaking on a subject that he accurately foresaw as absolutely critical to the future of liberal constitutional democracies?

The publication of Taylor’s essay – with comments by K. Anthony Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf, and me ¹ – did nothing less than “raise the debate [about multiculturalism] to a new level, providing it with the high moral seriousness it deserves.” ²

At the outset, Taylor makes the stakes powerfully clear: “Nonrecognition or misrecognition [of individual identity by a democratic society] can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” ³ A case close to home for Taylor would be not recognizing the cultural identity of French Canadians by insisting on English as the sole official language of Canada. Taylor’s point is that ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, national, religious, and other group identities can be essential to the dignity of individuals because our core identities are created not just introspectively but also dialogically, in response to our relations with others.

To appreciate Taylor’s prescience, we need only examine the news today in the United States, where the relationship of group recognition to individual identity is made manifest in issues ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement to the choice and use of pronouns to respect gender and sexual orientation. Taylor’s point is also that the democratic ideals of human dignity and mutual respect, which insist on the equal worth of all human beings, require more than equal procedural rights for all. I rightly want to be respected not despite the fact that I am a woman, but as a woman. A purely procedural understanding of rights, as Anthony Appiah suggests in his insightful commentary, would permit women, Blacks, and gays to be treated equally despite their gender, race, and sexual orientation, whereas a substantively just politics of recognition calls for our being treated as equals as women, gays, and Blacks. ⁴

Because we also are more than any single or sum of our group identities, liberal democracies are called upon both to recognize various group identities that are core to who we are as individuals, and also to respect the freedom of every individual to choose a distinctive set of identities as a unique person. I want to be recognized and respected as a woman, mother, spouse, political philosopher, and university president, but also for far more than this.

So there is a tension inherent in creating a politics of equal recognition, a tension writ large when some who responded to Black Lives Matter that “all lives matter” were genuinely surprised by the anger elicited by their response. Understanding two different visions that historically have informed the politics of pluralistic democracies helps explain this discord. As Taylor points out, one vision in modern democracies sees respect for equal dignity as demanding an equalization of all rights and entitlements. ⁵ Through this lens, the needless loss of any lives – Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, or other – all bear equal significance.

Indeed, all lives do matter, and those who publicly declare that “Black Lives Matter” are not suggesting otherwise. Rather, these words reflect a second morally vibrant vision: an equitable public response to social injustice must take full account of the varied situations of individuals, especially those whose group identities (e.g., as women, gays, and Blacks) have been systematically degraded and whose rights to be treated as equals would otherwise be neglected.

How can we best reconcile these two visions? A liberal democracy aspires to treat all individuals as equals, which is not equivalent to treating everyone the same. When Black lives have been systematically treated as less than equal, it behooves our society to call special ethical attention to this historical fact and to seek the most effective, ethically defensible remediation. Instead of insisting on what Taylor calls “difference blindness,” we can affirm the rights of all individuals to be treated as equals and not only recognize but take account of historically and ethically relevant differences in paving a better way forward. ⁶

Taylor never claimed that he had a full-blown theory of what such recognition demands. Does it require the survival of cultures over time, independently of their morally valuable connections to individuals? By posing challenging questions, Taylor’s vision enables us to step back from what we have long taken for granted, achieve a little distance, and carefully examine our multicultural societies from multiple perspectives. He precisely recognized something that I have experienced firsthand in my role both as professor and university president, namely that “the main locus of this debate is the world of education.” ⁷

While Taylor emphasizes the need to respect individuals through recognizing their distinctive cultures, Susan Wolf’s commentary importantly extends this call for recognition in the United States to a matter of both respecting others and understanding ourselves. Our culture in the United States today so clearly consists of what for too long had been mistakenly marginalized as only their cultures, the social and individual identities of women, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and so many others who deserve to be treated as fully equal citizens.

Charles Taylor’s insightfulness, imagination, and conceptual agility are undeniable, but even rarer and more admirable a philosophical virtue is his joyful dialogical stimulation of mutual respect through the widest multinational and multicultural public. The Politics of Recognition is in every sense a classic text with a core message: “Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.” ⁸