Abstract:

Jurgen Habermas and Axel Honneth have each criticized Marx’s emphasis on human labor as the most fundamental concept in any critical theory of society whose goal is human emancipation. Habermas’s critique resulted in the development of Discourse Ethics, a Neo-Kantian approach to normative criticism and social justice. Discourse Ethics obtains its universal basis by marginalizing the non-rational, such as reactive emotions and various forms of desire for recognition that often underlie and motivate the social criticisms whose aim is human emancipation. I argue that Honneth’s Neo-Hegelian theory of recognition is a productive response to two problems in Habermas’s overly cognitivist and rationalist approach. These are the problem of the role of emotions in moral motivation, on the one hand, and the problem of locating acceptable boundaries between public issues of moral right or justice and private issues of ethical life or well-being. The strengths of Honneth’s approach are clarified through two brief exegeses of classic works in political theory, Peter Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment and Joel Feinberg’s “The Nature and Value of Rights.”

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