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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recognition And Positive Freedom, David Ingram
Recognition And Positive Freedom, David Ingram
Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works
A number of well-known Hegel-inspired theorists have recently defended a distinctive type of social freedom that, while bearing some resemblance to Isaiah Berlin’s famous description of positive freedom, takes its bearings from a theory of social recognition rather than a theory of moral self-determination. Berlin himself argued that recognition-based theories of freedom are really not about freedom at all (negatively or positively construed) but about solidarity, More strongly, he argued that recognition-based theories of freedom, like most accounts of solidarity, oppose what Kant originally understood to be the essence of positive freedom, namely the setting of volitional ends in accordance …
When Microcredit Doesn’T Empower Poor Women: Recognition Theory’S Contribution To The Debate Over Adaptive Preferences, David Ingram
When Microcredit Doesn’T Empower Poor Women: Recognition Theory’S Contribution To The Debate Over Adaptive Preferences, David Ingram
Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay proposes recognition theory as a preferred approach to explaining poor women’s puzzling preference for patriarchal subordination even after they have accessed an ostensibly empowering asset: microfinance. Neither the standard account of adaptive preference offered by Martha Nussbaum nor the competing account of constrained rational choice offered by Harriet Baber satisfactorily explains an important variation of what Serene Khader, in discussing microfinance, dubs the self-subordination social recognition paradox. The variation in question involves women who, refusing to reject the combined socio-economic benefits of patriarchal recognition and empowering microfinance, dissemble their subordination to men. In this situation, women experience …