Ricoeur, Rawls, and Capability Justice: Civic Phronesis and Equality

Description

Contemporary capabilities-based approaches to social justice, inspired by the Aristotelian emphasis on human well-being, have tended to separate and even oppose identity-based or recognitive justice from resource-based or redistributive justice. This book demonstrates that such a divorce risks further polarizing capable members of the political community from disabled or vulnerable members. In order to prevent this danger of legitimizing the growing stratification between rich and poor, or between capability and vulnerability in modern neo-liberal societies, Molly Harkirat Mann turns to the work of Paul Ricoeur. In so doing she develops the argument that our historical and institutionalized practices of sharing, articulated by the lexicographical configuration of the Rawlisan principles of justice, represent a method for public deliberation or civic Phronesis, the ethical aim of which is the non-exclusion of our most vulnerable citizens from public institutions of care. By developing his political philosophy in relation to class politics in modern liberal societies, this book shows how Ricoeur's political thought is more closely aligned to that of John Rawls than has previously been acknowledged.

Molly Harkirat Mann is Adjunct Professor and Visiting Scholar at DePaul University, USA.

We begin with we are, not I am. We are who we are because of what we do through our daily practices. At a time when the United States has led the return to the gilded age when 1% of the population own one-third of its wealth, when those in the financial services who contribute least to the production of that wealth join the .com innovators to predominate among the super rich, when protesters claiming to represent the other 99% seek to reverse the direction of the narrative of greed that began in the 1980s to rise to its current pre-eminence, when protests that started on Wall Street have spread worldwide,when the principles to counteract the moralization of greed and inequality are in greatest need, this book's superb philosophical examination of that moral struggle could not be more timely. -- Howard Adelman, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, York University, Canada Ricoeur, Rawls and Capability Justice will surely deserve its place among first-rate scholarly works on social justice, compassion and welfare. Its close reading of Rawls through Aristotle and Ricoeur on the inclusion of the least advantaged citizen is admirably patient and persuasive. Readers will be especially intrigued by the concluding argument on the reduction of poverty and crime as civic rather than police policy. -- John O'Neill, FRSC, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, York University, Canada In this incisive work, Molly Harkirat Mann builds upon and deepens the work of Paul Ricoeur to argue that Rawls' theory of distributive justice, typically considered anti-communitarian, in fact supports a defense of the mutual society. This is a vital book in its response to our increasingly individualistic times. -- George Taylor, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh, USA