‘In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking . . . on the trails, and one person says, “Hello, how are you, good morning,” the answer is not, “I’m fine, how are you?” The answer translated into English is this: “I see you.” Think of that. “I see you.” How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see?’
Bill Clinton
There is more to social justice than the distribution of stuff. The slave forced to kiss the dirt at his master’s feet; the worker who cowers before his screaming boss; the wife made to submit to her husband’s cruel demands—these instances offend our conscience, but not necessarily because one party is rich and the other is poor. The injustice comes from a different set of inequalities—of status and esteem. This is a second way to think about social justice: justice in recognition.1
From this point of view, regardless of how much anyone has, it is unjust for some to be seen or treated as superior or inferior on the basis of their birth, class, gender, race, occupation, age, disability, culture, or other such characteristics. Humans have a deep-seated desire to be treated with dignity and for their way of life to be regarded with respect.2 Axel Honneth calls this ‘the struggle for recognition’.3 For many, this struggle is more important than the fight for distributive justice. It’s one reason why, to the bafflement of political élites, less well-off voters frequently reject social welfare policies that appear to be in their economic interests. Revulsion at being pitied or patronized—lowered in the eyes of others—can outweigh purely economic concerns.
The idea of recognition has its roots in a German tradition of political thought that emphasizes the role of the community in helping individuals to reach their full potential. It takes from G. F. W. Hegel the paradoxical idea that, in order to flourish as individuals, we first need the recognition and respect of other people. And it takes from Immanuel Kant the idea that every individual deserves to be recognized as an autonomous and morally responsible agent, capable of authoring the laws and rules that govern them. The German language has a special word for describing the failure to give someone due recognition, Mißachtung, which sounds like a sneeze and is usually translated as ‘disrespect’ but which neatly embraces a wide range of interpersonal wrongs: humiliation, insults, degradation, abuse.4
Injustices in recognition take two forms: objective and intersubjective. Objective injustices are caused by hierarchies. In Aristotle’s society, for instance, slaves and women were held to be inferior by birth. This was duly reflected in their social status. Intersubjective failures of recognition occur when individuals fail to see each other as beings of equal moral worth. Are you one of those who turns their nose up at the dress, habits, and accents of the lower orders? When you look at people who are different from you, do you recognize your shared humanity or do fear, disgust, even hatred, swell in your heart? When you walk past a gang of youths lurking on the street corner, do they appear to you as fellow human beings—or as animals or scum?
Justice in recognition is about seeing and treating each other as peers. Generations of LGBTQ+ people have struggled against (objective) rules that deprived them of the chance to serve in the military and the right to marry and adopt children. They have also fought to have their love and desires recognized (intersubjectively) as of equal worth to those of others—and not as sinful or shameful. Movements like these have never been about the mere redistribution of wealth. Their point, in Elizabeth Anderson’s words, has been ‘to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others.’5 The opposite of this ideal is the belief that some people’s lives are intrinsically less valuable. This belief can be found in the doctrines of racism, sexism, and xenophobic nationalism.6
Another consequence of failures of recognition is oppression. As Iris Marion Young explains, this concept embraces a variety of ills. Sometimes it means exploitation, when one group makes another work in unjust conditions. Sometimes it means marginalization, when certain groups (such as the dependent elderly) are condemned to lives of loneliness and exclusion. Marginalized groups must prove their respectability anew every day, while those with the right dress, accent, skin colour, and qualifications have their probity taken for granted, their needs more attentively serviced by police, waiters, public officials, and so forth. Cultural oppression allows dominant groups to have their art, music, and aesthetics seen as ‘normal’ while minority cultures are stereotyped, ignored, or suppressed. The fact that Muslim characters are disproportionately cast as terrorists on television is an instance of cultural oppression. The problem couldn’t be solved with a redistributive tax.
In extreme cases, failures of recognition spill over into physical violence: women sexually assaulted in public and in private, French Jewish schoolchildren forced to use armed escorts for fear of attack, African-American men made the victims of police brutality.7 In the United States, people with disabilities are around two-and-a-half times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than those without disabilities.8
Treating people with equal concern and respect doesn’t necessarily mean treating them the same. In fact, it’s partly about recognizing that people aren’t all the same; that we all have unique identities, needs, and attributes that make us who we are. The just way to treat a vulnerable elderly person will be different from the just way to treat a wayward young man. And if a particular culture is facing difficulties, then we may justly divert extra resources and support to that group.9
There is some debate in the academic literature about whether distribution or recognition is the more important dimension of social justice. We don’t need to decide: both are plainly important and they’re often intimately connected. If you’re at the bottom of the social hierarchy, in the ‘wrong’ caste or class, then your lowly status will probably spill over into a lack of job opportunities and a smaller share of economic resources. Likewise, if you are destitute and living on the street then your social status is unlikely to be high. Failures of distribution and recognition are often two sides of the same injustice.
How does the struggle for recognition actually play out? What mechanisms do we use to determine people’s rank, status, and esteem? The two most important are laws and norms.
Laws that prohibit women from voting, or people of colour from using public facilities, or gay and lesbian couples from marrying, give rise to unjust hierarchies. The Nuremberg Laws introduced in Germany in 1935 enshrined Nazi racialist doctrines into law, forbidding sex and marriage between Jews and non-Jews and declaring that only those of ‘German’ blood could be citizens. Laws like these are unjust because they endow some groups with valuable rights while depriving others of the same, on the basis of distinctions between groups that cannot be justified according to recognized principles of justice.
Laws can also enshrine rules of caste, class, honour, and rank that have historically played an important part in the politics of recognition. But such rules can also exist outside the law. Like the systems of nobility that dominated European life for centuries, they tend to come with an intricate code of titles, forms of address, routines, and rituals. Members of royal and noble households are greeted with magnificent unction as ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Your Excellency’, with accompanying bonanzas of fawning, bowing, curtseying, cap-doffing, and ring-kissing. In less self-aware times, the upper classes would routinely address their inferiors with generic names that barely acknowledged their personhood: ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘woman’, ‘slave’.10
These days, overtly unjust legal hierarchies are increasingly rare and the old rules of social rank and role are generally viewed with embarrassment. But many of the old hierarchies have ossified into the unwritten norms of economic, workplace, family, and social life. Norms are tricky because they lurk, often unspoken, in our traditions and customs. They lead us, sometimes unconsciously, to treat each other in ways that are unjust. The fact that men are routinely paid more than women for the same work is sometimes the result of deliberate discrimination, but it’s more often caused by a confluence of unspoken assumptions and behaviours in the workplace. It’s also a good example of where a failure of recognition can lead to an injustice of distribution.
In the future, as well as distributing resources, algorithms will increasingly be used to identify, rank, sort, and order human beings. This means that the struggle for recognition will play out in code as well as in laws and norms.
Algorithms are significant in the struggle for recognition in three ways.
At some point we’ve all been treated rudely by an official or patronized by a customer service agent. Nowadays, though, only humans can treat us disrespectfully or inhumanely. In the digital lifeworld this will no longer be the case. In New Zealand in 2016 a man of Asian descent had his online passport application rejected because the automated system said that his eyes were closed in the photograph he uploaded.11 This is just a hint of what might be to come: a world in which the struggle for recognition, for so long confined to relationships among humans, comes to include our relationships with the digital systems that surround and interact with us every day. More than a third of Americans admit to abusing their computers, verbally or even physically.12 We already get angry when our tech doesn’t work properly. Now imagine the rage and indignity of being dismissed, ignored, or insulted by an ‘intelligent’ digital system—particularly if that maltreatment arises because of race or gender or some other arbitrary characteristic.
Second, in the future there will be new methods of bestowing praise, honour, prestige, and fame. Followers, friends, favourites, likes, and retweets have already become a new currency by which people’s thoughts and activities are scored, measured, and compared.13 Fame, celebrity, publicity, and recognition itself are increasingly sought and received on social media platforms. There is nothing revolutionary about holding and sharing such opinions about each other, but the technology means we can express them more often, more efficiently, and more precisely. The big difference is that algorithms increasingly determine how these systems of rank and order function, choosing who is seen and who remains hidden; who is in and who is out; which content goes viral and which is doomed to obscurity. In the digital lifeworld there will be many ‘inequalities of visibility’—and some among us will be quite invisible.14 It used to be the role of political, legal, cultural, and social élites to determine matters of visibility, status, and esteem. Increasingly, in the future, it’ll be done by algorithms. Again, this isn’t inherently a bad thing. The question (for chapter sixteen) is whether the new way will lead to more justice than the old.
In the same vein, our lives in the digital lifeworld will be increasingly rateable. We’ll be able to give holistic personal scores based on trustworthiness, reliability, attractiveness, charm, intelligence, strength, fitness, and whatever else is considered desirable. From the perspective of the struggle for recognition, this may make you feel a little uneasy. Is it wise to have our popularity, our social worth, so starkly and publicly quantifiable? Is it prudent to develop systems that rank and rate people on the basis of their perceived merits—not just because those rankings may be wrong or unfair, but because the very act of assigning scores to people distorts our ability to see their lives as of equal value? The risk with personal rating systems is that they encourage us not to seek equal social status but instead favourable status compared with our peers. This is a regrettable but common human foible: the self-esteem and social status we derive from income, for instance, depends much more on how much others in our peer group are earning rather than the objective amount we earn.15 Constant social comparison would only exacerbate this regrettable trait. In the good old days we could go home and bitterly reflect on our inadequacies in peace; now there’s always some smug schoolfriend on Facebook humblebragging about his latest promotion. The digital lifeworld could hold much worse horrors.
Finally, as we saw in chapter eight, in the digital lifeworld technologies of perception-control will serve to filter how we perceive other people. Digital systems—including but not limited to AR—will increasingly insert themselves between people, determining what they know of each other. What could be more influential on the struggle for recognition?
Some of the ideas in the last two chapters may seem heretical to those who have spent a lifetime thinking about justice exclusively in terms of the market, the state, laws, and norms. But is it surprising that code should touch on issues of social justice? Rival models of distribution (who gets what, under what terms, in what proportions) and of recognition (who ranks higher or lower, who matters more, who less) are themselves algorithmic in nature. Recall the Sumerian clay tablets from the Introduction. They contained the earliest recorded algorithms in human history, and they were directly concerned with a problem of distribution: how best to divide a grain harvest between different numbers of men.16 At their core, competing visions of justice are essentially alternative algorithms justified by rival principles. Now these algorithms are making their way into code, and they’ll soon touch every aspect of our lives. Our task is to make sure that the algorithms that come to define the digital lifeworld can be justified according to principles of justice. To see how matters might go wrong, we turn now to the idea of algorithmic injustice.