Recognition as Legitimization and Second-Personal Justice

To assess the complex struggles for recognition in which our societies are engaged, we need better to understand what we owe one another as a matter of justice. This chapter critically examines Elisabetta Galeotti’s notion of (what I call) recognition as legitimation, a notion that falls somewhere between traditional liberal understandings of respect and toleration, on the one hand, and esteem recognition, on the other. I focus on whether legitimization can be a demand of (second-personal) justice and how it relates to the notion of dignity as a kind of authority to demand respect from others. I argue that while legitimation as recognition may be justified as a pragmatic means for remedying systematic patterns of disrespect, we should not see it as an alternative and better conception of respect. We need the second-personal and Kantian conception of respect, which regards it as something owed unconditionally to everyone, as a response to dignity, and as something that persons can exact from each other, features the idea of recognition as legitimation fails to account for and realize.