Recognition, communication and convention : an essay in the ethics of economics

(eng) Our modern identity can be defined by the search of two forms of recognition: the recognition of our autonomy and moral responsibility (citizenship), and the recognition of our individuality within the civil world. Individuals in the civil world are often motivated by a particular version of the Hegelian desire for recognition: the desire for differentiation. This characterization of the modern identity leads to two potentially distinct forms of behavior: on the one hand, as a citizen who promotes his and others' rights within the civic sphere of society; on the other hand, as an agent oriented towards the satisfaction of private ends (differentiation, particularly through the acquisition of wealth) within the civil world. Individual well-being can be defined in terms of the effectivity of the individual rights, whose scope and nature are the result of a collective decision. Ensuring this effectivity can be considered as a collective-action problem, since a properly implemented systems of rights can be viewed as a public good. Therefore, while individuals can agree on the rights that define well-being, individual agency within the civil world may preclude the provision of the public goods involved. Complex social problems such as poverty and exclusion, global warming, and the like, are detrimental to the effectivity of individual rights. Free riding-behavior (whose roots lie in agency) may, in turn, undermine the implementation of solutions to these complex problems. On the basis of a particular conception of human beings, this thesis defends the idea that a generalized overcoming of the desire for differentiation would make it possible to design non-market institutions -substituting for market relations- in which the effectivity of individual rights could be enforced through deliberation. Individual agency would be replaced by communicative action, and could be oriented towards the provision of collectively selected public goods.