paul ricoeur, solicitude, love, and the giftinternational, issues. He is acutely conscious that in this sphere justice
must operate in such a way that it will accord people publically an
integrity similar to that bestowed in friendship. In contrast, however,
this will now occur by means of institutional recognition. As citizens,
people must deem others worthy of the same rights as they demand
for themselves. “Without institutional mediation, individuals are only
the initial drafts of human persons.... Citizens who issue from this
institutional mediation can only wish that every human being should,
like them, enjoy such political mediation.”^23
Ricoeur then describes the form of recognition that he would
encourage to be implemented in the public domain where it would be
linked with justice. He believes that there should be an extension at
this level of plurality of a mode of justice that concerns itself with
those, in his words “who have been left out of the face to face encounter
of an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ and have remained third parties.”^24 The influence
of Emmanuel Levinas is obvious here. But rather than Levinas’s
exacting summons to absolute personal responsibility for the other,
Ricoeur prefers to explore a dimension of recognition that needs to be
incorporated into the public forum. Firstly, he describes the dimension
of equality needed.
The corollary of reciprocity, namely equality, places friendship on the
path to justice, where the life together shared by a few people gives way
to the distribution of sharing in a plurality on the scale of history,
politics and community.^25He then provides a finely tuned analysis of the relation of such equality
in a communal setting to intersubjective solicitude:
Equality, however it is modulated, is to life in institutions what solicitude
is to interpersonal relations.... Equality provides to the self another who
is an each [sic].... The sense of justice takes nothing away from- Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability,” in Paul Ricoeur and Conemporary
Moral Theory, ed. John Wall and William Schweiker, New York: Routledge, 2002,
- Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 195.
- Ibid., 188. Ibid., 188.