Unemployment, recognition and meritocracy Desempleo, reconocimiento y meritocracia

Abstract: Unemployment is one of the greatest social problems all around the world, including in modern capitalist welfare states. A social critique of unemployment is therefore a necessary task for any critical social philosophy – such as Axel Honneth’s recognition approach, which understands social justice in terms of social conditions of recognition. This paper aims to develop an evaluation of unemployment and its moral weight from this perspective. I will lay out the recognition approach and present a moral evaluation of unemployment as socially unjust based on knowledge of its negative consequences for those affected. I will then discuss two objections to this conclusion, namely that a mere correlation of suffering and moral wrongness is not enough, and that there are legitimate differences in the experience of recognition which could justify the existence of unemployment as deserved. In the next section, I will then refute both objections and first show that unemployment can be understood as socially unjust based on the knowledge that it is involuntary and that the unemployed are not responsible for their condition. Then I will discuss the relationship between the idea of meritocracy and unemployment to examine the assumption that unemployment is deserved. I will finally conclude that unemployment is not a necessary side effect of meritocracy, and that there are good reasons to argue for a moral and justified obligation to provide actual access to paid work for all who want it. However, such changes face serious obstacles and are not likely to happen under current interpretations of meritocracy and social esteem, which are one-sided and flawed