answer this question, this chapter argues that one of Hegel’s most important concepts—recognition—can provide some key insights into problems of administrative ethics. It is not the author’s intention to promote “Hegelian mumbo jumbo” (Brogan, cited in Williams, Sullivan, and Mathews 1997, 24), but it will be necessary to outline an interpretation of Hegel’s work where appropriate. Recognition, in the Hegelian sense, can be used in at least two ways. First, it may be viewed as a normative concept in itself: the necessity of constitutive mutual recognition is a key element of moral judgment and ethi- cal life; and its counterpart, misrecognition, is potentially the cause of much unethical behavior. Second, recognition serves as a dialectical trigger to move between competing ethical perspectives: rational and nonrational; deontology and consequentialism; compliance and integrity. Ethical dilemmas frequently occur when recognition is conflicted; that is, when a public administrator or official makes a fundamental human connection that skews their possibly long-held view of professional identity, duty, and objectivity.
This chapter is therefore going to make a rather bold claim: that our po- litical institutions and administrative systems ultimately operate in a state of misrecognition, whether willful or accidental. The supposed rationality of an organization (the classic Weberian bureaucracy) effectively entails a process of dehumanization that is regarded as essential for dealing with large numbers of people. People are not dealt with as distinct human beings but as abstract groups identified only through labels, which facilitates the neces- sary generalizations that allow us to make and implement decisions without necessarily dealing with the human costs. This problem is compounded by the philosophical tendency to discuss humans as abstract beings, which robs them of their humanity.
Recognition, Dialectic, and Parallax
Administrative ethics is, as Rorty (1995) argues, a practical business. Although questions of meta-ethics may be academically interesting, they do not neces- sarily help in assessing a real-life problem and, as a result, are often omitted from the literature. When such discussions do arise, they frequently debate the extent to which morality and ethics can be objective, with most commentators favoring a form of subjectivism: “The simple fact is that philosophers would not still be engaged in theoretical, philosophical, ethical inquiry if they all agreed that there was a single theory that had been proven, incontrovertibly, to be ‘right’” (Michaelson 2001, 335). Yet these perspectives miss a crucial issue: ethics exists in the realm of intersubjectivity. The object of ethics (good conduct, good behavior, right action, etc.) is itself indeterminate, abstract, and
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only exists for the subject. Moral judgment, then, is a process of reflexive change that will necessarily differ according to experience and context. As Weill (1998) argues, there can be “no concrete morality outside a concrete situation” (39).
A further misunderstanding in administrative ethics is the tendency to pro- mote ethics as a series of either/or choices. Rohr (1989), for example, famously suggested the low and high roads to administrative ethics, whereas a myriad of commentators have used a framework of compliance and integrity (e.g., Skelcher and Snape 2001; Lewis and Gilman 2005; Menzel 2007). Although those frameworks usually are presented as a spectrum, they implicitly sug- gest that one end of the spectrum is preferable (the high road, the integrity system) and, more important, they highlight tensions within the spectrum that need to be somehow resolved. Tensions exist in a number of either/or choices (consequentialism or deontology; reason or emotion) that present us with unhelpfully restrictive frameworks within which to deal with the very practical problems faced by administrators.
A much more useful concept is Zizek’s (2006) notion of the parallax. Parallax is not to be confused with paradox, which “in the primary and most important meaning, is an apparent contradiction; to repeat, the contradiction is only apparent, and indeed it expresses a profound truth” (Kainz 1998, 12). A parallax, on the other hand occurs when there are opposite but not neces- sarily opposing points of view:
The standard definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an ob- ject (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view. (Zizek 2006, 17) The parallactic shift is not one that allows us to resolve contradictions or point out the unity of seemingly dichotomous positions, but rather one that broadens our view, allowing us to encompass a number of disparate perspec- tives all at once. The parallactic shift, then, does not turn the two sides of a coin inward to face each other; it rotates the coin so that we can see both sides at once, and thus grasp the wider reality.
Hegelian recognition acts as a dialectical mechanism that allows us to move between parallaxes. Hegel’s dialectic will no doubt be familiar to many as the triad of thesis, hypothesis, and synthesis, a formulation that is usually presented as an attempt to provide unity through opposition (Kainz 1998). Despite the fact that Hegel never used this formulation as part of his broader
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