Mutual Recognition and Costly Signalling
January 21, 2021
According to Kant, being an agent is about having reasons for your actions. This is to understand having agency as a matter of being subject to normative assessment, of being the kind of creature that can undertake commitments and possess entitlements. Within Kant’s framework, our rational and moral agency rests ultimately on our possession of autonomy: our capacity as individuals to hold ourselves accountable to norms.
If being an agent requires that one has the capacity to bind oneself to a norm, then this seems to lead to a paradox. If one has the authority to apply a norm to oneself, then one also has the authority to retract it. But if this is so, then in what sense can one ever be truly bound by a norm?1 If the content of the norms to which a will is subject are determined by that same will, then the determination of this content would seem to be inherently unstable. Kantian autonomy—the special kind of authority one has to bind oneself to a determinate norm—is left as metaphysically mysterious in Kant’s system, complemented, on the other side of the equation, by the similarly dangling concept of respect—the responsibility to treat others as ends in themselves.
Hegel responds to the paradox of unmediated authority/responsibility by drawing them into a single apparatus, replacing the Kantian structure of individual autonomy with the dyadic structure of mutual recognition. According to this thought, X is able to understand themselves as subject to normative assessment not through direct (and therefore unstable) application of criteria to themselves, but through their recognition of the authority of another (Y) to apply that criteria to them. Y’s recognition of X, conversely, is their taking X to be subject to normative assessment (a taking implicit in Y’s application of specific normative criteria to X). And vice versa (Brandom, 2019, p. 262).
This dyadic structure of mutual recognition then supplies each with both the mediated authority to hold themselves to normative criteria, and a mediated responsibility to take the other as responsible to the criteria they have taken upon themselves—these are two faces of the same coin. Since no will is wholly responsible for holding itself to account, the problem of instability no longer arises. Within the Hegelian picture, individual, self-conscious agency is downstream of the social structure of dyadic mutual recognition. (And since recognition is a relation between individuals, the self-conscious individual and the social structure of the community to which they belong are mutually constitutive.)
What, then, are the conditions of possibility of mutual recognition? It is not sufficient that X privately recognise Y and Y privately recognise X—both need not only to recognise the other, but also to be aware of the recognition of the other. Genuine mutual recognition thus depends on the possibility of signalling one’s recognition of the other to the other, of an awareness of mutuality that occupies the public space of common knowledge. What is it to signal recognition? To recognise is to take another as (in Kant’s terms) an end in themselves. This is to grant them a certain kind of practical authority, namely to grant their ends the authority to provide reasons for your action. To recognise is to take it that another’s ends can provide you with a reason to act, even though they may conflict with your own. Consider:
You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You could choose a place you both love, or a place that only they love. You choose the place you don’t love, so they will know how much you love them. After all, you didn’t come here for the food.
Only the second option unambiguously signals that you recognise your spouse’s desire as authoritative, i.e. as binding on your action (if you choose the option in which your desires align then it would not be clear that their ends have been recognised as determining reasons). Though contrived, this example shows that the dependence of mutual recognition on the signalling of recognition amounts to a dependency on the possibility of costly signalling.
What, then, are the conditions of possibility of costly signalling? The example also demonstrates how costly signalling can fail. It is impossible to signal costliness with an act that can be plausibly construed as self-serving. Let us imagine a communications medium which systematically rewards the appearance of sacrifice. In such a medium it is impossible to signal cost, because in a certain sense it has become impossible to incur cost (since its the appearance is always rewarded). This touches on an old paradox of Christian morality: if your good works on Earth are no more than a strategic bid for eternal bliss, then they’re not really good works at all. A similar worry arises with regard to the incentivising of moral action in general, via markets or otherwise.2
There’s a typical utilitarian response to this apparent quandary which holds that it doesn’t matter how a good outcome is achieved—if someone increases their own utility by increasing utility overall, then if anything this is even better. But this argument does not respond to what is at stake in the Kantian and Hegelian question, which does not concern particular outcomes but the rather the social constitution of moral agency as such.
Say I find myself in a decision situation with the structure of a prisoner’s dilemma. It is unclear to me or the other player whether the scenario will iterate or not. But this is not simply some information that is unavailable to us—it means something much stronger, namely that at this point there is no fact of the matter whether the situation represents an iterated game or not. If I cooperate I make a costly signal, inviting the other to enter into the situation again in the future. Within a pre-defined situation (whether a one-shot, finite iteration, or indefinite iteration) we can establish a rational basis of action—but this is not the situation. What is at stake in my move is not its degree of rationality within a given game scenario, but the very establishing of the game scenario itself within the space of common knowledge. With a costly signal I help to make it so that the game iterates.
By making moves in the moral language-game, one implicitly makes costly signals by advancing and retracting universal maxims which entail commitments to act in ways which that may later turn out to conflict with one’s desire. The costliness of these signals are undermined if the language-game is embedded within a medium that rewards moral signalling, or fails to maintain a meaningfully accessible account of prior commitments. (For example: a social media platform that amplifies capitalisable visibility based purely on engagement, without distinguishing between different types of engagement, satisfies the first of these. If at the same time it organises content in a fast-moving timeline that massively privileges the present, then it also satisfies the second.)
The general point can be summarised like so. If we follow the Kantian account of agency to its Hegelian conclusions, it implies that the possibility of agency (individual or collective) is sensitive to the reward structures of communications media through which appearances travel. This can perhaps be seen as a version of the Hegelian slogan that “language is the dasein of Geist”—however, it places emphasis on language as a set of nested media governed by various economic forms of exchange (various value-forms, we could say). Through embedding and re-embedding language-games within each other (and in today’s context what this usually means is mediating them with various technical architectures3—see (Baudrillard, 1990, pp. 166-167)) their reward structures are modified by those of the enclosing media. This can happen without their manifest content appearing to change at all (a moral discussion on Twitter will still give every appearance of being a discussion about morals—every intention of being about morals—even while it is being functionally captured by the exchange structure of the platform). The Hegelian point is that these modifications necessarily bottom out in modifications to structures of agency and individual self-consciousness. In this way a direct link can be drawn between Baudrillard’s analysis of the mutations of the value-form of symbolic economies, and the Hegelian analysis of the structure of self-consciousness.
References
- Baudrillard, J. (1990). Seduction (B. Singer, Tran.). St Martin’s Press.
- Brandom, R. (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press.
Notes
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See also Note on the Rule-Following Paradox. ↩
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See also Note on Virtue Signalling. ↩
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“Electronic narcosis: it is the ultimate risk of digital simulation… We would slip from Oedipus to Narcissus… At the end of the self-management of our bodies and pleasures there would be a slow narcissistic narcosis. In a word, with silicon, what happens to the reality principle? I am not saying that the world’s digitalization will soon put an end to Oedipus. I am noting that the development of biology and information technology is accompanied by the dissolution of the personality structure we call Oedipal. The dissolution of these structures uncovers another region, where the father is absent: it has to do with the maternal, the oceanic feeling and the death drive. It is not a neurosis that threatens, but something of the order of a psychosis. A pathological narcissism… We believe that we understand the forms of the social bond built on Oedipus. But when the latter no longer functions, what will power do? After authority, seduction?” McLuhan, quoted by Baudrillard. Here an explicit link is made between digital media and personality structure. The challenge is to articulate how the structure of individual self-consciousness is dependent on the structure of the media which individuals use to communicate with each other. ↩