Adalet ve Ahlâki Benlik

Year 2023, Volume: 13 Issue: 1, 345 - 371, 28.03.2023

Muhammed A. Ağcan

Abstract

Adalet, son yıllarda siyaset teorisi alanında kamusal yaşamın ve siyasal kurum, uygulama ve süreçlerin meşruiyet soruşturması için sıklıkla başvurulan temel bir anlayış olarak belirmiştir. Adaletin bu normatif düzenleyiciliği, bir ahlaki açıklamayla desteklenmeyi ve ahlaki benlik anlayışıyla ilişkilendirerek temellendirmeyi gerektirmektedir. Makale, bu sorunu sırasıyla John Rawls’ın dağıtım ve Axel Honneth’in tanınma temelli adalet teorisine odaklanarak ele almaktadır. Rawls’ın liberal demokratik toplumlardaki ahlakiyatın bir tür sosyal sözleşmeci perspektifle biçimsel ve genel ifadesi gördüğü hakkaniyet olarak adalet teorisi, ahlaki benliğin oluşumunu ve öznenin adalete normatif olarak bağlanışını açıklamakla doğrudan ilgilenmez. Honneth ise adaleti tanınma teorisi aracılığıyla iyi fikri ve özerklik anlayışı ile ilişkilendirmekle böyle bir ilgiyi gösterirken iyi ile adalet ilişkisinin belirli bir kültürel-kurumsal yorumunu sunmaktadır. Makale, her iki düşünürün siyasal adalet teorilerinin kendine özgü sınırlılıklarını özerk benlik kavrayışına bağlamakta; ahlakı, benliğin tam ve kendiliğinden özerkliği olarak kavrayan bu öncülün, adaletin ahlaki temellendirmesi açısından içerdiği sorunları tespit etmektedir. Ayrıca ahlaki benliğin bağlanma temelli yorumunun adaletin normatif ve eleştirel kavramsallaştırmasına katkısını gündeme taşımaktadır.

Keywords

Adalet, siyaset teorisi, John Rawls, Axel Honneth, dağıtım, tanınma, özne, özerklik, ahlaki benlik.

Justice and the Moral Self

Abstract

Justice has been increasingly used as the main category in the discipline of political theory to investigate the normative foundation of public life and the legitimacy of political institutions, practices and processes recent years. The normative authority of political justice requires moral justification and groundwork for its connnection with the moral self. This article will discuss this problem of moral justification of political justice by focusing on John Rawls’ distributive and Axel Honneth’s recognitive theories of justice. Rawls’ justice as fairness, which expresses the moral background culture of liberal-democratic societies as abstract, universal and formal principles through reinterpretating the model of social contract, is not specifically concerned with the constitution of moral self and how political subjects are normatively related themselves with an idea of justice. Honneth does indeed give special attention to this moral dimension of justice by linking justice with the ideas of the good and autonomy through the theory of recognition. However his cultural-institutional interpretation of the good and justice is burdened with its own particularity, parochialism and limits. The current article argues that the limits and tensions of both theories of justice originate in taking the autonomous self as the premise for their ideas on morality, justice and subjectivity. The article also argues that this premise of autonomous self should be overcome in order to understand the constitution of moral self and its significance for developing an idea of political justice as a normative and critical understanding of public and political life.

Keywords

Justice, political theory, John Rawls, Axel Honneth, distribution, recognition, subjectivity, autonomy, moral self.

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