Abstract

Many contemporary political theories have inadequately addressed the problems of social injustice facing our society today, and have even perpetuated these problems in their explicit or implicit accounts of what it means to be a moral subject. I argue that one requirement for an adequate model of social justice is that it examines ethical conceptions of subjectivity that help address problems of oppression and domination. I critically examine five theories of a just society: John Rawls' Liberalism, Marxism, Anglo-American Feminist Care Ethics, Michel Foucault's Postmodernism, and Charles Taylor's Identity Politics. Out of these five theories, Taylor's identity politics, in virtue of its attention to the problem of the lack of recognition, provides the most promising resources for a theory of social justice, but is still inadequate. The multicultural theory I suggest moves beyond established approaches to social justice by arguing that we need to examine the ethical role of psycho-social values in order to gain a better understanding between the individual and the social, the psychic and the political. By making the cultural and psychological components of subjectivity a central dimension of social justice, a multicultural ethical pedagogy offers us a promising foundation for assessing the worth of human social arrangements and creating spaces of transformative recognition