Why it matters: Recognition was reclaimed through annotation, discretion and structural revision. The record began to reflect lived reality.
The Ethics of Being Recognised Within Ethics One proposes that recognition is not just a social act, it is an ethical one. To be recognised is to be acknowledged as a subject of moral concern, not merely a case, a category or a datapoint. Within ethics, recognition marks the boundary between abstraction and encounter. It is what allows judgment to be relational.
Yet recognition is often withheld. In many institutional settings, ethical frameworks are applied without recognising the person to whom they apply. Policy is cited, Risk is assessed, Procedure is followed, but the subject remains unseen. The author names this as ethical misrecognition; when moral language is used without moral presence.
To be recognised within ethics is to be met it is to be heard in one’s own terms, not reduced to system logic. It is to have one’s testimony held, one’s context considered and one’s agency respected. This does not mean agreement, it means encounter.
One notes that many ethical failures are not failures of principle, but failures of recognition. A triage system may follow guidelines, but ignore the patient’s fear. A grading algorithm may apply fairness, but erase the student’s effort. A safeguarding protocol may protect risk, but silence the survivor’s voice. These are not technical errors, they are ethical absences.
Recognition reclaimed is not a correction, it is a civic act. It occurs when someone refuses to let the system define worth through metrics alone and instead restores presence through testimony, discretion and relational judgment. Whether it’s a housing officer annotating an application to reflect informal care, a clinician revising triage to honour neurodivergent expression, or a teacher submitting contextual evidence to contest algorithmic grading, each act of recognition reclaims the right to be seen. These are not exceptions. They are thresholds. They show that recognition is not passive; it must be practiced, protected and made visible in the record.
Example 1: Recognising Informal Care in Housing Applications Context: A council housing system did not account for informal caregiving, excluding applicants who supported elderly or disabled family members without formal registration. Repair Action: A housing officer manually annotated applications with caregiving context. The council introduced a discretionary field: “Unregistered care responsibilities.” Staff were trained to recognise relational dependency as a housing factor. Impact: Applicants previously excluded were reassessed. The system’s scoring model was updated to include informal care.
Families reported feeling “seen” for the first time.
