Recognition and Moral Progress: Discourses on Disability in the Media

Abstract

Axel Honneth’s work supports the idea that an increase in both individuality and autonomy should be regarded as a “normative progress.” As Chapter 1 discusses, the three relations of recognition in different spheres are to be seen as normative expectations that safeguard conditions to individual autonomy and self-realization, and such expectations have emerged in the historical passage to modernity. To discuss the notion of moral progress in the theory of recognition, this chapter investigates, through frame analysis, transformations in the portrayal of people with impairment as well as in public discourses on the issue of disability in major Brazilian news media from 1960 to 2008. It addresses three controversies: the notion of progress as a directional process; the problem of moral disagreement and conflict of interest in struggles for recognition; and the processes of social learning.