Resilience as a Normative Ideal: Towards an Ethics of Resilience Discourse

• Main Author: Tan, Jean Emily P
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Applied Ethics; Arts and Humanities; Education; Philosophy; Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/is-faculty-pubs/55; https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003546955-3/resilience-normative-ideal-jean-emily-tan
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This chapter considers whether it is appropriate to recommend resilience as a normative ideal in view of the accusation that resilience is a conservative attitude that promotes acquiescence to unjust and harmful social conditions. It claims that we can affirm the normative value of resilience if resistance were to be included in its concept. The chapter offers such an ameliorative account of resilience in the following stages: first, drawing insights from Doorn, Gardoni, and Murphy's (2019) appropriation of the capabilities approach (as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum) in their conceptualization of resilience and from Paul Ricoeur's (2005) theory of recognition, it claims that the capacity to speak and narrate oneself occupies a key position in cultivating resilience. The cultivation of resilience is a social hermeneutic process that entails enabling the capability of individuals to speak and to resist dominant perspectives. Second, it argues that although it is meaningful to cultivate personal resilience, the primary locus of resilience discourses are societies or communities as a whole, rather than individuals. The chapter concludes that the appropriateness of resilience as a normative ideal is asymmetrical between individuals and communities.