| I develop Paul Ricoeur's civic translation of the Kantian moral norm through the course of its development in terms of the ethical aim, as it is presented in Oneself as Another (1992) and The Just (2000). By demonstrating the way in which the moral norm owes its imperative structure to a civic recognition of the problem of inequality, I develop Ricoeur's sublimation of the autonomous structure of the categorical imperative in terms of its civic-social structuration. In this way, I seek to develop Ricoeur's argument that the ethical aim is an articulation of the modern welfare or social state's capacity for providing a civic account of itself in terms of the principle of civic inclusion.;Our response to the problem of inequality depends upon our civic capacity to make critical ethical evaluations of our laws and policies as they relate to the socioeconomic facts of human vulnerability, making possible the civic translation of law through practical public deliberation or phronesis. The development of reflexive or social law draws on our historical, political and economic narratives of civic inclusion in the modern welfare state. I argue that it is Hegel who, in the Philosophy of Right (1967), articulates a civic-institutional narrative of right by arguing that moral subjectivity invokes juridification in the knowledge state. The continual development of reflexive law is made possible through civic narratives of the development of inclusive state laws and policies with respect to our least advantaged citizens (Rawls, 1999). Through the principle of civic inclusion we respond to the punitive modes of exclusion from the civic commons which assure individual dignity.;I explicate the civic reflexivity of law in Canadian public and legal policies with respect to our most vulnerable citizens by studying the development of social science knowledge in the Ombudsman Ontario's report on the under funding of residential services for severely disabled children, the Supreme Court of Canada's use of the Oakes Test in determining the ethics of proportionality in punishment, recent debates in Ontario on adequate minimum wages, the future of multiculturalism in Canada and the figuration of comparative models of welfare-state regimes. |
