Dignity, Character and Self-Respect

Robin S. Dillon, Robin S. Dillon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135769918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This is the first anthology to bring together a selection of the most important contemporary philosophical essays on the nature and moral significance of self-respect. Representing a diversity of views, the essays illustrate the complexity of self-respect and explore its connections to such topics as personhood, dignity, rights, character, autonomy, integrity, identity, shame, justice, oppression and empowerment. The book demonstrates that self-respect is a formidable concern which goes to the very heart of both moral theory and moral life. Contributors: Bernard Boxill, Stephen L. Darwall, John Deigh, Robin S. Dillon, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Aurel Kolnai, Stephen J. Massey, Diana T. Meyers, Michelle M. Moody-Adams, John Rawls, Gabriele Taylor, Elizabeth Telfer, Laurence L. Thomas.

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Introduction

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Robin S. Dillon

I

Self-respect is undeniably something of great value. Perhaps those who lack it know this best: to lose respect for oneself and then struggle to regain it, to be robbed of one's dignity and to try to live without it, to have to fight to maintain a sense of one's worth in a world that denies it, to find that one's self-respect is so fragile that even the most ordinary events threaten to topple it—to live like this is to be painfully aware that a strong and confident self-respect is vital to the ability to live a satisfying, meaningful, flourishing life. How very much it matters that we respect ourselves, and what happens when we cannot, is also a common theme in literature. In the great tragedies and epic poems, for example, the hero who dishonors himself in his own eyes suffers a fate worse than death with the loss of his self-respect. In contemporary dramas, such as O'Neill's The Ice Man Cometh and Miller's Death of a Salesman, characters who have lost all respect for themselves and all possibility of regaining it drive inexorably toward social, spiritual, and physical suicide. The journey in the opposite direction, from degradation and abject despair to a robust sense of worth, is described in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, where the development of self-respect marks, for Malcolm and Celie, the passage from merely surviving to richly living and brings with it love and respect for others. And as Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz makes clear, where survival itself is at stake, as it was for prisoners in the Nazi death camps, the struggle to maintain self-respect under conditions designed to obliterate human dignity is essential to surviving in any meaningful sense.

One thing made obvious by these works is that the significance of self-respect is not chiefly a matter of an individual's psychological health; it is something of profound moral importance, as philosophers have long recognized. Aristotle, Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche: all have had something to say about what is variously called “magnanimity,” “proper pride,” “self-esteem,” “a sense of dignity.”¹ ‘It was Kant, however, who first made the concept of self-respect a central topic in moral philosophy, and it continues to play an important role in contemporary ethical theory, to a great extent because of the attention given the concept in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.² In contemporary moral philosophy the concept turns up in a variety of contexts: in theories of rights and justice, in accounts of virtue and character, in discussions of agency and autonomy, in explanations of moral reasoning, moral motivation, and moral development, in explorations in moral psychology, in applied ethics contexts. In addition, concerns raised by people outside the academy about self-respect in connection with current political movements are reflected within philosophy in feminist theory, gay and lesbian theory, and discussions of racism.

Despite its prominence in moral philosophy, however, there is a difficulty: although philosophers and nonphilosophers alike would agree that respecting oneself is important, it is simply not clear what self-respect is, let alone why it matters. Indeed, there is more controversy than consensus about its nature and value, no general agreement concerning necessary and sufficient conditions for self-respect or its relation to other goods or concepts. And there is good reason for the absence of settled opinion about something so widely regarded as morally quite important. For what makes self-respect a theoretically useful concept is also what makes it hard to pin down: it is embedded in a nexus of such profound and profoundly problematic concepts as personhood, rights, equality, justice, agency, autonomy, character, integrity, identity, and the good life. Explaining self-respect thus raises many of the central issues in moral philosophy. And insofar as whether one respects oneself or not has everything to do with both how one lives with others and how one lives with oneself, thinking about self-respect takes us not only to the core of moral theory but also to the heart of moral life. The nature and importance of self-respect thus calls for sustained and focused treatment. Hence this volume, which brings together for the first time a number of the most significant and influential contemporary essays on self-respect. Together these essays show this to be a topic of formidable philosophical concern worthy of further exploration, and they provide an invaluable foundation for that venture. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to set the context for these essays: to locate the contemporary discussions of self-respect within the domain of moral philosophy, identify the issues and questions with which they have been concerned, survey some of the historical background of contemporary analyses, and attend systematically to some of the main themes.

II

Contemporary philosophers have approached self-respect with a variety of interests. Some have been chiefly concerned to better understand its nature and importance.³ Others have taken up the concept in the course of exploring subjects such as moral standards;⁴ intersubjective value;⁵ moral relativity;⁶ rights;⁷ equality;⁸ moral motivation and moral reasoning;⁹ egoism:¹⁰ personal morality;¹¹ virtue;¹² integrity;¹³ autonomy;¹⁴ selfdeception;¹⁵ self-trust;¹⁶ self-sacrifice;¹⁷ forgiveness;¹⁸ emotions in general;’¹⁹ particular emotions such as shame, embarrassment, pride, resentment, and indignation;²⁰ and the nature of a flourishing human life.²¹ Numerous discussions of self-respect have been generated by Rawls's invocation of the concept in A Theory of Justice, explicating, criticizing, or developing his account.²² Rawls had utilized the concept in assessing the justice of social institutions; since then, there have been many explorations of the effects of injustice and inequality on self-respect,²³ and discussions of it in the context of oppression and liberation with regard to race, sex, class, and sexual orientation.²⁴ Philosophers have also found it worthwhile to examine self-respect in the course of dealing with a variety of other issues in applied ethics, such as health care,²⁵ educational policy,²⁶ business ethics,²⁷ workplace ethics,²⁸ and what Mike Martin calls “everyday morality.”²⁹

The questions raised by these wide-ranging discussions are, as one might expect, many and varied, and some of the most significant ones have yet to be systematically addressed. A survey of the questions, which tend to fall into five broad areas of concern, gives a sense of the richness of the concept and the investigations of it.³⁰

The Analysis of Self-Respect

What kind of a thing is self-respect?

Is self-respect a grounded phenomenon? If so, what are its grounds?

Is self-respect an objective or subjective concept? That is, are there objective conditions—for example, moral standards or correct judgment—that a person must meet in order correctly to be said to have self-respect, or is self-respect a psychological phenomenon that gains support from any sort of self-valuing, without regard to correctness or moral acceptability?

Is the concept a substantive or a formal one? That is, is there fairly specific content to the concept of self-respect, as there is to the concept of generosity, or is it less determinate, like the concept of integrity?

Does respecting oneself conceptually require or entail the respect of others?

Is the concept of self-respect invariant across different cultural and historical contexts?

Is self-respect a unified phenomenon, or are there different kinds of it? If the latter, is there a core notion of self-respect?

The Phenomenology of Self Respect

What is it like to respect oneself or to live in a self-respecting fashion? What is it like to lack or lose self-respect or suffer blows to it, or to have diminished or insecure self-respect? Could self-respecting individuals be unconcerned about whether they respect themselves?

What features of an individual's psychology and experience engender and support self-respect? What features undermine or destroy it?

How is self-respect like and unlike respect for others?

Is self-respect important to anyone who has it? Is it of greater value to certain sorts of individuals or in certain contexts?

How does self-respect involve and affect a person's identity (who and what she is), her self-identity (who and what she takes herself to be), and her “self-ideal” (who and what she thinks she ought to be)? How does it affect who and what she becomes?

Moral Dimensions of Self Respect

Why and how does self-respect matter morally?

How does it connect with one's values, aims, commitments, and projects, including the moral ones?

Is self-respect something that everyone is morally justified in having, or is it something that only morally good people deserve? Do we have a moral duty to respect ourselves?

What is the relation between self-respect and moral rights?

How is self-respect related to moral virtue(s)?

What is the connection between self-respect and autonomy? Between self-respect and integrity?

What is its role in moral deliberation and motivation? How is it implicated in moral development?

Social Dimensions of Self Respect

What are the interpersonal dimensions of self-respect? What modes of interaction with others support or undermine it? Is respect for oneself reflection of the respect (or something else) of others, or could it be wholly independent of, even opposed to, others’ reactions? Must one believe the grounds of one's self-respect to be something that others value?

How are dimensions of public life, such as rights, the distribution of social goods, and membership or participation in social groups and activities relevant to self-respect? How do social norms, practices, policies, and the structure and functioning of social institutions affect it? Is the justice of such things to be assessed (at least in part) by how they affect self-respect? What does justice require in this regard?

Politics and Self Respect

How does oppression of various kinds, including institutionalized racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism, affect the ability of members of oppressed groups to develop and maintain self-respect? Do considerations of self-respect help to clarify what is morally wrong with oppression?

How can we understand self-respect in contexts of oppression so as not to regard as unproblematic the self-valuing of individuals whose understanding of and attitudes toward themselves, their circumstances, and their relations to others may be distorted by oppression?

What factors engender and sustain unproblematic self-respect in contexts of oppression? What responses to oppression or injustice are self-respecting?

How is self-respect relevant to liberation from oppression?

What is politically required to ensure widespread unproblematic self-respect?

III

In her essay included in this volume, Elizabeth Telfer notes that the first question that must be addressed concerning self-respect is: What is it? One surprising aspect of the contemporary discussions is how many different starting-from-scratch analyses there are; another is the significant overlap between accounts of self-respect, on the one hand, and accounts of ostensibly different concepts, such as pride, dignity, and honor, on the other. Reading these accounts, one may have the sense that the same phenomenon is being called by different names and different phenomena by the same name. One way to start making sense of all this is to identify the conceptual family to which self-respect belongs. This approach is especially helpful in identifying discussions in which self-respect makes its appearance incognito, as well as discussions of related concepts that may shed light on self-respect.

To begin the genealogy, self-respect is clearly the conceptual offspring of respect; indeed, “self-respect” is often defined simply as “due respect for oneself.” Thus, one strategy for understanding self-respect is explicitly to derive an account of it from a wider analysis of respect. Although most accounts do not employ this strategy, most do test conclusions about self-respect against what it would make sense to say about respect, maintaining, for example, that it is reasonable to respect oneself for x because it would be reasonable to respect someone else for x.³¹

The link to respect identifies further conceptual kin: honor, esteem, and regard, for these are regarded as synonymous with respect. So it is common to identify self-respect with self-esteem, self-regard, and (perhaps less common in contemporary America) with a sense of honor. Antonymous concepts include those in the neighborhood of dishonor, contempt, disregard, and devaluation.

What connects respect, honor, esteem, and regard is their common concern with worth. Regard is the recognition of the worth of an object, esteem the appraisal of the worth, honor the reward for great worth. And the notion of a sense of worth is a common element in contemporary discussions of self-respect; indeed, it is generally regarded as the core of self-respect, if not the whole of it. The Latin for “worth” gives us another conceptual relative: dignity, and thereby a sense of dignity. Conceptual contraries include worthlessness and a sense of worthlessness, ignominy, indignity, humiliation.

Another important member of this family is pride. This is a particularly useful concept, inasmuch as it provides some clues for distinguishing self-respect and self-esteem. Self-respect is treated as synonymous with pride insofar as they both concern “a sense of one's own proper dignity” or “a proper sense of personal dignity and worth,” whereas self-esteem (a favorable opinion of oneself) tends to be identified with pride when it is “overweening” or “inordinate.”³² Contraries here include shame, humility, and self-effacement, as well as arrogance, vanity, and self-conceit.

Respect, esteem, regard, honor; dignity, worth; self-esteem, pride—locating self-respect within this family of concepts is, of course, only a first step toward understanding it,...