The justifications that are offered for education are invariably too vague to stand as decision-making principles – or to hold individuals and institutions accountable. Expanding on the idea that education needs to be justified by the worth of the person forces us to remarkable conclusions This chapter explains the structure of “respect for persons”; the true value of a human life that should be our basic justification in politics, justice and education. We need to understand this structure of the ways in which we view the intrinsic value of human beings if we are ever to understand the problems of education and good living, of democracy, or of doing people justice.
When I started out as a teacher, and wanted to find the justification behind the schooling system that I worked in, I found nothing but vagueness. Where the purposes were discussed, there was a huge gap between the abstractions and the generalities that just didn’t seem to lead to the things we were trying to do, and it was questions about those things that had led me to seek for a larger, underlying explanation. What was the proper justification for education?
When I later turned to academia and philosophy, I found justifications that seemed idiosyncratic or theoretically peculiar, such as Richard Peters’s “transcendental argument”, or ideas of “growth”, or ideas of freedom that were vague about the nature and purpose of freedom and collapsed too readily into advocacies of near chaos.
Why, I wondered, didn’t our justification for education simply flow from values that were recognizable as core ethical values in the West – such as human worth itself? Ideas that could not only be seen to be underpinning the dominant ethical theories, and that made sense of such things as our constitutional arrangements and widespread appeals to fundamental freedoms and rights, but that had also become intuitive in everyday life when we discuss right and wrong? I could not find any such thing.
How could that be? Did it mean that there was something peculiar about our deep ethical values that meant that they could not generate a whole view of education? That would seem to suggest that they were fundamentally flawed. Or perhaps there was something peculiar about the process of education itself, which meant that our fundamental values don’t really apply to it.
To the best of my knowledge (and I have looked hard), nobody has ever really attempted to spell out the educational implications of our core values. To the best of my knowledge too, this work of mine is the only attempt, and if you keep with me as I work through it, I think that you will agree that the implications of expanding on the justification of education in humane terms are very, very big.
Indeed they are a huge challenge to so much that we take for granted, and do much to explain why our core values are not nearly as effective in all of our lives as most of us would like them to be. It is not just that our education needs to be justified by our core values; it is also that our core values need to be sustained by our education.
One obvious benefit from appealing to these core values is the depth and breadth of agreement that we should be able to reach and that can serve to ground our educational principles, bringing most people on board. I looked, therefore, for some simple ethical principle that seemed to capture the strongest of our moral sensitivities, developed and used in the West at least since the European Enlightenment. It seemed to me that it was best summed up in the idea of “respect”; that all human beings are of equal intrinsic worth, and should be treated accordingly.
All persons should be respected equally
This is sometimes stated as “Respect for Persons”. All persons are to be respected equally. That is, they are to be treated with equal respect, not just face-to-face, but in all of our arrangements, rules, procedures, joint undertakings and ventures together. Their best interests are to be taken into account equally. It should be constitutional. This respect has to govern and be expressed in our conduct and our decision-making, if these things are to be ethical.
We fail often enough, of course. People allow other desires and agendas to overwhelm respect. But when this happens, a range of negative reactions are likely to result – ranging from anger and a sense of injustice, to failures to flourish through frustration, and even in the breaking of the human spirit. We should expect a good morality to generate such moral feelings in the event of moral lapse, just as we should expect it to indicate what we should do. A morality should be designed to bring out the better people in us, and arm ourselves against the worse.
When it comes to human beings working out their lives together, seeking agreements together, making contracts together and following through with them, this is the ethical principle that makes it possible. If we can depend upon each of us holding this value, and doing so consistently, then we can trust each other. Depending on that, and each of us being willing to do that, means that we can address problems when they arise – when our contracts and agreements run into trouble, including very serious ones. This principle makes fairness possible, good dealing and justice.
The equality of the respect is crucial here. This isn’t the sort of respect that we might have for someone because they are a high performer or achiever in some activity. That sort of respect is respect for a particular difference that sets them apart from other people – what they are capable of or what they can do, and sometimes comes out when they are people we should fear – when they could be a danger to us. Any zoo keeper who doesn’t respect the lions is asking for trouble. The same with the leader of the drug cartel, or the slightly deranged gun owner. We also respect people for their skills. “Well, if she can’t do it, nobody can.” We respect the winning team when we come up against it.
But here, when we speak of the equality of respect, we are talking instead of a kind of respect that all human beings should have for each other just because they are human beings, and not because of some quality or ability they possess – or who they are or who they know. It is the respect that puts all of us on equal moral terms.
One of the key implications of equal respect is that we owe it to each other regardless of the differences in our views about what should give life meaning, or purpose, or dignity, or satisfaction. Respect does set limits to the possibilities of the Good Life, however, and to some extent regulates its realization. If we embrace this principle of equal respect, then two things follow from it when it comes to defining what a good human being is.
The first of these is that a good human being is one who holds to, and exemplifies the principle of respect in their thought, their attitudes and their conduct. The principle helps us to see what should be considered a vice and what should be considered a virtue. Arrogance, for instance, is a vice because our sense of self overrides our respect for others. Deceptiveness and manipulativeness are also vices, because they involve taking advantage of people.
The effort we might make to understand another person is a virtue. Making sure that their interests count equally with our own in any decision that we make that affects us both is another. Our effort to understand ourselves is a virtue too. It helps us to do ourselves justice, and also to work to minimize inclinations that may do each other harm. Being able to work out our own lives well is yet another. The value of generosity, humility, honesty, and trustworthiness can all flow from the principle of respect.
The second point that this idea of equal respect has for the idea of a good person is the emphasis that it places on independence, self-determination and responsibility. The good of a person’s life is something that they have to determine and seek for themselves, and take responsibility for. This is different, for instance, from the idea of a good specimen of a horse, or a dog, where we might judge it in the excellence of its conformation and the fineness of its nature. There are dogs that are clumsy weaklings and there are mean-spirited horses, and there are also men and women who are good physical specimens, or have nasty dispositions.
But with people, we have a lot more to say about their quality when we discuss whether they are living their lives well – living good lives, and we prioritize this. So much depends upon their developed point of view, and the decisions that they make. Not so with dogs and horses. The attention that we give to our lives; what we make of them, how we go about living them, and what we do with them, is the better part of what makes up a good human being. This is because this attention is an expression of the value that we place on that life of ours, its intrinsic human worth.
The decisions that people make about how they should live are at the centre of what we must respect in each other. The making of such decisions is at the core of what it means to be a mature member of the species. Respect prohibits us from deciding for others what they should do with their lives, or how to make their lives meaningful, just as they may not take over our decision-making either.
There are exceptions, of course, when decision-making becomes extremely impaired, or is insufficiently developed, and people become dependent on others. When we intervene, and start making decisions on their behalf, we try to guess, from our knowledge of their lives, what they would have wanted, and we favour decisions that might help them to assume responsibility if there is any chance of their independence returning.
We employ tests of their ability. We arrange wills, dependent upon them being “of sound mind”, and powers of attorney when they are still capable – and sometimes, with much more difficulty, when they aren’t. Where we consider such intervention we are obliged to make these judgments with extreme caution, however. Any chance that there might be some recovery, and that there is any potential that their authority might return hangs over every decision that we make. We aren’t free to follow our own predilections. It shouldn’t be about what we want.
Our care of children is obviously an important example. Initially we have to make all decisions for them. Gradually, we allow and encourage their own decision-making, reserving our paternalism for choices that we judge are beyond their maturity, particularly in matters of health and safety. But eventually our paternalism must give way to their independent responsibility, because their trajectory into an adulthood of equal independence is generally assumed.
That this is the usual and predictable course of their development – that their entitlement to our respect includes the prospect of their self-determination – means that we must always have exercised our paternalistic decisions-making with a view to the growing and eventual independence to which they have a right as equally worthwhile human beings. And this rule of the exercise of paternalism applies to any other circumstance or stage of life as well; that it must be exercised with a view to the possibility of the development or recovery of the dependent person’s independent powers. Only in desperate end-of-life situations do we seem to allow for departures from this rule.
The priority of mind in respect
All persons are to be respected equally; they are of equal intrinsic value. Each of us, as a person, has that same intrinsic value, and we have it irrespective of our age, our status, our employment or unemployment, our families, our gender or ethnicity, our talents or abilities.
At a first level, this valuing of people’s intrinsic worth is expressed in our efforts simply to survive, and to help others to survive. Beyond sheer survival, we want our bodies to flourish. We want good health – vigour and vitality and the development of physical capacities because of the way they underpin any chance we have of living well. We want these things for each other too, and get anxious, upset, dismayed when they fail to flourish, or suffer damage.
Beyond the human body, though, and more importantly, are considerations of the human mind. The capacities for feeling and emotion, for language and thought are the bridge between the concept of the human being and the concept of the person. Kant defined the person as a “rational being”, but without needing to reduce personhood to “rationality”, and starting to worry about what that might involve, we can at least note the distinctive contribution of personhood in terms of the capacity that a person has to define their own good.
What we can say and do, morally, about animals that are not persons is much more limited because we can gain little access to a conception of their good that is their own. Once we become able to do this, the potential for moral discussion and action is utterly changed. We begin to be able to say so much more about flourishing, about what there is that we should respect, and what we might do to respect it.
Other things equal, we respect the fact that a person’s conception of the good can even override concerns about harm to their bodies, We seem morally obliged to accept such decisions because we give priority to their mental life.
They can, for instance, choose to enter life-threatening situations – to nurse in an ebola crisis, to put themselves in harm’s way as a part of the military or as “first-responders”. They may even risk themselves in extreme sport. They may have passions and purposes in life that become seriously challenged or threatened, and we often respect their decisions to cling to that spark of purpose, to keep it alive, at the expense of their health.
They may have causes, lovers and friends that they are willing to sacrifice for, to die for – and we, though we may not see the point in any of them, we must, in the end, give way, once our reasonable warnings and reasonable opportunities to give advice have run their course. There is a point beyond which we must not interfere, and a simple warning from the other person should be enough to stop us.
In prioritizing the mental over the physical, we increasingly allow people to develop “living wills”, and to set rules for end-of-life treatments. If, near the end of life, they develop a serious illness, do they want it treated? If there is a medical emergency, do they want to be resuscitated? We do give priority to the mental over the physical in the determination of a person’s good, and in this we prioritize their self-determination.
If we have any sensitivity to the social world at all, most of us are aware of the huge diversity that exists in what people consider to be reasonable pursuits, pastimes, causes, commitments and ways of organizing their lives. We recognize that people will differ, with good reason, simply because of their experiences, and of the opportunities that they have had to make something of them. We recognize that each of us has a unique experiential history, and that groups and cultures differ in ways that structure these histories differently.
We also recognize, I think, that all of these histories usually involve inevitable “baggage” – emotional and intellectual tics, inabilities, blind spots, anxieties and fears that warp and distort our best judgments about our lives and what we do with them, and that if we used these “irrationalities” as grounds to take over anyone else’s decision-making, we would all be in trouble.
All of such considerations offer us a huge warning about interfering in another person’s life “because they are unreasonable”. All of us can see, in the lives of others, decisions, practices and commitments that seem pointless or misguided. Large numbers of people see ours in just the same way.
Because of considerations like these, respect errs on the side of assuming that people “know what they are doing”, that it is “their decision to make” and even that “they must make their own mistakes”. Giving them this freedom is a part of what “respect” means, no matter how sure we are that they have made the wrong decisions, or that the reasons they give are poor.
In the name of respect, we often find ourselves having to accept other people’s silly or unwise decisions about their lives, even when we love them, and even knowing that they will do so much harm to themselves and that the decisions will do much to destroy that flourishing, the very worth that the respect is supposed to preserve. This seems absurd, contradictory, until we notice just how important self-determination is in this process of respecting the person.
The acknowledgement of the importance of the mental life that comes with the person, and that the locus of intrinsic worth lies firstly in their capacity to possess a conception of their own good that is their own, forces us to accept their decisions about their lives, even if we feel they are badly made. There is nothing surprising here. All persons are to be respected equally.
We ask no less for ourselves. We don’t take kindly, either, to the idea of people interfering in our lives because they don’t like our reasons. We may be wise to hear them out. In the end, though, the mistake is ours to make.
This does not mean that the quality of the thought, the quality of the intelligent consideration that goes into the development of anyone’s conception of their good or their choices in life does not matter. Clearly, the quality of the decisions is central to the possibility that the life will be lived well, that it will be purposeful, meaningful and satisfying. This is why our duty to respect others must include a concern for the educational possibilities and opportunities that are open to them.
We are conscious of this on every hand. People enter on unsatisfying careers naively. They have children with little awareness of the impact that the duties of parenting will have on them – when they are even too immature to assume such duties. They enter into relationships for the wrong reasons and destroy good ones through stupidity. They destroy their health with bad food, and they make unwise investments. They smoke, or abuse drugs. When they make all these decisions that they are freely entitled to make, however, it is invariably too late, developmentally, for us to interfere even if it seems clear that we can fault their reasoning.
The only way we can legitimately address the issue of the quality of the decision-making is through their education. What we can do, firstly, is exercise educational responsibility during the early periods of life when they are dependent on our care. Indeed, educational responsibility governs the duty of care, specifying what we must and may not do, particularly for the development of their minds.
The educational responsibility, must, in turn, be guided by the requirement of independence and respect that they will be entitled to as adults. They will, as adults, have to decide their own good life for themselves, and make their own decisions, and they will do so as our equals, their decisions deserving just the same respect that we expect for our own.
When they are young, vulnerable and dependent we may not, then, pre-empt their decision-making ability or incapacitate their later independence to decide their own good in violation of a reasonable adult expectation of independence and responsibility; the adult freedom to decide. Instead, we must bring them up equipped to problem-solve issues of the good, and trouble-shoot decisions of life for themselves, without anticipating the correctness of their ultimate conclusions when the time comes.
Too often, unfortunately, we misuse this early period of intellectual and emotional dependency to try and stop them from making the decisions later on that they would otherwise be freely entitled to make as adults, and our moral equals. We do this when they are young because if we tried to stop them later, we would be prevented from doing so by the very respect that they would rightly and vigorously be able to demand. Two of the most blatant areas in which we do this are the political and the religious.
When we do this, though, we are saying that they are unworthy of full respect. We are circumventing it. We are denying them the humanity to which they are entitled, and arrogantly privileging our own judgment. The confidence in our own judgments, and the fear of the weakness of theirs, leads us to deny them the powers of judgment that we are assuming to ourselves. We do this instead of equipping them to choose well, which is the only legitimate thing that we can do.
We can, of course, use our caregiving to delay decisions that we have reason to believe that they are yet too immature to make, and there is a wisdom here to the way in which we set the attainment of “maturity” in terms of crude age-limits. We need to set somewhat arbitrary limits because free and independent adults are nevertheless free to make decisions that many others might consider “immature”. Without some firmly drawn age-line, we might be inclined to protract their dependency endlessly until we are satisfied that they are displaying the sort of reasonableness that we take for granted in ourselves.
Such a time might never come, of course, and the confidence in our own reason may be misplaced. Age limits should force us to be aware, in our caregiving, of the impending inevitability of the point at which we will have to treat them as equals whatever we think of their decisions, and this should heighten the importance and urgency of our role in cultivating their ability to take responsibility and to think things through for themselves; to learn from their own mistakes under conditions of relative safety.
The second thing that we can do to help ensure that decisions of life are wisely made is to secure conditions of good thought and decision-making throughout the culture at large, so that it is encouraged and facilitated everywhere, and not just left up to caregivers, or be available only to the young. A culture that doesn’t do this, that leaves the rest of the social world to the free reign of manipulation and coercion would always expect too much of families and caregivers in any case.
To fail to build a society that models good reasoning and respects the minds of all of its people, rather than being contemptuous of them, is to fail to confront the ways in which reason can be corrupted and manipulated, still, throughout adult life. We need to continue to be acutely aware that minds that are supposed to be independent and self-determining can be discouraged or even manipulated and prayed upon, and concerned as well to support the ways that independence and self-determination can be empowered and enabled to flourish.
The good reason of caregivers themselves needs widespread cultural support, as does the reason of every person who eventually crosses that arbitrary line, after which they are supposed to be independent and self-determining throughout the rest of the life-span. Reasoning about life, and even learning to reason about life, is life-long. Good, respectful, critical thought and discussion need to be freely modelled and encouraged on every hand, and processes that thwart, coerce, distort or circumvent good reasoning processes, or discourage it with contempt need to be readily exposed and held up to the light so that they lose their force. These need to be social expectations, and our institutions and public processes need to be designed, maintained and held to account to enable those expectations to be met. At the same time these continuing conditions must be free of any trace of the paternalism that is justified for the dependent young.
We should do this so that good capacities of thought and decision can be refreshed and enhanced through all the changing circumstances that will occur through our life-times. We should also do this so that people who may have had a poor start may be able to seek out second, third, fourth or more chances to gain better mastery over their lives. Valuing ourselves is not a once and for all affair.
We need to do this because the development of good qualities of thought and decision are never complete, because novelty can always impose demands on our reasoning that we are ill-equipped to meet, and because our abilities to judge well can wither through misuse, or be corroded by the injustice and social pressures that will continue to surround us. We should also do this to display our deep cultural commitment both to good processes of thought, and to respect – our self-respect, and our respect for others.
Our modern burden of self-determination
When we look at all the ways in which people, through being ill-equipped, or through self-deception or indifference, can make a mess of their decisions about their good, we might begin to wonder once again if history has landed us in the best way of respecting that human value at all. Other cultures have long settled these questions by tradition and the authority of the wise. Might not there be better ways than self-determination, with all its risks?
There is a particular history behind these judgments in the West, the experience of a lesson that is, I think, universal. We will be looking at that story in greater detail in Part 5 of this book, but we also do need at least a glimpse of it here.
The culture of the West began in the ancient Mediterranean world. It was a world of radical religious and cultural diversity out of which a single religion, Christianity, came to dominate in Europe. The ancient world also laid the foundations of science, and Western philosophy, particularly politics, ethics and social philosophy.
There was a cultural as well as a religious convergence in the European West, with regional variations, but much in common across the whole as a result of repeated internal conquests and trade, plus the lingering Roman influence of Latin as a universal language for scholarship, law and diplomacy. In the European West, this convergence of culture and religion meant that the question of how to live a good life was pretty much settled by historical tradition and convention, by social and political structure, and by a common religious authority.
Europe became very powerful. It colonised and dominated the greater part of the globe. But even as it did so, its religious unity blew apart in irreconcilable religious strife. That challenged the unquestioning acceptance of the prevailing understanding of the good life and the authority on which it depended. But Europe clung, as long as it could, to a tapestry of cultural solutions to the good life grounded in one’s “place” in society, determined by social class and birth, even though the religious authority that had been used to justify these arrangements had been weakened.
It may be hard to remember how the niceties of social convention provided a whole fabric for behaviour that settled the better part of good living – how the table should be set and the complex cutlery used, what one should wear on this or that occasion. When you might be bareheaded, and when you should remove your hat. How you should address people, whom you should not marry, and the conditions under which you were obliged to. When you should reproduce, when you should be seen at church, and what sorts of entertainments were appropriate for people of your class.
There was no sharp line between these things and moral behaviour; often no line at all, and this is, in itself, an indication of how things like etiquette and good manners were so encompassing and took over the part of morality that is the larger part of self-respect, shaping what made up good living. Doing the honourable thing, behaving like a lady or gentleman, and avoiding disgrace removed a good deal from the realm of decision. Patterns of life were largely ready-made.
Eventually, however, colonization and the emerging ability to break out of social class chains by acquiring mercantile or industrial wealth undermined the rigidity of social class convention. As people shifted their social position, they broke with traditional forms in which they had grown up, and had less investment in the peculiar conventions of the new groups they entered, sometimes viewing them with quiet scorn.
Finally, colonization and world trade brought many other cultures in, back into the European cosmopolitan centres, and the fixed structures of good living crumbled. The increasing ease of travel, even within a generation or two, and the changing ideals from nobility to celebrity and wealth – the models of behaviour – helped transform the issues of what it is now to live well. The West has become global and no longer European. It is religiously and culturally plural, diverse, and depends upon the responsibility of making up our own minds.
In this West, self-respect can no longer be achieved simply by living the lives that the authorities, neither secular nor religious, nor the authority of tradition and convention would seem to decide for us. Each of us is expected to take responsibility for our own beliefs and actions; for our choices over our own good. As developing technologies and infrastructures have meant that we live and move more and more interdependently among different peoples, the potential for conflict over difference has increased until conflicts over how to live have come to be recognised as the greatest sources of civil unrest, and even of the wars between whole peoples.
Competition among vehemently held conceptions of good living bring with them insoluble problems of conflicting authority and tradition. The only solution for any chance of sustained civil peace has been for each of us to decide these questions for ourselves, and to grant the same right to everyone else.
Thus when we respect each other’s religious or political convictions, or even choice of pastime, we do not need to be respecting the religious, or political (or recreational) authority that each may claim that their allegiances depend upon. Instead, we take each other to be responsible for settling our own questions of authority.
We must respect each other as the authors of our own lives. We respect the authority of each other’s personal convictions and decisions because they are their convictions and decisions, or ours, and we are each responsible for them. This only causes real difficulty when we have to decide something together, and then, if we can’t agree on a common external authority we must find some other common ground, which we very often can. The procedures of respect will help us here.
This shift is a recognition, based on hard-won, bitter and very bloody experience that all people will never agree on the same external authority to determine the Good Life, and even those that do will not interpret it in the same way. Many will never accept an external authority at all.
None of these positions, it turns out, is inevitably unreasonable, once we understand how good reasoning works at the individual level. Neither is it the case that such reasoning is inevitably poor. Indeed, people are capable of being very wise in their decisions about life. Nor is it any fault of reasoning that we are likely to reach quite different conclusions, as wise people often will.
What is crucial, however, and quite different from any alternative view, is that making good decisions about our lives will depend utterly on the educational trajectory that our life has taken, an educational trajectory that, at the moment, depends almost entirely on luck. For all of us to decide our lives well, to have our self-determination properly enabled, would require educational systems, provisions and resources that we have yet to design, let alone construct.
Principles and motivation; unconditional and conditional
As individuals, we must not only value every other human being as of first equal worth with ourselves, we must value ourselves as of equal first worth. How do we express that value towards ourselves? We do it by bending our efforts to achieve lives of our own that are good. Respect for the value of the human being takes two forms, and self-respect is one of them. It is a duty, to ourselves, to do the best for ourselves. We owe it to ourselves. We should do ourselves justice.
We equally owe respect to others too, of course, and this suggests an equal duty toward them. What must we respect in them? That they, just as we, must make the best of their lives – that they have a duty to live their lives well too. This equal respect must be the regulating factor in all of our relationships with each other, in all of the arrangements and undertakings that we are joined together.
Whatever contracts or agreements we reach with them, or take for granted, whatever social arrangements we create together, they must be governed by respect. To the degree that we require educational conditions in order to develop and realize our own good in the best way; so do they. To the extent that we are likely to benefit from the help of others in the pursuit of our own good, so too may they benefit from ours, and our respect for each other’s duties to ourselves to develop good lives should motivate us to care for the fulfillment of their duty as we care for our own.
Thus, “respect for persons” divides into two; self-respect and respect for others. But each of these can be divided again into different dimensions, and we need to understand each of them if we are to become more self-conscious about respect, and make better, more respectful plans. Mapping out these dimensions is what I had in mind when I called this chapter, “The anatomy of respect”.
Firstly, respect can be considered as a matter of principle, and also as a motive for action or reaction – a feeling or sentiment that we may wish to act on.
The second dimension is that of conditionality; respect can be conditional or unconditional. Thus there can be unconditional self-respect, considered just as a matter of principle, and there can be motives or feelings of unconditional self-respect. Both of these have to do with our intrinsic value, just as human beings
There can also be conditional principles of respect that parallel the unconditional principles; we can think of these as principles of action, the principled activities or actions of respect that we undertake in the particular lives and worlds that we inhabit. These tell us what self-respect requires us to do in our actual lives, in order to express the unconditional principles, to treat ourselves as of equal intrinsic worth to all other human beings, even though we have different qualities, and live under different circumstances with different histories.
Equally, there are conditional feelings of self-respect which depend on the contingencies of the world as well; feelings of respect that are, in various ways, adjusted to the conditions under which we live, but mostly the social conditions in which we are judged and come to judge ourselves for the particular qualities that we possess. We tend to have feelings about ourselves in terms of what we are capable of, and what our limitations are, as well as the regard in which we are held by others. Sometimes this is called “self-esteem”.
Thus:
1. Unconditional respect – respect that applies equally to everyone
· As a matter of principle
We are all equally worthwhile just as human beings. Our attractiveness, or our skill or lack of skill or ability at anything makes no difference. It makes no difference if we scrabble for survival in the rubbish tip in a developing country, or live in an East Side apartment overlooking Central Park; we are all of equal value as human beings. This is intellectual; a matter of principle that we may assent to, but for various reasons there may be little or no affective or emotional force that accompanies it, so that we feel little impulse to express this value, or act on it.
· As a motive force, a feeling, for action.
This is the experience or feeling of our worth just as an intrinsically valuable human being that moves us to express our value; to engage in actions and activities of valuing ourselves as persons. It expresses the unconditional principle, and motivates into action the principles for respect (the conditional principles) under the actual circumstances of our lives. These are natural feelings – of confidence, of the affirmation of life, the outgoing curiosity and exploratory will of the infant that ultimately come to bind with the principle and motivate its expression as it develops.
2. Conditional respect – respect played out in the world of varying circumstances; and the social judgement of difference.
· As a set of principles for action under the conditionality/contingency of life.
These are the principles and the undertakings through which we are able to deliberately seek out and develop worthwhile lives for ourselves in the circumstances of life in which we find ourselves. We may know what these principles and methods are, but we still may not activate them unless we have motivation to do so. What we can believe that we can do, or feel able or inclined to do, will also depend upon the nature of our conditional self-esteem and its relation to our unconditional motivating force.
· As a motive force, a feeling that provides an impulse or inhibition for action (self-esteem)
These are the feelings that we have about our worth and capabilities as a result of our own judgments and the internalization of the judgments of others regarding particular qualities that we possess; things such as age, gender, race, attractiveness or sporting or intellectual abilities or our abilities in relationships. Such qualities may be seen to give us advantages or disadvantages in life, boosting our confidence of success where some undertakings are concerned, and diminishing it in others.
Problems of respect particularly arise when we identify these judgments with our sense of our own worth as a person, our feelings of being worthy or unworthy, capable or incapable or as being a deserving or undeserving human being. Our capacity, at the personal level, to make unwarranted generalizations can hedge us around with fears and lead us to conclusions about our “selves” that unreasonably limit our possibilities. When this happens they can bleed back and undermine the overriding sense of our unconditional worth, and undermine the range and conviction of our application of the conditional principles. We tailor our efforts to develop good lives to the “sort of person” we come to believe that we are by our very nature. The range of possibilities open to “people like us” can seem limited, and we become self-limiting.
Alternatively, positive experiences could lead to an undesirable arrogance or sense of superiority. But it could also work to give support to our unconditional confidence, helping to prevent us from being overwhelmed by failure, and encouraging our persistence.
The anatomy of respect for self and others
Unconditional
Conditional
As matters of principle
All persons are to be respected equally
The principles that define acts of respect in the circumstances of our lives
As feeling and motive
The unconditional affirmation of life (self-love and fellow feeling)
Relative self-esteem and regard for others as we are situated socially
Figure 1
Self respect and its weakness
We are all, and equally of intrinsic value. This is unconditional. We possess this equal value regardless of our differences in gender, age, sex, height, hair colour or any other contingent quality. Each of us acknowledges this intrinsic worth that we possess through our efforts to live well. This is how we express our value as a good species member. This is our first duty. As moral beings of intrinsic worth we have a first duty to ourselves to live our lives in the best way we can.
Because human beings are of equal moral worth, this means that we have a parallel duty to respect the intrinsic value of others. And this also means, insofar as they are persons (potentially capable of a conception of their own good) our respect for them is respect for the equal moral duty that they, too, must perform – the duty to live their lives in the best way that they can.
These first order parallel duties are prior to rights. Rights flow from them, and are explained by them. The duties are matters of principle – unconditional principles of mutual respect and self-respect. Rights to freedom of thought and speech, rights to movement and assembly, rights to equality before the law, rights to popular sovereignty and the secret ballot, rights to informed consent, protections against discrimination on grounds of age, gender, ethnicity, or religion; all come back to our duty to develop and realize our own good lives in the best way that we can, and the equal duty of others to do the same.
One important feature of this unconditional principle is that respect doesn’t depend, either, on how we feel about a particular person. It applies to all human beings equally, regardless of our feelings of affection towards them individually, or even if we find them repulsive. This is one of the important things about it being a principle, and not simply dependent upon feeling.
The same applies in our own case. We still have a duty to self-respect, even if we think of ourselves badly; worthless, unworthy – perhaps not even worthy of life itself. Because we are a human being of equal intrinsic worth to all others, we have a duty to set this straight, to redeem ourselves, atone, make amends, recover and rebuild ourselves. To live a good life. This can be difficult, though, because even if we believe in the principle of self-respect, we are usually overwhelmed with negative feelings when we are in this condition. This can be so disabling that it can be hard to recover and muster the necessary motivation, the will and persistence that self-respect requires.
A special sort of feeling is required here. Our commitment to the principle must have an animating power. Indeed, one of the important features that makes it a moral principle, is that it urges us to act respectfully towards people despite whatever negative feelings we have towards them; to others or to ourselves. It is easy to be nice to people we like. Being fair to those who don’t is our moral problem, and we have to have some sort of moral sentiment or commitment in order to do it. There is nothing wrong, of course, with being fond of some people, and not wanting to spend any more time than we have to with others. Fairness does not mean that we have to embrace everyone equally.
It may seem obvious that simple assent to the principles of “respect for person’s” (self-respect and respect for others) isn’t enough. Yes, the principles have no animating force, just as principles. This is, however, a significant problem, because there are particular difficulties in cultivating and maintaining that animating force and, perhaps surprisingly, the more significant and more difficult problems for our own development lie in the area of self-respect.
This is made worse by the fact that the way in which morality so often presents itself to us is in terms of respect for each other rather than self-respect, and we are much clearer about the role of emotion there. When we are treated badly, or see other people harmed, our sense of justice can become engaged, and we may become offended or angry, and even feel impelled to do something. These are moral feelings that are consistent with the principle of respect for persons, and we can readily recognize them as such. Interestingly, we can often engage these feelings even when we are struggling with our own self-respect.
But although self-respect is the other half of morality, and even, in a sense, more primary, since it gives our respect for each other and our outrage at injustice much of their point, the feelings that we have that should motivate us to respect ourselves are often remarkably weak.
We are perplexed and worried when others seem to have little respect for themselves, when they are unable to pull their lives together or keep falling into disaster, or give up too easily, or don’t see what they could truly make of life. We have compassion for them, empathise or sympathise with them. We can even be dismayed when we have not lived up to our own expectations; when we have let ourselves down, not done ourselves justice.
But we just don’t seem to make the same deeper moral connection. It doesn’t have the same force as something that engages our sense of justice and injustice. The fact that it is personal seems to make a difference, and it is more easily fobbed off onto “human nature”, or to “what that person is like”, than to human responsibility.
There are, I think, three possible explanations for this imbalance, this weakness we have in facing up to the issues of self-respect.
The first lies in the conditions of child-rearing, where we think of morality as having to do with respect for others. There is an urgency to this, because of its effects in our domestic lives and our social worlds, particularly if we have to take a little untamed tyrant out there. Conventional issues of social morality press on us somewhat vividly – the problems of taking other’s possessions (and potentially destroying them) of dropping things on them, pushing them over or pulling their hair; of who gets to rule the sand pit. Of destroying our friend’s china or drawing on her walls. Of plundering the supermarket. Of telling the truth about it when it all comes to light. These, and many other things highlight morality as mostly about respecting others. They also have a habit of capturing our urgent attention.
Working out a worthwhile life for oneself does share some things in common; such as an appreciation of consequences, and the delay of gratification and a variety of other forms of emotional control. But the rest, such as personal enthusiasm, curiosity, extended pursuits of skill and imagination in play, the novelty of new experience, the general conditions of the growth of experience; all these are the more normal, even endearing qualities of everyday growing up. We are more relaxed around them.
Even discussions of these things; reasoning about them that might have something to do with their worth in life, or what matters to it, just seem normal, not so serious at all, unlike what is at stake in those other “moral discussions”. We want them to grow in these ways, but that growth doesn’t have the urgency that is presented to us by problems of their sociability. We feel uncomfortable, for instance, when we see curiosity, exploration and even interest stifled by their schooling, but it just doesn’t seem to rank up there with our sense of justice that can lead us to outrage.
The second reason that we have a hesitation with the idea of striving for our own good is because we have a long-standing problem with egoism and the idea of selfishness that partly goes back to religion, and partly goes back to former cultural conditions. Where the issues of good living were settled in the past so much by convention and conformity to a multitude of rules and expectations bolstered by social class position and religious authority, deviations were easily explained as forms of selfishness, egoism and wilfulness. Respect meant respectability.
We dared not break with any of these codes and put our own interests outside the intricacies of convention or the web of roles and their customary expectations, because these were so often held to be the glue of society, and the security of its order. We were supposed to play our part, usually ordained by birth. Breaking with any of these rules and deciding for yourself seemed to be to put yourself first, and outside the social order, even above it. It was a threat to everyone else, a presumption, and an arrogance.
Thus, in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, a woman who wanted to become a doctor might be thought wilful and selfish for desiring to defy conventional expectation and step outside the traditional role of dedicated wife and mother, or even to contemplate both a marriage and a career. Her “place” was in the home, and any potential husband might be embarrassed or even humiliated. Disapproval would come, not only from family and friends, but from anyone who knew, and this would include her teachers in her medical school, and her colleagues. If she did marry, and continued her work, her husband might be pitied.
Not only has society survived the collapse of these intricate codes of behaviour, but the onus of good living has fallen to our personal responsibility. Respecting ourselves by developing and realizing our own good has become the expectation, and this now falls short of egoism, selfishness and wilfulness by being ruled by the principle of equal respect. We must achieve our own good, but not at the expense of others. We are to value the human being that we are, but no more than the human beings with whom we share community.
To set ourselves above them would be our contemporary egoism, or selfishness, but the old idea, that would have rendered as selfish the larger part of what is now considered available to choice is still there, uncritically in the back of our minds. It makes us hesitant to occupy ourselves too much with the problem of our own good as self-determined, because that would have been seen as selfish in the past which is still close at our shoulder. In academia, as well, it is often confused with being “individualistic”, and relegating the importance of “community”.
The third reason is that, in the transition from a world in which “good living” was largely settled by custom and convention to a world of self-determination, we have done so little to replace that old and now redundant way of determining our good.
Instead of falling back on the socially enforced conventions, expectations and recipes from the days of fine class distinctions and future roles applied to us at birth, we are now supposed to figure out what to do with our lives for ourselves. Without the body of convention and tradition to guide us, however, and without anything much to replace it that will meet the new requirement, we are powerless and vulnerable. We need to be grown up now, and not simply depend upon the authority of custom, tradition and popular opinion. We need to learn how to master our fate, and to do that, there is a great deal we must learn about making ourselves and mastering the world. But we don’t really know how to do that. There doesn’t seem to be a “subject matter”; nothing apparently, to guide our learning. The new task has never been opened up properly, and unpacked.
The best we seem able to do is to look around and more or less follow what other people do, and their perplexity and the weak predictability of their choices thinly reassures us that there can’t be much else to it. We look, as we did in the past, for today’s recipes, as all the others seem to be doing as well; the job, the partner, a few overseas trips, the mortgage, the children, the empty nest, the retirement – and the “success”, the status and the “stuff” that displays it. The decorating. The sport and entertainment. The food. Reasoning is reduced to homilies and clichés; even the cliché that we don’t really believe in the recipes or the conventional measures of “success”.
The whole area of self-respect, in our popular understanding, falls back on conflating principle with emotion, and we embrace the vague idea that self-respect is self-esteem, and that all we need to do is “pump it up”, maybe by praising people a lot and chanting affirmations. There is no principled self-respect, and no art to developing a worthwhile life; no art made explicit in terms of its assumptions and procedures, its core concepts and principles and methodologies. As morally responsible, self-determining human beings with a duty of respect for ourselves, we need something of real substance to replace that body of convention and tradition that had our Good Lives ready-made for us.
We are now made personally responsible for showing the value of one of the most important things a person can value; a human life. Is there really nothing to it? Or is this the biggest, the most complex, the most important undertaking we will ever face, and we are missing a very good deal of what it would involve? It certainly doesn’t seem as if there is a body of knowledge here at all, or “they” would have told us. Respecting ourselves is vague simply because we don’t really have much idea of what fulfilling that duty to ourselves would require.
There would need to be a broadly fleshed out and public art and science of which all are aware. It would have to have an appropriate structure of concepts, principles and methodologies suited to engaging relevant sorts of subject-matter. This is an art in which we would all have to develop an expertise, since as independent, self-determining beings, it is not something that we could leave to a priesthood, or to experts. We would have to understand it critically.
We would each have to take personal responsibility for learning and practicing this art, which means that we would have to engage in it self-consciously, and be motivated to do so. We would need practice with appropriate intellectual skills for reflecting on decisions and their consequences. We would have to be open to relevant challenge and doubt, take ownership of our own interpretations and understandings, becoming our own authorities so that we can be the authors of our own lives.
The principles that lie behind the art of it all; the principles that we should use to guide the experience and the reasoning that we need to gain and learn how to use in order to work out a worthwhile life for ourselves, are the conditional principles of respect – the principles that we should engage to develop these lives under the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Currently, there is an intellectual vacuum in this area, and the whole of the next chapter will be given over to it.
Before that, however, we still need to give more consideration to the problem of motivation; the feeling or impulse that is capable of giving life to our sense of duty to our selves, that gives us the reason for pursuing the experience, thought and action that creating our own good would require.
The problem of feeling and motivation
The “feeling” of self-worth, of self esteem is sometimes talked of as “self love”, a description that makes some people feel uncomfortable. The distinction between unconditional and conditional self-love and self-esteem does have a history, however, most notably in the work of Rousseau where he distinguished amour de soi-meme from amour-propre. (1)
“Natural”, unconditional self-love and confidence
For Rousseau, we are born with unconditional self-love (amour de soi). It is natural. All animals possess it as a positive, life-affirming quality. It also manifests itself, under conditions of threat, as self-preservation. We have something significant to lose.
Conditional self-love he thought of as “unnatural”, since it comes from social arrangements, and is a kind of comparative self-worth that is generated by these arrangements. It is built on the judgments made by others, and that we come to make of ourselves according to social differences and relativities between us. Because social arrangements are not immutable, the specific judgments in conditional self-esteem could always (in principle) be different. What other people admire in us at one point in history, or in one culture, they may despise in another, and we may come to internalize either value accordingly.
To the extent, then, that we are not born with it, and that the way in which it manifests itself is contingent upon how we are situated in our culture and arrangements, and what these are, Rousseau is right to consider this form of self-esteem “unnatural”.
Unconditional self-worth is a kind of core confidence, and I suspect that Rousseau might be right too in thinking it innate; that it’s potential is there at conception, and from then on it is only diminished by experience. Under at least favourable conditions it comes into the world at birth and is the dominant mode of young infants; a dominant affirmation of the universe and a confidence in it that evolves into exploratory curiosity as they become more mobile. It knows no fear.
Layered over this, of course, are the dramatic swings in mood that are oscillations between physical pleasures and discomforts. We are wet, we are hungry, and we respond accordingly, returning to our default condition with satisfaction. We experience these things and respond to them from the beginning, but we don’t interpret them or conceptualise them. Neither are these discomforts the beginnings of our fears, or of our judgments of our relative worth, they are the beginnings of our desires and aversions, our pleasures and our wants as experience grows and our concepts begin to organise them.
These are different from the affirmation of life insofar as they do coalesce around objects; that wetness, the hunger, the satisfaction of food and warmth. As these evolve toward more sophisticated wants and desires, tastes and aversions, they not only continue to be directed towards specific objects or experiences, they evolve differently for each of us, depending upon where our experiences lead and what we make of them. They can become very sophisticated, to the extent that delay of gratification, appreciation of consequences, and persistence enable us to bring greater insight and discrimination to them as our concepts develop, and to construct them in greater complexity. They grow far beyond the primitive impulses of infants.
Unconditional self-love, the confident affirmation of life, on the other hand is, is not situation-specific but is modified by these other processes – tiredness, physical discomfort, anxiety and fear. It is a default condition that has no object. It is happiness-for-no-good-reason. In the absence of fear or other inhibiting judgment, it pushes us out to explore our universe and experience our lives, and it is indiscriminate.
Though this self-love is unconditional, it is experienced in a conditional world, a world of contingencies. It is unconditional, because it is wholehearted, and not dependent upon whether we are short, or male, or lacking in dexterity, or slow thinkers. Being short, maybe we can’t reach the top shelf without steps, or asking for help, but this may in no way diminish our core confidence, our proper pride, our willingness to go out into the world.
The world is full of these contingencies, environmental and personal. We may live by the sea, up a mountain, on a plain, on the edge of a desert. It might be hard to get to town, find a job, earn a living or get broadband. Or we might never want for money, and the cakes at the coffee shop on the corner may be outstanding. None of these may make any difference to our proper pride, our core confidence, our inner dignity, the ease with which we walk tall and lightly among our fellows.
The same applies to our personal qualities; our age, our gender, how thin or fat we are, our skin colour, or the circumstances of our birth. We may love cricket, but realize that we just don’t have the talent to play it well, or that learning to do so will take our lives away from something that we value more. So it becomes a spectator sport for us, and we content ourselves with beach cricket with our wife and children, our siblings, our nephews and nieces – who often beat us. But these recognitions of necessity need not diminish us. They do not lead us to feel any the less good about ourselves; they have no connection with our sense worth. They could have of course, and this is a problem that will deserve more attention shortly.
As we grow and develop, intellectually and emotionally, we construct understandings and appreciations of the contingencies of our world, mediated by the cultural circumstances that are a part of those conditions. Our sense that life is good, and that we are good, finds its meaning in and through the cultural understandings of good living in which we are embedded, how we understand them, and what we make of them.
If we find ourselves in the Eighteenth Century, with Good Living predefined largely by the social class position into which we were born, and settled with a myriad of conventions and customs and largely assigned roles, then our unconditional self-love will express itself through the conditions that we take to be the simple necessities and circumstance of our situation.
Enormously confining though that may seem to us now, there is an abundance of evidence of people who found their pride and confidence within the niches that confined them, and abundant evidence of curiosity and exploration. Some people developed aspirations beyond their class, finding and constructing opportunities to break out in inventive and bold ways.
Others adventured and explored around the globe in fragile ships that would daunt the modern traveller, and in dangerous circumstances far from the help available to our modern adventure tourists. They did such things in remarkably large numbers. Widespread invention and innovation, and the high quality of art and artisanship and the quality of reflection – about religion, about politics, about science and about philosophy, and not just among the highest ranks – is equally remarkable for such apparently confined lives. But where channels can be found for the expression of unconditional self-love, and where it has not been ground down or overwhelmed by other emotional developments, this is what we should expect.
In our day, unconditional self-love should find its identification through the principles of self-respect, unconditional and and conditional, and it should have a very much larger play under an ethic of self-determination that breaks with the straight-jackets of recipes for life, of classes and rigid roles, customs and conventions.
Our ethic almost appears tailored to exploit unconditional self-love to the full. We should want and expect the free play of our natural core confidence and proper pride. We should want a thoroughgoing affirmation of life that buoyantly takes on the world. We should particularly want that curiosity, that exploratory impulse, that enjoyment of experience. We would need, however, to understand what seeking our own good might entail, otherwise that unconditional self-love will fritter itself out in indiscriminate activity, or fall back on the recipes. As ever, too, it can be thwarted, undermined, overwhelmed.
Conditional self-esteem and its problems
The general feeling that life is good and to be lived can be thought of as having two aspects: the world is good, and we are good. The motivation for self-respect can evolve out of the second of these. Both of them can, by experience, be well and truly knocked back, and as either of them are, our happiness will diminish. Worn down enough, our affirmation of life may reduce to little more than a fearful self-preservation.
The world has its dangers, and this is why a fearless, life-affirming, curious and exploring infant or child must be kept safe by its caregivers until it can learn to trouble-shoot those dangers for itself. The dialectic between life-affirming, buoyant, curious confidence on the one hand, and safety on the other, is a fraught one.
We come into the world eager about life, but as we begin to acquire our bumps and scrapes, we learn that the world contains possibilities to be wary of. We learn to become cautious when confronted with new and novel things, that the new and unknown can be ambiguous with regard to its benevolence.
The dangers around us may well differ according to our geography and cultural situation. The specific fears that we learn in this way are specific to our own lives and circumstances, and this tailors and adjusts our actual fears and anxieties to the different worlds in which we each have emerged. The combination of a global, life-affirming confidence that has no specific object in the world, and the fears that are acquired from specific events in our actual circumstances enables our great flexibility and adaptability.
If our world is, among human worlds, moderately favourable, and we are helped through our fear-learning by thoughtful caregivers, we can hope our general confidence, curiosity and outgoing buoyancy will continue to be the larger part of our attitude to the world. Both the affirmation of life and the fear can join together in a larger adaptiveness. Properly cultivated fear becomes a friend, reliably urging us to run when there is danger, because we want to preserve ourselves. Once safe again, we can get over it, and even laugh and put it behind us; our reasonable fear having alerted us to a danger to be averted and perhaps avoided in future.
But this is a very “rational”, idealised picture of how fear is learned and the role it plays. Just as the positive, unconditional confidence may have been there at conception, and the learning of fear came later to moderate it, so the learning of fear comes long before the possibilities of reflection. It is primitive, more primitive than reason. We start to learn it earlier, and irrational fear can be difficult to recognise, confront and eliminate, particularly because it is so quick to habituate.
Humans generalize too readily from too few instances. One scary dog can make us fear all dogs. At the same time we have a sad propensity to confuse correlation with causation. The power of association – or classical conditioning – means that when the thing to be feared is met together with other coincidental things, the coincidental things can come to trigger the fear as well.
Without help in negotiating these mis-learnings, and desensitizing ourselves from the fears that we misconceive, we are open to the development of a considerable amount of unreasonable fear. Wariness and timidity can grow to overwhelm curiosity, exploration and confidence. We can become reluctant to risk ourselves to the world. The field of our opportunities narrows, as the unsafe world looms close around us.
If the world isn’t “moderately favourable”, the conditions can facilitate not just an excess of fear but a generalized anxiety. Many grow up in places where that general benevolence and the protective safety to be curious and explore is poorly secured, and where fear and due caution have little chance of developing in managed ways. When the foundations aren’t there for the development of reason, delaying gratification, and appreciating and reflecting on consequences, then, unconditional self-love will be in retreat, and the possibilities of exercising a duty of self-respect seriously compromised.
Too many children grow up in unsafe worlds; unsafe even from their caregivers. In addition to being unsafe, they can be worlds full of unpredictability where the rules don’t stay rules, and there is little to depend upon. There are fights and quarreling in their worlds, their caregivers aren’t there when they need them, and conditions create unintelligible frights that can become embedded as trauma.
The development of these fears and anxieties can, moreover, become organised and built in to our identities, and this is where a conditional self-esteem comes to compete with our unconditional self-love. How we are treated by and among other people; how we experience our place among them, leads us to reach bad conclusions about who and what we are, and what we are worth.
We internalise and personalise the approval and diasapproval of others. Qualities of ourselves come to be confused with our overall intrinsic value, creating a false sense of our worth. This is the sense of “unnatural” self-love that Rousseau identified as a form of comparative worth, forged by social judgment.
Many of these judgments are standardised; deeply embedded in our cultures. Social class is one of the most obvious institutions, and it is particularly clear in the case of class hierarchies determined by birth. The entire structure of society and the ways in which different people are judged differently often tells each person what they are worth around here, even according to a “scale”.
When it is then widely assumed that the points on the scale represent different “natures”, and that these differences are differences of “breeding” (no matter the ambiguity that the right upbringing was sometimes taken to be included in this), then equal intrinsic value, even if it is mentioned, can be only abstract and theoretical. We may hold our heads high, stand tall, and have proper pride, but be cautious about where and with whom. What you are worth as a human being is what you are born to.
This is, of course, carried over into the meritocracy. If we are born low down in the socio-economic scale, then clearly our parents lack merit. Our origin is a part of our identity, a good deal of who we are. The identity as a whole person begins to take in elements of difference that are valued differently in the community, and this is reflected in the differences in treatment and opportunity that are available from birth. We learn it very early in the places that we live.
We begin on the great meritocratic race itself, long before we can have any real idea at all about what the race is for, and we don’t start it as equals. When we go to the neighbourhood school we go with other children like us, from parents of equally little merit; a school frequently rather different from those for children whose parents can afford better, or live in better districts. In school we are advised about our goals, and how realistic they are. A few of us get encouraged to scale up our aspirations. Many more of us are advised to scale our aspirations down.
We all know stories of this, particularly the latter, and it is an international phenomenon that we can take to be an almost intrinsic part of the way schools work. Aren’t teachers, after all, supposed to make such predictions and give such advise? Many students, of course, believe them.
Stories are commonplace, too, of people who were cautioned by their teachers against seemingly extravagant ambitions and then went on to accomplish remarkable things, and we get to laugh about it with them, after some meritocratic success. This comedy is all a part of the establishment of human worth in a meritocracy, and it works, in part, by replacing our unconditional judgment of our worth with partial and conditional judgments of one or more of our accidental qualities in the definitions of our worth. In these cases, what the teacher said wasn’t enough to set back the affirmation of life, and the aspiration that it enabled, but they do succeed often enough.
Social class is only one of a number of dimensions of conditional judgement embedded in the culture, though it interacts with many others; gender, race, religion, age, disability and mental health are other perennial ones. Physical appearance – attractiveness – counts; and this can go to build, weight, body-shape, teeth and complexion. Some countries prioritise sport, and then speed, dexterity, coordination, strength and endurance can raise your apparent value, or hold you back.
Any of these things could just be variables, just contingencies for us to work around, like the poor surf, or the bad weather. To the extent that people around us widely and consistently make such judgements about others who share these properties, and ourselves in particular, we could simply see them nevertheless as annoying and unfair limitations on our opportunities, but the effect, far too often, is much worse than this. We are likely to adopt them as a part of the definition of who and what we are, of our identity, and the worth of ourselves as a whole. We are social beings. Our language and thought and much of our comfort depend on that. But in this regard our social connection and consciousness can do us great harm.
We can, of course, let ourselves down in any case. Insofar as mastering life involves running risks and making mistakes, we are bound to do this from time-to-time, and we can find ourselves plunged into moral disaster, in our own eyes as well as the eyes of others, some of whom we may have harmed in the process. One wired-in strategy for dealing with this is to fall into denial and refuse to acknowledge having done anything wrong. It was their fault. This is a natural reaction, because the cost to us of taking responsibility is going to be high.
To overcome this, however, to have the courage and insight to see our own role in moral disaster, it is inevitable that we will feel bad about ourselves. This will sometimes be a proper outcome of our reflection on the consequences of our behaviour.
Here we stand on the brink of a decision that will favour either the saving of our unconditional self-love, or allowing conditional judgment to lower our lives. Brene Brown characterizes the difference between shame and guilt in terms of the difference between making a mistake and being a mistake; the difference between being a person who performed a bad action and a person who is bad. Shame, she says, is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders; and equally interesting, it turns out that guilt is inversely correlated with all of those things.
I suspect that people who think they are bad people often behave badly, as befits their definition of themselves. “What more can you expect of me? This is the sort of person that I am.”
Separating the bad action from our value as a person, and feeling guilty instead of ashamed isn’t just a way of “getting away with it”. It opens up a whole field of powers for restoring the world to the way it was; of correcting the mistake by taking responsibility for it, and the West has a history with such moral machinery that goes back to the origins of Christianity, with concepts like “atonement” or the achievement of at-one-ment through remorse and forgiveness, of restoration insofar as this is possible, and of efforts to ensure that this sort of thing never happens again. There is a task of rebuilding trust – and also the possibility of doing so. When we engage in this process together with good will and commitment on both sides, there is the chance of rebuilding the trust that was lost.
Not everyone, of course, understands or has skill at these processes. Not everyone has built the proper moral machinery to do it. We don’t automatically learn it, or learn it properly, just by growing up in the West. If we haven’t learned it, then perhaps it wasn’t well-developed in our family. Either way we are going to be poor at passing it on.
Contrition can be feigned, and attempts at restoration “bought”. Forgiveness can be understood as a kind of permission to do it again, if the guilty party doesn’t understand the role of “forget” in “forgive-and-forget”. The promise to ensure that “it doesn’t happen again” can turn out to be empty, particularly if it involves a task that is difficult, such as breaking an addiction. In the end, we might just have to defend ourselves against such people.
These processes aren’t easy, but they do exist. When mastered and carried through with integrity, they not only enable a restoration of respect in our relationships and our communities, they enable the separation between our value as persons and the value of our actions, making possible the maintenance and continuation of our unconditional self-respect. They are therefore vital to our respect for each other, and to our personal strength; to the very possibility that we can achieve lives of meaning and purpose, of satisfaction and fulfillment. Where can we learn these things?
Our lives are, however, full of potential to personalize our failures.
We fail at something. Well, failure, even repeated failure, can be an ordinary part of any learning curve. But we give up prematurely; the teaching was poor, we lose confidence through the process, the learning opportunity ran out, our motivation was never very high to begin with. Oh, well, put that learning task aside for the moment until the conditions are better. We wait until we have a truly good reason to learn it. We seek a better learning situation.
But instead, many of us personalize it. We are “no good at maths”, or spelling, or abstract or creative thinking. We are no good with relationships. We are not mechanical. We are no good with money. We are, then, as if determined by our genes, quick to anger and irrational when we are, highly emotional, too trusting, too mistrustful, wary, impulsive, too spontaneous. We don’t think before we speak. We don’t listen, we daydream, we don’t apply ourselves. We are practical people, not abstract thinkers. We think too much. We are perfectionistic. We put ourselves down – or other people. We aren’t good enough. We are unattractive, unlovable. Nobody takes us seriously. We never listen. We are just hopeless at this or that – or maybe even just hopeless. We don’t have a head for business. We have no taste. Maybe we were born a girl when we should have been born a boy. Maybe we weren’t wanted at all. It is our fault. This is who we are. Take it or leave it, we are just this or that sort of person.
All of these and many, many more, turn the plasticity of our potential that learning makes possible into a fixed quality of ourselves, a limited quality that goes to our worth as a human being, a potential assault on our unconditional self-respect. In these respects – in regard to these qualities that human beings value – we establish ourselves lower on the scale of human being and its potential. The issues become a part of our nature, and to that extent they become immune to the possibility that they could be set aside from our worth, and of course, from the learning point of view, they are beyond repair. So we continue to limit ourselves and inflict our tics and our baggage on other people.
Conditional self-esteem isn’t all about feeling bad about ourselves, of course. Our culture will pick out admirable qualities, features and personal achievements, and they might admire us for having them, or fulfilling them. We are boosted by this, and, having imbibed of the culture, we are gratified that we have such qualities.
We are admired for our sporting prowess, our attractiveness, our celebrity, our attainment of high office, for being a member of the family into which we were born. We are envied for our career success, or our wealth, and we understand why. This heightens conditional self-esteem, and our confidence could distort, containing a sense of being better than other people, more worthy, superior and deserving. Indeed, in a meritocracy, we could almost expect that we are supposed to. Why otherwise associate deserving with merit defined in terms of such a narrow conception of success?
This would, however, corrupt unconditional self-esteem in the opposite direction, since we would be confusing these favourable aspect of ourselves and our lives with our worth as a person. We are not of equal intrinsic worth, we are better, mistaking contingent features of our life with the value of our life itself.
We are, however, quick to spot that snobbishness, that arrogance, that superiority, that assumed privilege in others, and we have a whole discourse about it. Despite those qualities that mark them out for admiration, this person turns out to be “unaffected”. They are “ordinary people; just like you and me”. We acknowledge virtues that maintain this moral equality, like humility, and modesty, and we can often see when they are feigned.
Positive experience can, however, make very important contributions to our unconditional self-love. What if we succeed at something we attempt to do, particularly after some failure? That rush of elation. That transitory happiness. The likelihood that we will attempt something difficult again is increased. Our natural, unconditional self-love is confirmed by these specific conditional experiences; the brief, situation-dependent feeling-good merging with the default natural confidence and affirmation of life, becoming grounded in the concrete and specific.
Here, our tendency to generalise from too few instances may be an asset. Here too, the encouragement given by others through our process of trial and failure, and their approval of our successes can compound the advantage. This strengthening of the stepping-forth curiosity and exploration helps to develop and maintain it in the face of failure or reasonable fear. It enables us to grow in our understanding of the role of repeated failure and the importance of persistence through the learning curve, which is a part of a proper understanding of consequences. Crucially, it helps to ensure that such understanding is bound together with the genuine unconditional impulse.
It is important to notice, though, that generalising these lessons is more important than the specifics of the conditions under which they occur. It is crucial here, that what we learn, and the way in which our confidence and affirmation of life is confirmed, not be bound to the uniqueness of the task, or the uniqueness of the conditions of the effort or the failures, or even the eventual success, because this would restrict its encouraging value just to highly similar situations, rather than extending it to our overall adaptability. It is important that it generalise. Otherwise it won’t be the force it needs to be in order for it to aid our general propensity to curiosity, exploration, our persistence and response to new challenge. In this sense, there are highly desirable lessons we can take for the support of unconditional judgment and feeling from these contingent experiences.
Thus respecting ourselves is a complex business and highly dependent upon all kinds of learning. It is made that much more difficult in our own time by the much expanded realm of decision that we are now each responsible for, because our own good is now so much more in our own hands than it was in the past. So much more is up to us.
Clearly it is not enough to leave all this to the positive impulse of unconditional self-love alone. This impulse, being initially indiscriminate, must come to be expressed through a sophisticated scheme of ideas and understandings – particularly of respect and its implications – that we must each develop for ourselves. We must learn to refine our thinking towards an awareness of what is at stake in making something of ourselves, or failing to do so. This emerging scheme must bring focus to our curiosity and exploration, both enlarging the possibilities of our lives, and improving the interpretations and judgements that we make in and of our experiences. We must, moreover, take on the authority for all of this, or at least take responsibility for the authorities that we come to depend upon.
The feeling side of respect is also critical, nevertheless, and it is clear just how easily this can get out of hand, how difficult it is to manage, and how its potential distortions and corruptions can severely limit us in our ability to carry out our duty to ourselves. I think it fair to say that most people engaged in any thoughtful pursuit of their own good have found themselves struggling with issues of conditional self-esteem that have impacted negatively on their unconditional worth at critical moments throughout their lives; even those who might have seemed to be among the most favoured.
It would seem, then, to be of central importance to the proper valuing of all people that we all grow up equipped and willing to clean up and manage our conditional self-esteem in order to optimize our natural, unconditional self-love. Our very ability to respect ourselves depends upon the freedom with which our buoyant, life-affirming confidence can be readily and fully deployed in the service of our duty to develop for ourselves our own good lives.
1. Hall, John C. Rousseau: An Introduction to His Political Thought. Philosophers in Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1973, p35.
The justifications that are offered for education are invariably too vague to stand as decision-making principles - or to hold individuals and institutions accountable. Expanding on the idea that education needs to be justified by the worth of the person forces us to remarkable conclusions
Author
Graham Oliver
Publisher Name
The Educational Mentor: making "education" educational
The justifications that are offered for education are invariably too vague to stand as decision-making principles – or to hold individuals and institutions accountable. Expanding on the idea that education needs to be justified by the worth of the person forces us to remarkable conclusions This chapter explains the structure of “respect for persons”; the true value of a human life that should be our basic justification in politics, justice and education. We need to understand this structure of the ways in which we view the intrinsic value of human beings if we are ever to understand the problems of education and good living, of democracy, or of doing people justice. 
