Western ethics, since the Enlightenment, has been remarkably silent about the idea of self-respect, or a duty to oneself. Some philosophers even doubt that there is such a thing. This might signal to us that the whole idea is simply mistaken. I think, however, that the gap here is another hold-over from the circumstances of the Enlightenment – that duties to oneself and respect for oneself were still thought of as mostly handled by religion at that time. The initial impetus for the development of ‘respect for persons’ revolved around resolving religious conflict among people so that they could live together despite their religious differences. It was still assumed, far more widely than it is today that, though we might differ in our religions, we would most likely have one nevertheless. It was still more widely accepted than it is now that the value of ourselves is tightly bound up with religious understandings of the meaning of life, and in religious prescriptions for individual conduct. The abuse of oneself, including suicide, was felt to be sinful – an act against God, rather than a moral mistake. Books on “the Good Life” were still more likely to be books on religious positions and the philosophical schools with which they often interacted. It took several centuries before self-help literature independent of religion gained much momentum.
In addition, one’s position in life, usually dependent upon birth, tended to be accompanied by very comprehensive roadmaps, which settled questions about family life, vocation, or politics – who had what authority and who was subject to it, of gender rules – including how partners were to be chosen – and complex codes of manners that ‘oiled the wheels’ of social interaction. All of this is has been summed up in terms of ‘one’s station and its duties’. The problems and decisions of good living were not as open-textured as they are today. Depending on social class, they were also, for most people, much more local. The realm of choice was very much smaller, and less ambiguous.
In contemporary life, however, what we should make of our lives and do with them is less obviously predetermined by visible structures, classes and conventions and full of ambiguity. Authority to guide us in our life-choices is of the thinnest kind – no longer ecclesiastical, no longer the iron hand of our station and its duties. Of course we follow convention and look to those around us. We know that this is just to follow the herd – but the herd is all we have. The herd dictates acceptability, and acceptability becomes much more problematic when the bonds of community have decayed. It also dictates status and wealth, through the meritocracy, and status and wealth become much more important in the absence of any better guide. So we try to ‘do well’ at school, in order to get a good meal-ticket and perhaps meet the right people. We try to ‘get a good job’.
We partner up romantically, knowing that the pheromones won’t last and that there might not be much to keep us together after the children. We don’t have to seek out ‘breadwinners’ any more, or become the one who is one, so the ties that bind aren’t based on a mutual support between the domestic and the earning spheres, and won’t be as strong as they used to be. We know that they are likely to break, and we are likely to be on our own again.
We rarely speak these days of good character, or seek it, or even honour it, so it isn’t to be looked for too deeply in a partner. Great souls, noble souls, perhaps even good souls don’t appear to exist anymore, except in eulogies. We talk of inner beauty, but we don’t know what it is, so we don’t attempt to cultivate it; we go to the gym, we run, we bike and worry about our appearances and our longevity instead. To fill the many new gaps, we have endless entertainments and distractions and toys. Capitalism and its marketing see to provisioning us with that. Our approach to education is unfit to deal with the much larger burden of the good that has come to fall upon us.
This lack of firm authority to tell us what to do, this lack of clear rules, asks much more of our decision-making, particularly about who or what we are, or will become. Without having been provided with the equipment to manage this level of existential difficulty for ourselves, however, it is hardly surprising that lack of confidence, (or false confidence) a poor sense of worth, and so much consequential depression have reached epidemic proportions.
If philosophy is reluctant to address all this, pop-psychology and the personal development movement certainly isn’t. Prescriptions, beyond affirmations, are thin, however. Love yourself, you are worth it, truly you are. You deserve it all. We try to fix the problem with empty praise, including self-praise, but then we find whole generations where our nostrum has worked in ways we didn’t anticipate. We create narcissists, with an inflated sense of entitlement, and limited compassion – unrealistic and troubled in their worth, and endlessly disappointed and frustrated that they don’t ‘get what they deserve’.
What is usually missing, too, in these popular understandings of self-respect are the rational principles of respect, and these are crucial. Without an understanding of these principles it is difficult to see what to do as a matter of self-respect. It is not at all clear how we should act in order to respect ourselves. This can leave us seemingly powerless when the sense of our worth is lost.
Instead of just treating self-respect as an emotion that can be pumped up or deflated, we need to recognize it, firstly, as a moral principle. Emotion or feeling is important to its activation, but treating it simply as a matter of how we feel about ourselves is a fundamental mistake. Self-respect is a piece of moral machinery, and we must understand its workings.
Respect for persons
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. 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, 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, or requests about how matters are to be handled if they lose their mental capacity.
“Other things equal”. We do give priority to the mental over the physical. Of course we draw back from this priority when we have good reason to believe that mental development is too immature – though we often do this somewhat crudely by establishing mere age limits. We also take over when they are incapacitated by illness or injury, and when they deteriorate into dependency in old age. 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, and always favour any possibility that mental capacities may return, or be developed.
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 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” and that it is “their decision to make”. 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. 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. 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 is 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. At the most we can use our caregiving to delay decisions that we have reason to believe that they are yet to immature to make. Nevertheless we may not, when they are young, vulnerable and dependent, 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 – the adult freedom to decide. 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 the solutions.
Too often, unfortunately, we misuse this early period of intellectual and emotional dependency to try and stop them from later making the decisions that they would be freely entitled to make. We do this when they are young because if we tried to stop them later, we would be prevented from doing so by the respect that they would deserve. When we do this, 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. We do this instead of equipping them to choose well, which is the only legitimate thing we can do.
The second thing that we can do to help ensure that decisions of life are wisely made is to establish throughout our culture educational environments consistent with the tasks and responsibilities of personal independence that persists throughout life, so that good, respectful, critical thought and discussion is freely modeled and encouraged on every hand. We should do this so that good capacities of thought and decision can be refreshed and enhanced through all the changing circumstances that occur. 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.
In order to find our way into the greater detail of this educational domain, we need to look at self-respect in more detail.
The unconditional principle of self-respect
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 or potential 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.
Insofar as we are persons, or potentially persons, that unconditional value is significantly enriched by our capacity, or potential capacity to develop our own conception of the good, and to implement it – by how well we do it. How well we can do it depends on a certain native endowment that enables us to be persons in the first place, but how well we can do it is also very largely dependent upon how we learn to do it. It depends, vitally, upon certain skills and capacities that we acquire – of thought and problem-solving, of imagination, of will, of inquiry, of seeking understanding, of decision-making. If we are to perform our duty to ourselves, we need education. Indeed, our duty to ourselves will largely define what education is, and pursuing that will be an expression of our valuing of ourselves.
More than that, it will be central to what it means to acknowledge that equal value of others. It will be to acknowledge that their ability to perform their duty to themselves depends on vital learning that they cannot entirely manage for themselves – vividly so, in their years of dependency. It depends upon what we do for them, just as ours depends upon what they did, and continue to do, for us. Education, properly understood, is a complex of activities, actions and arrangements that we undertake as a primary matter of respect for the unconditional and intrinsic value of human beings. Those requirements of respect – having to do with the independent decision-making of a moral being about their good – would have to infuse every arrangement for learning that we make. It should never be confused with something that we would equally do for a slave – as it far too commonly is.
The conditional principles and practices of self-respect
To respect oneself is to make an effort to fulfill one’s duty to oneself to live a good life. This means that there are practices, actions and activities of self-respect. The best way that I know of to articulate this is by drawing upon John Rawls’s notion of rational life-planning. To fulfill our duty to ourselves, each of us must develop, implement and maintain a life-plan in the most intelligent way that we can.
Some misunderstandings are immediately possible. Firstly, is the danger of thinking of the task as involving a life devoted to planning – building a blueprint of how life should go, or constructing a conception of the good as planning. But for Rawls, and rightly, the question of how much to plan, or even whether to plan, is a life-planning decision. At its simplest, Rawls suggests that we are already plans insofar as we have intentions or follow rules at all, and this comes very close to whether we have personhood at all. Any deliberate actions suggest intentions and the sort of consistency that suggests rule-following, and this is enough for the idea of a plan to get a grip. Very young children, insofar as they have intentions and follow rules, have “life-plans”. The immaturity of these plans is something that we would rightly worry about, except that we expect them to grow and change as they mature under our care.
How much should we plan? What sorts of plans? These things are to be determined by a simple test from within the motivation of respect itself. The value of the idea of a plan is that it suggests our temporality – that we exist in time and have pasts and futures. The good of our lives may wax and wane, our powers may increase and decline, luck may intervene, we can anticipate, we can prepare, we can be caught out. We are likely to continue to be a person in the future, short of serious deterioration and death, and that person is entitled to just the same respect as we are entitled to now. How will our decisions now impact on that future person’s good? How should we decide what the future person might accept from us now as reasonable?
This might not be easy, because we will change, and our judgments of reasonableness will no doubt change as well. That immediately suggests something about such plans – that they will need to be open to revision, and that planning is an on-going process.
These features of planning for ourselves are not greatly different from the challenges we face in the social sphere. Other people are not always easy to understand either, and they and all circumstances are prone to change as well. Just as we need to anticipate the possibilities of hurting others, we need, in our own case, to anticipate the possibilities of our future regret. What will also help is if we develop our capacity for compassion, and particularly to have compassion for how and why we made decisions in the past. But we should, at least be trying to avoid doing harm to that future person, and should be trying to favour their good. And we should, at least, be able to look back on the past, and know that the historical person was doing their best. If we decide to abandon planning, and live spontaneously in the moment, we perhaps need to take one thought before we do so, and consider how the future person will fare. It might be the right decision, but we need to know what we are doing.
It is this knowledge aspect that suggests the idea of rational life-planning, although the word “rational” is somewhat unhappy. That is why “reasonable” or “intelligent” might sometimes be better. There is a moral significance behind “knowing what we are doing”, a price to be paid if we don’t. The value of ourselves as a person is at stake. This is the educational motivation.
If we spell out what we need to know and to do in order to fulfill our duty, we will be identifying the substance of education. Rawls himself set out a variety of “principles” of rational life-planning, and more can be developed. They are not “strong” principles, in the sense that we can be faulted for not following them. They are more like potentially important considerations that flow from some awareness of the issues of decision-making about the general trajectory and contingency of life, and basic efficiencies, while minimizing the introduction of culturally specific content, or substantive conceptions of the good.
This process of rational life planning, though, in being an expression of self-respect and containing collections of principles and considerations of the practices of self-respect, represents a move from unconditional self-respect to having to make decisions about all sorts of things that are conditional and contingent. While the primary value of the person is unconditional, and the primary duties are equal – we are all equally worthwhile regardless of age, or sex, context of origin, attractiveness, or intelligence – these things become relevant and important to life planning itself. I will never be a rugby player now, because I am too old, but I would never have been much good anyway, because I have always been slow, not good at ball handling, and none too thrilled about being thrown to the ground and trampled on. These things more or less eliminated rugby from my life-planning, while doing nothing to diminish my worth as a person. I wasn’t much use to rugby players as a rugby player, though. It simply means that I must turn the spotlight of my plans elsewhere. If I can. If my world is so narrow that all I can find in it is rugby, I might be in trouble.
Life-planning, then, is an undertaking that must take deep account of the conditional world in which we live. Just by being born in a particular part of the world there are immediate implications for citizenship. We are born into particular settings – families and their histories and there are traditions and situations in our larger social world. These things give us many opportunities, while also taking many away.
We are born gendered, with body types, features of attractiveness, with potential talents, capabilities, disabilities and incapacities, and all of these have potentials that open up possibilities and take others away. So much of this is already socially, culturally and politically defined. How we grow up can increase or diminish potential opportunity. If we are fortunate to have had an educational development, we can come, in important ways, to have some control over the growth and decay of opportunity, equipping ourselves to create opportunity, or to take advantage of it. We begin with a fabric of identity. It is a fabric we can make decisions about, and to some extent change. How wisely we are capable of doing so again depends upon our education, and what we can make of ourselves.
All of this contingency exists infused with pre-existing and on-going valuation – valuing that structures the institutions and cultures into which we are inevitably introduced and must negotiate, and value judgments made everywhere by individuals and groups. These valuings can create the opportunities for living our lives in all sorts of worthwhile ways, but equally they can constrain and limit our lives, and even destroy them. If the first problem of self-respect is education itself, the second problem (which also embeds itself in the educational issues) is confidence.
Unconditional self-esteem
Unconditional self-respect, just as an intellectual principle, has little animating power. A person can give intellectual assent to it, and still not be motivated by it sufficiently to do much of a job of fulfilling their duty of self-respect. Knowing, intellectually, that you are of equal intrinsic worth to everyone else does not automatically mean that you will feel that worth. It is common for people to be committed to the principle, and to even have it “guide” their morality, but nevertheless to feel unworthy and even undeserving of respect to varying degrees. To the extent that a person doesn’t feel worthy of respect, or deserving of it, even from themselves, it will be very difficult for them to fulfill their duty to themselves to live well.
The “feeling” of self-worth, of self esteem is sometimes talked of as “self love”, an idea that makes some people feel uncomfortable. The distinction between unconditional and conditional self-love or self-esteem does have a considerable history, however, most notably in the work of Rousseau where he distinguished amore do suis from amore propre. For Rousseau, we are born with unconditional self-love. It is natural. All animals possess it as a positive, life-affirming quality. 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. Because social arrangements are not immutable, the conditions of conditional self-love 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. 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. It is Aristotle’s “proper pride” – not pride in some accomplishment or quality that we possess, but just in being the person that we are. It is our dignity. It is our determination to “make the best of it”, and to stick up for ourselves. It is the readiness to stare down attempts to violate us, even as we fear. It is the strength to have true courage. It is what enables us to “walk tall”. It is the motive force that animates us to fulfill our duty to ourselves to life-plan – to devise and live a good life in an intelligent way, and hence it is the source of our educational motivation. The first task of education therefore is to find it, to clean it up, and to keep it clean.
Though we are born with unconditional self-love, it can be worn down or destroyed to the point that life doesn’t seem worth living, and we may welcome death. This aspect too, is of considerable educational significance. If the conditions, the forces, the internalized judgments that may have worn it down are removed or unlearned, however, it rises again. It does not have to be recreated.
Conditional self-esteem
How does unconditional self-esteem get worn down or destroyed? By conditional judgment. Despite the fact that we are all, unconditionally of equal intrinsic worth, we are also, as individuals, more or less valuable to each other in narrower ways that depend on a vast range of things including, for instance, physical characteristics that influence our ability to perform at various tasks, as well as our attractiveness. Such characteristics might be our gender, age, height, weight, build and even our skin tone. It can also include our family, our social class, religion and political preferences, as well as our tastes and interests. It can include what we do for a living, and the services we can offer others. It can include our recreational activities and entertainments. Any things like these that draw people together, set them apart, or influence where they fall or are placed in activities or groups, can contribute to our conditional sense of worth – or worthlessness. Unconditional self-esteem is only partly independent of these contingencies. The boundary is permeable, and the conditional judgments can often penetrate through and undermine it. We are particularly vulnerable to this when we are young and dependent, and if it has had little chance to truly flourish, we may be vulnerable at any time in our lives
Don’t pay any attention to what people think, we say. What do they know? The trouble is that, to varying degrees we must.
Rawls suggested that, in order to engage successfully in life-planning, we must secure certain goods. These goods are distributable, and hence a well-ordered society will make them available fairly. One of these goods is conditional self-esteem. Where life-planning is concerned, Rawls claimed that self-esteem is, firstly, that your life plan is worth it, and secondly, that you are capable of carrying it through. If you canvas every possibility, but can’t come up with a plan that you can put your heart into, then it is going to be difficult to get very enthusiastic about your own life, or care about anything very much. If you can’t think of anything worth doing or pursuing that is within your potential capability, then again, you are likely to sink into defeat. There are, of course, educational aspects such searches.
But Rawls suggested there is a social dimension to this as well – that it will be hard to believe in a plan, either way, if no-one else believes in its worth, or in your ability. How absolute this is, I don’t really know. There are people who have pursued things that no one around them thought worthwhile, and there are people who achieved things that no one else thought they could. It is hard to get into the detail of such cases to understand them fully. There might, for instance, be someone long dead who had some faith in them. There might be heroes in some tradition that is meaningful to them, heroes who would have understood the point. Whatever the truth of such cases, however, they represent much, much harder life paths than if there had been other people in support. If you choose, for your plans, something that everyone around you sees as pointless, or seriously doubts your ability to carry through, life is going to be very, very hard, and this aspect of your plan will absorb very large amounts of your energy (at the expense of other things) just to make it happen. All of this figures in to what will make for a reasonable choice. For many people, particularly those with weak unconditional self-esteem, there will be sufficient reason here not to try.
Because of the importance of our social affiliations, the judgments of others carry more weight than other simple contingencies in our environment that condition our plans. If it snows, and we can’t ride our bike today, we shrug and adopt another plan. If they won’t let us play with them, because we are too short, or a girl, it cuts more quickly to our worth. If we live a long way from the sea, and can’t afford a boat anyway, we look for some other pursuit that we can undertake. If we lose our job, however, and our status as well as our income depends on it, we may feel shame and humiliation as well as worry about where we are going to get the money to pay our bills. We may, quite seriously, doubt ourselves.
Many people grow up with a huge storehouse of judgments that have not just shaken their confidence at the level of conditional judgment, but have undermined their sense of their unconditional worth as well. Their birth wasn’t wanted, or a boy was wanted instead of a girl, they are lazy, they will never amount to anything, they are not smart like their brother, they are too ugly, too fat or dumpy, have bad skin, they are no good at abstract thinking, are uncreative and no good at school. They are untidy, or they have done so poorly so often, disappointed so often, that they don’t deserve to succeed, or even be loved.
In addition to these, bad moral behavior can, and often should make us feel bad about ourselves. There is a difference, on the one hand however, between feeling the remorse, acknowledging responsibility, taking every step to repair and restore the situation and then moving on a wiser person, and on the other, coming to see ourselves as a bad human being – of lesser worth than other people and deserving less respect. If that was how morality was supposed to work then our value as human beings would inevitably decline through life, since learning morality and moral wisdom is partly a matter of making such mistakes from time-to-time and learning from them.
Many children grow up in environments lacking in stability and consistent rules – often in poverty. In such environments, verbal, if not physical abuse is common, and quarreling usually involves the use of words as weapons – as forms of attack, and defense by counter-attack in which “cutting down” the other person is common. Being useless, unwanted and stupid are typical rounds of ammunition. With unconditional and conditional self-esteem both being shaky, one must seek for ones plans the limited things that one’s apparent abilities make possible, and the approval of any group that can give it.
Small wonder, then, that gang membership becomes attractive. If the only people around you who can be sources of approval are those who seek out drugs, and deal drugs, if some of those around you alleviate their poverty with theft and protect themselves with violence, it is rational to become involved. In some segments of society, gathering up any small scraps of self-esteem, conditional or unconditional, is a struggle, and fierceness and aggression is required, just to hold your own. Small wonder too that alienated people join terrorist organizations when they stumble upon others who can affirm them, and give them purpose. Such things are, very often, all that is available as resources of both kinds of self-esteem.
The need for unconditional and conditional self-esteem create excellent opportunities for indoctrination and social control. If you want to control people, simply create conditions of growing up that will weaken their unconditional self-esteem, so that they are more than necessarily dependent on the approval of others. Then contrive the areas in which this approval is available. Step back a hundred or more years and consider the range of activities in which women could expect approval for their plans, and encouragement for their abilities to carry them out, and compare what was virtually impossible for women then that is readily possible now. For the most part women stayed where the approval fell, and often fiercely defended that limited life.
It is not just that negative appraisals of contingent qualities that we possess can diminish us, and undermine our sense of our unconditional worth. These may seem, at first, to be the most obvious ways in which our self-esteem can be damaged. Comparative judgments that lead us to believe that we are better people can be just as invidious, and these quickly leap out at us across human history. Cultures are commonly stratified into social classes, and those in the higher ones tend to be convinced of their superiority over those in the lower. Religious groups too, tend to view themselves as superior to non-believers. Each culture is confident of its superiority to outsiders.
Privileged status is superior just in the access that it gives to resources, opportunities and power, including access to others with power. Those who excel – at sport or business or politics or the arts – are entitled to enjoy the accomplishments that set them apart from others, and the esteem and admiration of others that goes with it. None of this makes them better or more worthy human beings even if, in some limited area or aspect of their lives, they have found an attribute that enhances the value of their plans. It is when these conditional judgments overtake the unconditional, and they begin to see the social world from a standpoint of human superiority that problems begin to arise. This is where moral concepts such as arrogance and humility, and popular terms like snobbishness, and pathologies like narcissism begin to find a foothold.
It is interesting to note, too, how the appearance that a status judgment has overtaken unconditional self-esteem does not mean that it is capable of replacing the work that unconditional self-esteem enables. A person from a higher class may well consider that they are a superior human being because of their membership in that class, and treat those less favoured badly. Nevertheless, their sense of superiority may still leave them lacking confidence and fearful among their peers, or quite incapable of mustering their duty to themselves to conceive a good life and to live it. Instances abound of people who inherit high status but are incapacitated in this way.
In our own day, of course, this damage is more likely to arise as a result of our so-called “meritocracy” than because of inherited status. Too many of those who rise attribute their advantage to their own effort, and are too quick to disparage those who fail, or are stuck. Circumstances and luck are oversimplified, and human development poorly understood.
How our society distributes various goods – financial (all that poverty), the possibilities of self-esteem, the intellectual goods of life-planning – are issues about the justice of our society, and its decency. When we are “teaching a subject”, and we run up against problems of motivation or educational confidence and ability, we are just playing around the edges of educational concern – rarely even engaging its inner dynamics. We do no service to the respect we should have for the learner – to all of that learning about their duty to themselves – when we reduce these issues to “psychological problems”, or “family problems”, or we medicalize it all in terms of matters for therapy, and try to pass it off to someone else. We do not engage with education at all. Inquiry into the possibilities of life, and the mechanics of conditional and unconditional self-esteem, lie at the heart of educational interest.
An account like this of the tasks of self-respect should be enough for us to make a serious beginning toward the development of good and detailed accounts of educational content and process, and toward exploring the educational possibilities of the whole raft of our institutions. It should be clear, for instance, that intellectual independence will have the highest priority, as will tools of critical and creative thought applied to the issues of living itself. It should also be clear that the ways in which we make our life choices, and the ways in which people conceive of their plans, or use to structure them, need to be opened up, and to receive sustained, rigorous and critical examination. We would need to explore, pretty comprehensively, what can go wrong with plans in life, and what can go wrong with planning.
Then, too a wide range of possible alternative contents to plans need to be opened up, explored vividly, and with imagination. We need critical sociologies and histories of the many institutions, activities and undertakings that are likely to inhabit our plans – particularly of work and leisure – sociologies and histories that disclose the real values that have come to be embedded in them, and the interests they serve, and the possibilities they have for distorting and corrupting our good.
As a backdrop to this, there needs to be considerable attention paid to our social nature, and critical attention given to our social institutions, particularly in view of the ways in which these distribute our chances, and the goods that will be available to plans. The social, cultural character of all of these things, and the ways in which they are structured with power, and can be infused with distortion and manipulation, mean that education would have to involve serious, honest and critical evaluation of the institutions that structure our lives and their possibilities. We need, too, to look closely at the issues that flow from the need for a well-order society, and what that society might need to be like. The enlargement of our interest in our own good will necessarily lead us in this direction, just as it led Plato. Our equal respect for the value of each human being is likely to bring us towards the idea of democracy, though it will also make us dissatisfied with the poor things we settle for as democracies today. This in turn will pose us with deeper questions concerning our proper relationships with each other, and the proper forms of dialogue we should be engaging in, and under what authority.
How courageously we are encouraged to do this, and how extensively, and how well we are resourced, are all measures of the freedom of our society – the freedom it is willing to admit. We are always unlikely to have too little of this, because those who govern prefer to govern easily and in their own way, and this creates a tension, even in a “free” society. Those with power would almost always prefer to have more self-serving and less critical stories told. They would much rather we celebrate the way things are. For these reasons we need to be vigorous and watchful of the erosion of our capabilities by the structures in which we are embedded, and make our arrangements so that creeping limitations on our powers of critical reflection and discussion are obvious, hard to achieve, and harder to sustain. Just how badly we are managing now is hard for us to see because we grew up with our critical capacities very poorly nourished and exercised, and are used to the way they are.
If we pause and consider all this about self-respect and the duty to ourselves, and reflect on our societies, and the condition of education in these societies, a number of things begin to stand out starkly.
After the Enlightenment brought down the older traditions of political and moral authority derived from God and interpreted by feudal and ecclesiastical authority, turning that authority and responsibility over to the reasoning ability of the individual, each with their own equal intrinsic worth, the purpose of education would have to change. It would have to change to the cultivation of that worth and that reason. The value of each and every learner would have to come first. Education would have to be an undertaking of moral respect. It would have to respect the duty of each learner to enable their own good in the best way they can.
To the extent that we adopt the fabric of human rights and dignities and freedoms that we inherit – world-wide – from the Enlightenment, and appeal to them to protect our own freedom, and the integrity to develop our own beliefs and convictions, and to pursue our own life choices, there is no higher ground of ethical justification for education. This is the high ground. It is a story that we should be able to tell with confidence and conviction, and for the sake of each and every human being.
When we look at our social arrangements, including our formal educational arrangements in all countries, it must clearly be evident that we have made little or no attempt to construct education in such a way as to realize this purpose. What we do have is of a very low order, ethically. It is unjustifiable, indefensible. It is, indeed, largely manipulative and indoctrinatory and degrading of the human person. It is unworthy of the values of freedom, and right, and human worth that most of us espouse. As such, it is hypocritical.
Our failure to address this central aspect of the Enlightenment legacy goes a long way toward explaining the apparent failures of the Enlightenment project itself. It is a significant part of any explanation of the failure of our political institutions, our institutions of justice, of law and order, of community, and even of commerce and economic productivity. It explains a good deal of our individual misery, our personal dissatisfactions and also the social problems that often dismay us. In many of these areas, it would hardly be surprising if we discovered that we live and act like slaves rather than free peoples.
Among our major aspirations, both personally and collectively, should be a serious and passionate effort to reconstruct our educational arrangements of all kinds, fashioning them into institutions, practices and activities worthy of the name. This should be one of our first and highest aspirations. Our lives, our very humanity, and the lives and humanity of future generations depend on it.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1971. P407ff
Respect for persons - the justification for education
Description
The final justification for education is respect for the human being who is to be educated. What that entails and how it needs to be spelled out in order to guide educational content and process is introduced in this article. Content and processes that violate that respect are not educationally legitimate
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.
In addition to these, bad moral behavior can, and often should make us feel bad about ourselves. There is a difference, on the one hand however, between feeling the remorse, acknowledging responsibility, taking every step to repair and restore the situation and then moving on a wiser person, and on the other, coming to see ourselves as a bad human being – of lesser worth than other people and deserving less respect. If that was how morality was supposed to work then our value as human beings would inevitably decline through life, since learning morality and moral wisdom is partly a matter of making such mistakes from time-to-time and learning from them.
