Incentives, Inequality and Self-Respect

Rawls argues that ‘Parties in the original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect’. But what are these social conditions that we should so urgently avoid? One evident candidate might be conditions of material inequality. Yet Rawls seems confident that his account of justice can endorse such inequalities without jeopardising citizens’ self-respect. In this article I argue that this confidence is misplaced. Unequalising incentives, I claim, jeopardise the self-respect of those least advantaged—at least under a Rawlsian schema—by undermining the very processes by which Rawls hopes to make distributional inequalities and self-respect compatible. I begin by setting out Rawls’s distinct account of self-respect before moving to describe how Rawls expects the difference principle to support citizens’ in this regard. I then draw upon GA Cohen’s distinction between ‘strict’ and ‘lax’ interpretations of the difference principle to argue that the presence of unequalising incentives undermines both the direct and indirect support that the difference principle can offer to citizens’ self-respect. As such, I claim that Rawls must either weaken his endorsement of unequalising incentives, or risk violating his ‘prior commitment’ to avoiding social conditions harmful to citizens’ self-respect.     

Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives

Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be determined how the benefits conferred on people by causing them to exist weigh against comparable benefits conferred on existing people. In particular, might the reason to cause people to exist ever outweigh the reason to save the lives of existing people?     

Hate Speech,Dignity and Self-Respect

This paper engages with the recent dignity-based argument against hate speech proposed by Jeremy Waldron. It’s claimed that while Waldron makes progress by conceptualising dignity less as an inherent property and more as a civic status which hate speech undermines, his argument is nonetheless subject to the problem that there are many sources of citizens’ dignitary status besides speech. Moreover, insofar as dignity informs the grounds of individuals’ right to free speech, Waldron’s argument leaves us balancing hate speakers’ dignity against the dignity of those whom they attack. I suggest instead that a central part of the harm of hate speech is that it assaults our self-respect. The reasons to respect oneself are moral reasons which can be shared with others, and individuals have moral reasons to respect themselves for their agency, and their entitlements. Free speech is interpreted not as an individual liberty, but as a collective enterprise which serves the interests of speakers and the receivers of speech. I argue that hate speech undermines the self-respect of its targets in both the agency and entitlement dimensions, and claim, moreover, that this is a direct harm which cannot be compensated for by other sources of self-respect. I further argue that hate speakers have no basis to respect themselves qua their hate speech, as self-respect is based on moral reasons. I conclude that self-respect, unlike dignity, is sufficient to explain the harm of hate speech, even though it may not be necessary to explain its wrongness.     

Self-Respect or Self-Delusion? Tomasi and Rawls on the Basic Liberties

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional (and important) ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument (the ‘greater wealth thesis’) in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when (and why) citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect.     

Realizing Honneth: redistribution,recognition, and global justice

The purpose of this article is to explore the potential contribution of Axel Honneth's critical theory of recognition to empirical and normative debates on global justice. I first present, very briefly, an overview of recent theories of global distributive justice. I argue that theorists of distributive justice do not pay enough attention to sources of self-respect and conditions for identity formation, and that they are blind toward the danger of harming people's sense of self even by well-intentioned redistributive policies. Honneth's theory suffers from complementary shortcomings; it is anti-technocratic but largely oblivious to the global nature of many contemporary justice claims. Given this situation, I seek to broaden the theory's scope by outlining transnational extensions of the recognition principles of love, rights and solidarity identified by Honneth. In conclusion, I show how utilizing a broadened conceptualization of the struggle for recognition allows us to better understand the changing logic of justice-oriented foreign policies.     

Health care reform: Can a communitarian perspective be salvaged?

The United States is culturally oriented more toward individual rights and values than to communitarian values. That proclivity has made it hard to develop a common good, or solidarity-based, perspective on health care. Too many people believe they have no obligation to support the health care of others and resist a strong role for government, higher taxation, or reduced health benefits. I argue that we need to build a communitarian perspective on the concept of solidarity, which has been the concept underlying European health care systems, by focusing not on individual needs, but rather, on those of different age groups—that is, what people need at different stages of life.     

Let's get serious: communicating commitment in romantic relationships

Are men or women more likely to confess love first in romantic relationships? And how do men and women feel when their partners say "I love you"? An evolutionary-economics perspective contends that women and men incur different potential costs and gain different potential benefits from confessing love. Across 6 studies testing current and former romantic relationships, we found that although people think that women are the first to confess love and feel happier when they receive such confessions, it is actually men who confess love first and feel happier when receiving confessions. Consistent with predictions from our model, additional studies have shown that men's and women's reactions to love confessions differ in important ways depending on whether the couple has engaged in sexual activity. These studies have demonstrated that saying and hearing "I love you" has different meanings depending on who is doing the confessing and when the confession is being made. Beyond romantic relationships, an evolutionary-economics perspective suggests that displays of commitment in other types of relationships--and reactions to these displays--will be influenced by specific, functional biases.     

Toward a Feminist Conception of Self-Respect

The concept of self-respect is often invoked in feminist theorizing. But both women's too-common experiences of struggling to have self-respect and the results of feminist critiques of related moral concepts suggest the need for feminist critique and reconceptualization of self-respect. I argue that a familiar conception of self-respect is masculinist, thus less accessible to women and less than conducive to liberation. Emancipatory theory and practice require a suitably feminist conception of self-respect; I propose one such conception.     

Women’s anger, epistemic personhood, and self-respect: an application of Lehrer’s work on self-trust

I argue in this paper that the work of Keith Lehrer, especially in his book Self-Trust has applications to feminist ethics; specifically care ethics, which has become the leading form of normative sentimentalist ethics. I extend Lehrer??s ideas concerning reason and justification of belief beyond what he says by applying the notion of evaluation central to his account of acceptance to the need for evaluation of emotions. The inability to evaluate and attain justification of one??s emotions is an epistemic failure that leads one not to act on one??s own aspirations and desires and treat those desires as if they did not exist. I argue that this is a common condition among women in patriarchal societies because patriarchy can cause women to believe that they are not worthy of their trust concerning what they accept, specifically acceptance of their anger over their own mistreatment. As a result, many women are unable to realize the self-protective role of their anger. All of this reflects a lack of what I shall call epistemic personhood, a concept based on Lehrer??s theory concerning the keystone role of self-trust in the epistemic arch of rationality, justification and knowledge. Lastly, I use this concept of epistemic personhood to develop a care ethical account of self-respect that counters the Kantian account.     

Work and the Human Essence

ABSTRACT Jenkins and Sherman hold that belief in the value of work is artificially inculcated and that a 'leisure society' is desirable and possible, as well as being necessitated by the introduction of microprocessors. After distinguishing between meaningful work and labour (first section), I reply obliquely to their case by contending that meaningful work affords most people their best chance of the necessary good of self-respect (second section), and that it constitutes the exercise of an essential human capacity, the development of which is necessary to human wellbeing (third section). Because of the contingent connections between employment on the one hand and meaningful work and self-respect on the other, we should recognise the value of work and plan for full employment (fourth section).     

Public reason as a social basis of self-respect

The idea of public reason was traditionally explained in terms of the need to justify the exercise of coercive power to reasonable people who do not agree on the truth of any particular conception of the good. In this paper, I show why this traditional, coercion-based, view is problematic, and offer a different account of public reason: the “self-respect account.” In addition, I argue that this account is capable of informing recent, nontraditional, accounts of public reason. The conclusion is that public reason can be conceptualized as a social basis of self-respect.     

Giving Voice to the Experiential Value of Natural Environments

People value natural environments in many different ways. In addition to the various tangible products and benefits that can be produced from a natural environment, people may also find value in their immediate experience of the environment while they are in it. This experiential value is an important aspect of quality of life for many people, but it is often not taken into account in making decisions about managing natural environments. In part, this is because the experiential value of the environment can be difficult for people to express in words. In this article, I explore how first-person methods from experiential and phenomenological psychology may help in giving voice to the ineffable experiential value of natural environments. Drawing on the work of Charles Lewis, Eugene Gendlin, and Kenneth Shapiro, I illustrate how an initially inarticulate, bodily felt sense of the experiential value of a natural environment can be explicated in a way that both expresses and carries forward the implicit sense of value. Such practices might serve as a basis for an environmental decision-making process that incorporates the hard-to-express experiential values of nature.     

The Rights of Future People

ABSTRACT  It has been argued by some that the present non-existence of future persons entails that whatever obligations we have towards them are not based on rights which they have or might come to have. This view is refuted. It is argued that the present non-existence of future persons is no impediment to the attribution of rights to them. It is also argued that, even if the present non-existence of future persons were an impediment to the attribution of rights to them, the rights they will have when they come into existence constitute a constraint on present actions. Both arguments build on a suggestion of Joel Feinberg's. Next, three arguments are considered which, while they do not highlight the non-existence issue, are related to it. The view that the causal dependence, of (some) future people on present policies, erodes or weakens the claim that rights considerations should constrain our present actions concerning them, is considered and rejected. The view that future people can only have rights to what is available at the time at which these people come into existence is considered and rejected. So too is the view that the attribution of rights to future people involves, in virtue of resource scarcity, an unacceptable arbitrariness.     

The Value of Choice and the Choice to Value: Expanding the Discussion about Fetal Life within Prochoice Advocacy

In this essay, I provide evidence that a new generation of prochoice advocates wishes to move away from defending abortion rights via the view that fetal life has little or no value (for example, as Mary Anne Warren does in her “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”) and toward a more complex view of abortion rights. This newer view simultaneously grants that fetuses are more than simply “clumps of cells,” that they are, to some extent, entities that possess some degree of value, and also that women still have the right to decide whether they wish to continue a pregnancy (for example, as can be found in the writings of Rosalind Hursthouse, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Margaret Olivia Little). Prima facie, this may sound like an impossible task—an instance of “having your cake and eating it too”—but I will show throughout my paper that, and how, such a task can indeed be accomplished.     

Epistemic Injustice and Open‐Mindedness

In this paper, I argue that recent discussions of culprit‐based epistemic injustices can be framed around the intellectual character virtue of open‐mindedness. In particular, these injustices occur because the people who commit them are closed‐minded in some respect; the injustices can therefore be remedied through the cultivation of the virtue of open‐mindedness. Describing epistemic injustices this way has two explanatory benefits: it yields a more parsimonious account of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice and it provides the underpinning of a virtue‐theoretical structure by which to explain what it is that perpetrators are culpable for and how virtues can have normative explanatory power.     

Three Types of Self-Respect

According to John Rawls, self-respect is the most important of the primary goods and is essential for the construction of the just society. Self-respect, however, remains a concept which is inadequately theorised, being closely linked to other concepts such as dignity, shame, pride, autonomy and security. Most usually self-respect is considered to be just the self-reflection of the respect we receive from others. In this paper I argue that self-respect consists of both a self-evaluative and a social reflexive element. Using Darwall’s distinction between two types of respect as a building block, I argue that it is worth considering self-respect as having three dimensions. Broadly these are human recognition, status recognition and appraisal.     

The Gift of Respect: Tourist Gift Giving and the Construction of Self-Respect Among Authorized Sightseeing Rickshaw Drivers in Bharatpur,India

Tourism workers may actively cultivate relationships with tourists to counter the social and economic marginalization they face by others involved in the tourism economy. In this article I explore the ways in which sightseeing rickshaw drivers use gifts as symbols of these relationships with tourists. I base my analysis on sixteen months of fieldwork that I conducted in 2008–9 with the authorized sightseeing rickshaw drivers at Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, India. I argue that they use gifts, both materially and discursively, to create a space in which they can construct narratives of self-respect.     

Intergenerational transmission of violence: Is violence a pathology of intersubjective contact?

In this article, I look at violence as a pathology of the intersubjective contact. In particular, I claim that one possible explanation of violence is lack of recognition on a societal, intersubjective level. I propose an explanation based on Honneth’s concept of struggle for recognition and Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity. The article takes the following course: I first give a short outline of the concept of intergenerational transmission of violence, as understood by psychology at the level of an individual, followed by a brief presentation a summary of sociological research on the concept. Then, I proceed with a discussion of Honneth’s three modes of recognition, viz. love, rights, and solidarity, as modes of intersubjective contact, leading to the development of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. I claim that the lack of these kinds of recognition leads to the decrease in confidence and trust and consequently to abusive behaviour, that it affects social integrity and brings about the destruction of social functions, and that it results in an individual and a society which have lost their “honour” and dignity. Finding his account of intersubjectivity lacking in its philosophical aspect, I complement Honneth’s account of intersubjectivity with that of Merleau-Ponty, based in his understanding of the intertwining of the subject and the world and the reversible contact between and among subjects within the world. Considering the negative effects of misrecognition as described by Honneth, in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intersubjective contacts among subjects, I conclude that a country where all three modes of recognition have been disturbed houses a society lacking self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, and consequently shows all the signs of Honneth’s forms of disrespect, i.e. abuse and rape, denial of rights and exclusion, as well as denigration and insult, all of which are forms of intergenerationally transmitted violence.     

The Problem with “Caring” Human Rights

Although Daniel Engster's “caring” human rights are, on the surface, a compelling way to bring the concept of care into the international political realm, I argue they actually serve to perpetuate some of the same problems of mainstream human‐rights discourses. The problem is twofold. First, Engster's particular care theory relies on an uncritical acceptance of our dependence relations. It can, therefore, not only overlook how local and global institutions, norms, and the marketplace shape our relations of (inter)dependence, but also serve to further naturalize our current dependence relations. Second, Engster's caring human rights are only minimally feminist, which means that they do not pay attention to the way in which women's full and equal political participation is a necessary component to challenging and overcoming the oppression, marginalization, and exploitation of women and their caring labor worldwide. Although I am sympathetic to Engster's goals and some of his proposed policy solutions, I argue that we should not abandon the critical, feminist lens of care ethics in favor of “caring” human rights that cannot overcome the care critique of mainstream human‐rights discourses.     

Reconsidering resource rights: the case for a basic right to the benefits of life-sustaining ecosystem services

In the presence of anthropogenic climate change, gross environmental degradation, and mass abject poverty, many political theorists currently debate issues such as people's right to water, the right to food, and the distribution of rights to natural resources more generally. However, thus far many theorists either focus (somewhat arbitrarily) only on one particular resource (e.g. water) or they treat all natural resources alike, meaning that many relevant distinctions within the group of natural resources are overlooked. Hence, the paper will start with an analysis of the various forms which natural resources can take and how this might influence one's conception of resource rights. In so doing, the paper argues that we have to carefully distinguish between the actual physical resources people might control and how we distribute these, and the life-sustaining benefits each and every person draws from sustainable and functioning ecosystems. Based on this distinction, the paper will argue for a right to the benefits of life-sustaining ecosystem services as a universal basic right every person has. Further distributive claims with respect to particular physical resources would thus be limited by the requirements of such a basic right.