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In his essay, Self-Respect: Theory and Practice, Laurence Thomas attempts to demonstrate that self-respect is not contingent on a person's abilities. He claims self-respect is a moral sense of worth; self-respect is contingent on viewing oneself as deserving full moral status. The important distinction that Thomas makes is between self-respect and self-esteem. What follows is an evaluation of this distinction, including a description of his Civil Rights Movement analogy, an examination of the plausibility of this view independent of his arguments, and an evaluation of the cogency of his reasoning. The Distinction Thomas borrows William James's notion of self-esteem who wrote that it could be defined as the ratio of a person's successes to his aspirations. In other words, self-esteem equals the amount of successes over the amount of aspirations that particular person has. It should be noted that any end a person aspires to can contribute (or detract) from a person's self-esteem when it is a success (or failure). High self-esteem can be the product of moral accomplishments just as it can be from accomplishments in sports or academics. "A person has self-respect," writes Thomas, "if and only if he has the conviction that he is deserving of full moral status, and so the basic rights of that status, simply in virtue of the fact that he is a person." Self-respect is the conviction that one has intrinsic worth, and so must be treated with value. Unlike self-esteem, self-respect does not turn on one's abilities or behavior. To have self-respect, a person need not have a morally acceptable character or possess a certain amount of ability in some field; one must simply view oneself as deserving full moral status.
Approximate Word count = 1106
Approximate Pages = 4.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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