Self-Respect Instead of Self-Esteem?

Chapter 5 chartered the rise and fall of global self-esteem as a salient sociomoral and educational variable. In a suggestive article, psychologists Roland and Foxx (2003) have argued that the star of global self-esteem in psychological and educational research should now be eclipsed by that of self-respect. Coming from psychologists, this is a quite a radical proposal, not only because of the scant attention that has been paid to self-respect in psychological, as opposed to philosophical circles, but also because, in philosophical discourse, self-respect has traditionally been associated with people's actual full selves rather than with their self-concepts – and it is usually only the latter that has interested contemporary psychologists. The aim of this chapter is to gauge the aptness of this proposal, to ameliorate certain shortcomings in it and to develop it further. In order to do so, I need to respond to two competing pulls: the philosophical one of elucidating the notion of self-respect, and the psychological one of suggesting ways for conducting empirical research into self-respect. Although it is difficult to respond adequately to both pulls simultaneously, it is worth a try, given the interdisciplinary remit of this book.

The radical nature of Roland and Foxx's proposal can be seen by comparing the respective numbers of abstracts yielded by PsycINFO (1985–May 2006) when using the search terms ‘self-esteem’ and ‘self-respect’. Whereas the former results in no less than 11,313 abstracts (let us recall), the latter turns up only 239.