Let’s workshop this essay where I detail my Logic-Based Therapy sessions with a client who—fueled by the thought fallacies of damnation, can’tstipation, and perfectionism—is prone to anger outbursts.
Unconditional self-respect, in this context, means you have inherent worth by virtue of being an agent with goals and purposes—worth that is not dependent on factors like mental or physical abilities, or status or wealth or circumstances so on. It means, in effect, that you are someone who should never be treated as a mere means to someone else’s ends—that you should never be used as are a mere tool. It is a humanistic notion according to which it is always wrong to treat someone as a slave (when they do not consent to that, of course). The view that there is a core of dignity, no matter how inferior one is to anyone else is not defended in the paper. The client, Albert, simply understood—in line with the Enlightenment ideal that all people have fundamental rights—that it would be useful for his betterment to remind himself that he is deserving of unconditional self-respect. So the angle was more pragmatic (rather than about defending the metaphysical foundation of rights or so on). My own views are not fully in alignment with this.
“promote unconditional self-respect”
Should we do this? Not all selves are equal.
Unconditional self-respect, in this context, means you have inherent worth by virtue of being an agent with goals and purposes—worth that is not dependent on factors like mental or physical abilities, or status or wealth or circumstances so on. It means, in effect, that you are someone who should never be treated as a mere means to someone else’s ends—that you should never be used as are a mere tool. It is a humanistic notion according to which it is always wrong to treat someone as a slave (when they do not consent to that, of course). The view that there is a core of dignity, no matter how inferior one is to anyone else is not defended in the paper. The client, Albert, simply understood—in line with the Enlightenment ideal that all people have fundamental rights—that it would be useful for his betterment to remind himself that he is deserving of unconditional self-respect. So the angle was more pragmatic (rather than about defending the metaphysical foundation of rights or so on). My own views are not fully in alignment with this.