SELF-RESPECT
Contents:
Respect toward a thing or person is the moral affirmation of the value(s) and/or virtue(s) embodied by this thing or person (note that “thing” here can refer to anything: organisms, creations, systems, etc.). To morally affirm something is to grasp its positive (i.e. supportive) relationship toward our fundamental values, the most fundamental of which is our volitionally-driven life.
Hence, self-respect is the moral affirmation of the values and virtues embodied by ourself, which means: (1) our character, (2) our achievements, (3) our decisions and deliberate actions, (4) our capabilities, (5) our habits and (6) our other qualities (e.g. appearance, attitude, etc.). However, if we observe the facts of our existence, we see that there exists a morally fundamental aspect of ourselves, i.e. an aspect that, if well-formed, shapes and contextualises other aspects positively, and if not well-formed or if ill-formed, fails to do so or does the opposite. This aspect is our character, i.e. the sum of our internalised premises (which form the basis for automated value-judgements) and practiced approaches.
Values exist only if we act to concretise them; hence, volitional action is an essential to the pursuit of values. Secondly, since a volitional being's ultimate value is volitionally-driven existence, it is the practice of volition that is the basis of morality; a non-volitional morality is a contradiction in terms. Thus, our volitional actions and particularly our practices (i.e. what we consistently do volitionally) is the driving factor in shaping the values we embody in our actions and thus in our self (this is because, by causality, a being acts according to its nature, which means how a being acts is key to its nature, i.e. key to both expressing its nature and/or shaping it over time). However, volitional action presupposes a conscious decision, and a conscious decision presupposes some grasp of reality, i.e. it presupposes some premises.
Internalised premises are those premises that we have integrated into our approach to life so thoroughly that it automatically shapes our value-judgements. As we observe, we can and do internalise premises, and doing so is key to building on our premises to advance our pursuit of life by advancing our knowledge and capabilities (since internalising premises frees our focus to integrate more data). Thus, we see that internalised premises and practiced approaches, i.e. character, are the basis of the consistent pursuit of values, especially long-range. Thus, we see that character is the morally fundamental aspect of our being.
Hence, self-respect is essentially the value we have for our character, which translates to value for our internalisation and consistent pursuit of values and thereby, through practice, our development of the corresponding virtues, which, in essence, translates to value for our volitionally-drive life and our ability to sustain it long-range.
A volitional being must grasp and pursue a valuable potential in order to sustain itself as a volitional being; such is its nature. Now, potential presupposes evidence of what is possible, and a crucial piece of evidence for the pursuit of valuable potential is the validity of our values and the internalisation of the virtues needed to pursue them. Hence, key to grasping valuable potential is grasping the value of our character.
Even if our character is poor for now, as long as we have evidence of the possibility to improve it and the realisation of this possibility by our own efforts, we can grasp and pursue valuable potential (note that a poor yet improving character, by logic, cannot be perpetual, since if the character never ceases to be poor, the evidence of improvement and thereby of valuable potential keeps weakening into despair). Hence, self-respect is not a luxury but a crucial necessity to a volitional being concerned with his volitionally-driven life, which means life lived with respect to a broader context (long-range or at least beyond the immediate moment).