Self-Respect And Childhood
Creator
Ryan, Nanette
Advisor
Storh, Karen
Abstract
In his autobiography Martin Luther King, Jr. recounts how his mother, Alberta Williams King, confronted what he describes as “the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child” (King 2001: 20). He writes “She taught me that I should feel a sense of “somebodiness” but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are “less than,” you are “not equal to”” (King 2001: 20). The challenge that Alberta Williams King speaks to raises many important issues. One of which concerns how a child should conceive of themselves from a moral point of view. Williams King is surely correct in wanting and teaching her son to conceive of himself well; to have a sense of himself as a “somebody”, as a person that matters, and matters equally among others. Moreover, this sense of self seems like one that all children should have as a matter of living well as children. But what does it mean more concretely for a child to have a sense of themselves in these terms? And why is such a self-conception of the kind that King describes so important? In order to answer these questions my primary aim in this dissertation is to offer a focused exploration and a robust account of how children ought to conceive of themselves in childhood. The account that I put forward is what I refer to as the ‘base form of self-respect.’ The base form draws from philosophical conceptions of Kantian ethical theory and contemporary cognitive developmental psychology to offer the first empirically informed philosophical account of self-respect that is fitting for the context of childhood.
Description
Ph.D.
Permanent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/10822/1080043Date Published
2022Subject
Type
Publisher
Georgetown University
Extent
119 leaves
Collections
Metadata
Show full item recordRelated items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Grounding a Right to Health Care in Self-Respect and Self- Esteem
DeGrazia, David (1991-10)