Hypatia, Inc. Self-Trust, Autonomy, and Self-Esteem Author(s): Trudy Govier Source: Hypatia, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 99-120 Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810303 Accessed: 20-06-2017 15:04 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Hypatia, Inc., Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hypatia This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Self-Trust, Autonomy, and Self-Esteem TRUDY GOVIER Self-trust is a necessary condition of personal autonomy and self-respect. Self- involves a positive sense of the motivations and competence of the trusted pers willingness to depend on him or her; and an acceptance of vulnerability. It does preclude trust in others. A person may be rightly said to have too much self-tr however core self-trust is essential for functioning as an autonomous human be The topic of trust is becoming a fashionable one in some philosophic circles, and rightly so. Working on this subject, I encountered what seem me to be an important subtopic: the matter of self-trust. Self-trust is intere in its own right, as a dimension of trust, and by virtue of its relation to o key topics such as autonomy, self-respect, and self-esteem. Or so I shall try show here. AN ACCOUNT OF TRUST DISTURBANCES AMONG RAPE AND INCEST VICTIMS In 1982 Doris Brothers, a psychologist, completed a doctoral dissertat which she examined trust disturbances among young women who ha victims of rape or incest. Her sample was quite small: she studied twenty women, nineteen and twenty years of age. Brothers worked with thre concepts: a. trust in others (typically called interpersonal trust; these were particular individuals known to the subject); b. trust in oneself, as regards others; and c. trust in oneself, as regards oneself. On this account, the trustworthiness of others, (a), requires decency reliability, willingness to take personal risks to help people in trouble Hypatia vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1993) © by Trudy Govier This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 100 Hypatia understanding and compassionate, being likely to act in responsible ways in emergencies, being protective of the vulnerable, and being unlikely to desert a troubled friend. An untrustworthy person would be self-involved, uncaring, more inclined to look out for himself or herself than to tend to the needs of others, unlikely to keep personal confidences, prone to use flattery and decep- tiveness, exploitative in sexual relations, and jealous and spiteful. One's own trustworthiness with regard to others, (b), was understood by Brothers in a parallel way to (a): to see oneself as trustworthy with regard to others is to see oneself as caring, unexploitative, loyal, and so on. My present interest, however, is in (c), which Brothers understood as the self's trustworthiness with regard to itself-here called simply "self-trust". Reading this dissertation first brought this concept to my attention. How did Brothers understand self-trust? In an appendix to her dissertation, she set forth a Self-Trust Scale, as follows: 1. I can take life's disappointments in my stride. 2. When I am angry, I feel I might lose control. 3. I can accept my own shortcomings. 4. I worry that I might become overwhelmed by panicky feelings I can't explain. 5. I expect to have satisfying sexual experiences. 6. I am easily swayed by the opinions of others. 7. I have faith that my talents will be developed. 8. I allow myself to be bullied. 9. I adapt easily to changes in my life. 10. It is hard for me to believe I will ever find a fulfilling love relationship. 11. I expect to succeed at things I try. 12. When meeting new people, I worry about being rejected. 13. I make the right decisions on important matters. 14. I demand more from myself than I am capable of doing. 15. I count on my ability to deal with difficult situations. 16. I lose respect for myself when I even have to ask for help. Assent to odd-numbered items counts as indicating self-trust; assent to even-numbered items indicates a lack thereof. (Broth- ers 1982) This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 101 Brothers defined self-trust broadly as "the representation of the self as able to cope with the world and itself." Studying her scale, I inferred more specific strands in this broad conception. Brothers seems to me to have understood self-trust as requiring self-acceptance; a sense of one's own competence especially as regards control, judgment, and adaptability; and self-confidence and hopefulness about the future as it involves oneself. Her conception avoids reference to any moral dimension of the concept of self-acceptance and fails to distinguish beliefs about oneself from those about the broader world in areas of self-confidence and optimism. Contrary to what Brothers implies, one might trust oneself and yet be pessimistic about one's prospects of developing one's talents due to one's beliefs about opportunities in one's society.1 Brothers found that for victims of rape and incest the greatest disruptions in trust were in area (c): victims' trust in themselves. The young women studied tended to blame themselves, de-value themselves, and to have a diminished sense of their own competence and judgment after the sexual assaults. This tragic response by victims was attributed by Brothers to their need to render the traumatic events that had happened to them intelligible, to preserve a sense of the world as a tolerably safe place. Sexual assaults by persons known to the victim indicate that even relatives and friends can be dangerous; attacks by total strangers ("blitz rapes") suggest that anyone might attack at any time. Paradoxically, blaming oneself for the assault seems a way of reasserting control: if the victim herself caused or instigated the attack then by acting differently she may be able to protect herself in the future. So far as I can determine, the work of Doris Brothers has not been developed further. Because the sample was small, it would obviously be premature to generalize from her results. But given the prevalence of incest, sexual assault, and sexual abuse among young women and the difficulties many women experience in the area of self-esteem, her results are suggestive in many important ways. Being a philosopher and not a psychologist or counselor, I was moved by this work to try to understand better the concept of self-trust and to relate it to other themes in social theory, most notably those of autonomy, self-respect, and self-esteem. SOME RECENT ACCOUNTS OF AUTONOMY The idea of autonomy has been questioned by many feminist theorists. Alison Jaggar, for instance, construes the political liberal's notion of autonomy as self-definition and understands it to presume an individualist account of human nature. Following Wittgenstein and Naomi Scheman, Jaggar criticizes assumptions of liberal political theory, arguing that there is no presocial human being. Autonomy, as she understands it, presumes that an individual person can and should determine and define his or her own emotions and mental states. But "(i)f individual desires and interests are socially constituted ... the This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 102 Hypatia ultimate authority of individual judgment comes into question" (Jaggar 1985, 44). Male thinkers, she says, have exaggerated the separation of the mind from the body and of people from each other-especially that of children from adults. These exaggerations, together with a failure to understand and appreciate the social nature of emotions and intentional states, have led to the construction of a misconstrued and mistakenly valued conception of autonomy. Similar themes are stated by many other writers. Sandra Harding (1979) finds in traditional epistemology an insistence that the Ideal Observer must be, in effect, viewpointless, a self that is detached, dispassionate, uninvolved, individualistic, self-interested, and fundamentally isolated from other people and from nature. Such an observer is impossible. But if he were possible, he would be male: as a supposed embodiment of pure reason, he is not easily referred to as female. A radical feminist perspective, says Harding, denies the feasibility or desirability of this sort of social transcendence. Lorraine Code sees autonomy as a central theme in the history of Western Philosophy (Code 1990, chapter 4). It is, she says, the focal point both of Cartesian epistemology and of Kantian ethics. The autonomous human being is seen as radically independent, as able to free himself or herself from all previously accumulated beliefs and habits so as to be detached, impartial, neutral, and self-reliant. Such a fully autonomous human being would be an ideal observer-independent of social convention and pressure and thereby capable of full objectivity. Code criticizes this idea as neglectful of the obvious fact that language, values, and thinking skills are acquired from parents and teachers. The construal of autonomy as total independence and self-reliance is not only descriptively unrealistic but normatively unattractive in its neglect of such capacities as responsibility, trust, and intuition and in its implication of adversariality. In addition, Code says, it is implicitly masculinist: it either eliminates the very possibility of female autonomy or entails that whatever autonomy women achieve is of different (lesser) worth as compared to the paradigmatic autonomy of men. Autonomy so construed denies epistemic value to affectivity in all its forms, denies worth to cognitive interdependence, and ignores particularities of experience, bodily existence, and practical life. The Autonomous Reasoner is utterly alone and can trust no one to check the veracity of perceptions. Everything is up to him or her; the Autonomous Reasoner will have to rely on himself or herself to the exclusion of everyone-and everything-else. Small wonder if this being experiences solipsistic skepticism as a constant possibility and unnerving temptation and launches a desperate appeal to God to escape from the all-too-dominant self! Autonomy in the Cartesian/Kantian sense implies a radical subject-object split, leading naturally to a conception of cognitive activity as oriented toward the ability to control, predict, and manipulate the external world. Code sees This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy GQvier 103 a need for an alternate conception of subject-object relationships. She makes some fascinating suggestions: reflecting more on the epistemic significance of knowing other people, of acknowledgment (social recognition of one's status or claim), of eye contact between people, of intuition, insight, case-based knowledge, detail, and narrative accounts. Perhaps such alternative accounts of knowledge would provide for a different conceptualization of autonomy and autonomous thinking, according to which an autonomous human being could be something more embodied, more natural, more social, and more sensitive than the Autonomous Reasoner. A suggestion that feminist theory will not happily relinquish all conceptions of autonomy is found in Lynne Amault (1989) who sets as a desideratum for moral reasoning that it should respect the autonomy of all affected parties. She proposes a radicalized and collective notion of autonomy, suggesting that to have autonomy is to be a member of a group that has sufficient collective control over public forms of discourse that one is able to express one's point of view in a natural, undistorted, and unrepressed way, without its being marginalized or discounted. Perhaps Arnault's conception can provide a necessary condition of autonomy. However, contra Arnault, it does not satisfactorily specify sufficient conditions: people may seek power over actions (not just discourse), and individuals, despite being members of groups, may wish to speak and act in ways not representative of those groups. That some feminist philosophers seek to maintain a notion of autonomy is clear again in Meyers (1989). Meyers argues for a procedural notion of autonomy. On her view, one has personal autonomy insofar as one is capable of controlling one's own life; this requires competence in discovering one's talents, feelings, beliefs, and values; defining who one is (one's "true self"); understanding oneself; and directing one's life.2 There are threats to autonomy from social pressure, attempts at external coercion, internalized cultural imper- atives, and individual pathology. Nevertheless, autonomous decisions are sometimes made. For Meyers, the problem for a theory of autonomy is to account for the fact that such decisions are possible and to describe how they are made. Contrary to any implications we might find in Cartesian or Kantian philosophy, autonomy does not, on her view, require a transcendental self. Autonomy can be and is manifested on the empirical level. Some decisions are autonomous and others are not. The autonomous person is capable of introspection, autobiographical retrospection, critical reflection and deliberation, and the reconciliation of conflicting desires; she is faithful to herself (Meyers 1989, 55). I find this account of autonomy attractive and plausible. It is, I think, consistent with my account of the nature and value of self-trust. I hope to show that procedural autonomy, as articulated by Meyers, requires self-trust in the sense I will explain here. Procedural autonomy has as its necessary condition a reliance on one's own critical reflection and judgment, and that reliance is This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 104 Hypatia possible only if one has, and can maintain against criticism, a sense of one's own basic competence and worth. Inside and outside feminist movements, thousands-perhaps millions-of women have struggled to assert their self-worth, dignity, and capacity for independent action. They have worked to preserve a sense of themselves as individual people with their own feelings, values, identities, capacities, and goals, often in contexts in which conventional values would have them disappear into derivative relational identities such as daughter, wife, or mother. These struggles are naturally interpreted as women's quests for greater autonomy. Thus it is somewhat paradoxical that prominent feminist theorists reject the idea of autonomy-and rather reassuring that others see a need to reconstruct the concept. Although the Cartesian/Kantian Autonomous Reasoner is easily satirized as a neurotic fantasy, autonomy in some sense still strikes me as valuable. The following reflections on self-trust can, I hope, make some contribution to the emerging feminist dialectic on autonomy. I will try to show that self-trust is a necessary condition both of autonomy and of self-respect. Understanding the role of self-trust in thought and action helps to show why autonomy is valuable. SELF TRUST AND INTERPERSONAL TRUST Usually we think of trust in interpersonal terms, as an attitude one person has toward another, or as an important aspect of a relationship between people. To show that self-trust is a kind of trust, I seek to explain central features of interpersonal trust and then show that these features are also present in an attitude toward oneself that can properly be called "self-trust." Trust is fundamentally an attitude, an attitude based on beliefs and feelings and implying expectations and dispositions. Consider what is involved in trusting a friend. When one trusts a friend, one believes that she is likely to act kindly and benevolently toward one, that she is unlikely to harm one, that she is well-disposed toward one. One expects the friend to lend a sympathetic ear, to cooperate in making joint arrangements, to help out in time of crisis. One assumes she will not tell secrets, abuse one's children, or try to steal one's job. To trust a friend is to believe that her motivations (toward oneself) emerge from affection, care, and concern and not from dislike, ambition, or egoism. Trust also involves a sense of the other's competence. When one trusts a friend to give advice, or to care for one's house or pet, one believes that she is sufficiently knowledgeable to do so. Trust is typically founded on a sense of the sort of person the other is with regard to motivations and to competence. To trust a friend is to regard her as a person who is sincere, caring, and dependable. Trust implies expectations that have an open-ended character; there is no determinate list of things that a trusted friend should do. When one trusts, one takes risks and is vulnerable. One is willing to rely or depend on the other, This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 105 although there is always the possibility that he or she will not act as one expects. Trust is a necessary feature of social life because we are interdependent: we have relationships with others whose future behavior we can neither predict nor control (Luhmann 1979; Gambetta 1988; Thomas 1991). Trust affects our interpretations of other people, our sense of what they are doing. For example, if one hears that a trusted friend has been disloyal, callous, or cruel, one will not take the story at face value. If, on the other hand, someone whom one distrusts tells a tasteless joke, one is likely to regard it as a manifestation of some real character flaw on her part. Trust is not an all-or-nothing thing. One may trust or distrust to various degrees, and trust and distrust are often relativized to specific roles or contexts. One will typically trust friends to care for one, to respond in emergencies, to be fairly reliable about arrangements and appointments, and to keep confidences. But even with good friends, one may not trust in every respect. For example, one might know that a good friend is somewhat unreliable about money and, though trusting her in general, not trust her to repay small loans. We make ethical and epistemic judgments about trust, saying that we trusted "too much" or "too little" in given cases, and referring to people as sometimes too trusting (gullible) or too suspicious (paranoid). To sum up, interpersonal trust, as exemplified in the case of trusting a friend, involves the following features: a. expectations of benign, not harmful, behavior based on beliefs about the trusted person's motivation and competence; b. an attribution or assumption of general integrity on the part of the other, a sense that this is a good person; c. a willingness to rely or depend on this person, an acceptance of risk and vulnerability; and d. a general disposition to interpret this person's actions favorably. Trust often exists in various degrees (one may trust someone only a little, but more than one used to) and is often relative to particular contexts and ranges of action (one might trust a person as one's gardener but not as one's baby-sit- ter). In trusting another person whom one knows, one's expectations are based on experience and evidence. But they go beyond what evidence proves: in new situations, from free agents, we expect decent and caring behavior.3 So what about self-trust? All these features, (a) to (d), can be used to characterize attitudes toward oneself. As in (a), one can have positive beliefs about one's own motivations and competence. As in (b), one can see oneself as a person of integrity. As in (c), one can be willing to rely or depend on oneself, accepting risks attendant on one's own decisions and one's vulnera- This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 106 Hypatia bility to their consequences. As in (d), one can have a general disposition to see oneself in a positive light.4 When these attitudes coexist in a person, she may be said to trust herself. If a person sees herself as basically well-intentioned and competent, able to make reasonable judgments and decisions and carry out reasonable plans of action, and if she is disposed, on the whole, to view herself in this light even in the face of superficial evidence or criticism indicating the contrary, she shows trust in herself. The analogy with interpersonal trust is in these respects complete. Thus we can properly regard self-trust as one type of trust. Like interpersonal trust, self-trust may exist in degrees and may be relativized to various contexts. One might, for instance, trust oneself to give a public lecture, do the family laundry, drive across the continent, or ride a bicycle down a steep hill, but not to purchase a secondhand car or offer advice to a suicidal adolescent. Self-trust, then, is not an all-or-nothing thing; one may trust oneself to various degrees and in some areas as opposed to others. We speak colloquially of self-trust, often in contexts where we do not feel we have it: 5 I wouldn't trust myself to drive a tractor with two small children riding along. (My attention would be split and my driving wouldn't be adequate; at issue are competence and control.) I wouldn't trust myself in a public debate with that person. (I might lose my temper; at issue is emotional control.) I can't trust myself to criticize my own work. (I'm too close to it to be a good judge; at issue are critical perspective and judgment, also impartiality.) I wouldn't trust myself to share a hotel room with that attractive young student. (I feel sexually attracted to him; at issue are emotional control, ability to behave according to my own values.) Self-trust is most obviously relevant in contexts in which one's judgments, capacities, motivations, or actions are questioned or are at issue. And that is often: other people, the social world, and the physical world challenge us in many ways, and we have to act. We have to make judgments about what is going on, make decisions and implement them, and do this ourselves. If we are insecure in our sense of our own values, motives, and capacities, we cannot think and act effectively. We will bend too easily to the suggestions and criticisms of other people, cave in in the face of social convention, lack initiative in overcoming obstacles. When a person experiences something, interprets what has happened, and later remembers and recounts what she has experienced, she may not think of This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier herself as trusting or not trusting herself. However, should she or others begin to question her idea of what happened, issues of self-trust become apparent. Here is an example: (a) Joan is organizing a panel discussion. She needs three panelists and has found two: Fred and Anita. After making several attempts to find a third member, she decides to solve the problem by going on the panel herself; she thinks she could do it and is tired of playing telephone tag. On the evening the discussion is held, Fred is ill and unable to attend. Anita is rather subdued, and as a result Joan's comments occupy at least two-thirds of time set aside for the panel. A male colleague criticizes Joan for having an all-female panel and accuses her of setting up a platform for herself and talking too much. He appears entirely unconvinced by her explanations. Upset, Joan begins to reflect on what happened and scrutinizes her motives. Did she try hard enough to get a third panelist? Did she somehow do or say something to discourage Anita-and even possibly Fred-from participating? Is she, or was she, seeking self-publicity? How Joan ultimately sees these things will depend on many factors. But clearly, if she trusts her own memory, interpretation, motivation, and integrity not at all she is too open to being undermined by whatever comes along. Self-trust is also at issue when one must decide whether one can depend on oneself to carry through decisions and act on one's values in difficult situations. Consider, for instance, the following example: (b) Susan is a recovering alcoholic. With the assistance of an AA group and her supportive family, she has been dry for three months. She has been invited to a wedding reception where alcohol will be served. She fears that the event will be stressful not only because of the alcohol but also because some years previously she had a passionate affair with the man who is about to be married. Officially they are now just friends, but it was he who ended the affair and Susan was miserable about it at the time. In deciding whether to attend the reception, Susan should reflect on whether she can trust herself to cope with her emotions, have the willpower to stay off alcohol when under stress, and-if she does have a lapse with drinking-return later to her AA program. If she decides to go, she is in effect trusting herself to conform to her values in these trying circumstances. One may be called on to trust one's perceptions and observations, interpretation of events and actions, feelings and responses, values and evaluation, This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 107 108 Hypatia memory, judgment, instinct, common sense, deliberation, choice, will, capacity to act, flexibility, competence, talent, and ability to cope with the unexpected. One has, in addition, a kind of overall sense of what sort of person one is, a general sense of oneself-and this sense of who one is bears on particular contexts. Whether any issue of self-trust arises, whether and how much a person trusts himself or herself, will vary from one context to another. To lack self-trust in some particular capacity or situation is not necessarily a serious handicap. (Few among us would be restricted or burdened by the sense we could not rely on ourselves to purchase a secondhand car or do suicide counseling). Anyone is likely distrust himself or herself in some specific situations. Far from being a handicap, self-distrust in this sense may on occasion be helpful in causing one to hold back from mistakes and rash behavior. But core distrust of oneself-self-doubt in fundamental areas-is something else again.6 To lack general confidence in one's own ability to observe and interpret events, to remember and recount, to deliberate and act generally, is a handicap so serious as to threaten one's status as an individual moral agent. Suppose that one were to distrust one's own memory of one's childhood, one's ability to understand the gestures and comments of other people, one's instinctive feelings toward acquaintances and possible friends, one's sense of one's interests and abilities as regards occupation and leisure activities, and one's ability to define and implement future goals. With such extreme self-doubt-a lack of self-trust in core areas, a lack of any sense that one is fundamentally a worthy and competent person-one could scarcely function as a person. With the self in default, something else would take over. Perhaps one would be governed by others-a parent, husband, or charismatic leader. Or The Party. (Autonomy, let us note, is understood in national political contexts as self-government.) Perhaps one would conform blindly to convention. Perhaps one would swerve with every external suggestion and bend to every passing fad. Absence of core self-trust will make procedural autonomy, as described by Meyers, completely impossible. To reflect on one's beliefs and desires, to work out a resolution in cases in which they conflict, it is necessary to view oneself as having worthy desires, competently founded beliefs, and the cognitive and moral capacity to make good judgments and implement decisions. This is simply to say that it is necessary to trust oneself-to believe that one can do these things reliably and dependably and need not abdicate one's judgmental and decision-making powers to others. Tessa Dahl's novel Working for Love depicts a woman's struggle to emerge from a relationship in which her husband sought to shape every detail of her personality and life. The following passage illustrates his presumption of the right to interpret her experience and motivation: "Why are you doing that Molly?" "For fun Jack." This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 109 "No you're not, you're doing it to impress Paul." "I'm not, darling." "Yes, you are." You have to tell my why and how and what my every move was for. And the more I started to become independent, the more you'd sit me down and tell me exactly what I was really doing and why, and even what I was going to do next. (Dahl 1989, 35) To emerge from this domination, the psychologically battered wife has to cling to a sense of herself, her own interpretation of reality, her competence, and her goals. There is, then, a strong positive analogy between self-trust and interpersonal trust. Significant differences between the two seem to lie in two main areas: evidence and vulnerability. Both interpersonal trust and self-trust have a basis in evidence and experience. When one trusts another person, one has evidence about that other person. One knows him, to some extent, through what he does and says; one has a sense of what sort of person he is from being with him, doing things with him, seeing and listening to him.7 With self-trust, one's evidence is about oneself. One has more evidence, of course; one has been with oneself one's whole life. But notoriously all this experience with oneself does not yield perfect self-knowledge: one can forget, misinterpret, overvalue or undervalue, or deceive oneself. There is also a difference between interpersonal trust and self-trust in the area of vulnerability. In interpersonal trust, the other, to whom one is vulnerable, is someone whose actions and emotions one does not control. If the other acts badly, one is in a situation not of one's own making, from which one must retrieve oneself. A supervisor who trusts an employee to mail off an important document will find himself, unexpectedly, responsible for the consequences should the employee fail to perform the task. With self-trust the predictability of the failure is typically greater: one can see it coming up. One is still vulnerable in the sense that one is taking risks and may be hurt or harmed if things do not go as expected. But the person who fails and the person who is responsible for coping are, in this case, one and the same. SELF-TRUST IN RELATION TO SELF-RESPECT, AUTONOMY, AN I believe that self-trust is closely tied to self-respect, se autonomy. There are two ways of seeing these relationships: pragmatically, and I explore both briefly here. Because self-res and self-esteem are all central and complex conceptions in thei exploration is rather preliminary in nature. This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 110 Hypatia 1. Self-Respect Self-respect implies that one values oneself for those things that make one a person: one's consciousness, will, ability to choose, capacities, and abilities. A person with self-respect has a sense that he or she is a human being whose interests and ends are valuable and that, as a human being, he or she has dignity and worth. Having self-respect, a person can stand up when demeaned and insulted, holding the conviction that these reactions are not deserved. (Downie and Telfer 1969) Allowing oneself to be exploited, manipulated, or used over a long period of time is seriously undermining to one's self-respect; if one becomes solely a tool enabling others to achieve their ends, one's sense that one's own ends, goals, and interests have worth is unlikely to survive. Conceptually, there is clearly a close tie between self-trust and self-respect. A person with self-respect must value herself as a person and regard her own interests, values, beliefs, and goals as having some importance. This is not to say that her ideas and needs must always take priority over those of others, but rather that they should be considered as having equal value and not be de-valued simply because they are hers. A person with self-respect must regard himself or herself as a person with dignity and moral worth. This person has intentions, motives, needs and goals, and these are worthy, meriting attention and consideration. Rawls (1971) regards self-respect as a primary good, something needed whatever life plan one was trying to implement. Rawls understands self-respect as necessary for continuance in any endeavor. In any endeavor there are obstacles; if one does not regard the endeavor as worthy and achievable, one will soon give up. A person with self-respect has a sense of his or her own value, a sense that his or her "plan of life" is worth carrying out and that the conception of good on which that plan is based is a worthy one.8 If one does not value oneself and one's plans, one is "plagued with self-doubt" and unable to move toward one's goals. Self-trust and self-respect as explained in these accounts are clearly closely related notions. Self-trust requires having a positive sense of one's own motivation, competence, and integrity. The self-trusting person is disposed to see himself or herself in a positive light, and, due to the sense that he or she can and will act competently and rightly, the person with self-trust is able to accept vulnerability to the consequences of his or her own actions and to be self-reli- ant. To distrust oneself would be to see oneself as ill-motivated, incompetent, and unable to act independently. Such self-doubt would entail a lack of self-respect: the self is deemed to be unworthy, lacking integrity and unable to implement worthy goals, and inadequately equipped to deal with the world. Such self-doubt is clearly incompatible with self-respect. Thus self-trust is, conceptually, a necessary condition of self-respect. This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 111 We can also examine the relationship between self-trust and self-respect from a pragmatic point of view. People often face challenges to their actions and beliefs. Others confront and criticize, suggesting that one is badly motivated, ill-informed, wrong in his or her actions, or just plain incompetent. (Sometimes these others are right; that's not the point.) In order to preserve one's sense of one's motivation and character, it is necessary to have resources within the self to consider and respond to these sorts of challenges. One must be able to reflect on what others say; reflect on one's actions, values, and beliefs; determine the accuracy or importance of the challenge; and respond appropri- ately. This reflection requires relying on one's own capacities of memory, deliberation, and judgment-and one will not be able to do this unless one trusts oneself. To discriminate between apt and ill-founded challenges from others, one needs to trust one's own memory, judgment, and conscience. A person who has no resources to preserve her ideas, values, and goals against criticism and attack from others will be too malleable to preserve her sense that she is a person in her own right, and will therefore be unable to maintain her self-respect. (Gross illustrations of this dynamic can be seen in the battered-wife syndrome.) 2. Autonomy Self-trust is a necessary condition of procedural autonomy as described by Meyers (1989). In order to reflect on and appraise one's options and beliefs and implement decisions based on the reflecting judgments, one must trust oneself. One must deliberate and choose on the basis of one's own values, beliefs, and judgments, depending on one's own competence and accepting one's vulnerability to possible omissions and errors. This relationship emerges quite clearly from the following passage: The main problem for a theory of autonomy is to explain how autonomous decisions are made. Whether episodic or programmatic, what makes the difference between autonomous and heteronomous decisions is the way in which people arrive at them-the procedures they follow or fail to follow. Autonomous people must be disposed to consult their selves, and they must be equipped to do so. More specifically, they must be able to pose and answer the question "What do I really want, need, care about, value, etcetera?"; they must be able to act on the answer; and they must be able to correct themselves when they get the answer wrong. The skills that enable people to make this inquiry and to carry out their decisions constitute what I shall call autonomy competency. (Meyers 1989, 52) This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 112 Hypatia A person reflects on what she needs and cares about: to do this presumes both that she sees her own self and her concerns and motivation as being worthy of her attention and that she regards herself as sufficiently competent to examine these ends and the actions she might take to achieve them. Such attitudes are not to be taken for granted: they can be put in question by challenges-either from other people or from the course of events. One may be treated as a person whose needs are of no importance, or as incompetent even to remember and describe events in one's own past, or one may frequently experience frustration and failure. Such denigration or disappointment can be internalized so that a person is left with no faith or confidence in himself or herself. In such a case, he or she would be incapable of the procedural autonomy Meyers describes. To put the matter simply, without self-trust a person cannot think and decide for himself or herself and therefore cannot function as an autonomous human being. 3. Self-Esteem The notion of self-esteem is overworked, if not trendy, and it is quite impossible in a short space to do justice to the many currents of thought about it. There are suggestions of paradox in the idea that everyone is special in some way that warrants self-esteem. And some strategies for maintaining or enhanc- ing self-esteem seem likely to be counterproductive in the long run. For example, some elementary school teachers and administrators refuse to test spelling on the grounds that the procedure will damage the self-esteem of children who do not perform well. Such self-esteem is unlikely to survive later educational challenges.9 In response to these issues, it is useful to consider three distinctions pertinent to self-esteem. a. Core self-esteem and situational self-esteem. Core self- esteem is one's sense that fundamentally one is an acceptable person. Situational self-esteem is one's sense that one is accept- able in some more specific context. One may have core self- esteem without having situational self-esteem for some situations. A person may, for instance, be quite secure about her worth, her appearance, and her abilities overall and yet completely lack self-esteem as regards spelling, sports, or gourmet cooking. The distinction between core self-esteem and situational self-esteem is directly parallel to the distinction between core self-trust and situational self-trust."° b. Competitive self-esteem and noncompetitive self-esteem. Self-esteem may be interpreted as comparative and hence as implicitly competitive. To esteem something is to rate it highly. This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 113 That suggests (even if it does not quite entail) that other comparable things are rated less highly. If we understand selfesteem comparatively, it seems impossible for everyone to have well-founded self-esteem. We can't all be above average! At the beginning of her recent book on self-esteem, Gloria Steinem (1992) speaks of women who are especially strong and courageous (compared, presumably, to other people) but who have inadequate self-esteem: they sadly underestimate their own powers and abilities. But later on in the book, it becomes obvious that Steinem believes that every man and woman should have adequate self-esteem. This goal presumes a noncomparative sense of self-esteem. One esteems or values oneself in a way compatible with the valuing of others; one need not compare oneself with others and see how one "measures up" in order to maintain one's self-esteem. c. Inner-based and outer-based self-esteem. Self-esteem is one's sense of one's worth and value. In speaking of self-esteem we are speaking mainly of a person's own internal sense of who he or she is. Logically, we can distinguish between one's inner sense of self-esteem and the outward-derived esteem that emerges from the attitudes of other people. (Psychologically, there are of course many connections between inner and outer grounds for self-esteem.) A person who is continually corrected, criticized, put down, or dismissed, who is frequently ignored and insulted, or who is a member of a demeaned and marginalized group will maintain self-esteem only with great determination and struggle. In the absence of inner resources, such a person is likely to feel incompetent and worthless, to be plagued with self-doubt, unable to rely on her own judgment, deliberation, and capacity to act. If she has no inner sense of self-esteem, she will be unable to maintain any trust in herself. But if a person who is denigrated by others is nevertheless able to retain a sense of worth and competence, this self-trust may enable him or her, against all odds, to preserve basic self-esteem. Now consider a person's inner sense of core self-esteem, on a noncomparative interpretation. That is, consider her internal conception as to whether, fundamentally, she is a worthy and adequate person-regardless of comparative judgments about how she measures up to other people and regardless of how other people may or may not esteem her. The goal of everyone's having "adequate" self-esteem makes most sense on this interpretation of what selfesteem is. (It is impossible or incoherent on other interpretations.) This sort of self-esteem I call "basic self-esteem." In fact, one might term it self-acceptance.'11 This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 114 Hypatia Basic self-esteem is a necessary condition of core self-trust because such self-trust requires a positive sense of one's own motivation, competence, and integrity. Clearly, core self-trust presumes a belief in one's own worth. If one does not accept one's motives and goals as worthy, if one does not believe that one has sound judgment and competence in key areas of decision and action, then one lacks basic self-esteem. And this lack of basic self-esteem rules out core self-trust. Self-acceptance and a sense of one's competence in core areas are conceptual prerequisites of core self-trust. But there is a pragmatic dimension too: to the extent that a person trusts himself or herself, self-trust will be of tremendous help in retaining basic self-esteem in contexts in which external recognition and acknowledgment are lacking. Should one be in a context in which others ignore and insult one, treat one as inadequate, incompetent, or unworthy, strong trust in oneself will be a major resource for resistance and emergence. We allude to such self-trust when we speak of "inner strength" and "inner resources." WHY SELF-TRUST IS VALUABLE A sense that one is unworthy, that one lacks integrity and competence, bodes ill for personal happiness and leaves a person open to exploitation and manipulation by others. To have goals and pursue them, to experience and remember confidently, to interpret reality according to one's own norms and style, to assert that one's own interests and needs count for something-all this requires self-trust. One with little or no self-trust is constantly open to having his or her beliefs and values put aside by others and is thereby deprived of any internal source of constancy that could provide for the appraisal of beliefs, values, choices, and actions and the reconciliation of conflicting desires and goals. Because pressure from outside the self is variable in nature, the integration of the self must come from within. Without self-trust, one cannot do this (compare Meyers 1989). To value self-trust is not to say that one's own sense of reality and one's own competence should count for everything; it is to say that they must count for something. They must count enough for a person to understand, reflect, judge, choose, and act in key areas of life with respect to his or her own experience, feelings, interests, needs, goals, and life plan. To function as a moral and cognitive agent, one cannot abdicate to others decisionmaking in key areas such as memory, interpretation, judgment, intimacy, friendship, reproduction, occupation, and use of leisure time. One's own sense of what happened, what experiences mean, what one's motivations were, what one is able to do, must be taken seriously and rejected only on the basis of one's own reflectively grounded conviction that one has made a mistake. Such conviction is based on taking account of one's own view and that of the other: it is an independent consideration of evidence, information, reasons, and arguments-not a suc- This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 115 cumbing to correction based on an assumption that someone else must have it right just because he or she is someone else. To preserve a sense of who one is, to preserve the conviction that one is worthy and competent, to hold to a sense that one is leading one's life, to preserve a meaning of one's existence is against ad hoc reconstructions offered by others, to exercise autonomy and maintain self-respect and self-esteem, to function as a cognitive and moral agent, one needs self-trust. One needs to preserve one's belief in one's own integrity and worth, one's credibility as a witness to, and participant in the world, one's capacity to remember and recount one's experience. One must confidently depend on oneself to think accurately, deliberate reasonably, make sound decisions, carry out sensible plans and implement worthy goals. Without core self-trust, a person is so open to the manipulations of others as to lose any sense of a meaningful agency. Only with self-trust can one conduct one's own life so as to lead an authentic personal existence not open to domination by other people, social convention, or passing fads. In trying to say why self-trust is valuable, I have in effect assumed that it is desirable to reflect on one's experience and make and implement one's own decisions. Thus my considerations about the value of self-trust express a residual commitment to individualism. Is this residual individualism objectionable? Some philosophical conceptions of personal autonomy have been readily satirized as presupposing an utterly unrealistic conception of human life, misconstruing it as asocial, unemotional, devoid of particularity, even disembodied. I believe I have avoided such misconceptions. The person who trusts himself or herself is situated in a particular context, stands in relation to other people and has beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, emotions, and memories that bear upon real people in real situations. He or she is embodied, located within a real social situation-although perhaps not fully endorsing all of its implied roles and expectations. The autonomous person, relying on himself or herself, can question cultural norms and social roles and reflect on them in the light of pertinent beliefs and values, using whatever information, examples, and arguments are available from within one's experience and culture (Kymlicka 1989). Such deliberation and questioning do not require that he or she occupy a transcendent position, beyond society and empirical relations. They can be done, and are done, using the various resources that society provides. Nor on the present account is self-trust to be valued absolutely. A person may in several different senses have too much self-trust. One may have more confidence in one's own character and capacities than past experience and evidence would warrant, thus having "too much" self-trust in an epistemic sense. (Example: The teen who passes her driving test the first time, thinks she's mature and careful on the road, and insists she could drive to a faraway city in one day with no mishap. She infers too much from a single success; her confidence is over-blown.) Or one may have "too much" self-trust in another This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 116 Hypatia sense. Even supposing that evidence and experience warrant one's confidence in oneself, one may rely on oneself so much that one precludes potentially valuable contributions from others. (Example: The supervisor who has performed efficiently on so many projects that she won't work cooperatively; she is more willing to depend on herself than on others.) In a consequentialist sense, then, one would have too much self-trust. Clearly, then, self-trust can be taken too far. Nor should self-trust and self-reliance be understood so as to discount systematically the suggestions and actions of others. To reflect on and define one's own emotions, capabilities, motivations, and plans, one will often work with others. Interaction and dialogue have a major role to play. To insist on self-respect, self-esteem, autonomy, and self-trust is not to deny the importance of relationships with other people; nor is it to deny some proper role for these relationships in our attitudes toward ourselves. SELF AND OTHERS What is the self, in this account, and what does its self-trust imply about its attitudes toward others? Are the ideas of self, self-trust, and autonomy defended here implicitly oppositional? Do they presume that other people are latently hostile, seeking to undermine, manipulate, and exploit the self? Or do they imply an adversarial attitude toward others, as some feminist critics have suspected? Like Meyers, who understands procedural autonomy as something achievable by an everyday empirical self, I understand the self as empirical. It is not a transcendental agent who rises above the earthly flux of emotion, sociality, and body to inject independent insight and agency into the material world. But nor is it a social dupe pulled along in the flow of customs and conventions it can neither question nor reject (Hekman 1991a, 1991b). The self preserves a sense of itself, an understanding, a capacity to reflect, to respond, and to act. It need not act solely from its own interest; it need not work alone to define its beliefs, values, needs, and interests. It can interact and cooperate with others. The self of self-trust is the everyday self-the empirical self that runs, walks, and swims, reads and writes, cooks and eats, laughs, worries, and loves. This is the self that believes and feels, that has attitudes of trust or distrust toward others and itself. When it trusts others, it has a positive attitude to them-pos- itive expectations and confident, relaxed feelings. When it trusts itself, it has positive expectations about its own actions and motivations. Whatever fascination we feel for the traditional philosophical conundra of mind-body and free will, we need not resolve these issues to define and preserve a sense that self-trust exists and is important in leading one's life. The self that trusts or does not trust-whether in others or in itself-is that familiar everyday self This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 117 that can question, feel, think, judge and act with greater and lesser degrees of self-control and independence.12 Stressing self-trust does not imply that the self is set against others in a way that is necessarily adversarial or oppositional. Though many of the examples here defend the importance of self-trust in contexts in which the self is challenged by others, there are innumerable other examples with other implications. One can come to trust oneself in some specific area because one trusts others. For instance, one may have trust in an art teacher whom one respects and who says one has a good eye and real talent and, partly as a result, one may come to have confidence about one's own critical and creative abilities in art. Here self-trust emerges from one's trust in the other: if one did not respect his judgment, one could not build one's own confidence on the basis of his praise. In other cases, trust in another is supported by self-trust: one is able to maintain one's trust in someone else only because one trusts oneself. Suppose, for example, that one regards oneself as a good judge of character and as having a good memory and believes that an acquaintance is trustworthy and well-intentioned. If friends suggest that this acquaintance is probably a spy, only one's own self-trust can support reliance on one's earlier judgment and maintain one's trust in the acquaintance. The need for self-trust can emerge from external events, from one's own feelings, or from what is said and done by others. One does not in general trust oneself instead of trusting others or trust others instead of trusting oneself. Trust in others can support and enhance trust in oneself, and trust in oneself can support and enhance trust in others (Govier 1991). The self is the I of relation and dialogue as well as the I of self-understanding and independent action. These are not separated "I's." The self is the I that listens and speaks, that wonders, feels, and responds-that accepts or rejects, confirms or disconfirms, persists or desists. To do this coherently and confidently, I need self-trust. NOTES I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a generous grant supporting my research on the ethics and epistemology of trust and distrust and to Eldon Soifer, Donald Conrad, and Cary MacWilliams for helpful exchanges on the subject of self-trust. Two anonymous referees for this journal made helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1. Believing that one had talent and ability but that the realities of life, through no fault of one's own, provided small opportunity to develop these, one could still have self-trust, though one might be pessimistic about one's prospects in the world. Provided these prospects were attributed to the world at large and not to one's own competence or will, one could nevertheless be said to have self-trust. 2. A similar account appears in Kymlicka (1989). This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 118 Hypatia 3. Compare Govier (1991, 1992a, and 1992c) and Thomas (1991). See also Baier (1986), Thomas (1989), Luhmann (1979), and Michalos (1990). 4. Both with self-trust and with trust in others, there is an implicit sense of general integrity as well as the specific reliability at issue in a particular context. One might say, "Joe is a good honest guy but I wouldn't trust him to clean the engine of my car." If one did trust Joe in other areas-for example as a barber or babysitter-that would presume a basic confidence in his honesty and good intentions. The same kind of point can be made for self-trust. There may be specific areas in which one has good reasons for not trusting oneself; given, however, that one trusts oneself in some key areas, that one has core self-trust, one has a basic sense of one's own integrity and a capacity to implement one's intentions. 5. Compare Austin (1962). On his view, distrust would seem "wear the trousers" (sic) in that trust is assumed, taken for granted. When something goes wrong and we suspect a reason for distrust, we then begin to notice that we have trusted. Compare Baier (1986). 6. John Baker, commenting on an earlier paper of mine on self-trust, called the account "Protestant" and noted that what I had selected as fundamental areas of life requiring self-direction are areas in which religious traditions often seek to dictate to people how they best should live. Insofar as such traditions seek autonomous adherence by followers to their codes, there may be ways of reconciling this feature with my account. If one is autonomously convinced, for instance, that an arranged marriage is the best way to find a mate, following such a custom might possibly be interpreted as an expression of personal autonomy and not as implying a harmful lack of self-trust. But insofar as religions or cults seek to commit their adherents to rigid rules pertaining to sexual intimacy, eating habits, leisure, occupation and other crucial areas without providing background conditions that would facilitate their autonomous consent, their practices undermine the sort of self-trust that I see as valuable. For that reason I would argue that such practices are ethically and politically objectionable. 7. Just how evidence bears on trust in others and on trust in oneself is clearly a broader topic and cannot be pursued here. Efforts to explore the former are made in Govier (1992e). How one would relate these to the latter would depend on one's overall view of self-knowledge. 8. The account of Rawls, in terms of a life-plan, seems overly intellectualized and deliberative. Compare Meyers (1989) and Kymlicka (1989). 9. Based on actual experience. It seems to be fashionable right now among educational theorists to argue against tests, even for routine drilling of spelling and arithmetic, on the grounds that they will undermine the self-esteem of those who fail to do well. 10. One who believes that getting a low grade on a spelling test will cause schoolchildren to have low self-esteem could be accused both of failing to distinguish core self-esteem from situational self-esteem and of confusing comparative and noncomparative self-esteem. 11. The relationship between basic self-esteem and self-acceptance is an important subject to which I can only allude here. 12. The ontology of "I" is a subject for another paper. This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:04:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Trudy Govier 119 REFERENCES Amault, Lynne. 1989. The radical future of a classic moral theory. In Gender/body/knowledge. See Jaggar and Bordo 1989. Austin, J. L. 1962. Sense and sensibilia. 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