Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1990 91

DISSCUSSION ARTICLE

Nozick on Self-esteem

ANDREW MASON

ABSTRACT This paper considers Robert Nozick’s account of self-esteem, as presented in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I criticise three aspects of it. First, the claim that people gain self-esteem only when they believe that they possess greater quantities than others of some valued talent or attribute. Secondly, the view that there will always be a conflict of interests between people over the acquisition of self-esteem. Thirdly, the proposal that the most promising way to improve levels of self-esteem across a society is to educate people so that they value a number of different activities and attributes. I argue against Nozick that there are non-comparative standards of doing something well or successfully that provide a person with a means of self-assessment; there is no necessary conflict of interests over the acquisition of self-esteem; reforming basic social and economic institutions is a promising way for a society to increase levels of self-esteem.

Low self-esteem is incapacitating, so everyone has a reason for avoiding it. This alone would be sufficient to make the notion of self-esteem of interest to psychologists. But it would not be enough to make it central to social and political theory were it true that people’s self-esteem is unaffected, or only minimally affected, by how they stand in relation to others and by the institutions that structure their lives. The social and political importance of the notion of self-esteem can be brought out by confronting questions such as these: Must the achievements of others threaten one’s self-esteem? Is self-esteem a ‘scarce resource’ for which people must compete? How do social and economic institutions affect levels of self-esteem across a society? I propose to examine and criticise the answers to these questions given by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia [ l ] and develop a different conception of self-esteem in opposition to Nozick’s.

I. Making Comparative Judgements and Acquiring Self-esteem

According to Nozick, people acquire self-esteem by believing that they possess signi- ficant quantities of some talent or attribute which is valued by at least some others; in order to gain self-esteem, people must believe that they score highly along some dimension( s) which others also think important. Nozick claims that whether a person does score highly along a dimension is determined by what scores are achieved by others. Consider a talent for playing basketball:

A man living in an isolated mountain village can sink 15 jump shots with a basketball out of 150 tries. Everyone else in the village can sink only 1 jump

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shot out of 150 tries. He thinks (as do the others) that he’s very good at it. One day along comes Jerry West. [2]

The general point Nozick wishes to make is that we judge how well we do things by comparing our performance to others. Taken as an empirical generalisation about the way in which some people assess what they do, his claim has merit. However, on Nozick’s account it is not merely a contingent fact that people often evaluate their performance by comparison with others; it is a necessary truth because “there is no standard of doing something well, independent of how it is or can be done by others” [3]. With some activities such as basketball, and competitive games in general, Nozick’s conceptual claim has plausibility. Consider the question of what it is to play chess well. It seems that there is no standard apart from how others play chess. A league table of chess players could be drawn up and how well one plays chess would be determined by the position one occupied in that table, or some relevant part of it.

But as Anthony Skillen notes with respect to many other activities (such as those which have an independent product), Nozick’s claim that there is no non-comparative standard of doing something well is inaccurate. It is at best a distortion based on a generalisation from a one-sided diet of examples and at worst straightforwardly false [4]:

a boat either floats or it doesn’t, a fishing net either holds or it doesn’t, people can either do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or they cannot, and such things are valued without the need for point-scoring and all the paraphernalia of winning and losing with which Nozick is so preoccupied. [ 5 ]

Nozick might admit that there are criteria which do not involve an implicit comparison with the performance of others, that are relevant in the assessment of how well someone has performed an activity like building a boat. However, he might go on to insist that satisfaction of these criteria alone is never sufficient to determine whether an activity has been performed well. Is ending up with a boat that doesn’t sink sufficient to show that one has performed the activity of building a boat well? In this spirit, Nozick might argue against Skillen that building a boat well requires not merely that one builds a boat, but also that one builds a good boat. He might then claim that what it is to build a good boat cannot be specified independently of the achievements of others. But this is highly questionable: boats have a function and there seems no reason to deny that what it is to build a good boat can be spelt out purely by reference to this function.

Even if it were correct that a full analysis of, e.g., what it is to build a good boat, would reveal an interpersonal comparison at some point, this would not mean that gaining self-esteem must involve comparative judgements. We can make a distinction between performing an activity successfully and performing an activity well. In many cases it is clear that performing an activity successfully does not involve a reference to the achievements of others and provides a basis for self-esteem, so a person may acquire self-esteem without believing that they have performed some activity better than others. I may achieve my aim of building a boat merely by constructing a vessel that floats; this achievement may be sufficient for me to acquire self-esteem even when I recognise that others could have built a better boat.

This suggests that there is generally a non-comparative consideration from which it is possible (in principle) for a person to derive self-esteem: namely, whether the aims and objectives he or she had in performing an activity have been fulfilled. Suppose that most people build boats that last twenty years, whereas I build one that lasts only 12

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months. It may seem that I haven’t been successful, but if I only intended to build a boat that would last me a year, then I have successfully done what I meant to do. In contrast, suppose I try to build a boat that will serve me as long as possible, yet someone else with the same materials builds a boat that lasts nineteen years longer than mine. This would show that I hadn’t been successful, but this would be because I manifestly haven’t achieved what I wanted, not because someone did better than I did.

Further doubts can be raised about Nozick’s claim that people acquire self-esteem only through believing that they have better scores than others along some valued ‘dimension’. Consider the idea that people might gain self-esteem merely by thinking that they have performed some valued activity to the best of their ability. Some people do take pride in what they have done in the knowledge that it may not be particularly outstanding, but believing on the other hand, that they have done as best they could. Nozick would be sceptical about whether this avoids interpersonal comparisons. He would claim that a relative evaluation must be introduced at some point: the judgement that one has performed to the best of one’s abilities is something that can only be made on the basis of a comparison with someone who has the same abilities. Nozick assumes that to say that a person had done well, given limited capacities, is to say that

he had realized a greater proportion of his capacities than most and fulfilled more of his potential than others do; considering where he had started, and with what, he had accomplished a great deal. [6]

But it need not be to say this. There are standards of assessment which allow us to say that a person has done well, given their capacities, which are independent of how others with the same capacities perform. Indeed, if it were true that the only way in which one could judge whether a person had done something to the best of their ability was by comparing their performance with others, then there would be grave difficulties in determining whether a person had done as well as they could. How could one tell whether one person had developed their talents to a greater extent than others, or had had merely a greater initial endowment of them? The fact that this epistemological problem doesn’t trouble us when we make the judgement that a person has done something to the best of their ability confirms that no interpersonal comparisons are involved. It might be true that in order to make this judgement one has to compare what a person has now done with what that person had done on previous occasions and make one’s estimate on the basis of this comparison. There are epistemological difficulties here, but they are not of the same kind as those that would be involved in determining whether one person had developed their initial endowment of talents more fully than another.

Nozick’s claim that people derive self-esteem only by believing that they have better scores than others along some dimension that is valued by a section of society, also assumes that people acquire self-esteem only when their activities are esteemed by others. If Nozick is correct, not only are people dependent on others’ scoring worse than them along some dimension in order to sustain self-esteem, they also rely on other people judging that what they do is valuable. It may be true that by and large people cannot preserve self-esteem unless their activities or attributes are valued by at least some others [7], but this does not resolve the issue of whether it is good to be subject to the judgements of others in this way, unless it is mistakenly treated as a fact of human nature. As Robert Yanal points out, “the temptation is to say that someone who continually relies on the evaluation of others of his excellences and accomplishments

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lacks good self-esteem” [8]. On the other hand, it is surely a bad thing to cut oneself off from the judgements of others to the extent that one pays no attention to their opinions about the worth of what one does [9]. People should base their evaluation of themselves on their own judgements of the worth of their qualities (in so far as this is psychologically possible) but be responsive to the arguments and criticism of others who think differently, so that their judgement is likely to be rationally based rather than prejudiced: “the particular estimations that a person makes of his qualities not only have to be of the right qualities but be made in the right sort of way” [lo].

11. Is Self-esteem Necessarily Limited?

Nozick rejects the idea that one might create a society in which no-one suffers from low self-esteem by downgrading the importance of dimensions that are socially valued or by equalising scores along those dimensions. Initially, he maintains that it is likely that some new dimension would come to be regarded as important and those who did badly along it would, again, come to have a low sense of self-worth [l 11. Later Nozick goes further and suggests that there is an incoherence in the very idea that one might eradicate low self-esteem by equalising scores along different dimensions: in Nozick’s view, self-esteem must be based on differentiating characteristics (i.e. characteristics in which persons differ from others), so if everyone performed equally well along those dimensions that are regarded as important, these dimensions could no longer provide self-esteem for anyone. So such a policy would result in universally low self- esteem [12].

According to Nozick, how much self-esteem is available will depend on how many dimensions exist that are valued by at least some. In his view, the best way to increase levels of self-esteem is to change people’s attitudes so that they come to value many different sorts of activities and weight the value of these activities differently [13]; reforms to social and economic institutions, for example, are not likely to improve levels of self-esteem:

The most promising ways for a society to avoid widespread differences in self-esteem would be to have no common weighting of dimensions; instead it would have a diversity of different lists of dimensions and weightings. This would enhance each person’s chance of finding dimensions that some others also think important, along which he does reasonably well, and so to make a non-idiosyncratic favorable estimate of himself. [ 141

So, in Nozick’s view, if there are only a limited number of dimensions that are significantly valued in a society, self-esteem will be limited: under these circumstances, it is likely that one person’s self-esteem will result in another person’s sense of worthlessness. Inevitably, envy will be rife because each person will have a reason for wanting to do better than others along these dimensions so that their own self-esteem is enhanced. If, on the other hand, there are a considerable number of dimensions along which persons can acquire self-esteem (i.e. a number of activities or attributes that are valued by at least some people), then self-esteem may not be a zero-sum game and, indeed, it may be the case that no-one suffers from low self-esteem. However, a person will still be threatened by others since they may decide to take up some activity from which he or she derives self-esteem and do it better, thereby making it more difficult for him or her to gain self-esteem from it. In consequence, a person always has an interest that is opposed to others taking up the activities from which he or she

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derives self-esteem if these others are likely to perform them better, and always has an interest that is furthered by other people taking up and performing poorly in these activities so he or she can preserve or enhance self-esteem [15].

So if Nozick’s account is correct, although self-esteem need not be limited, there will always be conflicts of interests over it. People might be educated to value a number of different activities or attributes so that there were a variety of different sources of self-esteem, and educated to preserve self-esteem even when others judge that what they do is worthless, but there would still be a conflict of interests over its acquisition. In contrast, on the view I’ve been presenting in opposition, there is no necessaly conflict of interests over the acquisition of self-esteem. According to it, there are no conceptual constraints on possible sources of self-esteem (except, perhaps, weak constraints on what can intelligibly be valued [16]) and the nature of self-esteem would place no limits on how much is available even in a society in which there was only one valued activity or attribute. Of course, to say that self-esteem is not necessarily limited, and that there need be no conflict of interests over its acquisition, is not to say that its sources and distribution are unaffected by social and economic institutions.

111. How Social and Economic Institutions Affect Self-esteem

Self-esteem seem to be conditioned by social and economic institutions in at least two sorts of ways, the first of which Nozick can perhaps admit without embarrassment, but the second of which he can accept only if he concedes that reforms to these institutions could increase levels of self-esteem.

First, what kind of activities people value is affected by social and economic institutions. Consider an alleged difference in the way that men and women (in general) gain self-esteem. Although it is a commonplace in some feminist thought that ‘women’s work’, because of its nature or its social devaluation, tends to give women who perform it low self-esteem, it also seems to be true that women acquire what self- esteem they have through the nurturing they provide and entering into supportive relationships. Carol Gilligan argues on the basis of her research that “women not only define themselves in a context of relationship, but also judge themselves in terms of their ability to care” [ 171. In contrast, Gilligan concludes from studying men’s answers to the question ‘How would you describe yourself?’ that “instead of attachment, individual achievement rivets the male imagination, and great ideas or distinctive activity defines the standard of self-assessment and success” [ 181. The results of Gilligan’s research could be explained by Nancy Chodorow’s theory of the construc- tion of gender [ 191, according to which men and women acquire different senses of self largely as a result of existing child-rearing practices (most importantly, the minor contribution fathers make to early childcare and the subtly different treatment boys and girls experience from their mothers at an early age) and by sex role socialisation theories which argue that women learn their nurturing roles (and men different roles) by instruction and imitation mainly in the family and at school.

If these complementary explanations are correct, major institutions, such as the family and the school, are responsible for socialising men and women differently so that, in general, they come to value different things and hence acquire self-esteem from different sorts of activities. Men come to value activities which are often the means to some further goal: some of these activities are essentially competitive and most lend themselves easily to comparative judgements. In contrast, women come to

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value activities, such as caring for others, which are ends in themselves, and success at which is not easily measured by comparison with the performance of others [20].

Secondly, although the logical constraints on what qualities can contribute to a person’s self-esteem are weak, social and economic structure places significant restric- tions on what sources of self-esteem are in fact available. Even though Nozick raises this issue, he does not consider the evidence that bears upon it. He cannot admit that existing social and economic institutions significantly limit sources of self-esteem compared to other possible arrangements without conceding that reforms to these institutions could increase levels of self-esteem.

Social and economic structure deeply affects (and in some cases determines) what opportunities a person has to do things that he or she can regard as worthwhile. Consider one way in which it does this, but which Nozick dismisses without consider- ing the evidence [21]. In developed capitalist societies, such as Britain and the USA, jobs often do not give those who do them much responsibility and do not allow them the opportunity to exercise significant and varied skills, therefore for many people working life does not provide a good source of self-esteem [22]. People who do not have opportunities to perform ‘meaningful work’ will not necessarily have low self- esteem; there may be other areas of people’s lives which provide dimensions along which they may acquire self-esteem. But since work [23] generally occupies a substantial proportion of people’s waking lives and consumes much of their energy, it does mean that an important potential source of self-esteem remains untapped and that many are left with few sources of self-esteem available to them [24, 251.

Nozick casts doubt on the specific suggestion that subordination in the workplace produces low self-esteem by citing a number of apparent counter-examples:

members of a symphony orchestra are ordered about by their conduc- tor . . . and are not consulted about the overall interpretations of their works. Yet they retain high self-esteem.. . Draftees in armies are constantly ordered about, told how to dress, what to keep in their lockers, and so on, yet they do not come to feel they are inferior beings. Socialist organizers in factories received the same orders and were subject to the same authority as others, yet they did not lose their self-esteem. Persons on their way up organiza- tional ladders spend much of their time taking orders without coming to feel inferior. [26]

Perhaps Nozick is wrong. Perhaps members of some of these groups (e.g. draftees in the army) do characteristically suffer from low self-esteem. Perhaps for some or all of the cases, a Nozickian account of why the people concerned do not suffer from low self-esteem is possible since they have other sources of self-esteem available to them [27]. Members of an orchestra have talents that provide a dimension along which they can acquire self-esteem. Socialist factory organisers can gain self-esteem from their political activities-something they (and others) value and which can be done well or badly. Perhaps persons on their way up organisational ladders derive self-esteem from the fact that they are climbing up a hierarchy successfully [28]. Of course, most of this is speculation but in this respect it is on a par with Nozick’s remarks.

Nozick is probably correct in thinking that subordination in the workplace doesn’t inevitably lead to low self-esteem: whether it does have this effect depends on what other sources of self-esteem people have available to them at work or elsewhere. But empirical evidence supports the claim that when people’s working lives do not involve the exercise and development of significant and varied skills, the lack of responsibility

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(which being constantly ordered around entails) tends to result in their having low self-esteem [29]. Under these circumstances not only do people tend to believe that what they are doing is worthless, sometimes they also come to think that inferiority must be the best explanation for why they are given no responsibility and for why they have to do work that does not give them the chance to develop or exercise significant skills. Nozick suggests that if someone mistakenly comes to think that he is inferior to those who order him around, he might be educated to recognise that people might be in subordinate positions even though they are not inferior. But this suggestion fails to do justice to how difficult it can be for people in subordinate positions to believe that they are not inferior when confronted by the prevailing cultural view that those in subordinate positions are there because of personal shortcomings [30].

On the face of it, levels of self-esteem could be improved merely by changing social attitudes towards subordination and by educating people so that they are capable of withstanding the adverse evaluations of others [31]. However, such a remedy would do nothing to liberate the potential sources of self-esteem in working life which are constrained by the hierarchical organisation of the workplace and the specialised division of labour. Increased responsibility, which can be an ingredient of meaningful work, requires that people have a greater say in the workplace. Consumer needs place some constraints on how work can be organised, but they leave scope for policies which would provide more responsibility and the opportunity to choose and implement arrangements (e.g. job rotation) which would permit the exercise and development of significant and more varied skills. Whether these policies could be pursued effectively in a system dominated by private ownership is a question beyond the scope of this paper. My arguments are not intended to provide a justification for reforms (nor are they sufficient to do so), but if they are correct they do show that Nozick is mistaken in thinking that changes to basic social and economic institutions would not improve levels of self-esteem. Encouraging people to value many different kinds of activities and not to be at the mercy of the evaluations of others, as well as to realise that people in subordinate positions are not necessarily inferior, are not the only ways of improving self-esteem across society and may not be the most effective means of doing so [32].

Andrew Mason, St Peter’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2DL, United Kingdom.

NOTES

[ l ] See R. NOZICK (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 239-248. [2] Ibid., p. 240. [3] Ibid., p. 241. [4] Nozick does allow that there may be some dimensions along which it is “inappropriate to judge oneself

comparatively”, e.g. holiness and wisdom. But he regards these as peripheral phenomena and hence of limited sociological interest (see Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 244).

[5] A. SKILLEN (1977) Ruling Illusions: philosophy and the social order (Hassocks, Harvester), p. 49. This paper is strongly influenced by Skillen’s discussion.

[6] NOZICK, op. cit., p. 244. [7] Rawls makes a similar generalisation: see J. RAWLS (1971) A Theoly of Justice (Cambridge, MA,

[8] R. J. YANAL (1987) Self-esteem, Nous, 21, pp. 363-379, 370 (emphasis in original). [9] Cf. YANAL, op. cit., p. 373.

Harvard University Press), p. 440.

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[lo] Ibid., p. 375. [ l l ] NOZICK, op. cit., p. 243. [12] Ibid., p. 245. [ 131 He might consistently have added that levels of self-esteem could be improved by educating people SO

that they do not rely on the judgements of others as to the worth of what they do-unless he thinks this is psychologically impossible.

[14] NOZICK, op. cit., p. 245-246. [15] Cf. Nozick’s suggestion that a person who thinks that he is good at basketball or mathematics “might

prefer that other persons lacked their talents, or prefer that they stop continually demonstrating their worth, at least in front of him, that way his self-esteem will avoid battering and can be shored up” (ibid., p. 241).

[16] Ethical naturalists, such as Phillipa Foot, argue that it is not possible for a person to believe that any imaginable activity is worthwhile, such as standing on one leg for 48 hours (unless some special context is supplied), since there is an internal relation between value judgements and their objects which places logical-not merely psychological-constraints on what it is possible for persons to value [see P. FOOT (1967) Moral beliefs, in: P. FOOT (Ed.) Theories of Ethics (Oxford, Oxford University Press)].

[17] C. GILLIGAN (1982) In a Dt’erent Voice: psychological theory and women’s development (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press), p. 17; cf. p. 70.

[18] Ibid., p. 163. [19] N. CHOWROW (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering: psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender

(Berkeley, CA, University of California Press). [20] Changes in child rearing and educational practices might increase levels of self-esteem by making it

easier for people to acquire self-esteem from more varied sources, and by making it easier for people to gain self-esteem by applying non-competitive standards to activities in which success need not be measured in terms of whether one does better than others.

[21] See NOZICK, op. cit., pp. 247-248. [22] See, e.g., A. KORNHAUSER (1965) Mental Health and the Industrial Worker (New York, Wiley),

especially Ch. 12. [23] When I use the term ‘work’ I don’t mean to restrict it to paid employment in the market; I’m also

referring to e.g., unpaid housework. I intend to distinguish work from leisure, however. [24] See W. S. NEFF (1968) Work and Human Behavior (New York, Astherton Press), p. 144. [25] There are other ways in which social and economic structure can constrain opportunities for self-

esteem. Besides the psychological dispositions created by socialisation (see above), there are external pressures which make it likely that women will become mothers and wives and acquire what self-esteem they can through nurturing others.

[26] NOZICK, op. cit., p. 246. [27] Skillen makes similar (but not exactly the same) remarks: op. cit., p. 50. [28] See NEFF, op. cit., p. 143. [29] See R. SENNE-IT & J. COBB (1972) The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, Knopf), especially pp.

76-98; R. BLAUNER (1964) Alienation and Freedom (London, University of Chicago Press), especially pp. 175-178; Work in America, a Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1973), Ch. 1; E. CHINOY (1955) Auromobzle Workers and the American Dream (Boston, MA, Beacon Press), especially Ch. X.

[30] See SENNEm & COBS, op. cit, pp. 250-251; CHINOY, op. cit., p. 123. [31] Although this will be a problematic strategy if the stability of hierarchical arrangements depends on a

[32] I would like to thank David Miller for comments on some of the ideas in this paper. widely shared belief that they are justified by personal superioritylinferiority.