CONCEPT
Social Bases of Self-Respect
The institutional and social conditions — meaningful work, public recognition, mutual acknowledgment of contribution — that support a person's sense that her life plan is worth pursuing, and that
Rawls identified as perhaps the most important of the
primary goods.
The social bases of self-respect occupy a special place in Rawls's theory. Self-respect, Rawls argued, is the most important primary good — the good without which all other goods lose their value to their possessor. Without self-respect, nothing may seem worth doing; or if some things have value, we lack the will to pursue them. The social bases of self-respect are the institutional conditions that support this sense of one's own worth: meaningful activity, the public recognition of contribution, membership in associations whose aims one can endorse, and the experience of being treated by others as having standing that cannot be overridden. A just society must secure these conditions for all its members. The AI transition puts these bases under novel pressure, not primarily through unemployment but through the erosion of the social recognition of human expertise, craft, and accumulated mastery — the dimensions of productive life that have historically underwritten self-respect for knowledge