 Self-respect is a form of self-regard, a moral relation of persons (and only persons) to themselves that concerns their own important worth. Self-respect is thus essentially a valuing form of respect. It is, moreover, a normative stance--it is due regard for oneself, proper regard for the dignity of one’s person or position (as the O.E.D. puts it). Like respect for others, self-respect is a complex of multilayered and interpenetrating phenomena; it involves all those aspects of cognition, valuation, affect, expectation, motivation, action, and reaction that compose a mode of being in the world at the heart of which is an appropriate appreciation of oneself as having significant worth. Unlike some forms of respect, self-respect is not something one has only now and again or that might have no effect on its object. Rather, self-respect has to do with the structure and attunement of an individual’s identity and of her life, and it reverberates throughout the self, affecting the configuration and constitution of the person’s thoughts, desires, values, emotions, commitments, dispositions, and actions. As expressing or constituting one’s sense of worth, it includes an engaged understanding of one’s worth, as well as a desire and disposition to protect and preserve it. Accounts of self-respect differ in their characterizations of the beliefs, desires, affects, and behaviors that are constitutive of it, chiefly because of differences concerning both the aspects or conception of the self insofar as it is the object of one’s respect and also the nature and grounds of the worth of the self or aspects of the self.