Impostor Syndrome and Self-Respect

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a Kantian account of what goes wrong when we fail to properly respect ourselves. In particular, I argue that failures of appraisal self-respect are often rooted in damage to our deeper self-conception; they are due to damage to our recognition self-respect. At the fundamental level, to respect yourself in this way is to know that you are a rational agent who has the capacity to rationally reflect and act on reasons in all areas of your life. To fail to respect yourself properly is to begin to question this capacity. It is to doubt that you are capable of living up to a role or a life project that is particularly important to your sense of who you are. I focus on impostor syndrome as a key instance of damaged self-respect, but my account has broader implications for understanding how external pressures can undermine our self-respect and how failures of adequate positive self-appraisal are connected to a damaged sense of rational agency. I will first argue that a person with damaged recognition self-respect will not be fully capable of adequate appraisal self-respect. Drawing on Korsgaard’s account of reasons as essentially shareable, I then demonstrate how our recognition self-respect (particularly recognition respect for ourselves qua bearers of a certain identity) can become damaged when others treat us with implicit bias. I will conclude by showing that this way of understanding the dynamics of self-respect has some important normative implications.