Get the information about Delhi IAS Coaching

There are three features by which the attitude of esteem is distinguished. It is an evaluative attitude, because it involves rating a person in one or another respect. It is a comparative attitude, because in most IAS

Coaching Delhi the intensity of the esteem depends, not just on the absolute rating, but on how the person

compares with relevant others in the ratings given. And it is a directive attitude, because the ratings are given in areas where the assumption is that agents can do something about their performance; they can generally invest more effort, for example, and improve the rating they receive. The fact that esteem is an evaluative attitude marks it off, most saliently, from an attitude like love or attachment. When I come to love someone, there is almost always an explanation to be given of why that attitude appears: the person attracts my love in virtue of this or that feature or set of features. But I may have no special access to that explanation; I may only be able to speculate about it. And there may be no other sense in which I am in a position to say what I love the person for. I will love the person, period, not love them for this or that accomplishment. Things are very different, however, with esteem. This is always based on a rating of the person for how they perform in respect of some characteristic, negative or positive.

If I esteem someone positively I will do so for their being kind or fair, brave or bold, a good parent, a conscientious colleague; or, in a more egocentrically focused way, for their being kind or fair, a good parent or a conscientious colleague, in their dealings with me. And if I disesteem someone I will do so for their being cruel or unjust, cowardly or snide, an uncaring parent or a sloppy colleague; or again, more egocentrically, for their displaying dispositions of those kinds towards me. There will always be a dimension in respect of which I grade the person and the esteem or disesteem will always be given in a proportion that answers in part to that grading. Even when I grade the person for how he or she behaves towards me, the implied base of evaluationfor example, the base implied in saying 'that is an unkind way for you to treat me'is always a general consideration that anyone in my position might invoke; it applies to me in virtue of my being in that position, not because of who I am. So at any rate we shall assume. The dimensions in respect of which esteem is given to a person come in many varieties. I may esteem or disesteem someone for their possession of standard properties of the kind illustrated above, whether these are considered egocentrically or from a more neutral point of view: properties like kindness, fairness, cowardice, or sidedness. But I may also esteem or disesteem someone for a positional property, such as being the most or least honest person in the company, the one who wins the race or the one who comes last Delhi IAS Coaching. Or I may esteem or disesteem someone for an aortal property, such as being a kind nurse, an honest politician, a corrupt accountant, or whatever. And of course I may esteem or disesteem someone for the higher-level property of being a person who scores very well or very badly in respect of a range of other, lower-level properties. Some of the words whereby we pick out dimensions of esteem do not indicate dimensions of disesteem, and vice versa. Take the terms in which we may esteem someone highly: say 'benevolent' or 'brave'. We benevolence or bravery, even when we fail to esteem them positively in such terms; the lack of positive esteem does not necessarily constitute disesteem. In such cases, however, there are almost always other words or phrases that can be thought of as representing the same dimension, now in the range of disesteem rather than positive esteem. Corresponding to 'benevolent' there is 'malevolent', corresponding to 'brave' there is 'cowardly', and so on. Our usage in this book will be to think of the dimensions on which behavior is estimated as being picked out, with different ranges in view, by both sorts of word. Thus there is a single benevolence-malevolence dimension, so we suppose, and a single bravery-cowardice dimension and it is possible in each case to win esteem or disesteem or, at least for most such examples, to score in an entirely neutral way. We may think of the dimension being scaled with positive numbers for degrees of esteem, negative numbers for degrees of disesteem, and with 0 representing the neutral score. The fact that esteem is an evaluative attitude in the sense explained means that when we invoke the desire for esteem in rational explanation of what people do, as of course we shall be invoking it here, we are not 'going radical' in the fashion of some rational choice theories. We are not providing the sort of explanation that begins from an austere picture of human beings as centres of self-interest that operate out of society, without any normative expectations or evaluations of themselves or one another. Our explanatory enterprise is more circumscribed and modest, presupposing the existence of habits of normative assessment among the people to whom it applies.