Abstract

I articulate and defend a perspectival norm that I call "self-centering." Self-centering requires that self-regard play an important role in one's choices, that one impose structure and limits on one's empathic responsiveness to others, and that one pay respectful attention to one's own perspectives and projects . Differing both from objectionable forms of self-privileging and from partiality as commonly construed, self-centering protects oneself from dissolution or subsumation. It is thus a precondition both for robust personal character and for fully responsible moral agency. ;I argue that self-centering is a key element of a more broadly encompassing state of character: that of normative independence. To possess normative independence is to recognize and experience oneself as a person with both an independent good and an independent conception of the good-that is to say, as a distinct source of value claims that matter. One loses normative independence by identifying so closely with some other source of value claims---whether a person, community, institution, or ideology---that one is subsumed by it. When one loses one's normative independence, one loses oneself. ;One becomes a distinct and integrated self by wholeheartedly identifying with oneself---by inhabiting one's own perspective as its subject. The antidote to self-abandonment and "loss of self" is a habit of respectful and engaged attention to one's own perspectives and priorities---and, through them, to oneself as a distinct source of value. To lack such habits of attention is to risk a centerlessness that is both personally and morally perilous