Why do we care so much about the respect of other people?

My primary research project is about approbative respect, which is the kind of respect we have for, say, excellent artists and athletes (as opposed to the kind we have for, say, the rules of the road). Here's my question about it. Why exactly do we care so much that other people respect us in the approbative sense?

It's a fact of life that other people's respect matters greatly to us. Under certain conditions, someone’s respect can make us glow with delight; under other conditions, someone’s denial of respect can make us wince with embarrassment (if we think it’s fitting) or boil with indignation (if we do not). But do we have any non-instrumental reason to care about other people’s respect in the ways that we do?

That's the question I tackle in my dissertation, which defends a novel account of respect's nature with any eye towards understanding how it could be reasonable for us to care so much about it. On the account I defend, approbative respect is, surprisingly, perspectival in nature: in particular, I claim that to respect someone (along some dimension) is to have a value-based inclination to take her perspective (on some range of things). For example, to respect someone as a philosopher is to have a value-based inclination to take her perspective on philosophical questions. This is a distinctive way of valuing another person—one that essentially involves trying to see some part of the world in the way she does. Moreover, I argue that understanding respect's nature in this way helps to explain, in turn, how it can be reasonable for us to care about somebody else's respect. The value of such respect lies in what it offers us: another person’s sustained efforts to try to see things as we do.

Dissertation: Respect as a Meeting of Minds

"Rethinking Respect" (Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, 2025)

This paper develops and defends a paradigm-based explanation of respect. Unlike the philosophically familiar method of analysis, a paradigm-based explanation does not try to illuminate a phenomenon by identifying its necessary and sufficient conditions. Instead, it illuminates a phenomenon by identifying a form of it (the “paradigm”) that is explanatorily basic. Although this paradigm form may have features that are not present across the phenomenon’s full range, its status as explanatorily basic is vindicated insofar as non-paradigmatic forms of the phenomenon can reasonably be understood to derive from that paradigm. After arguing that we should prefer this kind of explanatory strategy in the case of respect, I go on to offer my own paradigm-based explanation of it. This account derives a behavioral form of respect from a more robustly psychological form of it, one that I call perspectival respect.

Penultimate draft available on PhilPapers.

"Why Respect Matters" (draft available on request)

In this companion paper, I extend my argument for the paradigm-based explanation of respect I introduce in "Rethinking Respect." I argue that this account of respect rationally vindicates our familiar human concern with interpersonal respect.

"Personal Perspectives" (draft available on request)

I argue that the perspectival account of respect can plausibly be extended to a wide variety of cases of approbative respect, including respecting someone as an expert, as an athlete, and as a morally virtuous person.

Other Papers

Paper on servility (R&R)

Following Kant, many philosophers hold that servility—a vice of character typified by excessive deference, obsequiousness and self-abnegation—is morally objectionable. But what exactly is the moral problem with servility? This paper develops a unified account of servility's nature and its moral significance according to which it is an essentially relational defect: to be servile is to be disposed to relate to (particular) others as if one is morally inferior to them. I devote the bulk of the paper to developing this organizing idea in more substantive terms, and I conclude by drawing out one of its major implications, namely, that (relevant) others can properly hold servile people accountable for their servility.

"Between the Stoic and Rousseau" (in preparation)

When it comes to other peoples' approbation (like their approval, admiration, and awe), many of us find ourselves in a position akin to Hume on induction: just as Hume believed the sun would rise tomorrow while denying that he had any good reason to believe this, many of us care deeply about other peoples' approbation while denying that we have any good (non-instrumental) reason to care about this. In other words, many of us are tempted by Stoicism about interpersonal approbation. But is Stoicism about interpersonal approbation right—and if it isn’t, why are so many of us tempted by it?

This paper aims to unmask Stoicism about interpersonal approbation by sketching a diagnosis for its underlying appeal. I argue that Stoicism about interpersonal approbation “rings” true because of its resemblance to a more limited Stoic thesis. The limited Stoic thesis holds that there is no non-instrumental reason to care about a given form of interpersonal approbation insofar as there is no substantive difference between self-approbation and interpersonal approbation of the same form. For example, if self-approval is the very same thing as other-approval (save for a difference in its object), then Stoicism about other-approval would be rational. That is because other-approval could not offer one anything one could not already offer to oneself via one’s own self-approval. Not every form of interpersonal approbation is like this, however, and thus I argue that the pull of Stoicism about interpersonal approbation more generally rests on an illusion of evaluative self-sufficiency.

"(Don't) Look at Me!" (in preparation)

This paper investigates some of the surprising ways in which interpersonal understanding can actually injure the person who is its object. In particular, I explore what I call the reductive threat, which arises when an inquirer undertakes to “understand” a person in just the same way a scientist would understand the natural world. (For example: “He only feels that way because of his brain chemistry.”) While many in the literature would not countenance this as a form of interpersonal understanding at all, I show that many genuine cases of interpersonal understanding are, in fact, reductive. Yet I also argue that reductively understanding someone comes at a cost for the person who is reductively understood. Echoing Strawson on the objective stance, I argue that reductive interpersonal understanding debases its object by rendering him into a person whom the inquirer merely “treats” or “manages.” To avoid debasing others, I show interpersonal inquiry must be moderated by a governing attitude of respect.