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

Virtually all of us care about other people's approbative respect. When we get it, under certain conditions, we glow with delight; when we don’t, under other conditions, we wince with embarrassment or boil with indignation. These distinctive responses betray that we are not, after all, indifferent to whether other people respect us. But why is that? Is this familiar human concern with interpersonal respect purely instrumental? Or do we have some non-instrumental reason to care about the respect of other people?

My hunch is that we do: our concern with interpersonal respect is more than instrumental. That's the hunch I defend in my dissertation, which develops a novel account of respect's nature with any eye towards understanding why others' respect is something that matters to us. On the account I develop, approbative respect is perspectival respect, and it consists in a value-based inclination to take someone's 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 the world as she does. This account helps to explain, in turn, why we care so much about the respect of other people. We want other people's respect, when we do, because we want them to try to see things as we do.

Dissertation

"Rethinking Respect" (forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics)

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.

"Respect as a Form of Epistemic Partiality" (in preparation)

I argue that my account of perspectival 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

"What Is the Moral Problem with Servility?" (draft available on request)

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.