3.1 Recognition Respect revisited

Most of us would like to be the object of respectful treatment. We would like to be treated with respect in the various contexts in which we find ourselves. Being respectfully treated is assumed to be a prima facie good thing for the one respected. Why? If one looks at Darwall's account of recognition respect, the answer is hardly hinted at.

According to Darwall giving recognition respect "consists in giving appropriate consideration or recognition to some feature of its object in deliberating about what to do" (1977:38). Here we have a way of describing a kind of practical reasoning that involves concerning oneself with an object, and is chiefly considered an attitude of intending to act in the appropriate way, where the treatment of some entity is involved. To be the object of recognition respect is to be on the receiving end of a treatment. The respected is in some way affected (or likely to be affected) by the deliberate actions of another. But what is that effect on the object that, together with the intentions of the respecter, makes the action respectful? This is what writers don't often talk about. Instead, the focus is usually on who deserves this mysterious treatment and what grounds our duty to give it. 7

Moral Recognition Respect normally gets worked out like this: First we identify that some entity warrants moral standing. Then we say inter alia they warrant respect. We treat it as an analytic truth that the right way to treat morally important beings is to respect them. Then, by looking at the facts or features that give them that warrant to moral standing, we derive what are thought to be the limits on how we can treat them. We must treat them the right way concerning their morally important features. Anything less is disrespectful. So, treating someone morally correctly is respecting them and respecting them is treating them morally correctly. We acknowledge, however, that in times past, respect—the so-called right way to treat someone of value—did not necessarily have moral value at its center. And, since making norms about the correct way to treat people should always have moral standards as the bottom line, we confidently eschew this earlier way of engaging in relations of respect. Darwall calls it "honor" respect. This is replaced by second-personal respect, whose conceptual core is the value and practice of mutual accountability. Whatever else we do concerning each other, we should register each other as a direct source of claims on us. How do we know one deserves this status? Their capacity to be accountable to us in turn.

Most of us have the ardent desire to be treated respectfully in subtle and intricate ways that exceed what is required to register our moral personhood. We want the importance not only of our moral nature, but of our efforts, our abilities, our roles, our relationships, our charming quirks, to be reflected in the way others act concerning us. We experience justifiable resentment and offense when people or institutions fail us in this regard. Yet, it would seem to be the reactive emotions that signal that we are the kinds of beings that others ought to be concerned about respecting. Instead of asking ourselves what the respectful treatment delivers, such that we want it in all these different ways, we point to our sense of offense, connect it to the grounds of our self-respect, and assume, again, that respect as a valuable treatment, must track back to moral personhood. This is as if to say, "I need to know that those in my community care about preserving my sense of self-worth without which I would lack the will to enter into relations of mutual accountability." 8 If the good and the value of getting respected is reduced to and equated with the good and the value of being treated as a moral equal, then considerations about respect will always merely duplicate moral considerations. For those on the margins of moral personhood, as we've seen, this is not necessarily good news.

3.2 The Objects and Concerns of so-called Respect

What does respect aim to do for the respected? Maybe answering this question will shift us from what I think is presently too tight a link between respect as a value and the value of liberal personhood. This begins with trying to avoid conflations in how we talk about objects of respect (Dillon: 2018). 9 Consider the following statement:

You should respect the fact that Donna gets angry when she's tired, by phoning her only before four p.m.

When we respect-the-fact-that Donna gets angry when she's tired, the object of respect is nothing but a fact that we are having to deal with. But rather than dismissing such a statement as irrelevant to our purposes, let's consider the clues it might offer. Colin Bird has argued that to be a possible object of respect, one must pass the reckoning test (Bird 2004:216ff). Setting aside the question of whether whole unique individuals are reckonable as such, I just want to ask why it might be of value to be something that must be reckoned with? One answer might be that there is a difference between being (treated as) something that can be dealt with in any old way (scrub it out, eliminate it, ignore it) and to be something that is inexorable in its way and so requires much more careful attention and calculation in order to be dealt with. To be something to reckon with is to have a certain kind of power. It appeals to us to have the power to influence other people's choices, if not by our own will, at least by or due to facts and features that belong to us.

But, to be treated with respect—to be the object of respectful action—is not just to be the source of some fact that must be reckoned with if the so-called respecter is to achieve their goals. Notice how it is not Donna herself, but a certain characteristic she exhibits, that is getting the attention. Donna is the source of the anger that might inconvenience the person who would phone her. Respecting the "anger" fact about Donna does not seem to be a necessarily good thing for Donna. To make this clearer let's try a different statement:

Respect the lion's great skill for surprise attack, by bringing not only a whip but also a gun into the cage. 10

There is probably a reason we normally specify the fact or a feature as the object of respect in these sentences, rather than the entity in possession of those characteristics, and if we want to get to the bottom of why respect matters to the sentient beings who get it, we want to be as clear as possible about the focus of the alleged respecter's deliberation. The lion is not necessarily being given respectful treatment when we respect its sharp teeth or its power to attack us, by carrying a whip or a gun into the cage.

The point, with these examples is not to say simply that so-called respect means something entirely different when applied to a fact or feature as when applied to a sentient being or whole entity. There's also a pattern worth thinking about, which might help us arrive at a notion of the general aim of respectful action. With all the non-entities that we talk about respecting (facts, features, symbols), we can see a pattern. Our actions do something with regard to those sharp teeth—our attention to the sharp teeth, and our effort to connect that attention to our own projects is how facts about sharp teeth become a source of human norms. The whip that the tamer brings into the cage communicates not only the lion tamer's appreciation of a fact that is relevant to their own survival, but it conveys the power of that fact or feature to shape the way a practice is done. The same can be said of a variety of the so-called senses of recognition respect—whether obstacle respect (respect the power of the storm by staying home), or care respect (respect the infant's need for sleep, by being quiet), or directive respect (respect the speed limit by driving 50). For example, the mere act of following directions opens us to a sense of respect because the very action of following them confers on them certain authority "as" directions, and that gives rise to a certain status, a certain social power to be the source of norms is generated for what had before been merely some words on a sign, or some lines on a road.

But it is not enough to say that someone has been treated respectfully just in case they have given people a reason to constrain their actions concerning them—and in that way have become a source for human norms. A respectful act does more than make the respected influential. The act of respect must support a certain kind of influence, the influence that comes from something's being intrinsically valuable. 11 Joseph Raz (2005 & 2009) has argued that values are the basic focus of respect and has claimed that the possibility of engaging and disclosing values usually depends on there being sustained social practices. I want to gesture in the direction of his approach, which seeks a way out of the problem of making respect tautological to a view of moral duty. What might a conception of respect looks like, when it is seen as a relation aimed at supporting the respected's power not just to constrain action, but to confer value? 12

3.3 How Respect Relates to the Agency and Integrity of the Respected

A speed limit, a need for sleep, a power to wreck a boat has no agency of its own, and it is only by analogy that we think of what we are doing as if it is for the "respected's" sake. The lion's being known as an animal to reckon with is only desirable for the lion if that authority in some way enhances and improves what it is like to be the lion. It is not enough that the lion gets to occupy a place of value if that value is consecrated through activities that project an identity onto the lion that has nothing to do with the lion's own interests. So perhaps the kind of respect that it is good to get is whatever makes it valuable for the lion to be recognized "as" a lion.

If being respected requires that one is given an influence that is for one's own advantage, must the respecter then think of the respected as intrinsically valuable and worthy of such promotion? Would such a view fit with our sense of what is going on when we are getting respected? Let's consider the connection of respecting someone to valuing them. One thing that the appraisal-recognition distinction makes clear that acting respectfully toward someone is independent from finding them personally valuable (Darwall 1977). Yet, when it comes to why we desire to be respected, it seems like respect that is merely behavioral is not as valuable to us as respect that is motivated in part by respecter's positive beliefs about us. If we want to know what respectfulness distinctly does for the respected, don't we need to disambiguate between this psychological benefit (from evidence that one is appreciated) and a more objective benefit? For their part, theories of care have no trouble with their version of this ambiguity. It is clear that we want others to meet our basic physical and emotional needs when we cannot meet them ourselves—regardless of whether those caregivers feel like we deserve to have our needs met. It is also clear that we want to be in caring relations with people—we want relationships characterized by the other's affirmation not only that they have reasons to help meet our needs, but that one of their reasons is their belief that we are intrinsically deserving of their attention and concern. The way of seeing required to understand and meet needs in another is itself the product of genuinely concerned attention—attention that can only be explained in terms of caring about someone's whole integrity (not just this or that feature of them). It follows that a theory of care must focus not just on behaviors that tend to result in the wellbeing of the one cared for, but on the ways of seeing and attitudes that generate these practices of care. As a result of these two features—the value we place on being cared about and the work that such attention does to reveal how to meet needs and wants—relations of care are thought to depend upon and require seeing the cared-for as intrinsically valuable in a way that calls for the effort of care.

Yet, it seems mistaken to pivot from an idea of respect as appropriate recognition of moral equality to respect as a relation devoted to another's health and wellbeing, encompassing an individual's unique needs and everything that might make her life go well. Nor does the feeling of engrossment with the other seem to be an essential component of what we normally think about when we think about wanting to give and receive respect. 13 While I strongly believe we should reject the way care and respect are usually dichotomized, it behooves us not to completely collapse the two together. Getting cared for contributes to our flourishing through relations of trust that allow us successfully to take up another's effort to meet our needs and wants. In parallel terms we want to say how—by what means and in what domain—respecting someone contributes to their flourishing. Doing so might give us a conception of respect we can work with.

Consider Kittay's account of care as a success term. Care in the normative sense requires that certain conditions are met. There must be:

(1) Needs or wants of those cared for that require attention. (2) A carer who has the requisite competencies called for in this situation. (3) The individual (person or thing) cared for should be better off than before by some specifiable criteria (2019:190).

For care to have occurred, the cared for must be made better off. A caring relation, as such, might be distinguished from other relations in terms of how (by what tools and ways of interrelating) the cared-for is made better off, rather than in what aspect of their life they are made better off (body, mind, profession, political standing). Or perhaps it is also the specific areas of life that are improved as a result of the caring relation that in part define it as a caring relation. Similarly, in trying to understand what is required for "respect" to take place, it makes sense at least to start by treating respect as some kind of achievement concept. This means limiting what counts as relation of respect on the basis of the relation's consequences for the respected entity (setting aside whether the virtue of being a respectful person might be somewhat independent of consequences). What I am chiefly interested in is not what kind of respect everyone has a right to, or what type of respect can be given to every member of a category. Rather, I am looking to answer the question: What conception of respect-as-treatment fits best with the intuition that being on the receiving end of a relation of respect is something everyone has a reason to want for themselves?

3.4 Respect as a Response to the Social Instability of Dignity

Let's assume that respect is a relation between respecter and respected where there must, like care, be some positive result for the respected. A relation of respect requires, to some extent, that the way the respected is treated is effective for them—but effective treatment on what axis?

One answer is suggested by the frequent link between respect and dignity. But whereas we commonly think our demands for respect are (and ought to be) focused on inalienable dignity, I think that the opposite is true. Roughly speaking, it seems that the respect relations we seek are those that operate in and on the fragile domain of standing and status. Without doubt, Sesha's caregiver believes in Sesha's bedrock moral importance (her inalienable dignity) but the caregiver is also determined to preserve the much more fragile material and social expression of this importance. The respecter, as such, is at least someone who works to uphold this alienable dignity. This is why it makes sense to say that Sesha's caregiver seems to have been acting from reasons of respect, rather than only reasons of care, in insisting on keeping Sesha clothed.

Corresponding to a concern with the way standing and status for someone can be easily shaken, respectful seeing involves looking for and recognizing that certain kinds of standing and status would be a good thing for someone-such-as-they-are to take up, and a desire to contribute to that outcome. It is in seeing the valuable integrity of the possible object of respect that the respecter normally would be able to form a concern for the status and standing of the respected. The respecter sees the object of respect, in its integrity, as the source of the values that are or would be disclosed by their position. The respecter responds to a situation in which they can support or contribute to this valuable integrity, or they recognize and avoid actions that would disrupt what is making the integrity valuable. So, a respecter of the lion sees the lion as one that is able to have valuable engagements that do not threaten the lion's physical integrity, under the right formal and social circumstances. For example, if they are put on an endangered species list, or if their appearance in captivity constrained by norms that encourage the preservation of lion-friendly habitats. It may be respectful to treat the lion "as" an endangered species, while it might be disrespectful to threat the lion as the star of the greatest show on earth.

The concept we want to explore is of the kind of respect that aims to empower the respected entity. This "respect" can be partly understood as a relation in which a respecter deliberately acts in ways that make the respected's social legibility more valuable for them. 14 Yet, as many have argued, respect shouldn't be reduced to static ideas of granting good-making status. If respect is about how we make each other readable and recognizable in the social space of value-disclosing practices, it is just as much about how we make and remake our practices so that they disclose our intrinsic value to one another. I'll call this broad normative kind of respect Empowerment Respect.

4.1 The Focus on Social Legibility Distinguishes EMPR as a Normative Concept

The contingent statuses and roles that grant individuals access to forms of participation are not, and can never be, static. A once desirable title or social position can become tainted and a once discredited identity can become a lever for new powers. In a given social context, some ways of placing each other come to seem more conducive to personal flourishing, and so more desirable from the respected-individual's point of view. In this way, being respectful of another (EMPR) is inseparable from considering how one's status-creating action contributes to their flourishing. But, unlike care, the empowerment-respecter's sphere of influence is not the immediate mobility, joy, and trust, of the individual, but rather, the levers of her reputation, status, and role. We might say we are in circumstances of respect with someone if there is something we can do to support her personally beneficial social legibility.

Noddings (1984) and others have argued that care is completed by the cared for—it is completed in their successful uptake of a well-directed caring act, in the real improvement of wellbeing or at least in the deepened trust that someone experiences when they enjoy being cared for. Respect may be less straight forward, but we can think of it as being completed in the other's successful uptake of our effort to secure their positive social legibility in a certain context. Uptake is successful when the respected actually uses their received identity, roles, statuses, and so on, to be involved in practices that they have reason to value. Ultimately, this means, at least sometimes, to be centered as an agent (not necessarily a rational agent) whose experience of the values of that practice is part of what makes the practice valuable, full stop. To be sometimes centered in this way is to have what I call normative power. Given all this, here is a formulation of EMPR:

EMPR occurs when an agent (the respecter) deliberately strengthens the positive social legibility of an entity (the respected), contributing to the entity's enjoyment of normative power.

There is a connection between being able to be valuable and being able to engage with values in self-affirming ways. Respect aims at normative power—not (only) at "having" what confers value (the traits, etc.) but having the power to confer value, which also means to play a part in creating and changing values. A respected person, as such, and in the domain in which they are shown respect, is granted a say in how the disclosure and conferral of value is determined. So, the success of an act of respect is in part measured by the respected's ability to enjoy influence. They disclose shared values in a way that is also fulfilling to them.

The account of EMPR needs to be able to distinguish between the merely symbolic granting of a status that might be empty and useless, and the good-making engagement with someone through the available mechanisms of reputation, role, and status. Let's say that when someone's roles, status, and reputation are working to help them flourish, they are empowered. 15 Empowerment means different things to different people—it means having social power, or having not just a status but the ability to make use of that status, and it often connotes feeling confident, appreciated, and affirmed. I will be giving it a more technical sense—but one that reflects this ordinary understanding. Someone is empowered if they are able to actualize some of their desires through socially valued and protected participation or through the "normative power" they wield (enjoy) in social practices. Wielding normative power does not require the cognitively demanding ability to understand the value-disclosing possibility of social practices; instead, it requires only that one participates in a practice in a way that is both personally valued and has an influence on what makes that activity socially valuable.

Let me imagine that my friend Amy is serving her first term as a state senator. To empowerment-respect Amy "as" a senator, I would want my actions concerning her to help her take up that particular role in a way that is worthwhile to herself and others. If engaging in the practice of politics (as a senator) is intertwined with Amy's ability to participate in other valued practices, then respecting Amy full stop might require that I do what I can to respect her "as" a senator. While being a senator requires certain cognitive capacities not available to PSPID, there are many other practices and roles that are open-ended in this regard. Perhaps Amy's severely intellectually disabled sister-in-law, Colleen, is trying out weaving. Colleen is becoming someone who can be seen as a weaver, and both Amy and I can respect Colleen by doing things that help make her engagement with weaving legible and relevant to others. Our goal as respecters would be to make sure that our actions concerning Colleen help maintain the status she needs for worthwhile engagement in the activity of weaving. If we succeed in our EMPR relation with Colleen, then her legibility as a weaver is more likely to become a source of normative power for her, giving her influence and connection with others in that domain and beyond.

Sociologists who have paid attention to the intricacies of how roles work, stress the need to take these considerations seriously. EMPR is a conception of respect that resonates with their concerns. Discussing "social role valorization," Thomas and Wolfensberger observe,

people who hold valued roles in society are more apt than people in devalued roles to be accorded "the good things of life" by their society. Consequently, if people who are devalued by their society, or who are at risk of being devalued, are to be given the good things of life, then they should be helped to as much as possible fill roles that are highly valued in society. Otherwise, they will probably be very badly treated… (1999: 126)

No acts of respect can by themselves produce or guarantee empowerment—the full enjoyment of normative power in a given context. Empowerment involves a complex play of forces and many different agents. However, the point of EMPR is to be part of a relation that contributes to empowerment. We all come forward as individuals who can only be recognized through various available forms of identity and visibility. An empowered individual experiences a relatively positive and productive confluence between the way she is and wants to be, and how she is labeled and identified by others. We all play roles in order to engage with the things that matter to us. An empowered person is (and in some way expects to be) cooperated with in the potentially valuable roles she plays. We all are vulnerable to changing circumstances and practices. They expect to have their needs advocated for and their story told when these circumstances arise. Acts of EMPR are discreet, more or less deliberate acts where a respecter successfully uses the institutional mechanisms, norms, and public deliberation at her disposal to advance the social power of the one she is respecting.

4.2 Contexts of EMPR and Moments of Empowerment

In this process of being and becoming empowered there are three connected but distinct stages where the potential respecter can positively influence the social power of the respected: I call these three moments Crediting, Reckoning, and Advocating.

4.3 Full Respect and Disrespect

Someone who intends to fully EMPR another will be interested in seizing every opportunity to effectively credit them, reckon with them, and advocate for them. Often, we associate respect with non-disruption, with leaving things well alone. That is because many persist within a structure or context that is already sustaining their social value. Some lives already function like a well-made table one need only avoid disrupting. This has its ironies. Sometimes it is more obvious and embarrassing to us when we have nudged a little bit of the silverware in a privileged person's life than when we have failed to give the most basic support or opening for someone already harmed in their respect-needs by stigma, isolation, or the malicious obstruction of others.

If empowerment is dynamic and process-like; so is its opposite. For the three moments of EMPR, there are corresponding levels of disrespect. 17 To lack normative power—to be disempowered within a practice or in the broader context of one's daily life—involves a downward spiral of getting no or poor credit, lacking access to any good place, and finding no ear and no reaction when one raises a complaint. Met with waves of disrespect, one is mired in stigma, cannot get cooperation, and so must fail to bring most values to fruition. The moral isolation is the gradual result of practical isolation. Morally isolated, one's situation is seen, at best, as one's own tragic problem. One might fail to respect someone, as when one misses an opportunity to give them credit, to cooperate effectively with them, or to be present and accountable to advocates. Disrespectful action goes somewhat further. It occurs when one deliberately speaks of the other in stigmatizing ways, systematically or deliberately obstructs their practical avenues for valuable use of their practical roles, or actively refuses to listen and treats as illegitimate the stories of advocates.

Given the process of disempowerment, there should be moral pressure to EMPR someone in those contexts and moments in which doing otherwise leaves them particularly vulnerable to the crushing gears of stigma, failure, and isolation. Likewise, there are situations in which refusing to respect and even being deliberately disrespectful would be the all-things-considered best choice. One of the potential benefits of the EMPR view are heuristic uses that could be made regarding the causal interconnection of the three moments (crediting, reckoning, and advocating). Thinking about both the distinctions between the different moments, and their connections, can help us to identify when we are morally "safe" to be disrespectful, on the one hand, and when EMPR is urgently called for, on the other. An influential and arrogant person will normally not be crushed by my refusal to acknowledge their high social standing. Similarly, there are many cases in which I may fail to make use of an opportunity to credit someone for their skills and talents, for their kindness, or to otherwise speak well of them without in doing so undermining their access to the good roles or statuses that they rely upon to pursue what matters to them. I may even refuse to listen to someone's complaints and demands, especially if I find the complaints to be obnoxious and entitled. While it is difficult for us to think of a morally correct action as one that is at the same time disrespectful, I think we must welcome the conceptual distance between the value of respecting and the broader value of treating people as they morally ought to be treated. Just as I would never celebrate those times when I rightly refused to care for someone who could have used my care, so, if I value being respectful, I won't be inclined to fully celebrate those times when disrespect was my best moral option. I would instead regret, to some extent, the lack of empowerment respect in my relationship with the ones I rightfully badmouthed, undermined, or deliberately ignored.