Comment by mrandish
5 days ago
> understand a little about what life is like in their shoes.
That's empathy which is a different concept than treating someone with respect.
> learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.
Having knowledge of a breadth of different people's life experiences is also a different concept than respect. The author proposed "treating people with respect" as the minimal normative standard. You seem to be rejecting his proposal of "respect" as insufficient and instead are proposing an alternative which includes empathy and a "lifelong process" of gaining broad knowledge of different lived experiences.
While those are valid things to propose, you're suggesting a meaningfully different standard by expanding on what respect "sometimes means." It's worth highlighting because I interpreted the author's central argument on this point as being "treating people with respect" alone should be sufficient as the minimally acceptable standard. Whether I agree with the author's proposal or not, I understood it to explicitly exclude requiring anything beyond how we treat others.
While this may seem like a minor distinction, it strikes me as central because the concepts of feeling empathy and having a lifelong interest in acquiring cultural knowledge go to our internal thoughts and feelings, whereas the author's proposal limits itself to our external behavior - which I take to be his point.
It'd more useful if you'd been explicitly direct in your response, perhaps something like "Just treating people with respect is not sufficient. Instead, the minimal normative standard should be..." It would be clearer that you disagree substantially with the author and what you're proposing instead. It would also enable a more interesting discussion about whether society should limit itself to judging how we behave toward others vs going further to judging how we think and feel about others internally, regardless of our external behavior.
Knowledge can inform external behavior. When you go to another country, you have to learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context. In America, for example, somebody waving their middle finger at you will be seen as them intentionally disrespecting you. Not because they necessarily are (maybe they just arrived from Japan and don’t know better yet), but because for people socialized here that is perceived to go along with the intent to disrespect. National borders are not the only cultural borders.
(I accidentally posted my comment before I was finished, so I was still adding another two paragraphs you may not have seen while writing your response.)
> learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context.
PG said "treating people with respect" which is not the opposite of disrespecting someone. To me, disrespect evokes a different concept, despite containing the same word root. When I say "treat someone with respect" it's not related to the old ideas out of antiquated honor cultures about formal honor or dishonor, where "disrespecting" someone is taken as an offense and affront to their legitimacy.
The modern concept of 'treating with respect' simply means initially engaging with people you don't know yet with a default neutral posture and general assumption of good will and good faith. To me, the opposite wouldn't be overt disrespect or insult but rather treating one kind of person I don't even know yet, any differently than I treat all the other people I don't even know yet. It's equal default treatment vs unequal default treatment.
Personally, if I'm a visitor to a foreign culture, I'm not overly concerned about the risk of accidentally offending someone over some local cultural norm. I've lived around the world immersed in several cultures different than my own and it's never been a problem. My good will, good faith and sincere best efforts have always been sufficient to form new and lasting friendships, even when I've unknowingly committed some unintentional faux pas.
I would say treating others good will, good faith, and sincere best efforts are my definition of respect. My guess is that if in your travels somebody informed you that not taking your shoes off at the door is a faux pas in their culture (perhaps after you accidentally committed that one), you will start taking your shoes off when you go to people’s houses there. It doesn’t have to be about “honor”—maybe that culture is just more germ-conscious. You have just learned something that helps you show respect to people there. The more cultures you encounter the more of these norms you’ll pick up on over time. I’m assuming you consider such learnings to be not overly burdensome. If so, great! We probably don’t disagree on much of substance and maybe mainly word semantics.