How do you define respect and what makes someone worthy of your respect?

7 comments

1. Respect is to honor and treat a person with civility, I don’t think respect is earned it’s there from the start, I respect everyone even those who don’t deserve it. Plus is strokes my ego.

2. Personally, respect is treating other people with dignity, regardless of their social, economic, age, or whatever kind of status our society imposes on us. I try to treat everyone as equally as possible, even though sometimes unfortunately I fail. But something that I really value in people is their ability to think before speaking.

3. everyone deserves your respect until they show you otherwise.

4. There’s “respect” that’s basic human decency, and there’s “respect” that’s closer to admiration.

   If you don’t distinguish between them, you’ll just get an endless series of redditors circle-jerking about how they treat everyone with basic respect.

5. If they talk to me as an equal, that gets their foot in the door. If we disagree on something, but are willing to listen to one another to come a middle ground, that earns respect. If they become confrontational and start to raise their voice and so on, that loses my respect for them.

6. Respect is different from dignity.

   * People should be treated with dignity unless they prove otherwise.

   * Respect must be earned.

   Someone is worthy of my respect when their contribution to my life or the lives of my friends/family is important and beneficial, or when they are known to give careful consideration to their own words and deeds so they can be a credible example or source of knowledge or wisdom.

   When someone earns my respect, I will pay more attention to their words and deeds. When two people have different points of view, but one of them has earned my respect and the other has shown themselves unworthy of that respect, I will be more likely to take the respected person’s advice and disregard the advice from the person I do not respect.

   This is not to suggest I believe everything a person says out of respect, because even a respected person is wrong in the sense that all people are wrong sometimes; rather, their earned respect helps me better measure the worth of what they say.

7. It all comes down to character for me. In school especially being in a southern school there were teachers that just expected respect automatically bc they were older than me which is kind of ironic when they don’t want to say their age. But those teachers would be so condescending so it’s like fuck you and your masters in mathematics, I don’t care! I’ll give way more respect to my XC teammates that cheer me on and tell me good run during practice. I could understand respect being similar to human decency but we give that to everyone, to me respect is something you earn bc you stand out from human decency