I heard someone say the other day that "respect is a value." What the statement really means is that giving respect, or not, is an action based on a set of ethical ideas. That got me thinking and checking the literature, and it turns out that respect generally increases as people achieve higher levels of ethical development.
Let's take a quick look at some standard definitions:
- Ethics: The disciplined ideas or moral principals used to guide actions and beliefs
- Morality: The determination of rightness or wrongness of attitudes or actions within a specific set of ethics
- Values: Ethical ideas in the form of actions that can be worthy or unworthy of pursuit or emulation
- Respect: Acting in a way that shows you care about their feelings and well-being, or an attitude showing you value a person or thing
Many theorists have described levels of ethical development. For example, Lawrence Kohlberg, identified six levels of ethical development, from a low end of punishment and obedience, to a highest level of moral decisions based on abstract reasoning about universal ethical principles.
He saw that respect becomes an expression of morality beginning at about the middle of his scale, amid people who have surpassed self interest into a realm of being influenced by authority and obedience to social order.
The trouble is that professed morality and actual actions (values) are sometimes different and contradictory. The person who touts "law and order" but breaks the highway speed limit is a perfect example. People are VERY reluctant to face up this this realization that they are not being consistent.
But the fact is that actions which are unworthy reflect back on a person's fundamental ethics and expose you to other people evaluating your morality, based on their own morality.
Therefore, do not be surprised if you are judged by how you respect, or do not respect others who are different from yourself.
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