Respect theory

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Respect theory is a theory about how people perceive respect and distribute their respect to other people based on their deeds or properties. It also studies implementations of the respect within a society (descriptive), and properties of a theoretically optimal implementation (normative). Respect theory claims to be a major solution to the dilemma of economic growth and sustainability of resources: It is a method to redistribute resources based on the intrinsic value of things. In contrast, economics measures utility, individual's preferences, income, and intrinsic cognitive processes of opportunity costs among other things. Particularly, economics gives higher value to scarce than abundant utilities. It is therefore insensitive to things that are abundant but still highly respected, such as being good to other people. Thus, respect theory captures the most important things better than the economic theory in a wealthy world where most people have already fulfilled their basic needs.

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Scope

What are the properties of respect, how is it perceived, and how does it form, accumulate, and distribute in a society?

More specifically, respect can be thought as a social activity, where voluntary, individual expressions of respect about things and deeds are handled with specific rules in such a way that a synthesis of these individual expressions tends to converge towards the social respect about the things and deeds. Specific questions about respect theory include:

  • How and in what format should the individual expressions of respect be collected?
  • What are the rules for handling the expressions?
  • What does "social respect" mean, and how can it be measured?

Definition

Data

What is respect?

Respect is a feeling of good opinion, honour, or admiration.[1] Respect always has a target or object that is respected, and a human being or a subject who respects. Respect is a fundamentally social feeling. If you are hungry, it only involves you. If you get food and eat, the feeling of hunger goes away. Similarly, feelings of thirst, tiredness, joy, excitement, and many others are individual feelings: they only involve yourself. Respect is fundamentally different.

Respect is closely related to gratitude or thankfulness. Respect comes with a need to express it. It is often expressed specifically to the person who has done something respectful. You thank the cook for a meal, and a friend who brings you a present on your birthday. Importantly, you pay attention to the response. You expect the cook to be pleased for your compliments. But if he instead uses a Finnish proverb "Only cats live in thanksgiving", you feel discouraged to thank him the next time. On the other hand, your mother may remind you that it is the right and polite thing to thank anyway, and then you feel a bit less discouraged.

The basic unit (atom) of respect seems to consist of four inseparable parts ("protons" and "electrons" of the atom): the subject (the person who respects), the object (the thing that is respected), the expression of respect, and the response (someone's response to the expression of respect). In the previous example, you are the subject, cook's meal is the object, your compliments is the expression, and the cook's and your mother's comments are the response. It is important to notice that the thing respected and the response may or may not come from the same person. The latter was the case with the cook's meal and the mother. Although the mother may look like an outsider in this case, her response is actually more effective than that of the cook in justifying the your compliment. The purpose of the response is exactly this: to justify the expression of respect. This is why respect is fundamentally a social feeling.

The response is an expression of feeling, which can be called pride. Pride is a difficult word because it has several different interpretations, but from the different Wiktionary definitions, this is the closest to what I mean: "A sense of one's own worth, and abhorrence of what is beneath or unworthy of one; lofty self-respect; noble self-esteem; elevation of character; dignified bearing; proud delight; -- in a good sense." [2] The cook is proud of the meal he prepared and shows this pride as a response to your compliment. Other responses are also possible but lead to awkward situations. The cat proverb send a message that the cook does not care about the compliments, whether or not he thinks the complement was truthful. This response discourages from new compliments. On the other hand, the cook may think that the meal actually was poor and the compliment was untruthful. The response is ambiguous to the subject: it encourages to give more respect to show that people really like the food, but it also discourages from giving respect as the cook was shown to be insensitive to positive feedback.

The atom of respect is personal. The point of view is that of the subject. It is the subject's feeling about the thing, the subject's expression of respect, and the subject's perception of the response. This is natural, because respect is a feeling and feelings cannot exist outside the (human) brain.

The social aspect grows from the interplay of an expression of respect and the response. Actually, a response is an expression of respect by another person. If the original subject responses to this expression of respect with respect, it fulfils the other atom of respect. The outcome is a "molecule" of two atoms of respect bound to each other. It forms a mutual bond between the two individuals. These respect bonds actually describe an important feature of social life, which is full of mutual respect bonds between people. It is possible that the explication of these bonds enables us to predict many phenomena of social life and thus helps us understand the most difficult thing in the universe: human relations.

Respect can also be negative, showing that the subject feels bad about the object. Negative respect can be called disrespect. However, the same atoms and mechanisms also work in this case although the message is the opposite. The response can be said to be shame, instead of pride. Because the respect theory aims to describe the actual thought processes and feelings of humans, also these negative feelings should be included.

The object and the response don't need to belong to a particular person. You may respect a political or religious ideology, and you feel that you get a positive response from other people in the party or congregation even if nobody explicitly says that to you personally. In addition, the expression of respect does not need to be personal. It may be expressed in general, e.g. by wearing clothes or other signs that reveal your respect to a pop star. Usually, you don't expect the pop star to ever find out which clothes you use; it is a sign to the society around you. Also, the response typically comes from other fans and not directly from the pop star. But the subjective process is the same: you express respect, and as a response, your respect is respected.

In general, human beings are very good at recognising the respect by others. Even babies are able to understand that someone is happy about something the baby did. And small boys are happy that their dads are proud of their skills in football. The nature of respect is bidirectional. Someone gives respect to a person, and the person respects the respect one receives.

Respect is a very strong motivator of human life and endeavour. Actually, Robert Baden-Powell has stated that the true road to happiness is to help other people[3]. This is bidirectional respect, assuming that other people give value to your helpfulness (which is, usually, a reasonable assumption).

Interestingly, many of the individual feelings are such that you can buy goods to relieve or enhance them. Food, beverage, music, and film industries all aim to affect individual feelings. Of course all of them also have social aspects, but the main frame of reference is the individual oneself. In contrast, the market of respectable deeds is much less developed.


Respect measured with a currency

All the current currencies basically measure resources or services that can be traded to other resources or services. However, Eric S. Raymond[4] has noted that in a society where the basic needs have been fulfilled, social respect cannot be gained by collecting more wealth but instead giving something for common good. Therefore, it would actually be necessary for a society to have some currency for social respect, in addition to the measure of resources. Otherwise respect remains implicit or hard to recognise, and it is inefficient in motivating people to work for social development. It is not enough to have the current focus on efficient resource distribution by using money as a means to distribute goods according to the society's standard.

There should be a currency for respect. The respect currency should measure the amount of respect a certain act gains from the society. There exists some primitive examples of such a currency already. Honorary and other medals that are given to respected people e.g. on the 91st independence day of Finland (which is the day when the first draft of this page was written) are one kind of respect currency. Gifts in general also show respect. However, these currencies are not quantitative (i.e. they do not actually measure the amount of respect), and they are not (easily) tradeable to material benefits.

The respect theory has a practical objective. I believe that respect is, in general, a positive phenomenon both at an individual and a social level. Individually, it is an important factor improving quality of life. In a society, it is a method to guide its members towards behaviour that is acceptable in and useful for the society. The respect theory aims to improve the explication of respect in a beneficial way. It also may encourage people to express their respect more, which may be a good thing for the society and its members. A major challenge is to operationalise it to measure respect in a truthful way.


Respect and free information

The most obvious situation where the traditional money seems to fail is the market of freely available information. This problem is changing especially music and news businesses, where new information is expensive to produce but almost free to distribute once created. There are only two successful ways that have been used as business logics. First, the availability of information is restricted in some way so that the users are willing to pay for access to the information. Second, the information itself is distributed for free, but money is collected from selling commercials on the website where the information is. Both of these approaches have major societal problems.

When information is restricted, the societal problem is that - information is restricted. The society would be better off, if everyone would have access to that information, especially as all costs have occurred already and the distribution of information is free. The problem with commercials is twofold. First, only very few websites make enough money with commercials, so this will push the money to very few hands. Second, some topics are more tempting than others to advertisers, which will quickly lead to strong selection bias and ignorance of unpopular topics.

Respect theory claims to offer solutions to these problems. The nature of money is that two people have some scarce utilities, which they exchange (probably using money as the measure of the price of the goods). After the transaction, both have higher utility because they have things that they need more than the things they had before. But still, they both only have the new goods because they gave up what they had. With information, they both would have all information after the transaction, and exchanging money would only make sense if the information was unavailable from anywhere else.

Psychology

Respect is related to an event, object, individual, or group. It clearly exists in humans, but it seems to exist in many social mammals and maybe in other animals as well. The respect theory should be able to capture the essential properties of this feeling.

However, an individual may have strong feelings of respect (or disrespect) but the individual may not want to reveal this feeling to others for various reasons. Thus, there will be feelings of respect that will not be explicated. The following discussion differentiates the feeling itself and the explication of respect, which is an expression of the feeling of respect. Because we cannot know whether an individual actually feels the way the individual claims, we need to assume that this is the case. Anyway, the respect theory only operates with the expressions of respect. To be precise about these, we use different symbols. R'' denotes the actual feeling of respect of an individual about something, R' denotes the explicated individual respect about the thing, and R denotes the aggregated respect perceived by the subject ("I").##


Economics

Respect theory relates to externalities, which are benefits or costs to people that are not involved in an economic transaction. For example, a piece of freely available information may benefit anyone irrespective of who actually paid for producing it. An external cost occurs when the production of goods cause pollution that is not charged from the polluter in a form of e.g. a pollution tax. Respect theory may be able to capture some of these externalities and thus create an economic system that is more efficient than one without respect. Respect theory, if properly applied, may be more efficient way of capturing externalities than many traditional methods such as taxation, criminalisation, government provision, or tort laws. This can happen e.g. in a form of losing respect when polluting the environment. This may be easier to apply than environmental tax, and losing respect is bad business even today. D↷


Ethics

The above mentioned economic tools are not refined to actually capture efficiently the ethical aspects of actions. There are lots of things that are ethically questionable but still do not trigger any tort, not to mention criminal, laws. Also, ethically respected deeds are not at all covered by laws, which focus on forbidding bad things rather than rewarding good deeds.


Coherence of social respect

There is a hypothesis that social respect, and also social valuations, MUST be coherent within the society at a given time.[5] (Actually, this can be viewed as a definition for a society: society is a group of people, who accept the idea of belonging to the group given its coherent social valuation structure.) This coherence requirement does not apply to individuals, who are allowed to have inconsistent valuations, and they are also allowed to disagree with the social valuations.

If this hypothesis holds, it means that when starting from inconsistent individual expressions of respect, the rules must make a synthesis that is internally coherent.

Intrinsic and instrumental respect

In practice, it is useful to divide respect into two different kinds: intrinsic respect, which is respect of the thing itself; and instrumental (or extrinsic) respect, which is respect because the thing is useful in producing something that deserves intrinsic respect. This is analogous and closely related to intrinsic value and instrumental value.

How can these respects be separated? Is there actually any intrinsic respect, or is everything that is respected respected only because it is useful? These questions have stimulated lengthy discussions in the philosophy of values. Here, we only make a practical assumption: there are layers of respect. Many things that we originally thought that deserve intrinsic respect are, when carefully thought through, only instrumental to some deeper objectives. Instead of trying to separate these layers into "instrumental" and "deeper", we acknowledge that the line is inherently fuzzy. We must start by giving intrinsic respect to things we respect. However, as we develop our thinking and measurement methods, we understand that the things are instrumental, and we learn to measure their impact in producing something deeper good. Our intrinsic respect has changed into instrumental. And with further thinking and improved measurement, the deeper goods are found to deserve only instrumental respect as means to produce something even deeper good.

There is no objective boundary between intrinsic and instrumental respect. It is a matter of our ability to understand what we actually respect, and our ability to measure how different things affect other things that produce respected things.


What is the difference between respect and values?

Respect theory is closely related to Value theory. They are pretty much talking about the same thing. I guess the main difference is that values are thought as something that exist by themselves. Respect only exists if you give respect to something, and I have respect on your respect. Respect is more like a process of talking about values, and the respect theory is a method to measure the intensity of that talk. Value theory sees values more like as static products. The essence of values is having them. The essence of respect is giving it.


Individual respect versus social respect

Let's define the social respect as the average of the individual respects in the society. If an individual shows respect to something with equal intensity as the society (i.e. the individual respect equals the social respect), what happens? Does the individual gain respect in the act? Probably not. Does the individual lose respect? No. Does the individual's respect capital diminish? According to the current mathematical expression of respect yes, but there is no good reasoning for this.

I come to a hypothesis that if an individual shows respect at the same intensity as the society, it is a neutral act and does not change respect capitals. In contrast, if the individual gives respect at a different intensity than the society, this has implications for both the recipient and the giver. The recipients respect capital changes according to the respect given, but what happens to the giver's respect capital? If the society changes its respect to the same direction, the giver should gain respect (for revealing the true social respect that has been unnoticed), but if the society changes its respect to the opposite direction, the giver should lose respect (for being against a common norm).

However, there is a difference between the two statements: "I agree with the social respect in this case" and "I give X amount of respect (which happens to equal to the social respect) in this case." The difference is that in the first case, the individual respect floats according to the changes in the social respect, while in the latter case it does not.

----1: . The argumentation should clarify between different respects: respect given, received, possessed; amount, rate; instrumental, intrinsic; roles: giver, recipient, society, others?. There is a lot of work to clarify these issues. Does an analogy to energy, different energy types, and energy flows bring some useful insights into this? At least the basic rule is different: respect, unlike energy, can vanish. --Jouni 07:33, 23 December 2009 (UTC) (type: truth; paradigms: science: comment)


Learning to respect

Based on what I have learned about decision analysis, utilities or values are assumed to just exist in people's mind, and the question is about eliciting them. Sometimes they may in conflict, and then you might need multi-attribute utility theory. But I have not seen an idea that there would be normative values, i.e. values that you should have. My feeling is that this idea should be included in the respect theory.

A very common example is found in a family. A husband or wife can show respect to the spouse if he/she has a positive attitude about what she/he has done. The normative respect is the idea that he/she should show respect simply because she/he is the spouse. You have to learn to show respect to your spouse even if her/his acts do not stimulate that automatically. Although even this is not simple, it is actually more difficult than that. It is not enough to show respect. You should learn to feel the respect first, and then show the true feeling.

This is a complex societal structure. My current hypothesis is that

  • the concept of normative respect exists, i.e. has practical implications,
  • the possibility to implement normative respect in a society yields, on average, better results than never implementing it,
  • it is derived from a complex social system where the society expects you to behave that way (i.e. shows respect/disrespect to you if you behave/don't behave that way).

The "society" is often implicit and although there is nobody physically saying you this, you have a feeling that the society is still telling you what to do. Is this the definition of conscience?

Rationale for rules

The rules of respect should follow general patterns of thinking that are deep in the brains of human beings. The ability of thinking about respect is inherent to humans (and probably other mammals, too). Therefore, the main source of information about the rules of respect lie in our own brains.

  • An individual should be allowed to express respect about anything. Also disrespect should be allowed, because it clearly exists in human thinking of respect.
  • An explication of respect is more valuable if
    • the respector is highly respected,
    • the explication is a large fraction of the total explications of respect by the respector,
      ⇤--3: . This cannot be correct. I have never heard about the concept of "fraction of respect", and I have difficulties in thinking about what that would be. It seems to be the fraction of the respect given per the total respect the person possesses. But this cannot be intrinsically known by others, unless we mean the respect of the respector in the eyes of the others; in this case, the concept of fraction (the amount of respect you give to something divided by the amount of respect I give to you) is meaningless. --Jouni 06:23, 8 March 2010 (UTC) (type: truth; paradigms: science: attack)
    • the explication is informative or focussed ("I respect the whole world" is very uninformative and therefore not valuable) (another example: although a man's sentence "I love also you" is very informative (or revealing) in a sense, it shows a critical loss of focus in his mental respect structure, and probably the girl can make correct interpretations about the value of this explication of respect),
    • the explication is true (i.e. felt by the individual expressing it, and not only said due to being polite).
  • The expression of respect reduces the respect of the giver, if the object of expression is disrespected by others.

Result

NOTE! The properties of respect currency were moved to Respect currency.

The respect theory is able to describe many complex societal and inter-individual relationships. The descriptions are based on the atom of respect, which has the following parts:

  • the subject (the person who respects),
  • the object (the thing that is respected; it can be anything, e.g. an act, a personal skill, a feeling, a valuation, or an object),
  • the expression of respect (the act of giving respect), and
  • the response (someone's response to the expression of respect).

The atom of respect is a process where a subject gives respect about an object, and this act is respected by a respondent. The atom is always from the point of view of the subject. It is worth to notice that the response is a part of another atom of respect from the respondent's point of view.

It is important to notice that the thing respected and the response may or may not come from the same individual. Also, the subject and the respondent may be individuals or groups. They can also be implicit like "the society" or "the conscience". An atom can be empty if nobody responds to the act of giving respect. An empty atom can be described within the respect theory, but it is meaningless from the societal perspective.

The respect theory is also able to explain and operationalise ethics systems. Then, the topics are valuations shared by a group of people, e.g. a society. There are valuations that are shared by all members of the group and that are seen as indispensable valuations. Such a valuation forms molecules of respect with any two individuals from this group. The molecules of respect strengthens a certain value system within a society. Another society may and will have another set of indispensable valuations.

The valuation structure may be hierarchical so that a society divides into subgroups with additional indispensable valuations shared within the subgroup but not necessarily outside the group. Cultural clashes can often be explained by understanding the indispensable valuations and how the atom of respect about these valuations does not exist between some groups.

NOTE! Mathematical expression of respect was moved to Respect currency.

See also


EU funded project from Cordis database

References

  1. ↑ Respect in Wiktionary
  2. ↑ Pride in Wiktionary, meaning #2
  3. ↑ Robert Baden-Powell: Aids to Scoutmastership. Stevens Publishing (May 1992); originally published 1919. ISBN 0963205420
  4. ↑ Eric S. Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar [1]
  5. ↑ I don't know whether this hypothesis already existed, but now it does. --Jouni 00:10, 26 November 2009 (UCT)
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