Cicero on Different Kinds of Respect for Persons. A ‘Darwallian’ Approach

The present paper will investigate the notion of “respect” and its plurality of expressions in the work of Cicero. Such an investigation will be conducted by way of a reading of selected passages from his De Republica, De Legibus and De Officiis. With a view to this, I shall make use of the conceptual taxonomy of respect worked out by a contemporary political philosopher, Stephen Darwall. In his Two Kinds of Respect, 1977, and The second person standpoint, 2006, he draws a distinction between four different kinds of respect: (1) what he calls “appraisal respect”, that is, a relational attitude grounded on the recognition of a supposed ethical or intellectual excellence of the respected subject ; (2) a form called “respect as honour”, that is, an asymmetrical attitude based on the acceptation of a privileged role or social position held by the respected subject and, therefore, an attitude grounded on the recognition of the latter’s authority to claim such a kind of treatment; (3) respect for “epistemic authority”, which has as its basis a kind of recognition of the technical expertise of the respected subject relative to a given field of knowledge; (4) respect as “second-personal reciprocal recognition”. Such a kind of respect -probably the most relevant one from a political point of view – is grounded on the recognition of the moral authority of each and every member of the poltical community. By applying Darwall’s conceptual models of respect to the analysis of Cicero’s works, I shall attempt to show that the all four kinds of respect mentioned above make their appearance in Cicero’s works, and that each of them, instead of subsisting separately from the other kinds, is forged by the intersection with at least one of the others.