Placing Respect in the Foreground. Plato on Different Kinds of Recognition

The idea of respect (understood in terms of respect for persons as well as in terms of self-respect) has attracted an enormous amount of philosophical attention in recent years, being generally envisaged not only as a general guide to ethical practice, but also as one of the most forceful normative political principles to which liberal democratic institutions are committed in their attempt to negotiate different types of tensions inherent in political life. Also, major advances have occurred in working out a conceptual clarification of the notion at issue and its main underpinnings. As Stephen Darwall has argued , we might think of respect as (i) a form of esteem for the outstanding moral qualities of specific agents (appraisal respect); (ii) a kind of “asymmetric” reverence for individuals holding peculiar positions of power (e.g. reverence for a ruler, or an institutional figure) (respect as honour); (iii) a recognition of the technical expertise of a given individual and a consequential tendency to follow the indications prescribed by the expert person (respect as epistemic authority); a “symmetric” recognition of the inherent moral authority of an individual qua human being and equal to her fellow-humans (equal recognition respect). In this paper I shall contend that the above sketched taxonomy is not complete, although proving theoretically sound and profitably applicable as a paradigm for a study of how respect has been addressed in various stages of the history of philosophy. More to the point, I will argue that Plato’s philosophical thought might open new paths of investigation towards a richer articulation of the contemporary ideal of respect. My general suggestion is that, despite misapprehensions to the contrary, Plato is seriously engaging with respect by addressing it in terms of a necessary precondition for both the acquisition of individual aretē and for the actualisation of perfect justice in the ideal city.