We all have a little guage in us that measures the amount of respect we have for ourselves, our enviroment, each other, etc, etc,
We can set a certain criteria and in some cases our level of respect can fluctuate with new information we take in that is either negative or positive........creating plus or minuses in our Respect-O-Meter.
We can not like something but still respect it.
Loss of respect for a person, idea, business, ourselves can be devestating. As the meter goes up or down, somehow it seems to mess up feelings and thoughts of love and trust. We can lose trust and respect and still love. I can respect someone but not love them. I can respect someone but not trust them.
Everyone wants respect and deserves a level of respect.
Right now JunctionGuy is getting little respect for his knowledge posting politically, but as a person he is getting deep respect, although I am not sure he realizes it yet. For some of us, continuing to call him out means keeping self respect. Otherwise, seven pages and the continued fantasies of his talk show host dreams would cease, as he thinks we like him. But this thread is not meant to be about Junction Guy or politics.
There are many posters I respect but don't particulary like. Some over time the level of respect for posters has gone up or down after getting to know them. I am sure that views towards me and how I am respected have fluctuated.
In reality respect is a very personal thing.
Some demand it, some earn it, some cherish it and some just don't know what to do with it once they got it. Have you ever continued to respect someone when they lost respect for themselves? A wonderful gift, isn't it?
So, why am I posting this?
I have thought about the board in terms of the respect level here.
I honestly believe we love and care about each other. We agree to disagree. We support each other. We were forced to respect an organization that was undeserving. As we pull away our Respect-O-Meter got discombodulated.
Word of the Day RESPECT
What say you?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/respect/
Respect
First published Wed Sep 10, 2003; substantive revision Tue Jan 2, 2007Respect has great importance in everyday life. As children we are taught (one hopes) to respect our parents, teachers, and elders, school rules and traffic laws, family and cultural traditions, other people's feelings and rights, our country's flag and leaders, the truth and people's differing opinions. And we come to value respect for such things; when we're older, we may shake our heads (or fists) at people who seem not to have learned to respect them. We develop great respect for people we consider exemplary and lose respect for those we discover to be clay-footed, and so we may try to respect only those who are truly worthy of our respect. We may also come to believe that, at some level, all people are worthy of respect. We may learn that jobs and relationships become unbearable if we receive no respect in them; in certain social milieus we may learn the price of disrespect if we violate the street law: “Diss me, and you die.” Calls to respect this or that are increasingly part of public life: environmentalists exhort us to respect nature, foes of abortion and capital punishment insist on respect for human life, members of racial and ethnic minorities and those discriminated against because of their gender, sexual orientation, age, religious beliefs, or economic status demand respect both as social and moral equals and for their cultural differences. And it is widely acknowledged that public debates about such demands should take place under terms of mutual respect. We may learn both that our lives together go better when we respect the things that deserve to be respected and that we should respect some things independently of considerations of how our lives would go.
We may also learn that how our lives go depends every bit as much on whether we respect ourselves. The value of self-respect may be something we can take for granted, or we may discover how very important it is when our self-respect is threatened, or we lose it and have to work to regain it, or we have to struggle to develop or maintain it in a hostile environment. Some people find that finally being able to respect themselves is what matters most about getting off welfare, kicking a disgusting habit, or defending something they value; others, sadly, discover that life is no longer worth living if self-respect is irretrievably lost. It is part of everyday wisdom that respect and self-respect are deeply connected, that it is difficult if not impossible both to respect others if we don't respect ourselves and to respect ourselves if others don't respect us. It is increasingly part of political wisdom both that unjust social institutions can devastatingly damage self-respect and that robust and resilient self-respect can be a potent force in struggles against injustice.
The ubiquity and significance of respect and self-respect in everyday life largely explains why philosophers, particularly in moral and political philosophy, have been interested in these two concepts. They turn up in a multiplicity of philosophical contexts, including discussions of justice and equality, injustice and oppression, autonomy and agency, moral and political rights and duties, moral motivation and moral development, cultural diversity and toleration, punishment and political violence. The concepts are also invoked in bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, workplace ethics, and a host of other applied ethics contexts. Although a wide variety of things are said to deserve respect, contemporary philosophical interest in respect has overwhelmingly been focused on respect for persons, the idea that all persons should be treated with respect simply because they are persons. Respect for persons is a central concept in many ethical theories; some theories treat it as the very essence of morality and the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations. This focus owes much to the 18 th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who argued that all and only persons (i.e., rational autonomous agents) and the moral law they autonomously legislate are appropriate objects of the morally most significant attitude of respect. Although honor, esteem, and prudential regard played important roles in moral and political theories before him, Kant was the first major Western philosopher to put respect for persons, including oneself as a person, at the very center of moral theory, and his insistence that persons are ends in themselves with an absolute dignity who must always be respected has become a core ideal of modern humanism and political liberalism. In recent years many people have argued that moral respect ought also to be extended to things other than persons, such as nonhuman living things and the natural environment.
Despite the widespread acknowledgement of the importance of respect and self-respect in moral and political life and theory, there is no settled agreement in either everyday thinking or philosophical discussion about such issues as how to understand the concepts, what the appropriate objects of respect are, what is involved in respecting various objects, what the conditions are for self-respect, and what the scope is of any moral requirements regarding respect and self-respect. This entry will survey these and related issues.