Taking Humiliation Seriously

In this article I will try to argue that the concept of respect can be appropriately defined in opposition to that of humiliation. What I call a “negative theory of equal respect” starts from a critical approach towards humiliating conditions, in order to highlight respectful policies and conditions like those within which an equal not-humiliation is ensured to every human being. Indeed, by providing a positive definition of respect, modern normative theories of respect miss an overlapping conception of humiliation too, since that philosophy usually identifies the presence of respectful relations with the absence of humiliating ones. However, as I will show in the next passages of the article, respectful policies of a just society – in a Rawlsian sense – can be compatible with social arrangements implying human exclusion. At a first look, the attempt to define the concept of respect seems to face the same difficulties met by the Augustinian inquiry about the proper meaning of time1: people who wanted to provide those who asked about it with an explanation would probably give different answers and, then, admit not to know what it is exactly. Nevertheless, unlike the concept of time investigated by Augustine, there will be similar difficulties also in case nobody demanded a definition of respect, for the simple reason that people have divergent positive conceptions of this notion. This uncertainty surrounding the proper meaning of the concept in question does not concern only common sense: although moral philosophy has tried to solve this definitional – and, more noteworthy, conceptual – issue along its history, there is no agreement about the political consequences of the notion of equal respect among contemporary philosophers. As I will show in the first part of the article, all philosophical attempts to clarify what respect positively is have been inspired by Immanuel Kant and none of them can neglect the link between its meaning and the equality of human beings. Differently from the concept of esteem, respect cannot be unequal: when people say they are respecting someone more than another person, indeed, they usually mean they are esteeming the first one better than the second one. In this sense, respecting people unequally would be a non-sense expression: indeed, the modern history of the concept of respect dates back and takes its proper meaning from the modern concept of law, which prohibited any unequal treatment of people grounded on arbitrary – be they natural or social – factors, like class, status, race or handicap. John Rawls translated and renewed these Kantian arguments in A Theory of Justice: in this work, the transcendental grounds of the Kantian moral law were replaced with an equal decision-making procedure, in light of which people with different conceptions of the “good” could agree on the same principles of justice. In the second chapter of this article, I will sum up the theoretical development of Rawlsian ideas about justice and equal respect, which are strictly interlinked. Despite the importance and the complexity of the justifications embodied in the Rawlsian conception of “justice as fairness”, however, a lot of critics have underlined some problems inherent to this theoretical approach: according to Rawls' critics, neither the conception of “justice as fairness”, nor political liberalism can provide a neutral justification of the concept of equal respect. In this regard, I will analyse some ambiguities which go through A Theory of Justice and, in a second moment, Political Liberalism, so that it will be possible to show the partiality of Rawlsian version of justice and, then, of equal respect. Finally, this analysis will show the necessity to adopt a different approach to the concept of equal respect. In this last chapter of my article I will argue that the attempt to define the concept of respect can be better pursued starting from the analysis of what humiliation is. Once degrading social assets have been identified, respect can be defined as the practical negation of them: according to this negative and practical conception of equal respect, if institutions and certain social practises humiliate people, the last ones know very well what this concept requires to do, that is to put an end to these unworthy conditions. Paradoxically, this negative conception of respect suggests that on the one hand people cease to know the meaning of respect when they are respected or – in the present perspective it would be the same – when they are not humiliated; on the other hand, people become intuitively aware of its meaning when someone mistreats them or nobody considers their condition of suffering. Coherently with this approach, equal respect means an equal not humiliation owed to every human being. The obligation to respecting people includes a negative constraint: respect involves refraining from regarding or treating people in degrading ways. Starting from humiliating conditions, a negative and dynamic theory of equal respect aims not to theoretically justify what it wants to overcome in practice – degrading assets – and negatively promote respectful relationships between humans.