Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

Chapter 4: The Respect Fallacy: Limits of Respect in Public Dialogue

4 the respect fallacy: limits of respect in public dialogue Italo Testa Deliberative politics should start from an adequate and differentiated image of our dialogical practices and their normative structures; the ideals that we eventually propose for deliberative politics should be tested against this background . In this chapter I argue that equal respect, understood as respect a priori conferred on persons, is not and should not be counted as a constitutive normative ground of public discourse. Furthermore, requiring such respect, even if it might facilitate dialogue, could have negative effects and lead to fallacious paths of thought—as seems to happen on matters of deep disagreement such as the Colorado fundamentalist/gay HIV issue I discuss below. I put forward this argument from the standpoint of argumentation theory, drawing consequences for dialogical theories of politics. Basing my argument on a pluralistic notion of public discourse—understood as a mixed discourse of persuasion, information seeking, and negotiation—I argue that respect is a dynamic, situational phenomenon and that the norm of equal respect for persons is contextually contingent in political deliberation: equal respect should be considered as a potential outcome, a discursive achievement. I understand this as a second-order consensus achieved dynamically on a provisional basis rather than as a universal condition for dialogue. 1. Preliminary remarks: reciprocity, equality, impartiality. Respect seems to be first of all a moral and social attitude. It is not in itself necessarily reciprocal: someone can always be respectful without being respected. Neither does reciprocity imply equality: there are various social and political practices in hierarchical societies, even in democratic ones, that express reciprocal respect under conditions of asymmetry and inequality. One example is the Kula exchange or Kula ring—the ceremonial exchange system studied in Papua New Guinea by Malinowski and Mauss.1 Respect is not analytically equal respect. Even those who see respect as a moral ideal of intrinsic value might not agree that its intrinsic moral value implies the intrinsic moral value of equal respect. But should respect be equal? Should we submit it to some normative principle of equality? Some contest this, arguing that if there is a normative principle regulating respect, it is not equality. For instance, Harry Frankfurt states, “treating a person with respect means, in the sense that is pertinent here, dealing with him exclusively on the basis of those aspects of his particular character or circumstances that are actually relevant to the issue at hand.” That’s why “treating people with respect precludes assigning them special advantages except on the basis of considerations that differentiate relevantly among them” (1997, 8). In dealing with people we should be guided only by what is genuinely relevant. Thus respect entails impartiality and avoidance of arbitrariness rather than equality—understood by Frankfurt as “a matter of each person having the same as others.”2 Whatever the normative principle of respect may be, it is reasonable to agree with Frankfurt that respect, even if assumed as a basic moral principle, is a defeasible value that sometimes may be overridden by other moral values: “people often prefer—sometimes for perfectly good and even admirable reasons—to be treated as though they have characteristics they do not have or as though they lack characteristics that they actually possess” (1997, 8n). We need not share Frankfurt’s perspective to realize that respect is balanced against other values (I may prefer to love or be loved even at the price of not being respected or of being humiliated), and that in much social and political intercourse (such as recognition politics) respect is a “good” that is being negotiated. Hence the commitment to respect, equal or not, is not necessary insofar as it is often withdrawn in practice. In what follows we’ll see particularly how all of this is manifested in dialogical practices. 2. Against equal respect as universal a priori. Given this, we can come closer to our argumentation theory approach. First, I aim to show in which sense “equal respect” for persons—understood as addressed universally to members of the moral community—is not a necessary normative ground for public discourse in general. This means first of all that equal 70 public deliberation as rhetorical practice respect for persons is not a universal a priori that must be satisfied in order to enter into any form of dialogue. Argumentation theories—for example, Perelman’s nouvelle rhétorique, Toulmin’s fields of argument...