Can too much respect be bad?

[The Grand Nudger]

Equality for those deemed worthy is not equality. You would respect a racist as much as a non racist, but you wouldn't respect a soldier that joined for a paycheck as much as one that didn't?

I'm not giving you shit for rejecting equality in desert, it might help to keep that in mind. I was mentioning how surprising it is that we do so. All of us. It doesn't have to be about racists or anything particularly weighty. Two kids do the same thing, they might not deserve equal amounts of candy. Equality, reciprocity, and equanimity are floating variables in our calculation. We might not think that people should get what they deserve. It's common for us to think, explicitly or tacitly, there should be no necessary equality between what a person deserves and what they get. We might think they deserve less...yes, but also that they deserve more. Sometimes, inequality is generosity. Thing is, is that our outrage or frustration over outcomes can be directly and consistently predicted by exactly how far off of what we think some act or circumstance x deserves, and what a person got.

In the case of your soldier, you think less, in the case of your racist, more. Two axis, three views. Can you think of any act or circumstance which should generate -exactly- the deserved consequence, no more, no less - as a representative of the third view? The fundamental view of equality in desert. It's going to be difficult, that's what tickles me about the subject.

You've got my viewpoint all wrong, though, brosef - I'm an optimist that absolutely loves people. Even the weird fucked up things we do - that only endears us to me.. more, lol. When I tell you that there's a disconnect between desert and equality, I offer it as an endlessly amusing quirk of human moral reasoning, not a criticism. So, lets take a look at something in the abstract that directly relates to the op q. Can a person do a list of "respectable" things...but not deserve a full count of respect for those things in any 1 for 1 comparison? Well, yes. Maybe this person is a respectable act factory, cranking them out left right and center all day every day...but we operate on a sort of ceiling policy for do-gooders. We don;t have to imagine some negative outcome where a person or entity gets more respect than they deserve because they're not as respectable as the perception of them happens to be (for this board and this discussion, religious institutions are a common example) - we can and do also maintain that there is a level of respect that no one deserves no matter how many maidens they save from trains. Hell, there's even a point where a do-gooder grates on our nerves and starts to wander into negatively valued territory. Or where doing good happens so often for some person that it becomes very clear that it's just easy for them to do, and maybe they aren't even trying - then the value of their good acts can drop to nil. Billionaires engaging in philanthropy.

We might think to ourselves that a usually shitty five year old kid, staring in the store window at a toy they want, but dropping their ten bucks in a hobos cup..is (at least in that moment) more respectable than the millions of dollars routinely dropped into so many cups by a guy like bill gates.

There are alot of hypothesis as to why we do this, but a great demonstration of what the shape of any of our graphs - and which of the three views we subscribe to in a particular metric - will be is to pose q's like: all other things being equal, should a prisoner serve more, exactly as much, or less time than their crime would suggest? All other things being equal, should a person receive more, exactly as much, or less reward than their good act warrants? All of our answers, no matter what they are, end up telling us more about a person than just their ideas of comparative desert - they give the rough shape of how we wish the world to be. If we, for example, heavily favor "more" for reward and "less" for punishment (lets call this the orbital leftist view just for shits and giggles) - then we are describing an abstract proposal for behavioral modification. Entire cultures can be categorized by how they jumble around those basic assertions, and so can any given religion. Christianity, for example, asserts maximum punishment -and- maximum reward. Fundamentally lacking any equality of desert whatsoever. There's nothing a person could do to deserve heaven or hell. Christians (and people in general) want to live in a world where good people get even more than they deserve, and bad men get got even if they (maybe) don't deserve it.

Or, at least, we think we do.