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Respect, Jing, And Person, Pengbo Liu

Comparative Philosophy

While respect for persons is fundamental to many moral and political theories, its nature and ground remain controversial. According to the standard model of respect, respect is primarily a response to certain inherent features of a person or an object. Importantly, it is in virtue of the value, status or authority of those features that respect is justified or owed. This model, however, faces many serious challenges. Drawing on the classical Confucian notion of jing (敬), I develop an alternative model of respect, which construes respect as an expression of agent’s sense of the self and its place in …