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This is what I've always said to people when it comes to things like respect
Respect isn't earned it's the baseline. You give everyone a base level of respect as the default and their reaction is what determines your continued level of respect.
It goes way, way deeper.
It's the tit-for-tat strategy that is applicable in a very wide range of situations. And animals follow it too. It is deeply ingrained in our biology.
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first time you interact with a new person, you assume they are following the same strategy, so you cooperate.
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if they don't, then next time, you don't either. But if they do, then you both continue cooperating until someone breaks the chain of trust.
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Once broken, the guilty party must make amends to restart.
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If broken, but neither party acknowledges guilt, a restart can be tried, but it will always be difficult due to distrust. So it works better if one party takes the blame, makes amends and restarts. (this is called 'being the bigger person').
Upvote for mentioning tit-for-tat. There has been a lot of research on the iterated prisoner's dilemma, and as I recall the winning strategy determined by many experiments showed that over time, the 'nice tit-for-tat' strategy gets the highest score. It may lose out in an individual interaction, but over time, sticking to it is the best long-term strategy.
However this does mean if one is a grifter and fully expects never to interact with the other (victim) party again... there's less incentive to use such a strategy.
Indeed.
Which is why most people have an innate distrust and disgust of grifters.
I would even argue that our very deep disgust against grifters is the legitimate base emotion on which xenophobia is built and therefore xenophobia will always be with us and must always be actively unlearned.
(Racism, in contrast, is learned and can be eradicated by stopping it's spread)
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Word “respect” means two different things. One of them can only be earned, another can only be given.
What’s more, the part that can only be given is best described by trust. As in, the only way you can truly know if you can trust someone is to trust and find out.
In this context, the respect that is given - a regard for the others - is a baseline trust in a reciprocal valuation. The respect that is earned is the collection of outcomes that feed into others’ trust risk assessment.
I'd argue that dignity is the baseline but that respect is subjective.