These days, it’s not uncommon to hear of adult children cutting off their parents or of employees doing “quiet quitting” to spite their bosses. Such moves are often coupled with the quote “respect is earned, not given.” The prevailing notion is that no one is inherently entitled to respect; instead, it should be withheld until someone demonstrates himself “worthy.”

Is This Mentality Really Just?

To a certain extent, the mantra “respect is earned, not given” is valuable – depending on the definition of respect. Merriam-Webster’s first definition of respect is “a feeling or understanding that someone or something is important, serious, etc., and deserves appropriate treatment or regard.”

That’s fair! It’s true that not everyone or everything should be esteemed as important or serious. In fact, it’s important to order our priorities and recognize that there certainly are hierarchies in the order of respect. Parents, employers, and instructors certainly should be treated with higher esteem than strangers because of their roles of authority.

But respect goes beyond high regard or esteem. Another definition of respect in Merriam-Webster is “to treat or deal with (something good or valuable) in a proper way.”

This is where “respect is earned, not given” falls apart. To treat someone in a proper or fitting way should not be optional. It should be the default.

So what is the proper, fitting, appropriate way to treat a person?

Who Deserves Respect?

“Respect is earned, not given” implies a cold kind of cruelty. If everyone around us must work to “earn” our respect, this implies that our default assumption is that others do not deserve respect. It does not seem proper or fitting to approach everyone we meet with such an assumption of unworthiness and then expect them to pass an unknown test in order to be deemed worthy of respect. It seems uncharitable in the extreme to approach every new person with a “prove me wrong” attitude.

Likewise, the new mantra of respect offers a “quid pro quo” approach to kindness and respect in which we are only as respectful to others as they are to us. Jesus Christ himself condemned this selfish outlook in Luke 6:33: “And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.” Kindness toward those who are kind to us is not virtuous. But on the other hand, it is impressive to show respect to those who have not proven themselves “deserving.”

Every human being, by virtue of being a human being, should be treated with respect – not necessarily with deference, but always with courtesy, dignity, politeness, and with regard to our relationship with thats person.

Of course, we are not obligated to admire everyone we meet. Our duty of respect to others is contingent upon our relationship with these others. We are not obligated to remain friends with those who treat us unkindly, nor are we bound to maintain close relationships with family members who are hostile. But this does not absolve us of our duty of respect towards them, particularly in the case of family members, to whom we owe respect simply because of their familial ties to us.

I’d argue that respect is given, not earned, because everyone is entitled to the bare minimum of respect; if not esteem and admiration, everyone still deserves to be treated as a human being with human dignity. It is not for us to decide whether someone deserves to be treated as a person.

Like it or not, courtesy and politeness still matter, and they matter in our every interaction with strangers, employers, the barista down the street, and even with parents and siblings. In fact, respect for the latter is the most important.

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