Respect: An Exploration

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999. 230pp.+notes. $23.00 (cloth).

Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist and Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is the author of many works on education and related matters and is a recipient of various academic awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Prize. This latest contribution brings together various themes found in her other works. It is written for an educated audience of nonspecialists and would therefore be helpful in undergraduate ethics courses, especially as she always connects abstract principles to concrete people, stories, and actions. The general theme of the book is that respect is a necessary component of the good life, including its dimensions as personal, interpersonal, and communal. We see clearly that terrible results follow actions that do not show respect, but we can also see the moral necessity of respect for any humanly decent relationships.

Lawrence-Lightfoot rejects what she terms the "traditional" notion of respect that accords esteem with rank and social status, often of an inherited sort. She desires to "shape a new view of respect" that is egalitarian, that generates equality between people, mutual empathy, and connections of solidarity. She never actually defines clearly or offers an explanation of the conceptual core of the idea of respect. In any case, the book tries to dismantle hierarchies and other forms of domination -- e.g., between teacher-student, nurse-patient, etc. -- and to put in their place a sense of shared humanity, compassion, and equality.

Lawrence-Lightfoot believes that respect has six "qualities": empowerment, healing, dialogue, curiosity, self-respect, and attention. She devotes one chapter of her book to each of these qualities. The strength of the book lies in the way it interprets these qualities through concrete narratives, and I would suggest that this book is best read as a popular meditation on various virtues. Lawrence-Lightfoot writes in an attractive, breezy style that is not too taxing. She illumines empowerment by talking about Jennifer Dohrn, a nurse-midwife; healing through the actions of pediatrician Johynye Ballenger; dialogue through the work of teacher Kay Cottle; curiosity in light of Dawoud Bey, artist and photographer; self-respect as expressed in the dignity of law professor David Wilkins; and attention as exhibited in the pastoral care of Episcopal priest Bill Wallace.

The narrative focus of the book, however, also brings with it certain philosophical liabilities. Contrary to the expressed wishes of the author, it really offers nothing new concerning the notion of respect. Through striving for a kind of simplicity of theory, she never shows philosophically what respect itself actually means nor how its various "qualities" are coherently related to one another. She seems to want to say that respect gives rise to attention, which of course is true, but so do a lot of other motivations that run a spectrum from the desire to manipulate to the simple assent to contemplative awe. Lawrence-Lightfoot would have gained immensely from the writings of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch on attention, but they are not consulted. Paying attention is quite difficult in many circumstances: after all, how attentive can one be to the human beings flooding through Grand Central Station at 7:30 a.m. on Monday morning? Respect ought to also lead to dialogue, but so can other attitudes -- e.g., compa ssion or spiritual training in religious communities -- and they cannot all be reduced to one megavirtue called "respect."

Part of the difficulty that confronts Lawrence-Lightfoot is her reliance on a loose method of common-sense phenomenology. She works with the premise that respect is the primary virtue of the moral life in our society, and so finds everything good -- from curiosity to healing, from dialogue to attention -- to be somehow or other a reflection of respect. This leaves her with a problem, though, which is that there seems nothing left for the other virtues to do. What happens to the cardinal virtue of temperance and its distinctive attributes, norms, and subsidiary virtues? Or the virtue of courage? Or even justice, for that matter? Throwing different "angles of vision" on experience is fine, but it does not help to do so only through the narrow lens of one virtue or moral attitude. Lawrence-Lightfoot would have been able to avoid this difficulty by giving serious attention to at least a little of the philosophical literature on her topic. Self-respect, and respect for persons generally, has been treated in great detail by neo-Kantian philosophers like Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Alan Gewith, and Onora O'Neill. The same is true of the writings of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch on attention, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Monier on dialogue, etc. Unfortunately, then, the book, while interesting and perhaps a light read for a class of young students, does not fulfill its stated objective of providing a new theory of respect.