What is common decency? Why does respect matter? What can each of us do in our lives to increase respect?
Find out about this and more on this engaging chat between Colleen Doyle Bryant and Kate Hanley on the How to Be a Better person podcast.
When you treat a person with respect, it’s not necessarily because you respect that person.
Sometimes you treat a stranger with respect. You don’t even know them, how would you know if you respect them or not?
The point is that you value a civil society, you value the idea that all people should be treated with a level of care and dignity.
That agreement, that I will treat you with care and dignity and I should be able to expect you to treat me with care and dignity, that is fundamental to the functioning of a civil society.
So you’ll see for instance the Golden Rule appears in all the world’s major enduring religions, this idea that we should treat people the way we want to be treated, because 1) it invites trust, 2) it’s fair, and 3) it establishes reciprocity. So when people aren’t behaving that way, when they’re not treating people with the care and dignity we think they deserve, then it shakes that fundamental sense of how things are supposed to work.
Learn more about respect and common decency in Colleen's book, Rooted in Decency.
