About the Workshop

In contemporary political philosophy the idea of equal respect is widely cited as a fundamental normative criterion for the justification of political and legal institutions. But whereas in moral philosophy the notion of respect for persons has already been widely discussed and analysed, there is still much work to be done in clarifying its nature and its role when invoked in justifications of specific political and legal institutions. Besides a few noteworthy exceptions, political philosophers are often vague in their uses of the term "respect" and in their appeals to the ideal of equal respect, and they rarely refer in depth to the relevant literature in moral philosophy. On the other hand, the moral philosophers working on the notion of respect rarely concern themselves with the political implications of their analyses and with the problem of applying their interpretations of the notion of respect to the task of identifying and justifying the rules governing the fundamental institutions of society, whether domestic or international.
    The workshop here announced is part of a larger research project devoted to bridging this gap in the philosophical literature. It is meant to address two main questions, relating to the two ends of the justificatory path that leads from the principle that people should be equally respected to the defense of specific social and political institutions. On one hand, we need to ask which, if any, of the various possible interpretations of equal respect should serve as normative ideals to be implemented by the institutions of our society. On the other hand, we need to ask which specific social arrangements and which institutional processes and practices best embody and instantiate the principle of equal respect for people. Thus, we expect that this workshop will contain both papers on the definition and foundations of equal respect for people, bearing in mind the role that equal respect may play in the justification of political and social arrangements, and papers connecting equal respect to specific principles of distributive and retributive justice, social arrangements, political and social institutions, or governmental practices and procedures.