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. John Rawls, perhaps the most influential contemporary political philosopher, has claimed that the moral requirement of respect for others, and of promoting the social bases for self-respect, lies behind the liberal principle of equal liberty and its constitutional status. Bernard Williams has cited the Kantian notion of respect as founding the idea of "human equality", which in turn excludes certain forms of discrimination at the political level. According to Ronald Dworkin, the key to selecting among various candidate principles of liberal equality lies in the ability of such principles to meet the requirement of treating individuals with "equal concern and respect". For Robert Nozick, on the other hand, the ideal of respect for persons implies the protection of private property rights and renders the egalitarian redistribution of wealth morally unacceptable. More recently, the requirement of respect for persons has been invoked in justifications of special treatment for minority cultures and ethnicities andgenerally speaking oppressed groups. The liberal proponents of the politics of difference have argued that the recognition of differences and identities, under a certain description, is required precisely in order to treat members in minority groups with the same respect as majority members. And the same requirement has been appealed to by theorists of international justice, in both the cosmopolitan camp (equal respect implies the universal applicability of liberal principles) and the relativist camp (respecting cultural differences prohibits the imposition of liberal cultures at a global level). The way in which we interpret the ideal of equal respect clearly has significant implications both for the clarification and discussion of liberal democratic political principles and for problems of international and global justice.

But whereas in moral philosophy the notion of respect has already been discussed and analysed, there is still much work to be done in clarifying its nature and its role when invoked in justifications of political and legal institutions. 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, with the problem of applying their interpretations of the notion of respect to the task of identifying and justifying the rules governing the basic structure of society, whether domestic or international.

This project aims to fill this theoretical lacuna. The central question it addresses is the following: in what ways can political and legal institutions be justified by reference to, and in this sense be seen to embody, the ideal of equal respect? This question can be approached at different levels of abstraction and in various areas of moral, political and legal philosophy. By coordinating research carried out along these various dimensions, and by promoting a constant interaction between them, the project aims to answer the central research question in ways that are more integrated, consistent and complete than the answers that are at present to be found in the literature in political and legal philosophy.

In particular, the project is to be divided into three main parts:

1. analysis of the notion of respect for persons and of the opposites of respect, such as paternalism, humiliation and exploitation;
2. application to specific normative questions;
3. application to general normative questions.

Analysis of the notion of respect for persons.
The project will address in particular the following questions:

1. Issues regarding the nature of respect.
   Among the issues to be discussed are:
   • The status and scope of respect;
   • The difference between persons and other objects of respect;
   • Differences between respect and cognate or complementary notions;
   • Respect for others and self-respect;
   • Respect and ends in themselves.
2. Opposites of respect
   Three candidate notions for the opposite of respect will be taken into consideration in this project: those of exploitation, paternalism, and humiliation.

Normative questions in political and legal theory
In the second part of the project, the nature and justificatory role of the ideal of equal respect will be examined within certain specific normative issues in political and legal theory. These normative issues can be divided, very broadly, into those that concern distributive justice (issues of freedom and rights), and those that concern problems of citizenship and the recognition of group identities.

1. Equal respect, freedom and rights in domestic and international justice.
   We propose to investigate the justificatory role of equal respect in connection with:
   • The right to equal freedom;
   • Economic and social rights, in particular those connected with egalitarian alternatives to the welfare state;
   • Equal respect and the justification of rights in theories of international justice;
   • Equal respect and legal provisions for human rights.
2. Equal respect, problems of citizenship and recognition.
   Concerning the problems of identity and citizenship, we propose to investigate the justificatory role of equal respect in the following domains:
   • Respect and recognition of minority groups;
   • Respect and the public use of language and symbolic representations;
   • Respect and immigration policies.

General normative questions.
Three general issues are expected to be addressed through application of the above investigations:

• Distributive questions vs. questions of recognition;
• Classical liberalism and the negative and positive implications of equal respect;
• The problem of Identifying public criteria for respect.

In the process of reaching these more specific objectives, it is hoped that some more general objectives will also be reached, thus bringing us closer to answering the central research question. In particular, the project aims to shed light on three general normative theoretical aims: first, the aim of making sense of disagreements over the competing ideals of distributive justice and recognition of group identities in terms of their apparently common appeal to the more fundamental ideal of equal respect; secondly, the related aim of clarifying debates between classical liberals and their more egalitarian or radical critics through a prior clarification of interpretations of the ideal of equal respect; thirdly, the aim identifying genuinely public (political and legal) criteria for identifying cases of respect and disrespect.