I’m glad we both want to see fairness and kindness in the world. I see you interpret cruelty, abuse, and dishonesty’s effects as respect. I see it a bit differently. When I see cruelty, abuse, and dishonesty, I usually see fear, terror, hiding, lying— anything but respect.

If I see a serial killer who tortures people, I would never respect them. I’d probably fear them. But fear is not respect.

To me, respect is deep admiration. It involves feeling aligned in values, feeling that someone is doing things right and well. If someone is doing things wrong and cruelly, I’d feel deep disrespect towards them.

I suppose our cultures have wrongly conflated respect and fear. People don’t command respect. They deserve it and earn it. They deserve base respect for the mere fact of being human trying to be happy in a brutal world. And they earn admiration-like respect when their hearts are aligned with virtue.