Good question. As an educational note, please be careful and tell your kids some - unbalanced - people have no other endgame than to annoy you and play with your emotions. To destroy you mentally (sometimes physically as well). Thats their kick. Pretty sure this applies in this case as well. Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect.
> Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect.
But why? I feel like we devalue true respect by repeating phrases like this. I'm not saying they deserve to be abused, but why do they deserve respect for solely existing?
EDIT: All the replies seem to be conflating dignity with respect. Your birth gave you the right to your dignity, and no should be able to take that from you. Respect must be earned, and can only be given to you by others.
There's a baseline of respect people get for being human, they have wants, needs, beliefs, belong to cultures, they get hungry, feel pain, don't want to needlessly suffer or die, etc and those aspects are universal.
I'd use the word humanity to describe that level of respect, to contrast it with something more or less universally regarded as the lack of humanity, things we might even consider crimes against humanity, where people are deprived of the respect towards their humanity, denying them food, inflicting pain, eradication of culture, systematic murder, etc.
Obviously there's a lot of gray room between the two where, for example, cruelty for the sake of cruelty, in most circumstances, could be considered a lack of respect that people deserve for solely existing. That's certainly not on the level of crimes against humanity, but I wouldn't say that's respectful, either.
"The most common response people offer is that dignity is about respect. To the contrary, dignity is not the same as respect. Dignity is our inherent value and worth as human beings; everyone is born with it. Respect, on the other hand, is earned through one’s actions."
You think you are not like them because of your choices when it's actually because of sheer luck. I respect them for carrying such a shitty poker hand their whole life.
Anyway, you still gota defend yourself like they are monsters. Tell your kids: they are masterful liers and manipulators, they look normal, they have a cover (they have jobs and all, they can go undetected for decades, their whole life even) and more importantly: pain is pleasure, even theirs, especially yours (not always physically but mentally as well). That last bit is the endgame but you and me dont have that so its very difficult to comprehend. They come in variations (think Joker and DoubleFace). Oh and one last thing: they are not rare (between 0.7% and 1% of the population afaik).
If we don't have some base level of respect for people just because they're people ("for solely existing") then we can justify treating marginalized people even worse than we already are. Some of them already have it pretty bad! Seems evil!
This goes back to OPs point about devaluing the concept of respect.
I'm generally polite to stangers I meet. Not because I respect them (how could I? I don't know them), but because it's morally good to behave decently.
By conflating respect with basic manners/decency, you really devalue what it means to deserve respect and to be respected.
