Numerous reports addressing the care of older people have highlighted deficiencies in th provision of nutrition, hydration, and personal hygiene. Healthcare organisations may inadvertently compromise dignity by prioritising measurable targets and not placing due emphasis on the core work of looking after frail older people who are at risk of having their dignity violated.

The concept of dignity draws on ideas of dignity of merit, moral stature, and Menschenwürde (human dignity) – the dignity that each individual has as an essential component of being a human being. It is argued here that older people, as a group, are particularly worthy of the dignity of merit of wisdom, by virtue of their experience and associated understanding.

A suitable environment is important to promoting dignity; the emphasis is not only on basics like nutrition, hydration, and hygiene but on the delivery of person-centred care that encourages understanding of an older person’s life story.

Dying will come to us all (with even greater certainty than old age), and all older people have a right to respect and dignity when dying. Understanding how someone lived their life, and what was important to that person allows us to co-write the final chapter with preservation of autonomy and maintenance of dignity of personal identity.

August Wilhelm Rehberg (1757–1836) was a civil servant in Hanover, but he also made several important contributions to the philosophical debates of his time. This chapter contains the first English translation of Rehberg’s review of the second Critique, which was highly influential and read by figures such as Reinhold and possibly Fichte as well. In the review, Rehberg doubts that pure reason can be practical. One of the most important statements of the review is Rehberg’s claim that the feeling of respect must be something sensible and, as such, must contain an element of pleasure, despite what Kant says. Kant was aware of the review and is thought to have responded to it in later works such as the third Critique.

Johann Georg Heinrich Feder (1740–1821) was a well-respected and well-known professor of philosophy at the University of Göttingen, especially during the 1770s and early 1780s. A turning point took place in Feder’s life and career, however, when he edited the infamous Göttingen review of the first Critique, which was originally written by Christian Garve and to which Kant responds in the Prolegomena. This chapter contains a complete translation of Feder’s review of the second Critique, which therefore captures the opinion of one of Kant’s most well-known and infamous critics. Feder discusses a number of topics in the review, including: whether pure reason can be practical without the assistance of feeling and inclination, the nature of good and evil and their relationship to pleasure and displeasure, and the idea that respect for the moral law is respect for ourselves as legislators.

Chapter 2 examines criteria that people use when forming perceptions of how they and others have been treated is fair or unfair. One of the important criteria that people use is whether they were given sufficient opportunities to voice their opinions about important issues at stake. It is crucial that voiced opinions are given due consideration. Being treated in a polite and respectful manner by people, and especially people of power, is also among the core criteria for evaluating procedural fairness. Generally being treated in a fair and just manner by competent and professional authorities is also among the important criteria of perceived procedural fairness. Taken together, perceived procedural fairness boils down to feeling to be a full-fledged member of your community and society and, ideally, the entire world.

Words have powerful meaning. They can also be scary for some individual to address or confront. Oftentimes it is just “easier” to ignore or look the other way. This case study explores how inappropriate language and the response, or lack thereof, can say a great deal about the power structure of an environment and the importance of respect.

This chapter points to a dilemma at the heart of the judicial role. How can courts robustly review legislation for compliance with rights without exceeding the limits of the judicial role? And how can they pay respect to the democratically elected branches of government without ceding their obligations to uphold rights? Presenting courts as a form of constitutional ‘quality control’, this chapter argues they solve this dilemma by engaging in calibrated constitutional review. This requires judges to carefully calibrate the grounds and intensity of review depending on a complex analysis of legal and institutional concerns.

Chapter 19 opens by asking readers to reflect on prior collaborations, writing down their views on what makes people easy to work with and what makes them hard to work with. The chapter argues for a team-based approach to public engagement, and suggests ways to build effective teams. Also, it’s important to trust our partners at informal learning venues, as they have expertise on the audiences and logistics in these settings. Emphasizing that communication with these partners is still a conversation, the chapter returns to the principles of a successful conversation described in Chapter 3 and unpacks each one with reference to venue partners. A case study exemplifies these points, describing a partnership between university students and faculty and museum professionals. Details are given of negotiation about institutional missions and daily operations through to a demonstration on children’s science practices in a game about vowel sounds. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to make a detailed plan for getting their demonstration into a specific place or event.

Chapter 10 opens by asking readers to choose two kinds of people they might encounter in informal learning settings and to identify questions those people might have about their general topic and about their specific activity. Returning to the fact that a successful conversation is cooperative, this chapter emphasizes asking questions and listening. Asking questions of an audience gives the expert substantive information to listen to. Sets of questions give people choice, and the sets can include questions about explanations of the phenomena being shown. A "juicy question," for example, is one that nonexperts can address by using the materials/examples at hand – in effect, encouraging scientific reasoning. Giving people time to answer questions and then listening carefully as they do so shows respect, as does asking new questions that reflect people’s earlier responses. Readers are cautioned to avoid testing their audience or to feel that they themselves are being tested. The Worked Example finds juicy questions in a map-based demonstration of variation in regional dialects.

Moral soundness in our behavior requires more than conformity to the principles described in Chapter 4. This is above all because it requires moral conduct and not just the deeds those principles call for. There are two obligations that are higher level than those described in Chapter 4 in ranging over all the types those principles concern. One posits an obligation to preserve and promote liberty; the other posits an obligation to do the deeds morality calls for respectfully – in a morally appropriate manner. Like the liberty obligation, it is immensely comprehensive and extends to all interpersonal action. This chapter describes these higher-level obligations. To clarify them, the chapter pursues two major moral questions: the scope-question of what range of deeds are discretionary – not obligatory and within our freedom of choice – and the adverbial how-question of what manners of doing what we do are morally appropriate in the relevant contexts.

The theme of recognition is one of the most intensively discussed topics in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades. This chapter discusses its relevance for moral education. We begin with two examples illustrating lack of recognition in the school class, one concerning cultural difference and the other economic and social inequality. Secondly, we introduce the idea of recognition, its importance for individual and social life and some basic ways to think about its various forms. Thirdly, we discuss some specificities of school education that are necessary to bear in mind when applying the concept of recognition in this context. Finally, we tie these conceptual and theoretical considerations back to the two examples and show how a recognition-theoretical perspective can helpfully illuminate them. The conclusion summarizes our most important findings.

Abstract: Moral growth is an evolutionary process, for both the individual and the society. Democracy requires a certain kind of respect that is different from the expression of respect called for in other settings. Here, an object of respect is the capacity of the individual and the society to shape their own development and to determine their own idea of a good life. This calls for an education that aims to promote self-consciousness about existing and emerging possibilities and that enables rising citizens, both as individuals and as part of collective enterprises, to recognize their capacity for growth.

Populism entails a unique claim for recognition, which sets it at odds with the democratic ideal of respect for the equal standing of every citizen. This claim arises from a totalizing framing of political conflict, according to which one can and should understand one uniform group in society as the worst-off group for all political purposes. The populist claim for recognition is an exclusionary claim: We are something that you are not, “the people.” In contrast, this chapter argues that in order to show equal respect for everyone, as well as solidaristic concern for diverse marginalized groups, it is imperative to focus on particular struggles for recognition and discuss who actually suffers the greatest injustice in each case separately. The chapter goes on to contrast the populist claim for recognition and its illiberalism with the kind of respect, which Joel Feinberg argues is expressed in and through “the activity of claim-making” characteristic of a society with rights. Adopting a participant attitude and seeing rights claims as an intersubjective activity, we can better appreciate how rights contribute to democratic respect.

The Introduction presents the main idea of the book, namely that populism should be understood and assessed in terms of the kind of recognition for the people that it demands. The debate over the meaning and value of populism is fundamentally a debate over how democracy should recognize the people. Many people in contemporary societies feel disrespected and populism provides the recognition that they feel they have lost or never attained. The populist politics of resentment should not be understood as blindly emotional but as a struggle for recognition based on moral experiences that can be explained by people’s beliefs and principles. However, not all struggles for recognition contribute to the deepening of democracy, and we must distinguish between different kinds of recognition in order to understand why populism is often a threat to democratic principles and practices. The Introduction explains that the book is a study of the reasons people may have for supporting populism rather than the causes of populism. As a corollary of studying reasons rather than causes, populism is defined as a set of claims that can be assessed for their validity. The last part of the Introduction provides an overview of the book.

This chapter distinguishes between and discusses the validity of different kinds of demand for recognition, which are often conflated in the literature on populism. While “equal respect” is central to democracy, not all demands for recognition are demands for equal respect. In particular, the type of respect that citizens and government must display should not be confused with esteem for people’s merits, identity, or way of life, but must consist in respect for citizen status. Demanding and granting esteem for particular traits or ways of life, as populists do, is incompatible with a pluralistic society. Further, demands for respect among populists tend to be bound up with a hierarchical idea of honor, which should be confronted with the democratic idea of respect for dignity. Although democracy is a society of equality of respect and cannot supply equal esteem for everyone, inequality of esteem can still pose a moral and democratic problem. This is because inequality of esteem under some conditions can convert into inequality of respect. Therefore, the second part of the chapter argues that democratic respect depends on a form of solidarity that counteracts the ever-present danger of inequality of esteem turning into inequality of respect.