Gradients of Respect

David Pearce is a proponent of the idea that there should be no more (involuntary) suffering. He wants a future of "gradients of bliss", where people move from states of lower bliss to higher bliss and from higher bliss to lower bliss, but never crossing over into non-bliss.

I was thinking about surly people. Should you respect a surly person? Well, I feel like in our culture, we tend not to. And if someone is demanding respect in a surly way, that strategy for getting respect is one that may coerce displays of respect from us, but not cause us to genuinely find the surly person worthy of respect out of our own seeing of things. If you have to force people to act like they respect you, maybe you look like the kind of person who knows they are not worthy of respect, so they have to force fake displays of it.

However, I think there is a level of respect that all being deserves, that all people deserve. Respect is a seeing of legitimacy and value in something in what it is. Everything that exists ought to exist, on some level. This is especially so with people, who descend from God. Evil and danger deserve a kind of respect. They don't ought to exist forever -- their legitimacy is temporary. But here they are, existing, with a right to be what they are, as illegitimate as that may be on most levels. So, to be properly relating to reality, we need to respect all things, including surly people. But not all things are as legitimate or valuable as others, and there are kinds of respect that are not due some things (for instance demons or the venom of rattlesnakes). So we reserve greater, or better, respect for some things. We should respect all people, but we can or should respect some people in ways that we do not respect others.

This sounds like we always respect, but sometimes respect on higher levels / to a greater extent. In parallel with Pearce, this sounds like something that could be called "gradients of respect".