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Notes -
It seems to me that you treat respect as purely binary, in the sense that you either respect someone or don't.
I claim otherwise, that there are varying degrees of respect, and that all it takes to be a decent-ish person is to extend a minimum level of respect to everyone unless they provide a reason to withdraw even that.
I respect otherwise normal people with below average intelligence, say a hard working janitor with 90 IQ. I wouldn't insult them, denigrate them, deny them any basic rights such as political representation, their wage, a right to speech etc.
Do I respect them less than say Von Neumann? Obviously, as do most people in general when they explicitly state that they have "great respect" for person X, a qualifier that would be pointless if there was only a singular level of respect that is either given or withheld.
As far as I'm concerned, treating other people politely, refraining from insulting them, and such is perfectly adequate. And that it by no means is a form of disrespect to advocate that a 140 IQ person is more appropriate/worthy of being assigned a job and wage that shows the scarcity of their cognitive labor than a 80 IQ person is, while still respecting both.
The problem is, people are asking for more than that. But yes, it is true respect is a spectrum and not a binary. It would be interesting if the case of the janitor could generalize to race relations, but it doesn't seem like it can because of the commitment to equality. It still seems impossible to attempt to use an analogy like that to handle a genetic explanation for the black IQ gap.
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