I suppose you have three goals. (1) Actually be respectful. (2) Show respect in such a way that the other party isn’t upset or offended. (3) Do something that constitutes effective collaborative truth-seeking.
If your only goals are #1 and #2 then I think this is easy: if A’s and B’s notions of showing respect differ, and A knows this, then for A to show respect for B s/he needs to act in the manner B considers respectful.
But presumably you care about #3 too, and in this case it sure seems as if B’s notion of respect is actively harmful to the project of finding what’s true. I haven’t any advice for the general case, but in this case I think the approach you took is a good one. I’d have moved one notch further in the “seek truth even at the cost of possible conflict” direction by asking for more details: What’s the actual shape of the taxation curve? At what point does earning more result in lower income tax rates? Do you know why the rules were set that way when almost always the income tax rate is a nondecreasing function of income? (For the avoidance of doubt, I’m proposing questions that assume the other person is correct and seek more information.)
In the UK there is an income-tax-like thing called “National Insurance” that’s a fixed fraction of your income between a particular lower bound and a particular upper bound, and then a much smaller fraction of your income above the upper bound. So around that upper bound, it might be true that tax rate is a decreasing function of income. (NI is not formally an income tax; one might cynically suspect that the main reason why it still exists rather than being folded into income tax is that it provides legislators with ways of varying income taxation that don’t appear in the headline income tax rates. I think the US social security tax may be similar.)
I suppose you have three goals. (1) Actually be respectful. (2) Show respect in such a way that the other party isn’t upset or offended. (3) Do something that constitutes effective collaborative truth-seeking.
If your only goals are #1 and #2 then I think this is easy: if A’s and B’s notions of showing respect differ, and A knows this, then for A to show respect for B s/he needs to act in the manner B considers respectful.
But presumably you care about #3 too, and in this case it sure seems as if B’s notion of respect is actively harmful to the project of finding what’s true. I haven’t any advice for the general case, but in this case I think the approach you took is a good one. I’d have moved one notch further in the “seek truth even at the cost of possible conflict” direction by asking for more details: What’s the actual shape of the taxation curve? At what point does earning more result in lower income tax rates? Do you know why the rules were set that way when almost always the income tax rate is a nondecreasing function of income? (For the avoidance of doubt, I’m proposing questions that assume the other person is correct and seek more information.)
In the UK there is an income-tax-like thing called “National Insurance” that’s a fixed fraction of your income between a particular lower bound and a particular upper bound, and then a much smaller fraction of your income above the upper bound. So around that upper bound, it might be true that tax rate is a decreasing function of income. (NI is not formally an income tax; one might cynically suspect that the main reason why it still exists rather than being folded into income tax is that it provides legislators with ways of varying income taxation that don’t appear in the headline income tax rates. I think the US social security tax may be similar.)