“[H]onor, especially when purged of its prejudices of caste and gender and the like, is peculiarly well suited to turn private moral sentiments into public norms…That is one reason why we still need honour: it can help us make a better world.”

Author’s note: it’s an American book, and so he spells honour with an ‘o’ – being a Canadian, I refuse to do the same. Apologies for confusion.

In the Gospels, when Paul was about to be whipped, he revealed he was a Roman citizen, and therefore exempt. Romans took it as a matter of honour that their citizens should never be beaten but rather be treated with dignity at all times, regardless of the crime. For much of history, honour was a founding principle of (usually male) behaviour, but in modern society, it has something of a bad name, linked as it is to human rights abuses, including honour killings, and violations of the rule of law. Appiah, however, believes that far from deserving a bad name, honour provides a motivating force for morality; it compels people to be honourable out of a desire to avoid shame.

There are two kinds of honour, Appiah suggests. The first, competitive honour, is about being better than others; winning a race or gaining victory in war. The second is peer honour, which governs relations among equals: being born a lord in medieval England would give you peer honour,  to be beheaded instead of hanged if you were found guilty of a crime, for example, even if you were a completely incompetent lord. The modern conception of human rights is perhaps similar to a universal extension of peer honour.

Appiah examines three case studies, dueling, footbinding, and slavery, and discusses the role honour had in ending each of them. Each activity had critics long before it actually ended, he points out, but what actually ended them was a shift in the perception of what was honourable, from the activity itself being honourable to the activity being shameful.

To my mind, there is some question of correlation versus causation in his case studies, but they are interesting nonetheless. Unfortunately, my broader impression was somewhat neutral. The book plays an important role in attempting to introduce honour into the discussion of morality, and that far I agree. Often though I was left feeling his examples were incomplete, and they lacked the depth of understanding of Steven Pinker on a similar subject, for example. I just didn’t feel he fully engaged with the complexity of honour or morality, and as a result for me the book raised more questions than it answered.

Still, it’s an interesting subject, and if you want to keep reading, you can do so here (or in the UK or Canada),