The Honor Code

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Norton). "I soon found myself realizing that honor, especially once I started looking at the duel, is really separate from morality. It's not part of morality, but it interacts with moral demands. You know, when you then think about honor, one thought you might have - once you see that it can be independent of morality and can lead people to do things that are actively immoral - one thought you might have is, Why don’t you just give it up? Why don't you just say that people should not care about honor, they should just care about morality? ... And then finally, it turns out that once you start thinking about it, honor is profoundly connected with identity. First of all, the code, what honor requires of you, depends on your identity. Honor requires different things of men and women in many societies. It requires one thing of princes and another thing of ordinary people. Also - and this is a second and separate way in which identity matters to honor - we share in the honor and shame of groups through our identity." Da un'intervista a Appiah uscita su Bookforum.