The Honor Code Pdf Summary Reviews By Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Honor Code Pdf Summary

Long neglected as an engine of reform, honor strikingly emerges at the center of our modern world in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code. Over the last few centuries, new democratic movements have led to the emancipation of women, slaves, and the oppressed. But what drove these modern changes, Appiah argues, was not imposing legislation from above, but harnessing the ancient power of honor from within. In gripping detail, he explores the end of the duel in aristocratic England, the tumultuous struggles over footbinding in nineteenth-century China, and the uprising of ordinary people against Atlantic slavery. Finally, he confronts the horrors of “honor killing” in contemporary Pakistan, where rape victims are murdered by their relatives. He argues that honor, used to justify the practice, can also be the most effective weapon against it. Intertwining philosophy and historical narrative, Appiah has created a remarkably dramatic work, which demonstrates that honor is the driving force in the struggle against man’s inhumanity to man.

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The Honor Code Review

Herbert Gintis

2.0 out of 5 stars Philosophising is no substitute for scientific explanation
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2011

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Perhaps the most stunning, and salutary, fact about human history is that it has a strong emancipatory thread. This emancipatory thread is based on Enlightenment the values of secularism, tolerance, meritocracy, republicanism, democracy, gender equality, and the structuring of social life around egalitarianism rather than hierarchical privilege. There are two powerful enemies of this emancipatory thread: the despotic state and welfare-reducing social practices, including the four studied by Appiah in this book (dueling, foot-binding, slavery, and sexism).

Appiah attempts to explain this emancipatory thrust in purely philosophical terms, using the concept of “honor” as the emancipatory force. Honor for Appiah is an intrinsic human moral quality that can be diverted, suppressed, and exploited, but eventually will triumph. There is simply no honor in dueling, foot binding,slavery, gender discrimination, and the other abominations that have served to oppress our species. Appiah is thus an inverted Hegelian, in which the driving force of the Idea is incorporated in an evolved human characteristic.

No scientist will place much credence in Appiah’s story. Human society is a highly complex, dynamic, adaptive system that must be studied using the tools of behavioral science. Hand waving of the sort preferred by Appiah will not answer the big questions. I confess that I do not have a satisfactory alternative explanation of the emancipatory thrust of social history into which many of us have placed such great faith. I do have two points that I believe should be kept in mind in developing such a theory.

First, there is a very widespread human yearning for freedom and democracy (of course there are anti-democratic movements, but they are populated by small minorities that want to control the masses), and this arises from human prehistory as hunter-gatherers, where there was a socially enforced egalitarianism (see Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior). With

Second, there is no assurance that the emancipatory thread will not be extinguished by new ways of oppressing majorities. Perhaps the greatest emancipatory force for humans was the emergence of lethal weapons, including the hand axe and projectile weapons, which occurred some 300,000 years ago. Because of these weapons, the hierarchical organization of power and influence in humans was undermined, simply because one man can easily kill another, however powerful, in his sleep or when his back is turned. All of human prehistory is predicated on the egalitarian power of lethal tools and hunting weapons.

With the emergence of settled agriculture and private property, it became once again possible to oppress majorities by force. The past 10,000 years thus represent an interplay of centralizing exploitative states and state-like groups on the one hand, and the constant pressure by the oppressed to find a way to destroy their oppressors. The most recent egalitarian event was the invention of the hand-gun, which lead to the preeminence of the foot soldier in war. Because of the hand gun, despotic states were obliged to extend political representation to the masses as a precondition of recruiting effective armies (see my paper with Samuel Bowles, “State and Class in European Feudalism,” in Charles Bright and Susan Harding (eds.), Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), and our book Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Theory, New York: Basic Books, 1986).

I conclude from this historical review that there is no inherent thrust towards emancipatory social life, but rather a back-and-forth movement propelled by technology. This does not mean that honor is not an important force is the social life of humans—I deeply believe that it is. However, it is a knife that cuts both ways, and it is critical to remember this when planning and participating in emancipatory social change.


Brian Forst

5.0 out of 5 stars The Overlooked Path to Dousing the Flames of Hatred and Intolerance
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2010

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For all the handwringing over how to defend ourselves against violent Islamic extremists, the central point raised by Professor Appiah in “The Honor Code” has been widely overlooked: We can do better than accept codes of honor that harm us all. Mainstream Muslims can be supported to rein in and pacify their extreme factions by changing the codes of honor that drive young men to commit acts of violence in the name of a holy cause in the first place. It took some 200 years for Christians to change the codes of honor that gave rise to toxic notions of martyrdom, holy war and infidels during the Crusades, and in today’s world of instant communication technology, Muslims who operate under the very same notions should be convertible in much less time — perhaps in a few short years, and certainly in our lifetimes. As Appiah writes, honor killings in Pakistan have already been reduced by a decline in the acceptability of that practice, and the emergence of such websites as Arabs and Muslims Against Honor Killing (whose slogan is “No honor in honor killing”) should give us all reason to be more positive about the future.

This book may also encourage us to shift our own codes of honor from ones that encourage our lunatic fringes to produce international frenzy in threatening to burn Korans in public to alternatives that recognize that we pray to the same God as Muslims and share interests of living good lives, experiencing the warmth of family and friends, and raising our children in a healthier, more peaceful world.

Appiah exposes the problem of harm done in the name of honor to a bright light. He may have earned himself a major peace prize in so doing. He may have earned for us all genuinely enhanced prospects for peace.


Jaylia

5.0 out of 5 stars How do moral revolutions happen?
Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2010

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Dueling, foot-binding, slavery and “honor” killings were once considered honorable practices but today most people find them repellent. In THE HONOR CODE Appiah analyzes these four examples to illustrate how traditional beliefs about honor came to be in sharp contrast with evolving views of morality. In each case, arguments against the practices were well known long before they were given up, but knowledge alone wasn’t enough. “Honor” killing has not been completely eliminated, but for each of the other practices Appiah details how the development of an expanded, less insular world view or “honor world” changed cultural beliefs and overthrew these long held customs. With this book Appiah is hoping to help spark modern moral revolutions.

Appiah talks about what these modern revolutions might be in an excellent September 2010 article in the Washington Post. Just as we look back with horror at slavery and foot binding, people in the future may condemn one or more of our current practices. To determine what might cause our descendants to wonder “What were they thinking?!” Appiah provides three guidelines: first, arguments against the practice have long been in place, second, defenders of the practice cite tradition, human nature or necessity as reasons to continue (How could we grow cotton without slaves?), and third, supporters of the practice engage in strategic ignorance, for instance wearing slave-grown cotton without considering where it comes from. Appiah’s contemporary candidates for moral revolutions include industrial meat production, the current prison system, the institutionalization and isolation of the elderly, and the devastation of the environment.

Appiah is a philosophy professor at Princeton and his writing is sometimes a little choppy in a logician’s proof solving style, but the material is well thought out, timely and fascinating.

About Kwame Anthony Appiah Author Of The Honor Code pdf Book

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is a former professor at Princeton University and currently has a position at NYU.

The Honor Code pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information

The Honor Code pdf book
The Honor Code pdf book
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (September 13, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393071626
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393071627
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.1 x 8.6 inches
  • Best Sellers Rank: #1,277,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #893 in Social Philosophy
  • #4,631 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
  • #32,132 in World History (Books)
  • Customer Reviews: 4.1 out of 5 stars    61 ratings

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