A question of honour

Any world view is based, in part, on the answer to the question "What makes a person good?" We know the answer given by the dominant Western philosophy, liberalism. The good person is the one who doesn't interfere in others self-defining their own good; the good person, therefore, doesn't discriminate, isn't prejudiced, is tolerant, supports diversity, is accepting of otherness and so on.

What do traditionalists think makes a person good? Our answer has a more positive focus: it has less to do with passively not interfering (a procedural ethics) and more to do with upholding qualities that are inherently good or virtuous.

Many of these qualities are uncontroversial, but I'd like to look at one that might be seen as having both positive and negative characteristics, namely honour.

Honour isn't spoken about much anymore in Western cultures, in part because it was embedded most strongly within an aristocratic culture and aristocrats no longer make up the larger part of the ruling class.

Honour does, too, have a negative side. It can make people so conscious of their dignity that they won't deign to relate to those beneath them; it can encourage people to have such a sense of their own moral worth that they become self-righteous or sanctimonious; and it can make people so self-conscious of their reputation that they will defend it with violence.

Honour at its very worst: the thug who king hits (sucker punches) someone because "they looked at me the wrong way" or the father who kills his own daughter "for besmirching the honour of the family" or (historically) the young men who killed each other in duels because of perceived slights to their reputation.

The Bible very clearly condemns these manifestations of honour. For instance, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, showing that there is no dishonour in serving those beneath his station (this was incorporated into Christian societies - in Austen's novel Emma the upper-class heroine delivers food hampers to the poor and is rebuked by the hero when she mocks one of the poor women.)

The Bible also tells us to turn the other cheek. There are a number of interpretations of this, but the general sense of the command is that we are not to be easily provoked to violence - hence we are not to turn immediately to violence if we feel that our honour has been slighted in some way.

The Bible also condemns the self-righteous, particularly in the figure of the Pharisee. Jesus tells a parable about a Pharisee and a tax collector to correct "some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else"; the Pharisee loses out for standing by himself and praying "God, I thank you that I am not like other people--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector."

But here's the question. Is it the intent of the Bible to discard honour or to perfect it?

It seems to me that there is a strong case for perfecting honour rather than discarding it. Why? Because it is honour that helps to make morality matter. Honour gives us the sense that a part of who we are - of our self and identity - is our moral being, so that to lose in our moral being means to lose something important of our own self.

Honour, in other words, is a consciousness of the importance of our moral integrity to our sense of self. It is the sense of not wanting to be lesser, in our moral behaviour, than what we were made to be; of wanting to remain complete or whole in our moral integrity; and of there being forms of behaviour that are beneath our dignity.

If someone is conscious that morality matters to who they are, then they are also likely to be sensitive to their moral reputation within a community. If a man, for instance, faces the taunt of cowardice or a woman that of promiscuity, then it will be thought of as affecting how they are perceived, significantly, as a person. The two things go together: if morality matters then to at least some degree so will reputation - whether it is our own reputation or that of our family or community.

I'm not suggesting in all this that honour becomes the main focus of a moral life. My point is that in a society in which morality is taken seriously, there is likely to be some sort of expression of honour. It's not a good sign if honour goes missing.