Such a bewildering and contradictory welter of behaviors and traits are connoted by “honor” and its best equivalents in other languages that analyses of the concept have daunted philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and literary scholars for millennia. Is it an external good given — and revoked just as easily — by others? Or does “honor” name an inner good that’s absolutely in our control: our integrity, our very commitment to right conduct? Is honor a central moral virtue — (...) as when we might say that “all was lost, save our honor”? Or is it a good quality that’s not-quite “moral,” or indeed even an antiquated virtue hostile to true morality? Is the honorable man a heroic figure who protects the weak, or one who can be expected to bully the weak, as in the case of “honor killings”? Is honor aristocratic and inegalitarian, and thus a virtue that enables and ennobles what’s essentially oppression? Or is honor a signal virtue of fair-dealing, fair-fighting, and fair competition, as evidenced in sportsmanship? (shrink)

Given its psychological and sociological importance, especially in non-liberal societies, honor may be the most undertheorized normative phenomenon. Philosophical neglect of honor is due partly to the doubtful moral bona fides of honor: honor-typical motives have been usually viewed by philosophers in both the Christian and liberal West as either non-moral or immoral but replaced by morally sounder ones. More practically, honor (and what is usually translated into the English “honor”) connotes a number of apparently contradictory meanings, further bedeviling analyses. (...) Four particularly salient conceptions of honor emerge in the anthropological, literary, and philosophical literature on honor: honor as prestige, honor as the ethos characteristic of “cultures of honor,” honor as honestas, and honor as agonism. (shrink)