One of the characteristics of something we might term the “honor ethos” is that honor-minded people tend to respond favorably to those who resist, even if that resistance is aimed at the honor-minded people themselves.
This is distinctive: a Christian evangelical might protest, say, slavery by arguing that we are all created in God’s image; a liberal might decry slavery by appeal to human rights grounded on a hypothetical contract; a Kantian might invoke the slave’s humanity; a utilitarian the non-optimal consequences of slavery, and so forth.
But two considerations against oppression seem uniquely honor-based. The first is that (in my opinion, at least) honor-minded people tend to want to compete for status and to compete for it fairly. If it is realized that some groups aren’t given a “level playing field” (I insist this is an honor trope!), then honor-based sentiments are activated and the honor-minded person wants to rectify this—not for the sake of the disadvantaged party, but for the advantaged one.
But the second honor-based consideration against oppression is what I’m interested in here. One sees time and time again, in history, literature, and one’s own intuitions (if attentive to them), that honor-typical sentiments are stirred when an oppressed person or group stands up and fights. Our sense of honor forces us to note and admire these heroes. The idea seems to be, “We thought your people were just weaker in whatever way, and that you lacked the spirit to fight for higher status. But now we see that you at least are a fighter. So welcome to the club.” Thus, heroic figures who resist oppression are important for winning freedom for their people in part because they force honor-minded people (and the honor-minded side of each of us) to see—perhaps for the first time—that the oppressed people or class isn’t inferior by nature. At least some of them are willing to fight.
One of my favorite examples of this dynamic is the story of the Amistad, a Spanish-Cuban slave-ship commandeered by kidnapped Africans.
Led by Sengbe Pieh (renamed “Cinque” by his Spanish captors), the sick and malnourished Africans literally broke free of their chains, grabbed some machetes used for cutting sugar cane, and overwhelmed and killed most of their Spanish-Cuban crew. However, unable to sail the schooner themselves, the African rebels were forced to rely upon the ship’s Spanish navigator to sail them east and thus back to Africa. The navigator managed to trick the Africans by sailing north at night, and so the Amistad was finally intercepted by an American ship.
A complicated set of court cases ensued. The Spanish demanded a return of their “cargo” and punishment for the slave “murderers.” The African crew was represented by abolitionists, whose legal reasoning was that the slaves were from Africa and thus free, given that the African trade was illegal by this time. Furthermore, the abolitionists argued, as free men Cinque and his fellows were justified in killing their “pirate” captors. The case ultimately wound up being heard in the Supreme Court.
What is so interesting about the Amistad story from the honor perspective is that it provided the abolitionists with not only yet another instance of unjust and pitiful African suffering—an ethical commodity in limitless supply at the time—but crucially also a case of black honor. Instinctively, Cinque’s advocates seemed to realize that here they had a case that undermined the popular notion that blacks were like childlike—a view shared by plenty of abolitionists, too.
The then-prevalent opinion that blacks are “like children” is absolutely crucial from our perspective, for this was a day in which it was still platitudinous to say that justice supervenes on mutual threat and benefit. If blacks couldn’t threaten whites, how could both be united by concerns of justice? So portraying blacks in heroic roles was vitally important to the legal and popular defense of the kidnapped Africans, for by literally fighting for their rights (as opposed to merely “demanding” the pity of powerful whites, which too often counts as “fighting for one’s rights”), the slave rebels gave the clearest proof possible of their being people worthy of consideration by justice. The aims of justice would be served, then, by appeal to honorableness.
Former President John Quincy Adams used all his considerable persuasive skills in his Supreme Court arguments on behalf of the Amistad captives, and as a master of rhetoric he wasn’t remiss in pressing all the Court’s ethical buttons. When he strayed from legal to moral arguments, Adams would sometimes appeal to the Justices’ sense of justice and charity. But he also sometimes appealed to honor. The appeals are particularly dramatic in this case, for some Supreme Court justices were Southern anti-abolitionists. One might think that this fact would cause Adams to downplay the violence of Cinque and his cohorts. Quite the opposite. Adams argued to the Court:
They were victims of the African slave trade, recently imported into the island of Cuba, in gross violation of the laws of the Island and of Spain; and by acts which our own laws have made piracy—punishable with death. They had indicated their natural right to liberty, by conspiracy, insurrection, homicide and capture.
And later:
[T]he savage, heathen barbarians Cinque and Grabeau liberated themselves and their fellow suffering countrymen from Spanish slave‑traders, and [this] the [Prosecution], by communion of sympathy with Ruiz and Montes, denominates lawless violence. Cinque and Grabeau are uncouth and barbarous names. Call them Harmodius and Aristogiton, and go back for moral principle three thousand years to the fierce and glorious democracy of Athens. They too resorted to lawless violence, and slew the tyrant to redeem the freedom of their country. For this heroic action they paid the forfeit of their lives: but within three years the Athenians expelled their tyrants themselves, and in gratitude to their self‑devoted deliverers decreed, that thenceforth no slave should ever bear either of their names. Cinque and Grabeau are not slaves. Let them bear in future history the names of Harmodius and Aristogiton.
It is interesting that Adams holds that one “indicates” one’s natural right to liberty by, among other things, the “homicide” of one’s oppressors! Adams knew that, despite the racial prejudices of some Justices, as men moved by honor these same judges couldn’t deny that resisting slavery was the sine qua non of the honorable spirit. After all, for the pre-Christian European ancestors of white America, to be noble was little more than “to count among one’s ancestors no one who had been subjected to slavery.” And only a generation or so before the trial of the Amistad, Britain’s great war-anthem, Rule Britannia, first began to triumphantly boast that “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.” Cinque’s noble resistance helped prove to the honor-minded that blacks were not “natural slaves” as a class, and that nobility of spirit—the true dividing line for the honor-minded—cuts across racial lines.
The Justices ruled in favor of Cinque.
Honor Ethics 
paulfrobinson said:
Dan, there is certainly something to what you say. In particular, I think, your comment that ‘honor-based sentiments are activated and the honor-minded person wants to rectify this—not for the sake of the disadvantaged party, but for the advantaged one’ is on the mark. It is the self-referential element of honour which makes it such a powerful motive. However, there are limits to this desire for fair competition – only some people are entitled to compete. When somebody or some group tries to join in the competition, it makes a claim to a sort of moral equality. If you are willing to recognize this, then the competition is acceptable, but if you consider them unworthy, then their claim is deeply insulting, and their attempts to compete need to be made not with fair play but with extreme force. Thus in 19th century German honour codes, if a gentleman insulted an officer, he challenged him to a duel, but if a commoner did, he beat him to pulp with his cane. Similarly in war, historically people have applied the rules of war to those they accepted as equals, but not those they accepted as outsiders, who were generally treated much worse. This is, I think, a common distinction – not everyone is entitled to join the honour group.
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dan demetriou said:
Yes, I totally agree with that point. In my opinion–and I am very interested in whether you and others agree with this–the following principles help characterize the honor ethos’ rules concerning rank mobility:
RANK AMBITION: You must seek the highest status you deserve, so you must challenge those slightly higher-ranked than you if you think you can defeat them.
RANK HUMILITY: But one mustn’t challenge those much higher-ranked, and much higher-ranked parties cannot accept challenges from those much lower-ranked.
NO DUCKING: You must not decline legitimate challenges to your rank.
NO BULLYING: You mustn’t challenge those of lower rank.
The term “ducking” comes from boxing, when a higher-ranked boxer avoids fighting a lower-ranked one to preserve his ranking.
So the phenomenon you mention is captured by RANK HUMILITY. As you say, it was very common to just cane or box the ears, etc., of a low-ranked challenger. And as you know, it was often held appropriate to ignore “impertinent” challenges in the expectation that friends will step in.
Actually, I think this is all quite rational (I believe the principles of honor are in general defensible). Suppose we distinguish between honor as status, and honor as the value that regulates how status is won. I am favorable to the view that the latter sort of ethical honor demands that status be won competitively. That means in ideal circumstances, a high-ranked party will be a competitively successful party. It would be unduly burdensome for them to constantly be addressing every challenger. We can reasonably expect parties to accept challenges from those just below, however. And in any case, those parties have the most right to have their challenges accepted, since they proved themselves to have the best chance of deserving that spot.
There are exceptions. For instance, sometimes a higher-ranked party can compliment a lower-ranked party by inviting the latter to competition. This is a compliment because it communicates to all that the higher-ranked party considers the lower-ranked party to be a peer. But this must be done carefully, so as to avoid looking like a bully.
So how do we reconcile orderly model of challenge with the favorable response of the honor-minded to the “spirited defense of dignity” of oppressed people?
In my opinion, it works like this: honor tracks: 1) what rank you are in the game, and 2) whether or not you’re a player in the game in first place (something like Stewart’s horizontal and vertical honor distinction). When oppressed groups show spirit, the honor group may not be recognizing their claims as competitors for any particular rank (the Justices, for instance, wouldn’t have seen Cinque as challenging their rank). Rather, oppressed people fighting for their rights is processed by the honor group as showing that they deserve to be players simplicter. And it seems to me that this is how oppressed people often talk—they are not asking for high status, just the chance to fight for status. For instance, here’s a passage from a speech by Fredrick Douglass:
Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot- box, let him alone, don’t disturb him!
Sound plausible?
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Paul Robinson said:
Sounds plausible, but where do non-competitive forms of honour fit in? If honour is, as Aristotle puts it the ‘reward for excellence’, it follows in many cases that not all can be excellent, and that honour becomes hierarchical; but in some cases,everyone can display the excellence and perhaps even have it by default (e.g. chastity), and in these cases honour is an absolute, not relative, and something that is lost, not something that is won. No competition is necessary. So yes, what you say holds to a point, but it seems to me that there also some aspects of honour which lie outside of this framework.
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Marc Hersch said:
A search on the subject “honor” brought me here. As a non-academic sociologist and practicing organizational consultant, I have become very interested in the subject of honor from a theoretical standpoint and would like to suggest some avenues for inquiry and investigation that run contrary to definitional and boundary setting statements presented thus far on this blog. (I have not read the books listed in the sidebar.)
George Herbert Mead described a model by which to explain the emergence of reflexive self-consciousness in humans in the context of a constructive process of symbolic interaction. He suggested that the individual mind is called forth by others during early development. The social-collective mind in the form of narrative, precedes the rise of the mind of the individual. The individual mind — a narrative itself — is in effect a subplot. He speaks of this in terms of the “generalized other”.
The rise of the minded individual is rooted in a sense of moral relation among group members enacting their lives, that expands in ever-widening circles, from primary relationships with “significant others”, who are themselves embedded as members in the greater community, to secondary relations at large. The process that gives rise to the reflexively conscious individual is all encompassing. All consciousness is grounded in moral relation expressed as narrative. There is no escape from this condition of moral relation. There is no amoral stance possible in conscious experience.
The conscious self is called forth by others — the collective, narrative, mind — and continues to emerge throughout life in a process of mutual, collaborative, purposive interaction. The conscious self is fully and inexorably immersed in moral relation with others. The self is totally reliant upon its membership in a group that is bound together in moral intentions and practices. In practice these constitute relations of honor in which the well being of the moral community as a whole takes precedence over the well being of the individual. The group enables the conscious individual.
In this model, oversimplified for the purposes of this note, status ranking, ambition, and other self-serving motivations do not necessarily undergird honorable relations. It is only as a member of a group that sees self-serving actions as honorable in themselves, that honor seeking can be viewed by members of a moral community as a wellspring of honorable intentions and practices.
Our experience in consciousness is constructed in moral relation to our community of others. These are relations of honor. Some universals along the lines of the Golden Rule notwithstanding, the ethical yardsticks that constitute the moral landscape of a community, sustained in mythic narrative, vary, but underlying the whole of the process is the reliance of the socially constructed self upon the community of others for its continued existence in being and becoming. We are all in this sense, honor bound to the community of others who create us.
From this we can conclude that in some communities, self-effacement and self-sacrifice are honorable forms of relation, while in other communities, the failure to do anything it takes to preserve and enhance one’s individual status is shameful. Both narratives are about relations of honor among ourselves and with the world at large — the moral relation that undergirds our consciousness itself. To behave dishonorably is to become shunned by others and by one’s social constructed self, from the communal narrative mind that enables the self in being and becoming. To act without honor is to destroy one’s self.
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