I just discovered an organization called Honorshame: Resources for Majority World Ministry and had to share. Essentially, they are about framing Christianity in honor terms to make the religion more palatable to “shame” cultures. Here’s a video they produced:
They have a culture test (to determine your cultural type, according to their guilt-culture, shame-cultures, fear-culture model) and a theology guide that summarizes their approach.
Although I’m still perusing, it seems like they understand honor-shame cultures in a very Middle-Eastern/Asian way, and they contrast it with the African sort of tribal culture they see as “fear” based (even though those tribespeople would insist they are very concerned with honor themselves). Essentially, it seems to me, they are understanding authority and purity as honorable, not agonism and agonistic success (which is aristocratic or “tribal” apparently in their taxonomy).
Nonetheless, this is pretty advanced stuff, not too far behind the best research on cultural/moral psychology of honor, shame, etc., and clearly born of firsthand experience in these cultures. Thoughts?
Honor Ethics 
stevenskultety said:
Hey Dan! The video does indeed seem to suggest that God’s honor is just an unremarkable by-product of God’s authority. I found the contrasting account of mere human honor rather curious: at roughly 2:00-2:20 we learn that human honor is actually *worse* than a zero-sum agonistic good; human honor creates more shame than it does honor and it reflects nothing but group membership. It is almost as if the authors want to avoid a direct confrontation with agonistic success.
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dan demetriou said:
Sorry to have taken so long to reply, Steven—I was traveling. Yes, good catch. On their view, God is the font of honor, just as how renaissance monarchies (tried) to make themselves the font of honor for aristocrats, and were somewhat successful at doing so. This is a crucial authoritarian countermeasure against agonistic honor’s natural anti-authoritarian bias: competitors for prestige generally want to determine what exploits of theirs are prestige-worthy. Two groups infringe upon this: observers and administrators (kings, gods, etc). My favorite example of this is cycling: cyclists don’t see doping as deserving lower prestige, but fans and officials do. Cyclists adhere to other, quite demanding constraints, however (such as slowing down when a leader falls for a stupid reason), but the administrators don’t care about that, so it’s not written in the rules.
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Ryan Rhodes said:
The feature I found most intriguing was the story of the woman who touched Jesus and was healed, with the emphasis that her touch did not defile his purity (as might be thought under some conceptions of purity-honor) but rather that his purity made her clean as well. This seems implicitly to run counter to the idea that one’s own honor can be diminished by the action of another. Instead, it would suggest that if one possesses true honor, only one’s own actions can diminish it (or, presumably, increase it). With that sort of an understanding, might certain types of objections to either purity-honor or the external nature of honor fail to get off the ground?
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dan demetriou said:
IMO this is still a purity dynamic more than an honor one. Psychologists (look up Rozin and Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust”) have argued that there is this phenomenon with purity reasoning that allows super-pure items to make evil-contaminated items pure upon contact, instead of the other way around—“supervaluation.” I talk about that in regards to this exact biblical episode in my “Fetish Ethics” paper, p. 383. http://philpapers.org/archive/DEMTSF-3.pdf
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Ryan Rhodes said:
Dan, I greatly enjoyed the paper you mention here, and hoped to get your thoughts on a related aspect of it. At one point you mention the case of “Justice For All”, and noted an unease about their use of the language of rights in arguing for their pro-life stance. Since you suspect that a holiness dynamic is the true motivation for their position, you suggest that it is disingenuous of them to speak in terms of rights instead. However, it seems to me that in a general sense, we tend to recognize this sort of thing as a legitimate and even essential type of argumentation.
That is, suppose that you and I are debating an issue, and you say something like: “You hold P, Q, and R to be true, and that set of beliefs logically implies S. Therefore, you ought to accept S.” Supposing that I really do hold P, Q, and R, should it matter whether you hold those beliefs yourself? I would say not, or at the least that it isn’t obvious that it should. Because what you are arguing is that by my own grounds, I ought to accept claim S. If S really does follow from P, Q,and R, then you have given me a reason to believe S even if you reject P, Q, and R, and believe S on some other grounds.
If that seems plausible, then should we see JFA’s strategy as unobjectionable? In other words, that they are basically approaching their audience from what they take to be that audience’s starting point, rather than arguing from a framework which the audience is unlikely to share? Or if the strategy is still objectionable, how do you see it as different than the process described?
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dan demetriou said:
Hi Ryan!
Thanks, I’m glad you liked my “Fetish Ethics” paper. Yes I agree that there’s nothing intellectually vicious with the form of argument you describe, as far as it goes. What gets morally dubious IMO is when the interrogator portrays himself as endorsing P,Q,R, or as a fellow-traveler re: concern for P,Q,R. Justice for All does this. It’d be more honest to say, “Hey liberals, we get you’re all about freedom and individual rights and all that, but this is inconsistent with abortion rights.” Of course this would undermine JFA rhetorically—not to a philosopher perhaps, but to the average liberal who, like any average untrained thinker, won’t trust an interlocutor who doesn’t accept his starting points (and who calibrates his skepticism on “trust”). That said, depending on how righteous your cause, it may be morally permissible all-told to be “disingenuous” and argue for S according to your opponent’s framework, of course.
I also think that doing a lot of this “sublimation” retards your ability to understand the ethical reasons and logic you *do* endorse. It’d be cool if people who think in terms of holiness (fetish/magical reasoning/purity reasoning etc.) turned their minds toward this and really worked out the logic, instead of leaving it just to the anthropologists, psychologists, or philosophers, who may be biased against it because of the selection effects of academic culture.
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Ryan Rhodes said:
Would you say that there may be something like contextually-based moral standards for argumentation, then? For instance, suppose that, like you suggest here, an untrained thinker would be likely to dismiss an argument out-of-hand from someone who didn’t share his or her starting point. In that case, is it acceptable to be disingenuous to some degree because such may be a prerequisite for discourse to occur at all? (Whereas if one were speaking to a trained thinker, then the same disingenuousness would be morally blameworthy). Or, ought we think it is more praiseworthy to be entirely upfront about the fact that one is specifically arguing from views of the interlocutor that the speaker does not actually share? The latter would seem ideal, but if it would functionally preclude an exchange of ideas from the outset, it’s hard not to be amenable to the other picture.
I agree that there is a risk in losing touch with your own reasons as well. Currently I’m more focused on the other question, however, since it seems to me that something like that method will be necessary in the political realm. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how society can avoid intractable partisanship, echo chambers, and so forth, which seems an increasingly pernicious problem.
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dan demetriou said:
I am not opposed to accommodating one’s arguments to the intelligence, training, and starting points of one’s interlocutor, which may mean misrepresenting oneself. Certainly I do this in teaching. But I don’t think you’re truly having a philosophical discussion if you do this: you may be teaching, or persuading, or doing something else, but you’re not talking to your interlocutor like an equal.
Given my values, this is a daily problem for me. I think the solution is to engage with people on their own terms, try to draw out the reductios, hope the reductios trouble them enough, and then, in that teachable moment, suggest a different starting point that avoids the whole mess. Then it’s their job to draw reductios from my starting points, and we’ll see if I blanch at where it all leads, and so on.
But this is ideal. Few people have this much time, and few people can revise fundamental values by way of argument (usually it takes a traumatic epiphany).
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