Honour and shame: Modern controversies and ancient values

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 53, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 23-41

  Cairns, Douglas ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955716013     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: 14678705     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.2011.01974.x     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. See esp. John George Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965);
2. David D. Gilmore (ed.), Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Washington DC: American Anthropological Association, 1987).
3. In classics, see Peter Walcot, Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970).
4. My own work was published as Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). The thesis from which that book derived was inspired and supervised by Douglas MacDowell (1931-2010), Professor of Greek in the University of Glasgow from 1971 to 2001, the last and one of the most distinguished holders of a chair established in 1704. This article is dedicated to his memory. I should also like to thank my colleague Dr Martin Chick for much helpful advice and the Leverhulme Trust for funding the research project from which this article derives.
5. Pierre Bourdieu"The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society" in Peristiany, Honour, 191-241 at 211;
6. cf., with reference to the world of Homer, Arthur W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 49: the hero's self 'only has the value which other people put upon it'.
7. James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter, 2006).
8. See Donald Kagan"Honor, Interest, and Nation State" in Elliott Abrams (ed.), Honor among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1998), 1-16.
9. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown"The Ethic of Honor in National Crises: The Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, and the Southern Factor" Journal of the Historical Society, 5:4 (2005), 431-60.
10. Wyatt-Brown recognises that the motive of honour 'in both foreign policy matters and martial affairs . . . applies to nearly all other nations' armed services and diplomatic staffs to a greater or lesser degree' (pp. 432-3), but also regards the persistence of a culture of honour in the southern USA as a contributory factor in the US context. For the southern US as a paradigmatic 'honour culture" cf. James E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder CO: Westview, 1996);
11. also Dov Cohen, Joseph Vandello, and Adrian K. Rantilla"The Sacred and the Social: Cultures of Honor and Violence" in Paul Gilbert and Bernice Andrews (eds), Shame: Interpersonal Behavior, Psychopathology, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 261-82.
12. Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
13. Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
14. Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
15. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael, A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 116;
16. cf. Welsh, Honor, 18: we need to 'demystify honor and treat it as one kind of motivation that all are subject to'.
17. Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy of Esteem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
18. Cf. also (on esteem as a factor in both gift exchange and market economies) Avner Offer"Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard" Economic History Review, 50:3 (1997), 450-76.
19. Brennan and Pettit, The Economy of Esteem, 66.
20. Thus, regarding honour as in other respects, people are loss-averse: they 'hate a loss more than they value an equal gain' (Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 141; cf.
21. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (London: Penguin, 2009), 36-7).
22. For the relation between subcultures in which violence is driven by the pursuit of respect and inequalities of esteem in society in general, cf. Michael Marmot, Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 102;
23. Richard Wilkinson The Impact of Inequality (London: Routledge, 2005), 222, 226;
24. Richard Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 134, 140-41.
25. For the data, cf. www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence. For UK trends since the 1980s
26. see Alissa Goodman, Paul Johnson, and Steven Webb, Inequality in the UK (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
27. John Hills and Kitty Stewart (eds), A More Equal Society: New Labour, Poverty, Inequality, and Exclusion (Bristol: Policy Press, 2005);
28. John Hills, Tom Sefton, and Kitty Stewart (eds), Towards a More Equal Society? Poverty, Inequality and Policy since 1997 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2009);
29. and now John Hills, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel (January 2010, available at http://www. equalities.gov.uk/ national-equality-panel/publications.aspx).
30. Cf. also Daniel Dorling, Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists (Bristol: Policy Press, 2010).
31. On the ways in which growing discrepancies in income lead to increased competition for positional goods and increased dissatisfaction even among those who may be comfortably off in material terms, see Robert Frank, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press, 2007);
32. cf. Layard, Happiness, 41-8, 150-53.
33. See Plato, Laws 744a-745b (cf. 754d-755a, 756e-758a);
34. Aristotle, Politics 1265a28-b23, 1266b14-1267b16, 1280a11-25, 1282b14-1284a17, 1297a6-13, 1301a25-1303a13, 1308a7-11, 1308b10-1309a32, 1310a2-12, 1318a9-1319a4.
35. For Solon, see esp. fragments 4-6, 13, 24, and 36-7 West, and for a brief discussion of classical Greek attitudes to income and status inequality, see H. Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 18-21.
36. See Richard Wilkinson"Why is Violence More Common Where Inequality is Greater?" Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1036 (2004), 1-12;
37. Wilkinson, Impact, 145-67;
38. Wilkinson and Pickett, Spirit Level, 129-44;
39. Pickett, Jessica Mookherjee, and Wilkinson"Adolescent Birth Rates, Total Homicides, and Income Inequality in Rich Countries" American Journal of Public Health, 95:7 (2005), 1181-3;
40. cf. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly"Competitiveness, Risk-taking, and Violence: The Young Male Syndrome" Ethology and Sociobiology, 6( 1985), 59-73;
41. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988);
42. Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 331-3, 342-4;
43. Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Shawn Vasdev"Income Inequality and Homicide Rates in Canada and the United States" Canadian Journal of Criminology, 43 (2001), 219-36.
44. See Bowman, Honor, 45-6;
45. cf. G. Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) 54-7.
46. Both draw on the classic study of E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press, 1951)
47. whose own characterisation of Homeric society as a paradigmatic 'shame-culture' was influenced by Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (London: Secker and Warburg, 1947).
48. Cf. Jean-Claude Riedinger"Les Deux Aidôs chez Homère" Revue de Philologie, 54 (1980), 62-79;
49. condemnation of those who do not honour others: Odyssey 22. 414-15, 23. 65-6;
50. 368, etc. Cf. Stewart, Honor, passim, on honour as right. On hybris, see Nick Fisher, Hybris: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1992).
51. On the varieties of impartiality, cf. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985), 60, 82-5, 92, 115;
52. Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 112-25;
53. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 114-52, 155-73, 194-207, 292-4.
54. All translations from the Iliad are by R. Lattimore (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951).
55. See James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975).