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Honor, morality, and moral revolutions
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 33 (2012) 77–78
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Book review Honor, morality, and moral revolutions Kwame Anthony Appiah, The honor code: How moral revolutions happen. W. W. Norton & Co. New York, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-39307162-7 (hardcover), 264 pp., $25.95 Youths participating in an anger management program are sometimes presented with a depiction of an X inside a circle. Outside the circle is another X, which they are told stands for each individual in the group. The “inside” X, they are told, is “a clown in a circus ring.” This clown is a guy who's trying to start a fight. He's a clown and a fool because he's not thinking of all the disadvantages of anger and violence. His goal is to make you a fool, too, to draw you into the circus ring with him. He wants to attach his strings to you. . . . Then he can pull on the strings and draw you into the ring with him. If you let him attach the strings and pull you in, then who's in control? He wins if you start fighting. The youths then see a circle containing two Xs. The group leader asks, “Let's say you get drawn in and start fighting. How many clowns are in the ring now?” (Gibbs, Potter, & Goldstein, 1995, p. 122; cf. DiBiase, Gibbs, Potter, & Blount, in press; adapted from Feindler & Ecton, 1986). Such group “anger management” exercises aim to treat human aggression or violence by reshaping its social meaning, demoting its status, and redirecting its energy. The taunting tough guy is really a clown, a fool; letting that clown pull you into a pointless brawl is not being tough or strong. Truly tough guys have the strength and savvy to keep in mind that fights lead nowhere. They manage their anger, control their impulses, and stay balanced and focused—as do the most admirable of the great athletes (the youths are prompted to name some). Such individuals are even strong enough to care about others, such as teammates or fellow group members. In effective intervention programs, such reframing (reshaping, reforming, relabeling, redefining, cognitive restructuring, etc.) of being “strong” or “tough” in terms of self-control and caring helps to transform a macho mentality or culture into a positive one (Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985; cf. Gibbs, Potter, DiBiase, & Devlin, 2009). Reframing may also figure into the great moral revolutions in human history. In his brilliant, wise, and beautifully written book The honor code: How moral revolutions happen, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah probes changes in the social meaning of “honor” evident in past as well as incipient moral revolutions. Moral revolutions do not end honor, any more than anger management programs end anger. Like anger, honor is instead reframed and redeployed along more rational, moral, and positive channels. Appiah's book ponders honor's proper care, management, and framing—its reframing, that is, in the service of moral progress. Through the study of how certain immoral codes, practices, and worlds of “honor” came to an end, Appiah derives strategies for how to end a current severely immoral practice, namely, “honor” killings. Historical “honor” codes selected for study are dueling, Atlantic slavery, and Chinese footbinding. The practice of dueling, for example, was 0193-3973/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2011.09.004
explicitly about honor, i.e., defending one's honor or respectability as a gentleman against an affront. Interestingly, the emergence of the honor code of the duel represented relative moral progress insofar as it replaced a prior culture “in which young men found their honor in unregulated affrays” (p. 189). And a kind of courage seemed to be reflected in the willingness to risk one's life to defend one's entitlement to respect, one's “honor.” On balance, however, the dueling honor code was clearly irrational and morally wrong. Doesn't it matter whether the accusation is true? If true, why not just apologize? If patently false, why dignify the affront with any response, let alone such a life-threatening one? Isn't it grossly out of proportion to risk one's own or another's life over a verbal taunt? Is it fair and sensible to leave to chance whether a deadly outcome befalls the culprit or the victim? Despite the cogency of moral arguments against dueling, dueling's immorality did not bring about its end. To understand how moral revolutions happen, Appiah suggests, we must probe more deeply into the social dynamics of cultural change in the honor code. Dueling was a status thing. In terms of its honor code, the duel was an affair that could properly take place only between “gentlemen.” In Britain, an accusation not from an aristocratic peer but from a man “of the lower orders” was to be met not with a challenge but with a lash from a horsewhip. The horsewhip was symbolic here. The distinction between knights and others in the feudal system was a distinction between those who fought on horseback and those who fought on foot. The horsewhip signified your status as a gentleman, as one who rode. (p. 184). More than the power of moral argument, the main galvanizing forces that ended dueling were an expanded and more democratic British community, the popular press, and, finally, ridicule. In the 1800s, the aristocracy was gradually losing “its central place in British public life” (p. 44). A rising middle class was amassing family fortunes and gaining centrality despite its disparagement by aristocrats as mere “trade.” As “base mechanical” tradesmen and industrial laborers began to consider engaging in dueling, the prestigious exclusivity of the duel, its “capacity to bring distinction,” was “exhausted” (p. 46). Despite some instances of dueling among them, the tradesmen generally saw the duel as “an unloved symbol of aristocratic privilege” (p. 47). Meanwhile, the popular press in the 1800s promoted a more democratic age, bringing “all the citizens of Britain into a single community of knowledge and evaluation” (p. 38). In this expanding sphere of influence, newspaper comments and cartoons as well as other publications began to lambast the duel, reframing it as “juvenile,” “ridiculous,” “barbarous,” and even “vulgar”—words of shame that were as effective against dueling as “clownish” and “foolish” can be against the pointless brawls of anger. The driving force of the moral revolution that finally ended dueling, then, was not moral argument so much as societal and cultural changes
78
Book review
that both mitigated its distinctive high-status exclusivity and mocked it as, really, a rather ridiculous thing to do. Appiah argues that essentially the same dynamics drove the end of footbinding in China as well as slavery across the Atlantic. In each case, dishonor or shame and ridicule in the context of an expanded sphere of social influence played a key role. These accounts are fascinating and well worth reading. Armed with his understanding of honor codes and how moral revolutions happen, Appiah suggests strategies for ending extant moral evils such as “honor” killings, so called “because they are seen by their perpetrators as ways of reestablishing the family's honor” (p. 146). His focus is on its practice in Pakistan, where thousands of women and girls are murdered each year by relatives. As Appiah notes, “change” from this horrific practice “is desperately needed” (p. 146). Fortunately, as Appiah describes, the moral revolution in Pakistan to rescue true honor from “honor” killings is already emerging. Appiah is optimistic that the revolution will continue and ultimately succeed, given that it is beginning to use strategies that were effective in past moral revolutions. If there was no honor in dueling, footbinding, or condoning slavery, there is certainly no honor in “honor” killings. The quotation marks indicate the invalid application of the term to such murders. One might refer to misguided or false honor in such cases, in much the same spirit as Moshman's (2011) conception of false moral identity. (In this connection, a major objection to a short-lived American Academy of Pediatrics proposal to substitute a harmless “ritual nick” for female genital mutilation—another “honor” code of gendered violence— was precisely that it would seem to retain the false frame of the practice as in principle respectable or honorable.) The correct reframing and rechanneling of the honor code make clear that the real way family honor is upheld and problems resolved does not entail murder or violence:
2004; Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985). An adolescent's “explosive behavior” can be reframed or relabeled “as a childish temper tantrum,” but the group leader should not directly ridicule the youth as a child (Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985, p. 24) or the group as a “bunch of babies.” Perhaps an insider—but definitely not an outsider—can engage to good effect in such direct personal ridicule. To his credit, Appiah does indicate that ridicule must be “carefully calculated” (p. 172) and entail a coalition of insiders and outsiders. Otherwise, even indigenous reformers can be hit with “a torrent of complaints” or worse (p. 152). I found this superb book to be refreshing, an inspiring break from skepticism regarding moral truth and objectivity, from the moral relativism so rampant these days in moral development literature. Typical are Haidt and Bjorklund's (2008) assertions that “moral facts are facts only with respect to a community of human beings that have created them” (p. 214), and are right if “endorsed by the great majority of its members, even those who appear, from the outside, to be its victims” (p. 216). (One wonders: does this perspective recognize real victims?) Instead, we read in this book of genuine moral progress, of fueling moral revolutions with reframed honor, of making honor “consistent with the great modern discovery: the fundamental equality, in the eyes of morality, of all human beings” (p. 127, emphasis added). Indeed, beyond Appiah's eudaimonist and communitarian position (see also Appiah, 2008), fundamental human equality arguably partakes of a deeper reality of “necessary” logical and mathematical truths (Gibbs, 2010). Accordingly, “moral” merits its place alongside “honor” in the book's title. Moral truths are in their own right “cogent” (p. 37), i.e., motivating; they just need a little help—crucial help—from a powerful prospective friend: honor.
In all the earlier revolutions, the motivating power of honor was channeled not challenged. The right way to proceed, it would seem, is not to argue against honor but to work to change the grounds of honor, to alter the codes by which it is allocated. . . . Changes in honor codes can reshape honor, mobilizing it in the service of the good. . . . Reforming honor is relevant, I believe, to every form of gendered violence; and, in particular, every society needs to sustain codes in which assaulting a woman—assaulting anyone—in your own family is a source of dishonor, a cause of shame. . . . . Keep reminding people, by all means, that honor killing is immoral, illegal, irrational, irreligious. . . . [After all,] the wrongness of such killings is essential to the explanation of why they are shameful; as were the wrongness of footbinding and slavery to the arguments that they were sources of Chinese and British shame. . . . But even the recognition of these truths [of moral right and wrong], I suspect, will not by itself align what people know with what people do. Honor killing will only perish when it is seen as dishonorable. (pp. 169–172)
Agee, V. (1979). Treatment of the violent incorrigible adolescent. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Appiah, K. A. (2008). Experiments in ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DiBiase, A.-M., Gibbs, J. C., Potter, G. B., & Blount, M. (in press). Teaching adolescents to think and act responsibly: The EQUIP approach. Champaign, IL: Research Press. Feindler, E. L., & Ecton, R. B. (1986). Adolescent anger control: Cognitive-behavioral techniques. New York: Pergamon. Gibbs, J. C. (2010). Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn & Bacon. Gibbs, J. C., Potter, G. B., DiBiase, A. -M., & Devlin, R. S. (2009). In B. Glick (Ed.), The EQUIP Program: Social perspective-taking for responsible thought and behavior. Cognitive behavioral interventions for at-risk youth, 2. Kingston, NJ: Civic Research Institute (pp. 9-1--9-47). Gibbs, J. C., Potter, G., & Goldstein, A. P. (1995). The EQUIP program: Teaching youth to think and act responsibly through a peer-helping approach. Champaign, IL: Research Press. Haidt, J., & Bjorklund, F. (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology. The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity, 2. (pp. 181–218) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Moshman, D. (2011). Adolescent rationality and development: Cognition, morality, and identity (3 rd ed.). New York: Psychology Press. Samenow, S. E. (2004). Inside the criminal mind (rev. ed.). New York: Random House. Vorrath, H. H., & Brendtro, L. K. (1985). Positive peer culture (2nd ed). New York: Aldine.
Caution is advisable, however, for anyone heeding Appiah's endorsement of ridicule as “among the tools we need” (p. 172) against gendered violence. Consider whether shaming to the extent of ridicule is effective in anger management and related programs, where the group leader's comments may be tantamount to a semi-outsider's evaluations (Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985). It is true that a group leader's confrontations must be blunt (Agee, 1979). Also true, however, is that the confronter must remain generally respectful and caring (Samenow,
References
John C. Gibbs Department of Psychology, 1983 Neil Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA E-mail address: [email protected] 26 September 2011
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Book review Honor, morality, and moral revolutions Kwame Anthony Appiah, The honor code: How moral revolutions happen. W. W. Norton & Co. New York, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-39307162-7 (hardcover), 264 pp., $25.95 Youths participating in an anger management program are sometimes presented with a depiction of an X inside a circle. Outside the circle is another X, which they are told stands for each individual in the group. The “inside” X, they are told, is “a clown in a circus ring.” This clown is a guy who's trying to start a fight. He's a clown and a fool because he's not thinking of all the disadvantages of anger and violence. His goal is to make you a fool, too, to draw you into the circus ring with him. He wants to attach his strings to you. . . . Then he can pull on the strings and draw you into the ring with him. If you let him attach the strings and pull you in, then who's in control? He wins if you start fighting. The youths then see a circle containing two Xs. The group leader asks, “Let's say you get drawn in and start fighting. How many clowns are in the ring now?” (Gibbs, Potter, & Goldstein, 1995, p. 122; cf. DiBiase, Gibbs, Potter, & Blount, in press; adapted from Feindler & Ecton, 1986). Such group “anger management” exercises aim to treat human aggression or violence by reshaping its social meaning, demoting its status, and redirecting its energy. The taunting tough guy is really a clown, a fool; letting that clown pull you into a pointless brawl is not being tough or strong. Truly tough guys have the strength and savvy to keep in mind that fights lead nowhere. They manage their anger, control their impulses, and stay balanced and focused—as do the most admirable of the great athletes (the youths are prompted to name some). Such individuals are even strong enough to care about others, such as teammates or fellow group members. In effective intervention programs, such reframing (reshaping, reforming, relabeling, redefining, cognitive restructuring, etc.) of being “strong” or “tough” in terms of self-control and caring helps to transform a macho mentality or culture into a positive one (Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985; cf. Gibbs, Potter, DiBiase, & Devlin, 2009). Reframing may also figure into the great moral revolutions in human history. In his brilliant, wise, and beautifully written book The honor code: How moral revolutions happen, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah probes changes in the social meaning of “honor” evident in past as well as incipient moral revolutions. Moral revolutions do not end honor, any more than anger management programs end anger. Like anger, honor is instead reframed and redeployed along more rational, moral, and positive channels. Appiah's book ponders honor's proper care, management, and framing—its reframing, that is, in the service of moral progress. Through the study of how certain immoral codes, practices, and worlds of “honor” came to an end, Appiah derives strategies for how to end a current severely immoral practice, namely, “honor” killings. Historical “honor” codes selected for study are dueling, Atlantic slavery, and Chinese footbinding. The practice of dueling, for example, was 0193-3973/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2011.09.004
explicitly about honor, i.e., defending one's honor or respectability as a gentleman against an affront. Interestingly, the emergence of the honor code of the duel represented relative moral progress insofar as it replaced a prior culture “in which young men found their honor in unregulated affrays” (p. 189). And a kind of courage seemed to be reflected in the willingness to risk one's life to defend one's entitlement to respect, one's “honor.” On balance, however, the dueling honor code was clearly irrational and morally wrong. Doesn't it matter whether the accusation is true? If true, why not just apologize? If patently false, why dignify the affront with any response, let alone such a life-threatening one? Isn't it grossly out of proportion to risk one's own or another's life over a verbal taunt? Is it fair and sensible to leave to chance whether a deadly outcome befalls the culprit or the victim? Despite the cogency of moral arguments against dueling, dueling's immorality did not bring about its end. To understand how moral revolutions happen, Appiah suggests, we must probe more deeply into the social dynamics of cultural change in the honor code. Dueling was a status thing. In terms of its honor code, the duel was an affair that could properly take place only between “gentlemen.” In Britain, an accusation not from an aristocratic peer but from a man “of the lower orders” was to be met not with a challenge but with a lash from a horsewhip. The horsewhip was symbolic here. The distinction between knights and others in the feudal system was a distinction between those who fought on horseback and those who fought on foot. The horsewhip signified your status as a gentleman, as one who rode. (p. 184). More than the power of moral argument, the main galvanizing forces that ended dueling were an expanded and more democratic British community, the popular press, and, finally, ridicule. In the 1800s, the aristocracy was gradually losing “its central place in British public life” (p. 44). A rising middle class was amassing family fortunes and gaining centrality despite its disparagement by aristocrats as mere “trade.” As “base mechanical” tradesmen and industrial laborers began to consider engaging in dueling, the prestigious exclusivity of the duel, its “capacity to bring distinction,” was “exhausted” (p. 46). Despite some instances of dueling among them, the tradesmen generally saw the duel as “an unloved symbol of aristocratic privilege” (p. 47). Meanwhile, the popular press in the 1800s promoted a more democratic age, bringing “all the citizens of Britain into a single community of knowledge and evaluation” (p. 38). In this expanding sphere of influence, newspaper comments and cartoons as well as other publications began to lambast the duel, reframing it as “juvenile,” “ridiculous,” “barbarous,” and even “vulgar”—words of shame that were as effective against dueling as “clownish” and “foolish” can be against the pointless brawls of anger. The driving force of the moral revolution that finally ended dueling, then, was not moral argument so much as societal and cultural changes
78
Book review
that both mitigated its distinctive high-status exclusivity and mocked it as, really, a rather ridiculous thing to do. Appiah argues that essentially the same dynamics drove the end of footbinding in China as well as slavery across the Atlantic. In each case, dishonor or shame and ridicule in the context of an expanded sphere of social influence played a key role. These accounts are fascinating and well worth reading. Armed with his understanding of honor codes and how moral revolutions happen, Appiah suggests strategies for ending extant moral evils such as “honor” killings, so called “because they are seen by their perpetrators as ways of reestablishing the family's honor” (p. 146). His focus is on its practice in Pakistan, where thousands of women and girls are murdered each year by relatives. As Appiah notes, “change” from this horrific practice “is desperately needed” (p. 146). Fortunately, as Appiah describes, the moral revolution in Pakistan to rescue true honor from “honor” killings is already emerging. Appiah is optimistic that the revolution will continue and ultimately succeed, given that it is beginning to use strategies that were effective in past moral revolutions. If there was no honor in dueling, footbinding, or condoning slavery, there is certainly no honor in “honor” killings. The quotation marks indicate the invalid application of the term to such murders. One might refer to misguided or false honor in such cases, in much the same spirit as Moshman's (2011) conception of false moral identity. (In this connection, a major objection to a short-lived American Academy of Pediatrics proposal to substitute a harmless “ritual nick” for female genital mutilation—another “honor” code of gendered violence— was precisely that it would seem to retain the false frame of the practice as in principle respectable or honorable.) The correct reframing and rechanneling of the honor code make clear that the real way family honor is upheld and problems resolved does not entail murder or violence:
2004; Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985). An adolescent's “explosive behavior” can be reframed or relabeled “as a childish temper tantrum,” but the group leader should not directly ridicule the youth as a child (Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985, p. 24) or the group as a “bunch of babies.” Perhaps an insider—but definitely not an outsider—can engage to good effect in such direct personal ridicule. To his credit, Appiah does indicate that ridicule must be “carefully calculated” (p. 172) and entail a coalition of insiders and outsiders. Otherwise, even indigenous reformers can be hit with “a torrent of complaints” or worse (p. 152). I found this superb book to be refreshing, an inspiring break from skepticism regarding moral truth and objectivity, from the moral relativism so rampant these days in moral development literature. Typical are Haidt and Bjorklund's (2008) assertions that “moral facts are facts only with respect to a community of human beings that have created them” (p. 214), and are right if “endorsed by the great majority of its members, even those who appear, from the outside, to be its victims” (p. 216). (One wonders: does this perspective recognize real victims?) Instead, we read in this book of genuine moral progress, of fueling moral revolutions with reframed honor, of making honor “consistent with the great modern discovery: the fundamental equality, in the eyes of morality, of all human beings” (p. 127, emphasis added). Indeed, beyond Appiah's eudaimonist and communitarian position (see also Appiah, 2008), fundamental human equality arguably partakes of a deeper reality of “necessary” logical and mathematical truths (Gibbs, 2010). Accordingly, “moral” merits its place alongside “honor” in the book's title. Moral truths are in their own right “cogent” (p. 37), i.e., motivating; they just need a little help—crucial help—from a powerful prospective friend: honor.
In all the earlier revolutions, the motivating power of honor was channeled not challenged. The right way to proceed, it would seem, is not to argue against honor but to work to change the grounds of honor, to alter the codes by which it is allocated. . . . Changes in honor codes can reshape honor, mobilizing it in the service of the good. . . . Reforming honor is relevant, I believe, to every form of gendered violence; and, in particular, every society needs to sustain codes in which assaulting a woman—assaulting anyone—in your own family is a source of dishonor, a cause of shame. . . . . Keep reminding people, by all means, that honor killing is immoral, illegal, irrational, irreligious. . . . [After all,] the wrongness of such killings is essential to the explanation of why they are shameful; as were the wrongness of footbinding and slavery to the arguments that they were sources of Chinese and British shame. . . . But even the recognition of these truths [of moral right and wrong], I suspect, will not by itself align what people know with what people do. Honor killing will only perish when it is seen as dishonorable. (pp. 169–172)
Agee, V. (1979). Treatment of the violent incorrigible adolescent. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Appiah, K. A. (2008). Experiments in ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DiBiase, A.-M., Gibbs, J. C., Potter, G. B., & Blount, M. (in press). Teaching adolescents to think and act responsibly: The EQUIP approach. Champaign, IL: Research Press. Feindler, E. L., & Ecton, R. B. (1986). Adolescent anger control: Cognitive-behavioral techniques. New York: Pergamon. Gibbs, J. C. (2010). Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn & Bacon. Gibbs, J. C., Potter, G. B., DiBiase, A. -M., & Devlin, R. S. (2009). In B. Glick (Ed.), The EQUIP Program: Social perspective-taking for responsible thought and behavior. Cognitive behavioral interventions for at-risk youth, 2. Kingston, NJ: Civic Research Institute (pp. 9-1--9-47). Gibbs, J. C., Potter, G., & Goldstein, A. P. (1995). The EQUIP program: Teaching youth to think and act responsibly through a peer-helping approach. Champaign, IL: Research Press. Haidt, J., & Bjorklund, F. (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology. The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity, 2. (pp. 181–218) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Moshman, D. (2011). Adolescent rationality and development: Cognition, morality, and identity (3 rd ed.). New York: Psychology Press. Samenow, S. E. (2004). Inside the criminal mind (rev. ed.). New York: Random House. Vorrath, H. H., & Brendtro, L. K. (1985). Positive peer culture (2nd ed). New York: Aldine.
Caution is advisable, however, for anyone heeding Appiah's endorsement of ridicule as “among the tools we need” (p. 172) against gendered violence. Consider whether shaming to the extent of ridicule is effective in anger management and related programs, where the group leader's comments may be tantamount to a semi-outsider's evaluations (Vorrath & Brendtro, 1985). It is true that a group leader's confrontations must be blunt (Agee, 1979). Also true, however, is that the confronter must remain generally respectful and caring (Samenow,
References
John C. Gibbs Department of Psychology, 1983 Neil Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA E-mail address: [email protected] 26 September 2011