Why Honor Matters

by Tamler Sommers

A controversial call to put honor at the center of morality
To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself. Sommers shows how honor can help us address some of society's most challenging problems, including education, policing, and mass incarceration. Counterintuitive and provocative, Why Honor Matters makes a convincing case for honor as a cornerstone of our modern society.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Politics, Sociology, Cultural, Audiobook

272 pages, Hardcover

Published May 8, 2018

Reviews

[Xavier Shay · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most fascinating book I've read this year. Literally thought provoking. Contrasts traditional western liberal philosophic ethic, which he labels "dignity", with the much maligned/ignored ethic of "honor". Argues that we should reintroduce "constrained" forms of the honor ethic to various domains. The author is acutely aware of the large potential issues with unconstrained honor systems - excessive retribution, subjugation/killing of women - and so throughout is very careful to keep this foremost in the discussion and to emphasize that the "constrained" modifier is critical. Overall, he's looking to see how we could turn the dial towards honor, rather than flip the switch: "Well-contained honor-oriented approaches may have inherent defects, yet still be morally preferable by a mile to systematic and idealized approaches that could achieve perfection “in principle.” The old saying “Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good” is worth taking very seriously here. If we allow honor to work its magic, while limiting its excesses, we can make actual rather than theoretical progress."

Gave me a richer understanding of some issues I've wrestled with:

* Singer's argument (that basically underpins much ethical altruism) that there isn't a moral difference between saving the life of a drowning child, and saving the life of a starving one half way around the world, has never resonated with me emotionally despite intellectually trying to support it. This dissonance has been ... uncomfortable. Sommers identifies this kind of issue as a fundamental lack: "Dignity can’t support “us against the world” because it sees no division between “us” and the “world.” Dignity’s slogan is “We are the world”—which sounds nice in principle but can be isolating in practice. Individuals can truly belong to a family, sports team, gang, class, or school group. But the “human family”? It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to feel connected to something as massive as all of humanity except in the most abstract and metaphorical manner."

* Is violence ever acceptable? When? (ref "nazi punching" from earlier this year.)
"It may sound paradoxical, but today we place too much value on our own lives. Threats to physical safety, no matter how infinitesimal, have come to trump all other concerns, moral and otherwise. This obsession with risk is antithetical to honor, which places supreme importance on courage and being faithful to your group’s principles." ... [later] "Excessive aversion to violence has produced ineffective zero-tolerance policies, the school-to-prison pipeline, a massive police state, and the largest prison system in human history." "Dignity doesn’t have much to recommend for the oppressed. Dignity is passive; it tells us to respect others and not to violate their rights. Okay, but how should we respond when our rights are violated? On that question, dignity is silent, and honor has a lot to say. Honor says, “You should be prepared to fight and even to die to preserve your self-respect and the respect of others in your group.”"
He forwards an idea that I haven't fully processed that conflict is _actually necessary_ of a connected society: "conflicts—both violent and nonviolent—are important for maintaining relationships in an increasingly segmented society. Conflicts provide opportunities for active participation and engagement with other human beings. They reconnect us with others, allowing individuals and communities to discover who they are, what they’re made of, what they believe and feel. Honor-based conflict without insults leads to greater cooperation. As Nils Christie puts it, “Conflicts might kill, but too little of them might paralyze.” It’s impossible to completely eliminate violence without also reducing productive community-building conflict."

* Particularly relevant now that I don't have a full time job: what activities should I be pursuing and how? In particular, thinking through "connectedness" from the honor perspective was interesting for me.

It also introduced me to a critique of the US justice system, in particular around the idea that having the state handle justice without any regards for victims is a big problem:
"Defenders of the status quo often assume that punishing wrongdoers automatically restores the self-respect of victims by sending a message to the offender that the victim is a person whose rights cannot be violated. But this is a rationalist fantasy with no basis in real human psychology."
... and provides an overview of a proposed solution of "restorative justice" that involves the victims:
"The results of a recent Canadian survey indicate that 89 percent of violent crime victims wanted to meet the offenders. Even in what seems like the most problematic type of crime—sexual assault—victims report positive effects from meeting with offenders. Victims who participated in restorative conferences showed a decrease in PTSD symptoms. Survivors reported that the “experience was empowering rather than traumatizing.” In another recent study, 70 percent of rape survivors reported that they would welcome the opportunity for victims to be able to meet with their offenders in conference settings." "We cede the role of punisher to the state in large part to prevent victim retaliation and vigilantism. But we don’t do this for reasons involving justice. We do it for practical reasons—to prevent escalating feuds and to limit collateral damage."

I particularly liked this chapter: providing practical examples of how reintroducing some ethic on honor could actually make a difference, grounded in actual examples, while constraining it to mitigate downsides. I was worried about potential issues of discrimination, but then so is the author: "At this stage, the worries about racial bias are purely speculative. Restorative justice is a recent movement, and more empirical work needs to be done to gauge the effects of racial bias on restorative processes. But given the systematic and structural biases that infect our current disciplinary practices, it would be difficult for restorative justice to fare any worse." (The author also provides example of dramatic decreases in gun violence from approaches founded on a constrained honor ethic.)

At the times I don't feel that the author did a great job of "re-express[ing] your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way." when talking about dignity ... but given how familiar I (and presumably you, given how pervasive it is) are already with the concept I was able to read through it. I'm sure that better critiques of this book exist than the author presents, but that doesn't detract from the book. It's given me fuel for thought, not a stone tablet.

Like the "The Righteous Mind", this book has given me new ideas to help understand and interpret the world. Highly recommended.

[Bakunin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norms have become the focus of my attention lately as I have been reading about culture and how one regulates human behavior. In the contemporary political parlance norms are seen as a hindrance to the freedom of the individual. I therefore welcome this book by an associate professor at the University of Houston. How can one bring up such an outdated concept as honor in hope of defending it?

It is perhaps easiest to start the discussion of this book with two different ways of viewing human behavior in society. The WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic) societies have a dignity-based view of society. “The individual can only discover his true identity by emancipating himself from his socially enclosed roles – the latter are only masks, entangling him in illusion, alienation, and bad faith” (p.26) Sommers then goes on to say that “[by] rejecting the primacy of social structures both formal and informal, dignity offers more freedom – indeed unlimited freedom – for individuals to determine their own values and identities.” (p. 28)
This sounds lofty and well but with it comes certain problems such as personal accountability, risk-aversion and a growing lack of community. What happens when an individual crosses a norms and boundaries? How are we as a society supposed to handle such transgressions? There are no formal rules to handle such indecent behavior and indeed often dignity based cultures tend to avoid conflict at every cost possible. We try to avoid conflicts until they become unbearable. One example is how the media handled the attack on the Charlie Hebdo cartoons; they didn’t dare print the religious caricatures which had offended the islamists who had perpetrated the attack. They made no real attempt to defend the freedom of speech which is the foundation of a free society. And why would they? Would you want to risk your life for the greater good?

Compare this scenario with how one handles conflicts in an honor based society. “Conflicts […] are opportunities for “norm clarification.” […] Conflicts can illuminate the presence of norms that were previously unknown, unarticulated or even undetermined. Resolution rituals allow communities to explore normative commitments and expectations in a lively, active way.” (p. 92) In order to garner the respect of one’s environment one needs to stand up for oneself. Otherwise one will face high social cost and risk being called a coward.
I have had a somewhat ambivalent relationship to these kinds of communities. Having worked in sales for a couple of years I can very easily relate to how individuals purposefully put themselves into a hierarchy and compete amongst them to earn maximal respect. Sommers describes two types of honor: horizontal – “that [honor is] distributed equally to all group members. Another is that it is not tied to a specific action or achievement” (p.18) and vertical which involves members of a group competing for honor through action.

Questions of honor also provide an interesting solution to the question of free will. Having practically read all of Sam Harris books one is bound to come out on the hard determinist side of the issue. This has however led me to other questions such as: how do we handle criminals given that they have no free will? Is it ethically viable to punish someone given that they had no control over their actions? Societies which revolve around honor view this as a non-question. “Indeed, many regard it as shameful to make excuses by appealing to a lack of control. In honor cultures, taking responsibility is a bedrock moral principle” You are presumed to have control over your actions and therefore you are more careful with how you act in public. This provides boundaries to human behavior.

Although Sommers doesn’t go into detail on the subject he also discusses the idea of retributive justice (which is integral to understanding the notion of honor). This reminded me of the Austrian economist Murray Rothbards discussion of the same issue which can be summarized as the ancient concept of a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye. This may seem odd to modern day people who are accustomed to an impartial view of justice where a punishment is supposed to be determined in an ‘objective’ way by a judge. If you however view all law as basically being civil law then it would make sense for individuals to base their punishment on par with the injury. “Let the punishment fit the crime” as they say. This evaluation of a punishment does not make it more arbitrary however as the punishment has to be accepted by the community at large. This provides a framework in which justice can be served.

I found this book to be written in a conversational way with a lot of references to both high and low culture. Sommers manages to provide an overall philosophical defense of honor and in doing so makes us think more about the machinations of our modern society. I would recommend it to anyone interested in psychology and gang behavior.

[Paul C. Stalder · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book.

In this book, Sommers has provided a well-reasoned, and compelling argument for a revitalization of honor within our society. While it is not without its flaws, I found myself tearing through the pages of this work, compelled to find the next argument. Sommers has a way of writing which takes complex ideas, and molds them into digestible tidbits even the most simple of us can understand.

With all that said, I found parts of this book quite unconvincing. Sommers had a tendency to brush off the more unpleasant aspects of honor cultures, focused primarily on the masculine aspects, and offered rather scant examples of how individuals who don't find themselves prowling the streets in gangs can push honor back into the limelight. These shortcomings, however, did not diminish my overall sentiment towards to the book, nor will they stop me from recommending it friends and family alike.

Well-done, Tamler. I look forward to the next.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking but somewhat under-delivering 3.75/5. Or unrealistic expectations on my part. One of these two.

Single-lense views often fail to deliver anything more than their own validation. This book is more than that, and worth the time, for the number of questions it poses (or reopens) to a receptive reader. Only if I could figure out what exactly it proposes we do, and how.

The coverage was not diversified: too much stress on the justice part of the analysis, and too much cheering on (honor). Some of the items mentioned in the first part of the book weren't developed much or at all, and those I would have found way more interesting, like the impacts of the culture of dignity/lack of principles of honor on our social, mental and emotional well-being.

The argument for replacing the current justice system with a community and honor based restorative justice approach is probably the strongest one here. There were also good points around the positive sides of honor based morality (with bad ones brushed away a bit too lightly, imo - it is not obvious that we should consider something seriously without first dealing with its negative aspects, especially if they are not insignificant). And it all seems a bit male-centered, maybe justifiably so (nothing wrong with that), but it was made implicit rather than explicit and hence some complaints on that front.

Possibly most of all, this book made me think about some of the prescriptions that have made Jordan Peterson so (in)famous and (un)popular. Things like "Don't be a harmless rabbit, rabbits are not virtuous, they're useless. Be dangerous, a monster, and decide not to use your power - now, that's morality." Mr Sommers seems to be conveying the same principle. Some people might not like it, some might not get it, some might be eager to hear more.

In the end, my pessimistic take is that this is one more item on the list of things considered essential and acceptable to only one side of the splintering Western mind.

[Blake Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

New Years resolution: be more honourable

[David Gross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tamler Sommers, a professor of philosophy who specializes in ethical philosophy and the conundrum of free will, has written a book defending “honor” as a way for cultures to regulate justice and other ethical matters.

The book is strangely defensive about its thesis, and seems to go out of its way to depict honor and “honor cultures” in unflattering ways (Mafia made men, pugnacious Boston sports fans, hockey en­for­cers, and inner-city gangs are among the exemplars Sommers chooses). So you have to work to learn to love honor the way Sommers loves it.

The way Sommers sees it, honor fills a gap in modern Western ethical philosophy. The “WEIRD” minority of humanity (“western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic”) have adopted an abstract, impartial, unemotional ideal of ethical evaluation and of the administration of justice that is foreign to most of humanity and doesn’t really harmonize well with human experience. (Sommers gives these the sobriquet of “dignity”-based in contrast to “honor”-based systems.)

One advantage to honor-based systems is that they have a built-in motivator for people to behave virtuously. Instead of offering people an abstract ethical system and reasons they should live up to it, honor-based systems offer people status and prestige: “They have rituals and traditions for bringing people together, for celebrating exceptional people and behavior, and for holding people accountable.”

There are a couple of varieties of honor: horizontal honor, which you gain (and must uphold) simply by being a member of a particular honor-based culture; and vertical honor, which you earn (or lose) by your deeds. This is also in contrast to dignity-based cultures in which everyone is supposed to have an equal worth without distinction.

In a dignity model, people discover themselves by factoring out all of their social roles to find the essential person underneath. In the honor model, people use their role and how they uphold their responsibility to it as core parts of their identity.

This reminded me of Alasdair MacIntyre’s descriptions of “heroic” societies in After Virtue. As I summarized when I reviewed that book:

In these societies, everyone had a role and a purpose just by virtue of being born into a particular station in a particular society with relations to particular people. Nobody is defined by their “hidden depths” or their inner lives, but by their actions relative to their roles; a person is what a person does. Morality and social structure are the same thing; there isn’t even a concept of morality as distinct from, independent of, or superior to the particular social structure. You can’t “step outside” your society and judge its moral system in comparison to some other system.… Virtue is what enables you to fulfill the role you have… the hero does not assert his arbitrary will, but accepts his role as being a real thing worthy of respect; the self is not self-created but is an incarnation or enacting of a socially-defined role.

Dignity is your “human right,” allegedly, while honor is more fragile. You may have to regularly defend your honor against threats and insults. But this may make honor more worthwhile. Sommers compares dignity to a “participation trophy” and honor to the real thing.

One symptom of the decline of honor culture is a heightened concern for personal safety and more risk aversion. We value our lives more than our honor, and so become increasingly cowardly. Sommers ridicules our insistence on wearing bicycle helmets, for instance, along with the usual helicopter parents and such.

Another symptom is isolation, hyperindividualism, lack of community, and our descent into a sort of Ayn Randian, contractarian abyss in which all of our intercourse is temporary and contingent on mutual gain, with no cooperation in the service of something bigger than ourselves.

In contrast, the better social cohesion of honor societies leads to better mental health (people need belonging) and lower crime rates (potential lawbreakers are deterred by social norms, or by fear of shaming themselves or their families).

There is also greater personal accountability (in honor cultures, people take responsibility for their actions whether or not they accept blame for them). Dignity-based cultures like ours, by contrast, are increasingly shameless. We have an attenuated sense of blameworthiness and so a large-scale refusal to take responsibility.

I found myself wondering about a different sort of honor that didn’t seem to match what Sommers was talking about. The honor Sommers describes is very much the product of “honor cultures” — it is defined by and enforced by these cultures, and the motive to become honorable is the external rewards of esteem and of material goods (a greater portion of the spoils in battle, for instance). But I’m also used to hearing about a different sort of honor, one that is more internally-regulated, and that is its own reward. People who do the right thing even when nobody else is watching: that sort of honor. I didn’t see much of that in Sommers’s book, and I wish I had.

But to continue with a review of the book I read and not of the one I wished I’d read… Sommers turns to questions of justice. In the modern liberal justice system (“dignity”-based), the people who are most involved in resolving a dispute (lawyers, judges, and the like) are those with little personal involvement in it. Those with the most skin in the game (defendants, witnesses, victims) are given minor supporting roles at best. Because of this, people who go through this process tend not to feel like things have really been resolved satisfactorily. The law has been followed (more-or-less), but there’s little sense that justice has been done or that the conflict has been resolved.

The system even denies victimhood to the victim of a violent crime, saying that the case is between the offender and “the People” or “the State.” The victim’s desires, whether they be for revenge or for forgiveness, don’t count. Emotion, the feeling of being wronged, being victimized, being treated unjustly, is deliberately excluded from the deliberations. This is although emotions like these are key to why we consider something to be a criminal offense in the first place. In their place, the system has erected a sort of post-hoc scaffolding of rational-sounding, measured, consistent rules, but this both masks the ultimately irrational foundations for the rules and prevents them from operating in a way that brings catharsis to these emotions.

Honor societies, on the other hand, make no pretense of creating an objective system that treats all crimes the same and focuses on the blameworthiness of the offender without getting distracted by the feelings of the victim. Instead, their processes are victim-centered, emotionally validating, and seek a cathartic resolution that restores balance in the society. They more authentically reflect human psychology about justice. (This reminded me of James C. Scott’s studies of the ways cultures have self-organized complex systems of regulating commons without resorting to the use of governments.)

Sommers puts in a plug for the restorative justice movement in the United States as one way of rectifying this. I’ve been participating on a small scale with a local restorative justice group and I like what I see so far, but I haven’t seen much. Our official justice system is such a travesty that experimenting with promising alternatives seems like a good idea.

Sommers also looks at some of the downsides of honor-based cultures (vendettas and feuds, honor being used to enforce or resist the reforming of reprehensible practices, higher levels of aggression and violence (though he notes that “dignity”-based cultures can have more official violence and repression that makes them only superficially less-violent). He suggests some ways to mitigate these problems, such as the cultivation of trusted mediators to dampen the escalation of violence in honor-prompted feedback loops.

Alas, I went into this book eager to agree with my vague idea of what its thesis would be, but left it not feeling very sympathetic or better-informed. I still think there’s probably something to this, I just didn’t find it here.

See also:

* The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah
* The Moral Equivalent of War by William James

[Nick Geiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thoughtful and intelligent defense of honor that's also intellectually honest about its dangers. It makes the case for a greater role for honor in public life (the restorative justice movement in criminal justice, for example). It argues, persuasively in some places, that neglect of honor has unappreciated costs such as intolerance for risk and diminished personal accountability. There is an important intellectual and cultural project here to recover the elements of "honor cultures" worth affirming in modern liberal societies.

The book is organized around a conceptual distinction between honor and dignity. However, I found parts of the discussion and criticisms of dignity to be in error. For example, one criticism of dignity is that because dignity can't be lost, dignity cultures do not motivate people to reaffirm their dignity in response to violations. By contrast, honor is contingent and fragile on the recognition of others and motivates people to have their honor affirmed (36). This criticism however only applies to particular theories of dignity such as the Stoic's where universal dignity entails that your external circumstances have no moral significance. It doesn't apply to views that make a distinction between having dignity and having one's dignity recognized in the right way. For example, Joel Feinberg writes in a classic essay on moral rights that rights distinctively give us standing to "look each other in the eye." Sommers never shows to my satisfaction that we don't have an interest in others /recognizing/ our dignity and that this desire for recognition couldn't be part of a plausible moral psychology.

There is a greater role for dignity in the book's defense of honor than I think the author lets on. Honor is personal--it is hostile to third-party involvement in the resolution of disputes. This feature makes honor motivationally potent. However, honor also depends on social norms and expectations. This means that disputes created by honor are potentially disputes about norms themselves and opportunities for a community to clarify, reaffirm, or revise what the norms are. But this task requires taking a comparatively impartial, non-personal point of view. The point here is that there is a tension within a community between a personal desire for honor and a comparatively impartial perspective for the social group. If impartiality comes in degrees, the question is when to take a comparatively more "moral" point of view, from which we consider each person as possessing equal dignity? The point here is that impartiality is already part of honor cultures and plays an important role in regulating the pursuit of honor. This suggests that we might assess about honor norms themselves in terms of whether they respect equal dignity.

I don't think Sommers would disagree with any of this, but I think it makes salient how honor is less of a departure from universal dignity. Honor has both a first-personal and a third-personal dimension, and the third-personal perspective pushes us to assess honor norms in terms of concepts like dignity. So while we perhaps need to embrace the particularistic and first-personal dimensions of honor, dignity plays a significant background role in assessing honor norms.

[Writer's Relief · Rating 5 out of 5]

Focusing on both the history and current perception of honor, Tamler Sommers examines the ideas surrounding both ancient and modern-day honor cultures via a lens that is equal parts pop culture-laden, humor-packed, skeptical, and scholarly. The end result for the philosopher is that honor, duty, and even expectation are all keystones to a functional, modern society. That is, if they can be implemented without hate and fear.

Sommers takes a potentially heavy, difficult subject and makes it a very brisk and entertaining read. Covering everything from honor killings in Eastern cultures to THE GODFATHER and hip-hop culture, WHY HONOR MATTERS makes a convincing case for repairing this age-old reactionary style of community management. In short, preserving the family at any cost once meant preserving society, but that focus is currently far too narrow to help contemporary communities. Thus, the book argues that we must broaden the application of honor and put it to use on a larger scope with more modern sensibilities. Sommers achieves this by explicating the intent and purpose behind various duties, while explaining their limitations in the circumstances that generated them.

Tamler Sommers, a specialist in the fields of Ethics and Free Will, is a Professor of Philosophy at the Univeristy of Houston and host of the far less scholarly podcast VERY BAD WIZARDS. WHY HONOR MATTERS is his third book. His focus on ethics and the ability to uphold (or discard) them is what makes his perspective on the archaic idea of societal duty so interesting, and he maintains a sense of humor and timeliness throughout.

Despite some of the harsher subject matter covered, Tamler Sommers’s WHY HONOR MATTERS seeks to discover the true purpose and intent behind being honorable. Sometimes, this requires discussing and dissecting violent, often sexist, brutal, and callous action and explaining how those pitfalls may be avoided without discarding the honor society altogether. That, coupled with Sommers’s wit and ability to explain, is what makes this book worthwhile.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a nice line in Adam Grant's book 'Think Again', where he says the point of learning isn't to re-enforce our beliefs, but to evolve them. 'Why Honor Matters' by Tamler Sommers probably won't evolve my beliefs too much, but reading it was a genuine learning experience.

Sommers is an academic philosopher with a particular interest in the way society deals with crime. Our current approach, he rightly argues makes no sense. Not only is it deeply unfair to minorities, extremely punitive, and unable to prevent further crime, it goes against our basic human nature. It strips the victim from the equation, forcing an impersonal 'state' and a justice system that seeks 'consistency' in punishments above all else. Hence the spiral towards ever longer punishments, while victims feel ignored, left to forever be victims and so unable to move on.

What's missing from this picture Sommers argues, is honor. Most crime is not against the state, it is against a specific person. Both individuals, and their moral communities. We have depersonalised crime, and are now surprised that 'justice' seems to work for neither side. We have forgotten the human element.

Honor Societies (which may in fact be the most common way human society is organised) offer a different way of thinking about organizing society compared to what we in the liberal west know well. These societies establish strong standards of behaviour that bind members to their code. They offer a sense of identity and security which ensures far lower rates of depression or mental health issues than in the west. And when working well, they can offer outlets for the base but real elements of human nature - such as anger or revenge - while also reigning in the excesses that we too often see or have to work so hard against.

Sommers know's he's up against a tough crowd. The kind of person in the west who reads academic texts on ethics probably isn't comfortable with a discussion of why standing up for a fight can be a deep demonstration of character. And to be honest, the way Sommers makes the case isn't always that persuasive. He's at once quick to recognise the limits and counter-arguments, but often seems stuck in a tautological loop. Where the 'honor code' that helps break a cycle of ill-behaviour, is needed first and foremost because that same honor code took some small act and made it into a far larger issue of honor that escalated.

One element I was surprised by was Sommer's focus only on honor as a social construct. Obviously, if you're looking to change laws and society that's the logical foundation. But when I think of honor, I begin with honorable individuals. They were products of their society, but not merely derivative of them either. Take a George Washington or a Friedrich Nietzsche. They had standards which many around them could not match, and this is what made them stand out and live lives we venerate. There has been a revival in recent years of Stoicism, in part because it establishes internal standards for honorable living. One that accepts the world around you is fallen, and does not require or expect society to operate within those codes. Indeed, Stoics see their approach as all the more important because the drive for character comes from within, despite the contradictory pressures from without.

As this review suggests, I am still not entirely sure what I take away from this book. I found Sommer compelling when he argues that liberal notions of 'dignity' sit at odds with how humans actually function. Dignity theories do not reflect real people, and require vast and often extremely harmful and distorting states to enforce. Many liberal ideas are the ultimate square peg for our decidedly round shapes, and can't even begin to understand the pressure release valves which imperfect human society needs. He's also right that many of us feel called to the kinds of attachments which honor societies excel at. The contrast between Sommer's love of Boston sports and Adam Grant's genuine confusion at why people are fans of professional sports teams is stark and amusing. FWIW I'm with Sommers here.

Yet, at the same time, I've lived much of my life and grounded my intellectual and moral character on the notion that society should not be able to bind or control my judgement. That I can and sometimes must stand apart from society, and feel no loss if such a distinction occurs. That I am not 'honor-bound' to respond in predefined ways. I may do so ultimately, but it's not society judgement. It's mine. Nor do I think the kind of societies Sommer's highlights reflect the kind of societies I wish to live in. As sociologists have noted, Honor society norms tended to emerge in more precarious forms of life - the shepherds for whom one robbery could cause a family's starvation. The street kids who need each other to simply survive the night. Who have nothing but their status to hold onto. Can developed, prosperous, secure societies revitalize and bind in Honor codes of significance? I genuinely don't know.

So maybe my views have evolved. They certainly haven't been re-enforced. That seems a learning experience well worth honoring.

[Jukka Aakula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly the most interesting book this year. First time for years I read a book by a philosopher which I really enjoyed.

The reason was certainly partly because Sommers had really studied the subject also from outside the philosophy science:

1. The anthropology of honor cultures like the Pashtu or the Albanian high lands.
2. The evolutionary science of co-operation.
3. The social policy trials in the inner cities of US.
4. The US legal system.

Book discusses honor - instead of human rights, dignity etc. - as a basis for moral behavior. It is a kind of critique of the liberal/enlightenment view where the

a) morality is based on universal values and rationality/utilitarianism instead of particular communal local honor based norms/values
b) justice is based on blind impersonal justice with an emphasis on equal level of punishment on same crime - instead of honor based personal justice based e.g. on revenge and face-to-face reconciliation with help of trusted older community members.

It may sound radical or reactionary but Sommers is not proposing a black-and-white approach. Instead, he takes certain problems in the US and Western societies as a starting point and discusses whether we could learn something from the honor based cultures to find methods for solving those problems.

One concrete problem is the high crime/homicide rate of the inner city America. He concretely shows through some social policy trials by Non-Government Organisations how the violence rate was decreased by something like 25%-60% by instead of zero-tolerance concentrate on decreasing violence by trying to increase reconciliation with help of respected community members and decrease revenge as methods to solve problems. Kind of accept the honor based systems with revenge-based justice but reform them in a way that decreases violence in local conflicts.

In honor based cultures you are supposed to solve your conflicts without help from the state - based e.g. on revenge and based on the local traditional law systems like the Pastuan Pasthtunwali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtun.... Sommers discusses the main problems of the honor based systems openly:

1. the content of honor norms may in principle be whatever - e.g. support plainly immoral behavior and non-respect for human rights.
2. if justice is based mainly on revenge, the system may escalate violence out of control.

So it is certainly nor black-and-white.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been listening to the author’s (a philosopher focused on ethics of moral responsibility) podcast, Very Bad Wizards (co-hosted with psychology professor Dave Pizarro), for a couple of months, and I’d heard the book mentioned on a couple of older episodes, so I thought I’d check it out. I didn’t come in with much background on the anthropology or similar of honor vs. dignity cultures, but this was a nice summary. I don’t agree with all of Sommers’s conclusions—about revenge, for instance—but his arguments are definitely thought-provoking, and I do agree that our modern society is too atomized and hyper-individualistic, so I think some elements of what he mentions could be beneficial (I think my personal philosophical outlook is sort of a mix of the dignity and honor perspectives). Also, I think Sommers spends a bit too much of the book trying to make *really* sure readers know he doesn’t agree with the more problematic aspects of honor culture, such as honor killings. I feel like he should have just been able to make such points once and leave it at that, but maybe he couldn’t, given the hyper-sensitivity of some elements of our culture to the slightest hint of anything remotely connected in the popular estimation with sexism, racism, etc. It’s a shame he felt the need to defend himself so strenuously, as it nade his arguments a bit less believable—he talked so much about the bad parts of honor that he doesn’t believe in, somewhat at the expense of exploring in enough depth the good and beneficial parts of honor that he does believe in. Overall a pretty good book, though the author does stumble quite a bit with the audiobook narration. This might be off-putting to some, but since I’m used to listening to him talk on his podcast (and he has mentioned a couple of times there how he struggled with some of the narration) I was expecting it and mostly thought it gave the recording character and a personal touch.

[Tariq · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book didn’t live for very long on my virtual 'to-read' bookshelf, and after reading this I can confirm it was for good reason.

'Why Honor Matters' stuck out to me for the simple implied reasoning that currently, in Western Culture at least, the virtue of Honor seems to have taken a backseat in this current era. This isn't anything controversial either, who can really argue against it? But knowing this wasn't enough, this book seemed to state this fact and teasingly offered a counter argument as to why Honor is indeed important and how we in can benefit from it. Sommers touches on Honor within the concepts of Justice, Revenge, Aggression and more, and his findings were not always what we may often assume.

The book introduced the paradigm between the two competing systems of society in the Western World. One is Honor based, while the other is Dignity based. Currently we live in a society founded on the philosophical principles of Dignity. The difference between the two is that a Dignity based culture promotes the understanding that every individual has an innate sense of Dignity that none can remove from him and that it is not necessarily decreased due to any of his actions. Honor cultures mainly understand the concept in a different way, it can further be defined into Vertical and Horizontal Honor. Horizontal Honor means a person has Honor for being a part of a somewhat exclusive group; examples given are fans of a sports team or even the Mafia! Vertical Honor is when a person is able to increase the level of Honor afforded to him (within a group)and recognised by others due to individual acts he or she may do that are valued by members of the same Honor group. Honor is not something that lives in an individualistic society, it is communal and can only exist in a communal society.

That brings me to another interesting point, according to Sommers, Honor is almost impossible to define, almost no one has done it, and for those who have tried, there are many who disagree. Sommers makes another interesting point in that while there are many positive aspects to Honor, we can take it to extremes and it can result in generations long feuds, deadly, oppressive violence and more. However this is not what Honor cultures themselves often call for. Though the age old 'Eye for an Eye' law is often quoted as ‘making the whole world blind’, we must give attention and understanding to the constraint taught within. Note how it does not teach its adherents to exceed beyond a level of retribution in a like for like manner, nothing more! Even so, we must look at the virtue of Honor in a constrained sense as anything unrestricted could lead to extreme implementations.

An example of such constrained Honor would be examples of limited, sanctioned violence and aggression which ultimately lead to healthy outlets. Consider both a traditional 'Rap Battle' and an NHL Hockey game. In both scenarios, a level of aggression is encouraged in small amounts and acts as an expression of art, or in the case of hockey, resilience and teamwork. In both cases, the sanctioned outlet of aggression contributes to the art/game as a whole and may even serve as a bonding experience between feuding parties. Controlled outlets of aggression also serve the purpose of releasing anger in a careful, moderated manner, and who can deny that sometimes releasing anger is better than letting it in and letting it fester? How many feuds and injustices have been committed by letting anger fester and build up? Sometimes a non violent, completely pacifist approach might not be the best or healthiest way to resolve a situation. Perhaps it is not a question of banning violence and aggression, but controlling it. Sommers believes that this speaks volumes when it comes to the subject of the ‘school to prison pipeline’ in many Inner City American communities. Zero tolerance for aggression sounds good in principle but doesn’t work well in reality, that will lead to another point in a moment.

Throughout the book I learnt much of the contrast between the aforementioned Dignity and Honor based approaches. It was remarkably interesting to understand how much of current Western Civilisation is built upon liberal principles, everything from the laws we live under and the punishments given to criminals, everything is ultimately decided by principles of ethics and its development within a philosophical framework. The fact that I was able to gain an insight into this at all has opened my eyes up to a whole new world of understanding, and for that reason alone I enjoyed this book very much – isn’t that one of the main points of a book at all?
For example, punishments meted out to prisoners in a Dignity based culture (intertwined with liberalism) understand that the punishment is usually between the Criminal and the State, the real life victim is almost excluded from the process in some situations. the prisoner is punished for the greater good of society, essentially a future looking based approach. In Honor cultures however, the victim is often very much involved in the justice process and third party interference is kept to a minimum. The criminal is punished according to his crime (i.e. his past action) and the victim feels a personal connection to the resolution of the case. Many people feel this to be more just and this has been adapted in America and some European countries under an approach known as restorative justice with much success.

Keeping in mind that I don’t wish to get carried away and explain the whole book, I'll try to keep it short from here on out!

Coming back to a point I mentioned earlier, I also learnt from this book that while many of the moral foundational principles which Liberalism is built upon sound almost perfect in theory, we aren’t necessarily seeing the results in real life that we might expect. Sommers understands this as being because they simply are too good to be true. In theory, the values of individualism, liberalism and Dignity based approaches to society are intertwined and work to reinforce one another. Humans live in peace with no conflict, and the State, an abstract entity, is the ultimate arbiter and defender of the people. In the real world however, the ideal society does not exist, humans are complicated and messy, and Honor is an (as previously discussed) undefinable virtue which does well to glue people together by nature of its undefinable but cohesive approach. Honor is personal, Honor is collective, Honor makes people feel involved and gives people a reason to commit heroic acts for people who can never benefit them. As Sommers mentions, in some situations Dignity is silent when Honor has a lot to say.

Ultimately I learnt so much from this book and it answered a lot of questions I had about Honor and its role in society. I tend to agree with the conclusions of the Author in that while the principles of Liberalism may seem to be well thought out, humans are just too complex to fit the mould of a utopian society. Some oppress others, some exceed bounds and some feel that impersonal renditions of justice are not justice at all. Honor addresses these irks and promises an understanding society where people can live together under common norms in harmony, we just have to be careful not to let it run amok. Principles from an Honor based approach such as initiatives involving restorative justices seem to be gaining in popularity and this bodes well for the future of incorporating the best of both worlds into society.

I have no doubt that I have much more to read on the topic, but this book has been outstanding in opening the door onto the subject for me.

Incredible read, I highly recommend it!

[Salpi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intuitively on point yet logically scattered.

The book starts by promising to give a framework of how honor would function in today’s world and in the western society but it never truly delivers.

Inspection of the concept is weak. Gender and power asymmetry is barely touched upon despite it being a major axis of the topic. Another crucial point, optics. Honor is and has been a currency in many ways. Particularly in collectivist cultures.

One paragraph from the book states ‘we created a society with high depression rates’ but may I ask as opposed to which society??? Which other society cared about well-being and had the means to actually measure the level of depression. It’s easy to condemn the Western society when the alternative is a world that never existed in the first place.

-what i liked-

I liked the critique of the legal system, i also think the point on violence and sterilising the society and individuals is quite accurate, although i’m not sure it’s related to honor.

I agree with the aggression to containment pipeline. I believe it works from a psychological perspective as well.

Finally, I thorougly enjoyed the first paragraph of the 7th chapter because courage and honor are less endorsed values which counter-intuitively does lead to more freedom on a personal level. Unfortunately, rest of the chapter didn’t give me much.

I would have enjoyed to see a deeper inspection of the topic and how it would -really- work in our modern, individualist and western world.

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deeply uninteresting. I agree and I'm sensitive to his view about Western societies, and how risk averse we all became. But instead of exploring this thesis with arguments, examples and similar, he spends considerable time excusing himself from his view ("I-I'm not a conservative!") or going nowhere, talking about bicycle helmets and Syrian refugees. Don't expect to read analysis about samurai honour bond suicide.

[Pat Hearps · Rating 2 out of 5]

Does make a good argument for changing how to deal with extreme ends of the justice system, but I didn't find any convincing arguments for what/how to practically apply his honor system beyond these examples. Other examples like ice hockey convinced me more that I didn't agree with his proposition.

[Filip · Rating 4 out of 5]

A personal disclaimer first. Sommers's "Why Honor Matters" belongs to a genre of books that I tend to enjoy inordinately: giving a spirited defense of an idea that is unpopular or unfashionable. The joy is magnified when the author is going against the grain of his political "tribe", as Sommers does in defending the notion of honor, while himself being a left-wing US liberal (Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, would also be a similar example). Even if the argument doesn't persuade me, I find it hard to resist well-tempered contrarianism.

Although I could quibble with, and sometimes strongly object to some arguments that Sommers makes, in the end I think he makes a compelling case for rethinking the role of honor in Western culture, as opposed to the dominant "culture of dignity". For me, this is quite an achievement for the book, because I am not positively predisposed to all the components of honor cultures. For example, adherence to preset social roles and a strong sense of identity are quite integral to honor cultures, whereas I see more value in individualism, and the rationalist idea of avoiding entrenched tribalism by "keeping your identity small" (or, as Julia Galef puts it in her book The Scout Mindset, "holding your identity lightly"). With his book, Sommers led me down the primrose path, right into the garden of exciting cognitive dissonance. But, what more could one ask of a book, than to be yanked out of one's cozy reflective equilibrium? And Sommers succeeds, even though he is guilty of my pet peeve - authors using American sports to illustrate points that should be somewhat universally understandable. The latter might be why I spitefully deducted one star from the rating.

To his credit, Sommers also describes and addresses the downsides of honor cultures and the philosophical messiness of trying to rationally justify them. But, he also emphasizes the need for comparative thinking: one must compare honor cultures to the current dignity culture as it is, not as it ideally might be. In such apples-to-apples comparisons, the advantages of dignity culture are less obvious. Even if honor cultures should be consigned to the dustbin of history, before doing so, it would be wise to understand the psychological and sociological functions of honor, given its longstanding and prominent place in human cultures around the world. Although Sommers never explicitly invokes it in the book, the "Chesterton's fence argument" applies quite aptly here:

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'" - G. K. Chesterton

Perhaps the strength of honor culture (and virtue ethics more generally) is that it is a bit messy, and sits uncomfortably between other ethical systems. It seems to me that one could draw a strong parallel between different ethical systems and different psychological mechanisms (or computational models) that we use for decision-making in general. The strict rules of Kantian deontological ethics (e.g. roughly "do not lie/steal/harm", or "the Golden/Silver rule") seem to resemble what Daniel Kahneman has termed "System 1" thinking: fast but inflexible. For a computer scientist, such heuristics might correspond to "model-free" (or "high bias / low variance") decision-making algorithms. On the other hand, impossibly difficult considerations of utilitarian ethics (e.g. roughly maximizing the expected future sum of 'happiness') seem to resemble "System 2" thinking: slow but flexible. In computer science, this would be "model-based" (or "low bias / high variance") algorithms. Perhaps then virtue ethics (with honor as a specific case) sits in the "sweet spot" of moral decision-making: flexible enough to work in many different contexts, yet simple enough to be humanly ascertainable in everyday situations. As such, honor would fall into the realm of "boundedly rational", which is perhaps the most one can hope to achieve, given the complexity of the world and the messiness of human affairs.

Ultimately, it seems to me that, even by deontological and utilitarian standards, the habit of asking oneself "Would an honorable person do this?", would often lead to better lives. Maybe not because honor can perfectly persuade the mind, but because it can powerfully sway the heart.

[InvestingByTheBooks.com · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this his third book the relatively young Texan associate professor of philosophy at the University of Huston, Tamler Sommers, defines the virtue of honor, describes the pros and cons of honor cultures and claims that honor is underrated in our modern world. The author argues that the Western world has made a mistake in suppressing the concept of honor to the extent that has been done and that we need to adapt a “constrained” honor concept to live a good life. Although clearly interesting, Why Honor Matters fails to fully tie together all the loose ends.

According to the author the Western world is virtually schizophrenic when it comes to honor. The concept has little place in the discourse apart from when we horrify over the blood feuds, racism and bullying of women in honor cultures. On the other hand we admire the courageous hero of books and movies that rights the wrongs and in sports honor is still a valid concept. The first two chapters of the book define what honor is and discusses why it’s a problem that the West has abandoned the concept. Chapters three through five, drills deeper in the various aspects of honor cultures. Then “the most ambitious and […] the most important chapter” six argues for introducing so called restorable justice in the Western criminal justice system. Finally, the last chapter tries to present a picture of how the contained type of honor concept might look.

Sommers distinguishes between a Western dignity framework with its roots in the enlightenment and honor cultures – and to be clear, honor cultures could be attributed to both the populations of the Appalachian mountains and the Afghan mountains as well as the Navy SEALS, Mexican drug cartels and NHL hockey teams. Dignity is in this respect a universal unbreakable value that comes with being a human being and it is as such skeptical of narrowing forms of identifications with for example nation, class, race etc. This is because too close identification risks excluding others from the moral sphere. Honor is a much more fragile value that takes the opposite view. Giving equal moral weight to outsiders and insiders of a group is seen as immoral. While others should be treated with respect and hospitality, caring for your own is absolute priority. In a dignity culture living a moral life is a pursuit and choice of the individual while in honor cultures the individual moral is a part of a group’s norms and a moral life a necessity to be accepted by, and gain status in, the group. Dignity is independent of social structures and this has huge value in breaking free from oppressive structures. The downside is a loss of stability and structure plus of the self-respect that comes from standing up for yourself. To the author the western focus on the free will and the independence from others is too abstract where an atomization is prioritized over the meaning and solidarity that exist in honor cultures. Without the, granted not always positive, group cohesion of group norms dignity societies instead come to depend on an all powerful state penetrating deep into civil society.

Although I agree that a person to his best ability should live an honorable life of integrity, I reserve this as a choice for myself. My quarrels with the book are three. The discussion around restorative justice comes up now and again in the book and not just in chapter six. I think that it could have been better flagged that a debate on procedural structures in the US court system were such a large part of the book. Further, at times the author in my view comes a bit too romanticizing of the “honorable savage” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The ending chapter on how to create the contained type of honor isn’t very developed. Basically Sommers says that since honor norms are not universal they are changeable. What we need to do is to have norms that prevent violent escalation and that utilize less violent methods for standing up for oneself. Examples given are the dance-offs in Hip Hop culture, NHL norms, poetry slams and the Chicago BAM-project (Becoming a Man) - a bit slim basis for the change of western culture.

An important debate worthy of a stronger finish.

Mats Larsson, November 7, 2018

[Arj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Often, from the way Western media talks about (unambiguously bad acts of) “honour killings”, retaliatory gang violence, and repression of women’s freedoms, it would seem that honour cultures — the underlying generator of these phenomena — are from an objectively more primitive age and should be dispensed with by education and social conditioning. In Why Honor Matters, Tamler Sommers does an admirable job of rehabilitating the concept of honour and showing how we can integrate it into a modern, cosmopolitan society in a way that gets rid of the excesses above while keeping the positives.

Sommers’s main thrust in the book can be summarised as follows: Western thinking tends to work in ideals; as such, when philosophy is arbitrating between alternatives, it tends to compare the worlds that would emerge in the ideal state of each. Since “honour” is not clearly defined—certainly less well-defined and systematisable than, say, utilitarianism—it has been knocked out of the running for the fact that it does not present an admirable and cogent “ideal state”. Sommers argues, however, that when we compare the actual real-world instantiations of Western ethics (which he summarises as “dignity ethics”, as in “the ethics that preserve the fundamental and inherent dignity of every human being”) to the real-world instantiations of honour cultures, Western ethics come up lacking.

Sommers gives several key examples of this. One is, quite simply, how visceral these moral structures seem to individuals in them: as nice as it might be for humans to settle moral arguments with pure rationality, raw statistics and the good of the “global community” in mind, these tactics fail in practice, and appeals to community, courage and self-respect (all of which are typical of honour communities and inimical to “dignity ethics”) tend to resonate far more. Another is the criminal justice system: Sommers argues that the “equal punishment for equal crime” is, even in theory, an almost fetishised aspect of justice (given how many other aspects it causes us to ignore) and that in any event we often fall woefully flat of the ideal in practice. As such, Sommers compellingly argues that restorative justice (whereby victims and perpetrators of a crime jointly decide the punishment in a mediated environment) presents a compelling alternative to the current justice system, as it addresses the other aspects of justice far better than do retributivist systems, and the abandonment of “equal punishment for equal crime” in theory is a worthwhile trade-off.

Where the book falls flat is in the aspects of honour communities it tries to defend, most pointedly in Sommers’s defences of violence and revenge. I say this not because Sommers does a bad job defending them — he does admirably — more because he himself later argues that these values/actions are incompatible with a modern cosmopolitan society and spends the final third of the book outlining how we can incorporate honour codes into modern society without integrating revenge and violence. As such, the chapters stick out like sore thumbs in the final analysis.

That being said, the book is concise, compelling and written in plain prose, and it stands as a worthwhile book for anyone dissatisfied with purely rationalist narratives about ethics and policy.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a hard time figuring out how to review this book.

From my more critical side, I want to point out some of the things I feel this missed out in giving an actual, rigorous, complete treatment. I want to point out that the groups of honor described in the book are superorganismic collections, and that what he struggles in giving an ethical guidance to in honor codes comes naturally from metrics of health on these organisms. That membership in honor societies defines the superorganismic hierarchies that define the levels of ethical choice. And fundamentally, many of the rules of honor are crude approximations to what are really the rules of trust networks.

And my critical side is stimulated by some of the little expressions of Tammler's distrust of social justice and it's proponents, even though fundamentally he should recognise social justice as an honor code and restorative justice is the whole point behind things like affirmative action. These acts that name the victims of historical crimes of exclusion and seeks to make the groups affected whole is the basis of all social justice.

But really, this book kinda admits these points. And where he touches these points, indirectly and in passing, he always reveals that he has a fundamentally good heart and is trying to understand how things can be better. His view of restorative justice seeks to fix what he admits are really bad problems.

I want to be critical, but Tammler wins me over with a really good foundation of honor codes and societies that ended up changing my own views in a number of important ways.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book as a counterbalance to all the books I have come across in recent years emphasizing 'enlightenment values'. The author does a good job at comparing 'honor cultures' to 'dignity cultures'. In doing so he makes a strong case for how restorative justice and mediation can help heal broken communities better than courts and third party judges.

He makes a less compelling case for why parents shouldn't make their children wear bike helmets, which ended up being a weird tangent to come across while recovering from a bike injury myself that could have been made much worse without the presence of a helmet...

However this is a highly recommended read for anyone looking to challenge preexisting beliefs about the South, the military, or sports leagues like the MLB and NHL. It might not be mere egoism that gets in the way of good decision making in the face of seemingly small slights, rather it is a whole different value system which can be easily appreciated through a different prism and brings meaning to those who highly value honor.

A more expansive look at this topic with politics and religion as the backdrop can be found in Jonathan Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind' where more values examined.

[Gemesi Balazs · Rating 3 out of 5]

By reading the book I actually realised why the podcast is working so well. The book has super-exciting and timely theory, but I found it short on the research and evidence side. Mr. Pizarro’s methodical approach would have made this book excellent. Just to mention two frequently cited examples: there’s absolutely no evidence that compulsory helmet laws reducing the number of cyclists (sorry Tamler, I don’t mind if you hate it, but there’s no science behind it). http://disastercast.co.uk/wp/2013/12/... Also the historical evidences overwhelmingly point towards that although the antiq Spartans embraced equality by all measurable means the were behind Athens. https://web.stanford.edu/~scheidel/Le... It’s a good book, fun to read, but easily could have been a great book with more solid research.

[Lance · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some very valuable points here. His work draws a stark contrast between the idealized version of what society could be, and how far it really made it. Even ignoring that gap, and I do find it's gap but a chasm, there are fundamental philosophy differences that can be used to check some of your core beliefs.

I don't know that I was convinced, the arguments were anecdotal, and there just isn't enough research. To his credit, Tamler didn't *try* to convince me. I wasn't beaten into a belief. Instead it was a an exploration. He said from the outset, that honor has problems, and he treats the subject fairly.

[Zb1113 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about the positives of honor and why we should try to keep as many as we can. Contrasting with "dignity", focus on "personal or community", relationship with group identity (Pos. and Neg.), morality of violence, "Transformative Revenge", Utilitarianism vs Retributivism in our current justice system, Restorative Justice, and a very unique reading of Aeschylus's "Oresteia". I wish Tamler would have focused a couple chapters on the negatives, or would've been a bit more statistical in his arguments.....but that's not really his style.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, I did not expect this book to impact the way I thought about the world. I was completely unfamiliar with the concept of honor cultures, dignity cultures, and the way each of those impact ethics, institutions, and our behaviours. The discussion on the virtues of honor resonated with me and it feels like it filled in a missing gap to the way I think about human systems, ethics, fairness, and justice.

[John Laliberte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This exploration of Honor and Dignity was truly informative. Sommers develop the importance of both Honor and Dignity, but he helped me gain appreciation for the importance of Honor for all persons. Very insightful, well presented with value insights for my daily interactions with people (individuals and groups) and their own need to experience honor.

[Jamie Emerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listeners to the Very Bad Wizards podcast will be at home with Sommers’ conversational prose in this short defense of (some aspects of) honour cultures. Perhaps because of its concise nature, it arguably doesn’t do some of its counter-arguments justice. However, this is a refreshingly punchy book on morals which the general reader, or podcast fan, will enjoy.

[Andreas Bodemer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does an excellent job of questioning procedural justice and makes a good case for its title—why honor matters.

Moreover, it is an American book that does a good job of carefully walking the line between Left and Right in search of the truth. This book positively contributes to our ongoing national dialogue.

[Joseph · Rating 1 out of 5]

I went in thinking it might be good to bring a sense of honor back into society and came out thinking how fortunate the human race is to have done away with honor. Sommers put me firmly in the Pinker camp.

[Sergei Shnitman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good reminder that Honor does not only imply violence, vendetta and ruined life. Honor culture is something that gave meaning to the lives of our ancestors, something that we've lost in out totally atomized modern society.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting.