The Honour Code

[Neetu]

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen
by Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

It was a larger-than-usual group that met at the PA East Book Club. It was a delight to welcome a few new members into the club as well. The book that had attracted all this attention was Anthony Kwame Appiah’s The Honor Code.

In this book, Kwame Appiah, a scholar and a philosopher, attempts to define honour and the role that it has played in affecting lasting change during our collective histories. By taking three diverse examples of dueling in England, Atlantic slavery, and the practise of foot-binding in China, Appiah argues that despite existing legislature, these practises endured for centuries and yet, became equally unpopular within the span of a generation.

It is Appiah’s belief that a change in the society’s honour code itself was enough to bring about these revolutions since all the other legal and moral reasons to abolish these practises already existed. Appiah goes on to culminate his thesis by arguing for a moral revolution in ending the practise of honour killings in Pakistan, where women who have been raped, are murdered by their families for the apparent dishonour that the victims brought to the family name.

Even before we started to discuss the book, we book clubbers had an animated discussion about honour and what it meant to us as individuals, and to us as a female collective. We delved into our personal memories to look back on our native societies and recollect how honour was defined and codefied. We took some time to argue whether honour was traditionally a masculine word and what honour meant to a modern woman.

Always respectful to the authors whose work we choose to read, we felt that although Appiah was a gifted scholar, and given that this topic was so close to our hearts, his writing skills were a let down. He spent too much time on the historical facts and a lot less on developing his thesis convincingly. His chapter on dueling, we admitted sheepishly, was not really a page turner. Ultimately, well intentioned as his thesis might be, we were less than convinced about the author’s attempt to connect social changes with honour.

We contemplated whether the author’s ultimate goal was to kickstart a moral revolution to end the plague of honour killings in a part of our world. We debated if honour as an ever-changing value was the way to go about it.

We parted with the thought if honour was outdated or irrelevant in our present times. Do we use the word ‘honour’ in our lives. Ultimately, does this word exist in our children’s vocabulary?

-Neetu.