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Honour, and its correlative shame, have received something of a bad press philosophically in recent years. In the wider world as well, there is a feeling that honour has little place in an era when equality and democracy are watchwords. It seems that the notion of honour is all too often brought to public attention in connexion with practices of a barbaric nature (as in 'honour' killings and in sagas of familial and tribal revenge, sometimes perversely glamourised in Hollywood treatments ostensibly crafted to show us just how primitive these practices are).
In his book Modern Honor: A Philosophical Defense (Routledge 2013), having considered honour in its myriad applications from Homeric times to the present day via episodes such as Icelandic sagas, duelling and the American south, Anthony Cunningham sums up the case for the prosecution: 'when Western intellectuals collect such honor stories they get an extremely worrisome picture. They see a world where lives are squashed, wasted and warped for ideals that often seem arbitrary, vain, violent, unfair, superficial, self-absorbed, conformist and melodramatic. They look askance at honor when rape victims are killed to erase a family's shame, when some are exalted and others debased on the basis of race or class or genealogy, where deadly violence becomes a frivolous sport and knee-jerk response to trifles, or where forms of life are so prejudicially vilified that exposure can make victims turn to suicide.' In sum, it looks as if honour cannot co-exist with Cunningham's own humanistic vision, whose watchwords are liberty, equality and fraternity.
Against what might be seen as atavistic applications of honour, Cunningham develops a conception in which the honourable life is seen in terms of upholding virtues such as dignity, courage, fortitude, fidelity, honesty, compassion and gratitude, as opposed to the elitist and misogynist moral codes we find described in...