Honour

Given its psychological and sociological importance, especially in non-liberal societies, honour may be the most undertheorised normative phenomenon. Philosophical neglect of honour is due partly to its doubtful moral bona fides: honour-typical motives have been usually viewed by philosophers in both the Christian and liberal West as either non-moral or immoral but replaced by morally sounder ones. More practically, honour (and what is usually translated into the English ‘honour’) connotes a number of apparently contradictory meanings, further bedevilling analyses. Four particularly salient conceptions of honour emerge in the anthropological, literary, and philosophical research on honour: honour as prestige, honour as the ethos characteristic of ‘cultures of honour’, honour as honestas, and honour as agonism.