Why We Still Need Honor

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

Thankfully, busy though we are bemoaning the end of values, some are not beyond evaluating their worth in the first place.

Take integrity. Before The Great American Novelist observed in Freedom, "Integrity is a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity," Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic made much the same point using Sarah Palin: "Her grotesque and fascinating candidacy broaches an interesting subject, which is the moral insufficiency of integrity." 

Next up was trust, which saw its reputation battered by an economic crisis. The Fed and institutions like the FDIC stepped in to bolster confidence, but economists like Luigi Guiso, Jeffrey Butler, and Paola Giuliano also showed that reckless, misplaced trust contributed to the crisis in the first place. Trust is not simply good, but also something to be managed.

Now, in an enlightening and bold book by Kwame Anthony Appiah, honor gets its treatment. Though The Honor Code is the work of a professor and philosopher, it is no more detached from reality than are election ballots or employment data. To the contrary, Appiah's lofty ambition is to conjure up from the realm of ideas a means to stop one of the world's most ghastly practices, the honor killing of women....

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