The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

A study of how moral revolutions happen, built around historical case studies. Appiah notices that the arguments against many bad practices were well known long before the practices ended, so argument alone cannot explain the change. What changed, he argues, was honour: an entitlement to respect within a group, earned by meeting its codes. He traces the end of duelling among British gentlemen in the early nineteenth century, including the Duke of Wellington's duel of 1829; the end of foot-binding in China, as educated Chinese came to see it as a national shame in the eyes of the world; and the British campaign against Atlantic slavery, which drew on working men's sense of the dignity of labour. He then turns to honour killing in Pakistan, a practice still under challenge, and asks how honour might be enlisted against it. Throughout, he distinguishes honour from morality and from esteem, and argues that a sense of honour can be put to good use.

It offers a clear, historically grounded account of how moral progress actually happens, and of the part that pride and shame play alongside reasoned argument.