16
Joshua A. Miller
distinction between societal privilege, claims to basic dignity, and the reputation due to merit, and that we confuse them at our peril. At some point, a philosopher has to admit his priors, and in moral matters Kant will always trump Hume, for me, because we can use reflective equilibrium to distinguish between the reasons that motivate us and the reasons that we would prefer to motivate us. Moral equality is not derivative ofbirthright status: it is not something we deserve by dint ofhaving been born human, as evidenced by the fact that we can and should extend our moral community to include future unborn generations and animals. The conception of dignity as a special case ofhonor cannot make this leap, even ifwe will ultimately motivate our fellow citizens to extend their communities through the selective application ofshame.
VII. Hacking Honor and Shame Perhaps a better title for Appiah’s book would be The Shame Code, because his account ofthe role ofhonor in policing behavior. An honor code is a set ofprinciples for justifying respect, and the drive to pursue of honor and avoid ofdishonor can be extremely influential. Many people will do anything to preserve their reputations, and iftheir society requires them to fight duels, keep slaves, bind their feet, murder their daughters, or mutilate their childrens’ genitals, they will. While I see this as a reason to decry honor, Appiah sees an opportunity: all we need to do is change the code, and the duelers, slavers, binders, murderers, and mutilators will change their tune. There’s an analogy here between the honor code and the programmer’s code, and indeed I suspect Appiah’s project will appeal to the tinkerer in every philosopher: change their moral operating system, and within a generation that band ofeasily manipulated simpletons will decry violence, declare themselves colorblind, celebrate feminine perambulation, and allow their daughters to choose their own husbands or their children to enjoy sex. Here, then, is the problem that Appiah’s project must suppress in order to succeed: honor codes work best when they are unacknowledged, and they are best changed when they are not the object ofdirect study or overt deliberate manipulation by outsiders. Moral revolutions that are predicated on honor code changes are most likely to succeed when the transition does appear to be the work ofself-conscious elites, even ifit probably is. This would probably help explain some other details suppressed in Appiah’s account, like why debates about slavery and racism did not end with the Atlantic slave trade or the American Civil War.
VIII: Praise In general, Appiah’s emphasis on honor discounts our capacity to arrive at moral judgments independently ofthe codes ofhonor and esteem that motivate us. He puts the cart before the horse, but he does it so entertainingly and with such erudition that it’s difficult to fault him for it. Appiah’s style is a kind ofrigorous popular historicism. Though they are motivated by disputes within philosophy, his books aren’t designed for a specialist audience, and are rich with narrative detail, historical examples, and the sense ofplot that we find in the best fiction. This is the kind writing that most philosophers should strive to emulate. One’s career should not be capped with a handful ofarticles that make minor technical