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What Should Realists Say About Honor Cultures?

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice volume 17, pages 893–911 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since my account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support.

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Notes

  1. I thank two anonymous reviewers for raising this point.

  2. We might suggest reserving “honor cultures” for cultures putting a premium on prestige, and “cultures of honor” for that subset of honor cultures that accept an agonistic “theory of right” about how to distribute prestige.

  3. See the discussion in Brennan and Pettit 2004 for an in-depth analysis of general constraints on competitions for prestige/esteem.

  4. To be sure, this prospect raises evolutionary debunking concerns for realism (Street 2006), but those objections are different from disagreement-based objections, and must be addressed elsewhere.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Mark Collier, Peter Nichols, and two anonymous referees for excellent feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. University of Minnesota, Morris, Morris, MN, USA

    Dan Demetriou

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Correspondence to Dan Demetriou.

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Demetriou, D. What Should Realists Say About Honor Cultures?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 893–911 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9490-3

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Keywords

  • Cultural psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Honor cultures
  • Metaethical realism
  • Moral disagreement
  • Pluralism