Frank Henderson Stewart is a very distinguished scholar, now retired, an expert on the ancient Near East, but he thought deeply about honour. He read ancient texts and legal documents because, as you know, honour is a legal concept in German law and you can seek to have your honour protected in various ways – it’s sort of what they have instead of libel. Analysing and thinking deeply about it, he tries to understand how honour developed, and it was he who led me to see the core thought, which is that honour is an entitlement to respect, and that what honour codes do is say how you get to be entitled to respect. I disagree with a lot of what he says – in particular that he wants to give up on honour because it has such negative connotations: I think it needs reform as a concept – but I think it’s a very lovely piece of scholarly analysis.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah
Professor of philosophy and law at New York University
Ghana / United Kingdom / United States · b. 1954
Arts and letters
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British-Ghanaian philosopher and novelist, author of The Ethics of Identity, Cosmopolitanism, The Honor Code and The Lies That Bind, and the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist.
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