Though it has fallen out of favor in Anglo-European cultures today, the concept of honor must be valued and reclaimed as more than just outdated, aristocratic pride: Honor is in fact the "engine" that drives community action, according to philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist Kwame Anthony Appiah. Honor's potential role in moral revolutions is to be highly prized, he stressed.

Appiah, University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and one of Foreign Policy magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers, delivered the Graduate School's 2011 Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Lecture to a packed Statler Auditorium Sept. 23. He spoke on the topic of his recent book, "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen."

"Honor isn't morality, but the psychology that the law of honor mobilizes can unquestionably be put to the service of the right and the good," Appiah said.

Having closely studied some of the great "moral revolutions" in modern history -- the rejection of dueling, foot binding and slavery, in particular -- Appiah said that he was surprised to find that in each case, strong rational and moral arguments had been made against the practices long before they were actually abandoned by societies.

"Dueling was always murderous and irrational and understood to be so," he said. "Foot binding was always painfully crippling ... and slavery was always an assault on the humanity of the enslaved." Therefore, it was not overwhelmingly reasonable arguments that changed societies' practices, Appiah concluded.

In fact, he noticed that these practices were rejected only when they became a wound to an individual's or a nation's honor. Appiah said he remembered thinking during his research: "I can think of a hundred better reasons not to cause pain to three-year-old girls than national honor," but that was nonetheless the "operative" mechanism in China when it finally abandoned its millennial custom of foot binding.

Appiah's main explanation for the neglect of honor in contemporary philosophy and scholarship is that it has for most of history been linked to hierarchies of "honorable" families or groups to be born into, "as if," said Appiah, "it was something you'd achieved, or cleverly done."

However, for Appiah, the practice of esteeming people based on a hierarchy of honorable standards is a valuable feature of all societies. Failure to acknowledge honor is essentially "to throw out the baby of esteem with bathwater of hereditary hierarchies," Appiah said.

Whether we like it or not, in any society there will be accepted standards by which individuals are judged, and almost universally, people desire to be regarded well by their community, said Appiah.

Appiah acknowledged that honor has led to such awful things as "honor killings" that persist today. Furthermore, he admitted, honor is not easy to control, Nonetheless, "the only sensible thing," he said, is to more actively honor and shame people whose actions we endorse or oppose.

English by birth, raised in Ghana and educated at Cambridge University, Appiah is director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton and has previously taught at Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Yale.

The Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellowship Program -- of which this annual lecture is a part -- was established at Cornell in 1987 to foster the intellectual exchange of ideas and help drive discussion of critical issues in the sciences and the humanities. The lecture is part of an ongoing series.

Paul Bennetch '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.