#126 — In Defense of Honor
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Summary
Tamler Summers is an associate professor at the University of Houston and holds a PhD in philosophy from Duke University. He is the author of a new book titled, "Why Honor Matters." In this episode, Tamler and I get deep into the topic of honor, and why it might still matter. We agree on points and disagree on others. But the whole topic is fascinating and consequential, and I hope you feel that we have done the topic some justice. And now, without further delay, I bring you Tamler Summers: I am here to introduce you to the podcast, The Making Sense Podcast, hosted by Sam Harris. If you are not a member of the podcast's core listening group, you ll need to subscribe to the full-length episode to get the most out of this episode. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. Please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. You'll get a better understanding of the show and a better sense of what it means to be a Misericordian in the making sense world. Thank you for listening, and we're making sense of it all! - Sam Harris and the Making Sense PodCast Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Music by Nordgroove Art by Ian McKellan and the Vigilante Graphics by Mossy Creek, Inc., Inc., LLC., and the Good Mythology Project, LLC., and so much more! - The Good Mythologies Project, by Sojourner is a project by , and so on & so on, and so forth, and , in the Bad Mythology is so that you can help us make it so that we can be a better place to be so that they can be better than that so that it can be more like that? (please help us do so? ) can do so, and it helps us do more of that, and they can help them do that, etc., etc., and they do it better, and more so, etc. , etc., & etc., etc., etc. etc., & so much so that so can be so thanks, and that they do that such & so forth ? etc. & so & so, so on & so and so, & so etc., such & such, etc..
Transcript
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You might know Tamler as one of the hosts of the Very Bad Wizards podcast.
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He's also an associate professor at the University of Houston.
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He holds a PhD in philosophy from Duke University, and he's the author of a very interesting
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And today Tamler and I get deep into the topic of honor and why it might still matter.
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He certainly thinks it has more value than I do, so we agree on points and disagree on
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But the whole topic is fascinating and consequential, and I hope you feel that we have done the topic
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And now, without further delay, I bring you Tamler Summers.
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I think mostly you and David Pizarro have been on mine once, and then I've been on yours
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There were two marathon sessions, and then there was—you came on when we had just a
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bunch of guests on to say what you'd changed your mind about.
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So for those who aren't aware, although I will have introduced you before this, you are
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one of the hosts of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, which I love and widely recommend.
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And you are a philosophy professor and the author of a book that was just published this
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I guess we could also wander off the book, but the book I just got a couple days ago, so
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I haven't finished, but I've read enough of to know that it's quite interesting and relevant
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to many questions of how we live, both personally and how we organize society.
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You're especially concerned about the justice system, so we'll get into all of that.
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But before we do, I guess, how did you come to this defense of honor?
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Because this is not—there's something rather archaic about waking up one morning, deciding
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that we need more of an honor culture rather than less.
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Yeah, I mean, this was one of those happy accidents that sometimes you get in academia, where I
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did, as I think you know, my PhD work, my dissertation on moral responsibility and free will, and I
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And I was particularly concerned with how our retributive intuitions evolved, our intuitions
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that people deserve to suffer, that people deserve to be punished, deserve to be blamed.
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And so I was looking at a lot of kind of cultural and genetic theories in evolutionary biology, and someone
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recommended to me a book called Culture of Honor by Richard Nisbet and Dove Coen.
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Richard Nisbet, a now kind of accidental rival of yours.
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But this is just a fantastic book that they wrote.
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And their idea was that people in the American South, because they are descendants of the Scotch-Irish
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herders, they tend to subscribe to more of an honor culture than people in the North.
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And they presented a bunch of experiments that showed this.
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And so I read the book, and their idea was that these norms and these values tend to emerge in certain
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kinds of environments, with a particular ecology, with a particular kind of social arrangement.
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And that just led me to kind of explore those norms and the differences in the values that they
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had compared to non-honor cultures as it related to responsibility.
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And one of the things I found was they really don't emphasize control as much as a necessary
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condition for being responsible or blameworthy.
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In fact, you could be responsible for something that you didn't even do, but a member of your
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And so this became, for me, this huge project of looking at cultural diversity in people's
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But at first, it was just sort of a kind of a curiosity.
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It was something that I thought was really interesting.
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And then I found myself getting drawn to some of the values in these cultures and recognizing
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the absence of some of those values in my own life and in the life of the United States,
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But I started to think for the first time, maybe for worse in a lot of ways.
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And that led me to actually start exploring the idea of a defensive honor, like an honor
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comeback, reclaiming it in a way that reclaiming honor in a way that will sort of contain some
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of its dangers, but harness some of its virtues.
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I mean, it's interesting because the dangers are so salient to me that I think we'll disagree
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on many points throughout this conversation because, you know, honor and certainly honor
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culture seems to capture almost everything we want to outgrow as a civilization.
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And yet, I'm sympathetic to many of your points with respect to what has been lost in our current
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I mean, certainly retributive justice has a lot that can be improved about it.
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The notion of honor does appeal to something very deep in us.
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And to forsake that appeal across the board comes with a price.
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I think we have to acknowledge that we pay a psychological price and a social price for
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So it'll be interesting because I think there'll be clear disagreement here, but there is a gray
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area, and I think perhaps even most of it is gray and will converge on some points.
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So before we get into the details of honor, culture, and its application to justice in
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particular, what is honor and how does it differ from its counterfeits like dignity or self-esteem,
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which really anchor more of our modern liberal values?
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That's unfortunately for me not the easiest question to answer.
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I think that part of the problem with honor, one of the reasons that people don't talk about
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it that much, even to criticize it, is that it's very hard to pin down exactly what it is.
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There's so little philosophical work on honor that it was hard to even find kind of a target
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or a critic that I could hone in on in trying to write the book.
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It's a messy concept, and it can mean a lot of things in a lot of contexts.
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Philosophers especially don't like their concepts messy.
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But I think this is one of its virtues, actually, is because I think its messiness as a concept
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is well-suited to the messiness and complexity of the choices we have to make and the relationships
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Let me just at least try to give some characteristic features of communities that are honor-oriented.
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So one of the things you find across various honor communities is a heightened concern for personal
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reputation and a heightened concern for group reputation.
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So there, I mean, we all are, we all value our reputation to some degree, but in honor cultures
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And along with that comes a heightened sensitivity to insults and a heightened sensitivity to
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Because if somebody challenges your reputation and you back down, then that's a source of shame
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So there is this strong conviction that people should handle their own business in honor cultures,
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that they should stand up for themselves when they're challenged and not turn to third parties
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And so that's why you have like stop snitching campaigns in the honor culture of the inner
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city and urban gangs and, you know, baseball and hockey players.
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I talk a lot about baseball and hockey because those are, I think, are the most honor-oriented
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They know when they get into their beefs or feuds, they don't speak to the media.
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They try to, there's a strong code that you have to handle any offenses against or challenges
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I was surprised in your account of the beaning of a batter by a pitcher, the intentionally throwing
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the ball at him, is part of the culture of baseball to a degree that I didn't realize.
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I mean, baseball is a lot more like hockey than I realized.
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And it's kind of fascinating, all the unwritten rules.
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And this is another feature of a lot of honor cultures is there's just a lot of unwritten
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norms and codes that go along that just, that are part of the, what governs the way people
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behave in these cultures and they're constantly evolving.
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They're, they're flexible, but, um, but, but they're very internal.
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And so from out, from an outsider's perspective, they can be difficult to understand, but yeah,
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I mean, you can hit a home run in baseball and walk a little too slowly, run a little
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too slowly around the bases, and then that will make you a target for the, you know, the
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There's just so many, it's, it's a pretty Byzantine kind of, and, and dramatic and kind
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of fascinating set of rules that govern, you know, when you're supposed to get payback,
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when you're supposed to just take, you know, just accept that you're being hit by the pitcher
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because you understand that they have a grievance and they need to, um, they need to get their
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revenge and then get it over with and you can move on.
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And, um, and that's very typical of honor cultures.
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And I think baseball and hockey are examples in my mind of successful honor communities because
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they're able to contain the conflicts and not let them spin out of control.
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Other features of honor communities, they tend to place higher value on virtues and character
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traits like courage, hospitality, loyalty, integrity, and, and maybe this is one of the
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problems you're going to have with them, solidarity with a particular group.
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There's a real sense of collective identification and collective responsibility in honor cultures.
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Um, and there's a sense of tribal, like they're, they're tribal.
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There, there's a real tribalism to honor cultures.
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But I think that word right now, the way it's tossed around today doesn't capture the sense
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Today, when we speak about tribalism, we often mean, and I think sometimes when you speak
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about tribalism and people like Pinker and it, we, we often mean people identifying with
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an ideology, like a political ideology or a racial or ethnic ideology.
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But in an honor culture, there is this sense of collective identification.
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There is this tribalism, but you're identifying with actual people, not a, not a, not an idea.
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Um, actual people, the people in your community who, you know, and who you interact with on a
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And so that's the sense in which honor communities are tribal.
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There are two examples that come to mind that really crystallize what is attractive about
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honor and what is obviously pathological about it.
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And I guess I'll just float both of those to you.
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And I, cause they seem to articulate psychological extremes for me.
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So, I mean, and there's one you reference in the book, you might reference both, but I saw
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one, you talk about the satisfaction that awaits anyone who watches YouTube videos where bullies
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get pounded by the people they were, they were targeting.
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I mean, there's actually a site or a thread on Reddit called Justice Porn, which wraps up
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So if you watch these, especially if you're a guy, I, you know, being a guy, I only know
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what it's like to actually see it with the, with the brain of a man.
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But I imagine women feel some of the same, if not the same, satisfaction here.
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So the prototypical case is, you know, there's some thug on the sidewalk who is harassing
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And eventually he picks the wrong person, you know, who turns out to be a professional
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It's a perfectly encapsulated moral circumstance.
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It's really like a, just a mini morality play in like two minutes because this person's culpability
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There's no question that this guy, if anyone deserves to get pounded unconscious, it's this
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And then it happens and it seems like a perfect result morally.
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And again, so it has the feature of there's no appeal to a third party.
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The person who is threatened is defending himself, in some cases herself.
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There's some, some great videos where women, you know, wind up destroying the guy who was
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And it's hard to see what's wrong with it, except when you scale it to the rest of society.
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If you're, if you're going to run a society this way, you have to acknowledge that the full
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chaos and dysfunction of vendetta and vigilantism is the result and civilization, you know, as
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you mentioned Pinker, you know, as he's pointed out again and again, in large part depends on
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And yet these videos would be very different if they just entailed somebody, you know, getting
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on the phone and calling the police and watching the police show up and arrest the guy, which
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As a counterpoint to this, I would say that almost the reductio ad absurdum of honor as
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a force for good is that the concept of honor killing, which you see in, it's very widespread
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It's not only there, but in traditional societies, it's often imagined that the honor of the family
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is fatally threatened by any sexual indiscretion on the part of any of the women in the family.
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So if a man's daughter refuses to marry the person he's chosen for her or has sex out
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of wedlock or just is caught holding some guy's hand to whom she's not married in these societies
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and in these communities, even within our own societies, you often hear about a father or
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a father and a brother killing a young woman for the imagined offense to the family's honor
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And so, you know, if you could see a YouTube video of that, there'd be none of the satisfaction
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for anyone standing outside of that circumstance.
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You know, I'll just give you both of those examples to react to.
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Yeah, OK, so let me take the justice porn one first and then I'll address the honor killings.
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I mean, certainly nothing in this book is anything but horrified by honor killings.
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But let me first go back to what makes those videos so satisfying.
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I think the way you framed it is that it's perfect justice because this bully gets exactly
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I mean, assuming that it is a guy, which it almost always is.
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And and I think that it's it's even a little bit more than that or it's it's significantly
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more than that, because you could imagine just a stranger punching the bully, just kind
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of a bystander, an impartial bystander punching the bully.
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What's especially satisfying about those videos is that a person who was going to be a victim,
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who's going to be bullied, stands up for themselves.
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And the sense of respect that comes with that, self-respect, respect from the community, respect
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I mean, it's palpable and you can see it and it actually it's tangible.
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Sometimes even the bully respects the person that just knocked them out because they stood
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And that is exactly what is lost when you marshal out these kinds of conflicts to some impartial
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That's why, you know, I say in the book, it's not justice porn.
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It's not even remotely justice arousing to, you know, have the bully be taken away by a security
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officer or the principal and get suspended or even expelled.
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You know, at that point, it's like, well, maybe the bully, maybe the school needed to
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do that because of the harm that that he was causing.
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But that's that's sort of the lesser of evils rather than an assertion of self-respect.
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That's the problem with honor cultures is sometimes the power imbalance is too great and you can't
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stand up for yourself and you need third parties to come in and prevent great injustice.
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And that's where this idea of containment comes in.
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And this is what I one of the things I feel like we've lost.
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We shouldn't lose or reject the value of standing up for yourself, of of being willing to take
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a risk that maybe you will get your ass kicked or something, but at least you are showing that
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you can't be pushed around and you're not immediately turning to a third party to handle
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a conflict that is that directly involves involves you.
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Honor killings, I think, are an extreme example of one of the problems with honor, which is that
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there is very little restriction on the content of honor norms.
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So all honor groups have norms and codes that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated
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And those there are some commonalities, but there are also a lot of differences.
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And there's nothing within the sort of honor morality that constrains what those codes are.
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So if you have a community like certain cultures where just the suspicion or the reality of
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extramarital sex on the part of a family member will reduce the honor of the family,
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And you called that imaginary and it's imaginary.
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They are they are dishonored and they are treated poorly by the people in that community.
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That's a fucked up way of allocating honor and dishonor and especially dishonor or shame in
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But that's but that's what happens in these communities is that the family honor and all
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the privileges that come with being an honored member of the community and all the the shit
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that comes with being a shamed member of the community that will happen to the family unless
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they act in the way that they feel they need to have that they need to act in that.
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You know, often it's if it's like a duty, it's like some sort of weird, perverse duty,
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moral duty that they feel like they have to kill their sister that they love or the daughter
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that they love in order to preserve the family's the the the family's honor for generations.
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And so this is a huge problem with honor that we don't have those kinds of restrictions about
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what the norms can will be that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated.
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And that's another goal of containment is to make sure.
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So, you know, in in my world, if you find an honor community where this is their way,
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this is their value, this is their way of of allocating honor and dishonor, then you just
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then you don't allow that. So you do need some kind of higher authority that will enforce a minimal
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respect for human rights in a way that would rule out honor killings. But again, that doesn't mean you
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throw out the baby with the bathwater. That doesn't mean that you the fact that there are honor killings
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in the vast minority of honor cultures across the world and throughout history. I mean, it's a tiny,
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tiny percentage of cultures that find this to be morally acceptable or not dishonorable to kill a
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family member. The fact that that exists doesn't mean we should throw out honor and all the motivational
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benefits that come with it. I guess the thing I would argue here is that the
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the only thing that would value honor appropriately morally and psychologically and the only thing
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that would contain its perversions would be some kind of consequentialist understanding of its
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effects on individuals and on society. So, I mean, the reason why it's bad to have notions of male
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honor that extend to the sexual behavior or even the sexual misfortune of women in the family. So,
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I mean, as you know, honor killings even happen when a girl gets raped because she's viewed as
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sullied by having been raped. I mean, that's like the perfect case of moral lunacy where, you know, a father
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kills his daughter because of the shame that has been brought to the family over her rape.
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So, you would want to argue that that kind of honor is pathological on the grounds that it creates
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immense human misery for no good reason and doesn't create any benefit that outweighs that misery.
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Whereas in other cases where you're talking about things like hospitality and the kinds of moral
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heroism that can be motivated by things like honor and can't quite be motivated by its cousins,
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Or dignity, yeah. So, and then you want to argue for its place because it does good for us. But,
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again, like even going to the best possible case, or at least the best case we've mentioned so far,
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which is these justice porn videos, there you can argue that there's a higher norm to which even
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people who are chock full of honor would adhere in those circumstances. So, for instance, I've spent
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a lot of time thinking about self-defense and violence and, you know, I've spent a lot of time
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training in martial arts and I'm surrounded by people who are, who have a tremendous amount of
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martial honor. But because they have so much honor and so much experience, I mean, these are, you know,
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world champions in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and, you know, SWAT team members and Navy SEALs. I mean,
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people who are just, who have absolutely no doubt about their ability to handle situations of, you
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know, interpersonal violence. These are people who, when they, you know, walk around in the world and
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see behavior of the sort that, you know, we're seeing in those videos, they're not the guys who run
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up and punch the bully in the face because, one, they have absolutely nothing to prove from that
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contest. I mean, they, they know they can punch the bully in the face. If they decline to punch the
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bully in the face, they will not lose sleep that night wondering what it says about them, right?
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They're not going to be racked by doubt about their own martial abilities. They see these things in very
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pragmatic terms and they just realize they have a lot to lose if things go haywire. You know,
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they've, they've been in enough fights themselves that they know what follows. They know, you know,
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you punch a bully in the face and, you know, you, you know, your, your hand gets cut and you've got
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his blood in, in your wounds. And now you have to worry about whether or not, you know, you need an
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AIDS test. There's the possibility of getting arrested and having witnesses misunderstand what
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happened there. And now you have, you know, criminal or, or, you know, civil charges against you.
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There's a huge hassle awaits you if you get involved in any of this stuff.
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And so when you talk to people who understand human violence really deeply, these are not the
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people who you see meeting out vigilante justice in those kinds of videos, and nor would they if
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when you talk about what they would do in those situations. This becomes especially true when you
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imagine what it's like to, to walk around armed. I mean, you know, people who I know who carry
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concealed weapons. You don't get into shoving and punching encounters with strangers when you have
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a gun on your belt, because you're then two steps away from having to decide whether you're in over
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your head. And now it's now it's escalated to a lethal encounter with all of the legal ramifications.
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So people who are walking around armed are often just the first to just dial 911 and not go near
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situations like that. Right. And that I mean, at a certain point, the consequences do become
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too dire to do the thing that I think honor cultures and honor codes tend to promote, which is to
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handle your business and and and not involve some sort of stranger or a third party. I mean, I want to but
00:30:18.160
but but to respond to your to your claims about the Navy SEAL people, the jujitsu experts that that you
00:30:26.660
know, that's a very common feature of honor cultures that if it's clear that they can, if they needed to,
00:30:39.520
if called upon, respond to some sort of insult or challenge to themselves, then they often don't need
00:30:47.360
to. I mean, the main the whole the whole reason some of these honor norms on this ask, this aspect
00:30:55.460
of honor norms evolved is to give people an incentive to preserve a reputation that means you can't be
00:31:05.660
messed with. Right. And they have that reputation already. They have nothing else to prove, as you as you
00:31:12.460
say. But Tamla, except they might only have it in their head in that context. I mean, so if you imagine
00:31:17.860
you're just you're traveling with your wife and you're in a bar that you've never been in before and
00:31:23.920
will never be in again, and you don't look like some colossus who would scare people at a glance,
00:31:30.800
but you're a, you know, a Navy SEAL or whatever, who has no doubts about his ability to protect
00:31:36.400
himself and his wife. And you might even be armed, say. Right. And so somebody at the bar challenges
00:31:42.460
you and even insults your wife, like a prototypical case where you would have as a man, you would feel
00:31:50.100
tempted by, you know, a million years of hominid evolution at your back to defend yourself and your
00:31:57.540
partner. That is precisely the situation where it's most tempting, where people who have this kind of
00:32:04.820
discipline, see the downside and just walk away and actually don't save face in that context.
00:32:12.800
The bully has the satisfaction. But there's nothing there's no community to save face to there.
00:32:17.580
These are strangers, as you say. So there's no real incentive to save face because nobody knows who
00:32:24.800
they are in the first place. There's no reputation to either lose, preserve or augment. Right. And I don't
00:32:33.460
know, like I want to interview one of these people right now and ask what would happen if they're at
00:32:38.400
a bar with their wives or their daughters and somebody does insult them or seems physically
00:32:43.720
threatening or starts to hit on one of their wives. I don't know if they're going to if they're really
00:32:50.020
going to walk away from something like that if they feel like the consequences of engaging are it's
00:32:58.560
not going to lead to a gunfight, which most bar fights don't lead to gunfights. And most and most
00:33:07.220
conflicts don't lead to anything worse than just somebody getting their ass kicked.
00:33:14.000
Obviously, there's there's what they think would happen or should happen. And then there's what would
00:33:18.780
actually happen when push comes to shove, literally. But, you know, I've had many of these
00:33:23.640
conversations and I know what people aspire to do in those situations based on what they consider to
00:33:29.720
be a higher ethic that even even does preserve this notion of honor. I mean, if you've come out of a
00:33:38.340
an honor culture like, you know, the Navy SEALs, right? I mean, so the Navy SEALs are badasses. They
00:33:44.000
have their training has many of the features you describe of an honor culture. Yeah, I talk about
00:33:49.980
them a lot in the book, actually. But the net result when you when you try to when you export
00:33:55.460
that to living in a in a more cosmopolitan society, it becomes reduced down to a kind of higher ethic,
00:34:04.520
which is it would be a kind of failure if it's a failure to have avoided conflict that was in fact
00:34:11.060
avoidable. And avoidance is still a kind of master principle there, given all of the uncertainty that
00:34:17.580
comes with conflict. And yet it is, there is a kind of, I mean, if you're honorable enough, if you're
00:34:24.780
secure enough, and I guess this is where self-esteem maybe swallows honor, if there really is no threat
00:34:32.000
to your view of yourself when backing down from a challenge, then you you're free to do it in a way
00:34:38.800
that somebody who is more threatened isn't. The person who's easily goaded into a fight that he can't
00:34:44.960
win, just because he finds it so intolerable to lose face. You know, that's a person who's just
00:34:50.520
a monkey being manipulated by eye contact and insults. Yeah, I mean, so I think we we agree about
00:34:57.020
this in this sense, where there's nothing about honor, that suggests that in every context, you need
00:35:05.520
to act in a certain way. I mean, this is one of the best things about honor codes and, and honor values
00:35:14.340
is how flexible they are. And so in contexts where standing up for yourself or standing up for your
00:35:19.780
family or standing up for your friends isn't appropriate, according to their codes, then they're
00:35:24.340
not going to do it. And you're right also that, and you need a certain level of self-regard and confidence
00:35:32.100
in your abilities that you won't be lying awake in bed for the next two weeks, kind of thinking about
00:35:40.700
how you should have stood up to the person or how you should have said something or how you shouldn't have
00:35:46.640
just walked away and listened to them taunt you or whatever it is. You know, if you have that level, this
00:35:53.640
is I think it's this isn't just true when it comes to violence. This is true in most aspects of life, when
00:36:01.240
people insult you in a way that you don't feel like they have the standing to really affect your
00:36:13.200
reputation and the way you view yourself, then it's easy for that to just glide off of you. But when
00:36:22.380
you're in a situation where you do feel like your self-respect is at stake and you do feel like your
00:36:28.240
reputation among people amongst people you care about is at stake, well, then that's a different
00:36:34.900
story. But in the kinds of situations you're describing, it doesn't seem like either their
00:36:42.240
self-respect or their reputation is at stake here. So yeah, you absolutely in those kinds of situations
00:36:49.700
can do the thing that will, you know, not lead to some kind of unpredictable calamity or something
00:37:00.520
like that. And in some ways, it's a point of pride. It's like a kind of a warrior value to be able to
00:37:07.160
have the kind of self-control that you don't get triggered like that in situations when it's not
00:37:13.840
warranted. I mean, that is a big part of warrior culture, a big part of a code. I mean, you know,
00:37:19.740
you see this with samurais is restraint, not giving in to violence when it's not called for
00:37:28.080
is as much of a virtue as being violent when it is called for. The real concern with honor as a
00:37:35.880
major plank in one's morality is that it creates a kind of attractor state where incentives get all
00:37:45.900
screwed up and the problem is that it is dependent on how others view you or at least how you imagine
00:37:54.780
they will view you. And then that begins a kind of spiral of needless norm enforcement, which becomes
00:38:03.080
highly non-normative if you stand back outside of that culture and look at the consequences. And so there
00:38:09.960
are many examples you give in the book. One example, which I often think of here is prison culture, where
00:38:16.300
incentives are so badly aligned that even good people will reliably turn into monsters simply because
00:38:24.520
there is no alternative, given what everyone else will do to them if they don't prove that they can be
00:38:30.440
monsters. Right. You have to project a kind of almost insane toughness so that you're not taken
00:38:38.300
advantage of and, you know, and punked. And that's true for people who just aren't like that, who aren't
00:38:48.480
disposed to that, but that they have to make that part of their identity. This is true. Elijah Anderson,
00:38:55.780
a book I quote a lot in the book, the sociologist, Elijah Anderson, and his book Code of the Street.
00:39:02.080
But this is also true, I think, of young kids in certain urban neighborhoods. And, you know,
00:39:07.080
these are kids that they want friends and they want to have a normal high school experience. They want
00:39:13.160
girls, but they also want to not be sitting ducks for the more aggressive kids in the neighborhood. So they
00:39:23.060
have to establish some kind of reputation for toughness so that they're not taken advantage of
00:39:30.660
and thought to be weak. And again, even if that's not who they are, even if they don't have a kind of
00:39:38.640
disposition for violence or aggression, they have to project that. And they have to do it. This is just
00:39:47.120
their environment. This is just the environment in prison. You have to project that kind of image.
00:39:53.360
And when it's successful, they can do it and not have it swallow up their identity entirely.
00:40:03.360
Because there is this kind of tricky point, equilibrium point, where you've shown that you're
00:40:10.500
tough enough that you can handle any challenges and insults that come at you, but nobody feels like
00:40:17.480
you need to go any further than that. And then they'll just leave you alone. So if you can project
00:40:22.360
this image of being violent, if called upon to be violent, then you don't actually have to engage
00:40:30.780
in acts of violence and you won't be the victim of violence. But if you're not able to do that,
00:40:35.560
then you're more likely to be a victim. Right. But so all of that seems to be an advertisement for
00:40:41.940
some prior stage of humanity that we are wise to have outgrown, at least outside of a prison or
00:40:49.140
outside of a gang or outside of a ghetto that's crime-ridden. These are all places we are busily
00:40:55.880
leaving, both as individuals and who are lucky and as societies, which are structured along different
00:41:03.400
lines. And yet you seem to worry we're leaving something critical behind in that flight.
00:41:09.680
We're leaving the values that come from how to survive in those kinds of environments, because
00:41:17.780
we have not, as a society, figured out a way to extinguish all these kinds of scenarios and social
00:41:27.860
environments where people will be threatened in this way and where your reputation can ensure
00:41:37.640
that you'll either be left alone or that you'll be a kind of a victim. And, you know, while the fact
00:41:47.540
that there are prisons and the conditions in prisons, which are abhorrent, and the fact that there are these
00:41:54.040
really poor neighborhoods where people are desperate, obviously that's a bad thing. But that doesn't
00:42:01.260
mean that every value that comes from those kinds of environments and how to handle yourself in those
00:42:08.600
kinds of environments, that can actually be a real positive that we shouldn't lose just because
00:42:16.560
we're so worried about the kinds of conditions that these environments have, poverty or prison.
00:42:27.120
I mean, a good example is, I think, the military and the soldiers there, they develop a kind of code
00:42:36.620
and a kind of strict honor code in the Navy SEALs you were talking about, right? They have a code that
00:42:43.840
is crucial to them, important to them, involves collective accountability, collective responsibility,
00:42:53.680
never leaving a brother lying out in the field, right? And then they leave those kinds of environments,
00:43:01.880
but they retain the values that they acquired in those environments and the kind of environments they go
00:43:10.680
into. And the kind of environments that necessitate having those kinds, embracing those kinds of
00:43:17.340
values, they're often really dangerous and something normally we would want to avoid. But the values that
00:43:26.060
they bring out of that is something that stays with them for the rest of their lives. And I'd be surprised
00:43:31.480
if you found any Navy SEALs or really military anywhere saying that they want to turn away from
00:43:40.500
honor and the kind of honor values that were instilled in them when they were at war or in boot camp or
00:43:55.120
wherever it is that they really started to internalize it.
00:43:59.540
Hmm. There are just these other parts of the honor picture that seem dispensable in the end. And
00:44:06.660
maybe we can purify this notion of honor to something that is compatible with a more modern,
00:44:12.480
liberal, consequentialist value system. But you mentioned tribalism briefly and also the notion
00:44:20.220
that of kind of collective responsibility for things so that even if you do something terrible
00:44:26.820
to another person, he or even a member of his family could retaliate against you, obviously,
00:44:34.920
but not even necessarily just against you, but anyone close to you. So, you know, if you kill
00:44:40.440
someone, well, then their family can kill your brother, say, as in retribution. And then somehow honor
00:44:48.520
makes sense of that instrumental violence where you're targeting someone who's actually not responsible
00:44:55.500
for anything here. But because of their association with the responsible party, it's deemed legitimate to
00:45:02.320
target them because of the effect that will have on the person who you actually do have a grievance
00:45:07.720
See, I disagree with that interpretation of collective punishment and collective responsibility. I don't
00:45:14.780
think it's instrumental. It often has it often achieves instrumental goals like, you know, showing that the
00:45:22.960
family is not to be messed with. But I think in honor cultures and true honor cultures, they think it's
00:45:32.240
just, they think if someone from your group, I mean, in an easier to relate to example, when you get into a
00:45:42.800
beanball feud in baseball, and the opposing pitcher hits one of your batters, if you're in the American League, that
00:45:51.940
pitcher isn't going to come up to the plate. So you're going to just hit another guy on that team. And yes, there's
00:46:01.540
instrumental value in doing that to show the other team that you can't throw at your players. But there, there is
00:46:08.500
also a sense that this is the right thing to do. This is the just thing to do. That if, if that team has a pitcher
00:46:17.300
that will do that, then everyone on that team is accountable for that. And I think, you know, that maybe seems
00:46:26.440
irrational, certainly from a perspective that we come from where individual responsibility is the only
00:46:33.300
thing that can possibly matter. And as you believe, and I used to believe, you can't even really make
00:46:40.040
sense of individual responsibility, moral responsibility, and that kind of dessert entailing
00:46:45.240
sense. That just seems totally insane. But I think there's a lot of moral advantages to that kind of
00:46:54.080
attitude. And I think you can see them when you think, look, it's not just about punishment. It's not
00:47:02.140
just about getting revenge on an on some family whose brother may have injured or killed your family
00:47:14.200
member. It's also about like making up or compensating somebody for something that your
00:47:20.940
family member did. Right. It's that same instinct, that same norm that encourages that motivates
00:47:30.540
people to say, look, I know it was my brother who harmed you, but my brother can't make it up to you.
00:47:36.980
My brother can't make this right. But I can't. And I feel obligated to do it.
00:47:42.160
Yeah, that resonates with me. And the only reason they feel obligated is because they feel that sense
00:47:47.620
of collective identification, that sense of collective responsibility. Well, even though I
00:47:52.600
didn't do it, I had no control over whether my brother did it or not. I still feel an obligation
00:47:58.120
to try to make it right, to try to to make up for what my brother did. And you see that in honor
00:48:06.500
cultures quite a bit as well. So it's not all of the dark side of these blood feuds and Hatfield and
00:48:13.580
McCoys and these long multi-generational cycles of violence. It's also a sense of of justice that,
00:48:23.780
yeah, it's not just you. You're responsible for the people around you. And that also as a side benefit
00:48:30.240
encourages a healthy amount of self-policing within groups. Because now you know that if
00:48:36.200
one of your group members fucks up, you're going to have to be you're going to have to pay for it in
00:48:42.060
some way. I'm certainly open to the utility of all of these ideas and social structures. Again,
00:48:51.220
the cash value for me morally is always the consequences of thinking in these ways and
00:48:56.540
obeying these various norms. And yeah, so you allude to my view of free will as undercutting
00:49:03.440
any notion of real responsibility in the ultimate sense, or as it's imagined to exist by people who
00:49:10.940
believe in free will. But you would think that's like ultimately just as irrational to think that
00:49:16.000
somebody is individually responsible for an act that they did. It's no more rational to think that
00:49:25.500
than it is to think that you're responsible for what a group member did, right? I mean,
00:49:29.560
according to your view? Except for the consequences of holding people responsible
00:49:34.040
in those cases. And the reason why it makes sense to hold people responsible.
00:49:39.200
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