Moral Cultures 1: Honor & Dignity

What is a serious offense and what should you do about it?

Conflict, as defined by sociologist Donald Black, is any process of expressing and handling grievances. It occurs whenever anyone defines something as wrong, sinful, evil, criminal, insane, rude, or otherwise objectionable.

Conflict in this sense is a very broad category. This series is going to focus on a few major patterns of conflict that sociologist Bradley Campbell and I have called moral cultures.

Moral culture is just a shorthand for a pattern of grievances and sanctions that is more common in one time and place than in another. This includes differences in what people tend to have grievances about — what they complain about, what they condemn and punish — as well as differences in what offenses they treat as the most severe. It also includes differences in how they tend to handle their grievances — their most common or preferred ways of dealing with various injuries, wrongs, and offenses. And it can even include the broader language and logic they use to make sense of right and wrong, and of their own reactions to them.

Psychologists, historians, and anthropologists have classified a few major types of moral culture. One of the most important distinctions is between what they call honor cultures and dignity cultures. Let me give a couple examples to illustrate.

Honor Culture

In 1804 in Weehawkin, New Jersey, U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed former Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Perhaps the weirdest part of this, to the modern middle class observer, is that the two men had actually agreed beforehand to meet on that morning and shoot at one another.

The reason for violence was that Burr had heard that Hamilton was talking smack about him, and challenged him to either apologize or face him in a duel. In doing this he appealed to the rules of honor. Hamilton’s own son had been killed in a duel years before, and he said he was morally opposed to such violence. But he agreed to the fight anyway, saying that if he didn’t his public reputation would be ruined and he wouldn’t be able to do any more good in US politics. Honor demanded he fight.

Sociologist Mark Cooney relates another example in his book on the handling of homicide. In Richmond, Virginia in 1868, a newspaper published a story about Mary Grant. She was a rich man’s daughter who, the story said, ran off with a man and got married in secret — a pretty scandalous thing at the time. The Grant family was humiliated by the story. Not only did it question her virtue, it questioned the ability of the men in the family to protect it. Three days later the newspaper editor was shot to death just outside of his office.

The police quickly arrested the woman’s brother, James Grant. It looked like an open-and-shut case. They found him in a building across the street, sitting next to an open window, armed with four guns, including one that had recently been fired. And witnesses said he’d rented out the room that morning and had been sitting there waiting. But when police led him out into the street after his arrest, the people there cheered him. And when the prosecutors attempted to try him, they couldn’t find a single juror even willing to consider convicting him. As far as the people of Richmond were concerned, the killer had done something virtuous: He had defended his family’s honor.

What is the honor these people so value? It has to do with two things: reputation and violent aggression. Burr, Hamilton, and Grant were all concerned with their public reputations, and attempted to defend those reputations by facing or inflicting physical violence.

People in honor cultures treat toughness, assertiveness, and physical bravery as paramount virtues. And people in honor cultures locate moral worth primarily in their reputation among others, such that harm to their reputation brings great shame and dishonor. The combination of these two traits is that people in honor cultures are quick to defend their reputation by demonstrating their toughness and bravery with physical violence.

People in most places value bravery and strength to some degree or another. But in honor cultures it has an exaggerated importance. It is very easy to get labelled a coward, and to be a coward is extremely shameful. Because reputation is the main source of moral worth, people in honor cultures are always vigilant that someone is trying to dishonor them. Letting even little things slide might harm your reputation and cause shame.

In an honor culture, disrespect of any kind is a severe offense. A careless word, a challenging stare — all these things can be read as a major attack. In honor cultures people are extremely touchy, and sensitive to slight. They might fight lethal duels over minor differences of opinions, such as which star is in the sky is brighter or which dog breed if finer. Or a drunken boast — “I can beat any man!” — might immediately invite challenges from listeners who need to prove they cannot be beaten. Things that in other cultures would be minor annoyances are a source of serious grievance in honor cultures. Really, though, most of these grievances have a similar social logic: He was disrespecting me.

In honor culture, the preferred way to handle these grievances is with aggression, often violent aggression. The offended party must issue a challenge or insult, hit or threaten, inflict a beating or fight a duel. Violent ways of handling conflict are far more common in this kind of moral culture. Other ways of handling conflict are correspondingly less common. Relying on authority figures — such as calling the police, or complaining to a supervisor — might be read as cowardice, and so is shameful, a further source of dishonor. The honorable tend to eschew law and other forms of settlement by an authority.

Honor culture was prominent in earlier times. Western elites were still dueling to the death up until the 1800s, and a strong culture of honor persisted in the American South until after the Civil War. But by the 20th century, the average American, especially the educated middle class sort, no longer had a strong sense of honor. They might occasionally use the word in its broad sense of virtue or integrity, but they did not live in fear of being dishonored by an insult. They certainly did not fight duels to the death over it.

Dignity Culture

Writing in the 1960s, sociologists Peter Berger described the concept as obsolete. You accuse a modern American of having no honor, he is more likely to raise his eyebrow and look at you funny than fly into a rage and challenge you to a fight. He argued that the concept of honor had been replaced by the concept of dignity.

Dignity cultures are those in which someone’s moral worth is seen as inherent and inalienable. People in these cultures still care about their reputation — people everywhere do — but the emphasis isn’t so great. Reputations aren’t worth dying for. Other people’s views can be more easily dismissed. “That just, like, your opinion man.” No one can take away your dignity.

And while people everywhere value bravery, dignity cultures don’t emphasizes it to the exclusion of other virtues. The bar for calling someone a coward is set higher, and the social consequences of getting called one aren’t so severe.

The combination of these traits is that compared to honor cultures, dignity cultures have a lower sensitivity to slight. People don’t have to be so vigilant for signs of disrespect, and things like accidental slights, careless words, and harsh glares aren’t worth making a big deal about. Having a thick skin itself becomes a virtue, a sign of one’s confidence in one’s own worth. Being prone to take offense is itself a kind of offense, something that people will criticize and condemn. Violence and aggression are also more strongly condemned, even if they are the result of provocation. Proving one’s bravery isn’t worth hurting others.

Between greater tolerance of slight and disapproval of aggression, people in dignity cultures have lower rates of violent conflict. But they are correspondingly more likely to turn to settlement by the authorities. While they are encouraged to tolerate many minor offenses, for material damages or physical injury they are encouraged to turn to police and courts. There is nothing shameful about relying on authorities, as long as one does not do it for trivial reasons. It is better than taking the law into one’s own hands.

Any real life society, or part of society, might combine some elements of these two different moral cultures. We can always quibble over where to draw lines, whether to lump or split. But in their extremes these are two very different moral systems, characterized but different patterns of conflict and conflict management. Lethal duels simply didn’t happen among the American middle class of the late 20th century — two people agreeing to shoot at one other over mere words seemed insane. On the other hand, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” would be an alien sentiment to a planter from the Old South — the contemptible words of a coward.  

The distinction between honor and dignity cultures is therefore useful. It tells us something about how the people in a given time and place deal with their differences, how they understand virtue and vice, and what kinds of conflict behavior we can expect to be common. But what of social settings where people’s behavior don’t fit very well into either of these two categories?

What started Campbell and I down the road to writing about moral cultures was our attempt to make sense of new patterns of conflict emerging in modern America in the 21st century. The path has led to a little bit of recognition, a lot of misunderstanding, and the occasional hostile condemnation. The short story is that we thought we saw enough differences to justify classifying parts of modern America as having a distinctive moral culture, different from cultures of honor and dignity. For anyone new to our work, the next installment of the series discusses this new culture in more detail: Moral Cultures 2: Victimhood.

I appreciate you reading this!

For the detailed argument, check out our book: Rise of Victimhood Culture.

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Sources:

Ayers, Edward L. 1984. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South. New York: Oxford University Press.

Black, Donald. 1998. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong (Revised edition). San Diego: Academic Press.

Black, Donald. 2011. “Social Castration.” Pp.71-73 in Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press.

Berger, Peter. 1970. "On the Obsolecence of the Concept of Honor." European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie 11(2): 338-347.

Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2014. “Microaggression and Moral Cultures.” Comparative Sociology 13 (5): 692-726.

Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2016. “Campus Culture Wars and the Sociology of Morality.” Comparative Sociology 15 (2): 147-178.

Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2018. The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (Hungarian translation available)

Cohen, Dov, Richard E. Nisbett, Brian F. Bowdle, and Norbert Schwarz. 1996. “Insult, Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor: An ‘Experimental Ethnography.’” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(5): 945-996.

Cooney, Mark. 1998. “The Foundations of Honor.” Pp.107-132 in Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence.  New York: New York University Press.

Cooney, Mark. 2009. Is Killing Wrong?: A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. (Describes the Grant case discussed above.)

Cooney, Mark. 2014. “Family Honour and Social Time.” The Sociological Review 62(S2):87-106.

Leung, Angela K. Y. and Dov Cohen. 2011. “Within- and Between-Culture Variation: Individual Differences and the Cultural Logics of Honor, Face, and Dignity Cultures.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100(3):507-526.

Meyer, Michael J. 1989. "Dignity, Rights, and Self-Control." Ethics 99 (3): 520-534.

Nisbett, Robert A. and Dov Cohen. 1996. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Boulder: Westview Press.

Seitz, Don C. 1929. Famous American Duels. Thomas Y. Crowell Company.