@Paladin742 A personal story. In my very first philosophy class, when I was an 18 year old freshman, we were reading an anthology called Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life by Based Mom herself, @CHSommers, an essay called “On the Obsolescence of Honor” by Peter Berger: altervsego.hypotheses.org/files/2009/12/…
@Paladin742 @CHSommers I do not remember the particulars of the argument that followed, but I do remember this much: the entire class, save one person (not counting the professor who remained pedagogically neutral) agree that Honor was worthless and it was good that it had vanished in modernity.
@Paladin742 @CHSommers The one lone voice of dissent was me, of course.
I wasn’t as philosophically articulate back then, but even my partially trained Nietzschean nose SMELLED something rotten in this trashing of HONOR.
I stubbornly held my ground.
I wasn’t as philosophically articulate back then, but even my partially trained Nietzschean nose SMELLED something rotten in this trashing of HONOR.
I stubbornly held my ground.
@Paladin742 @CHSommers I suppose you could even call it my first true philosophical argument—even though I was a complete novice at the time.
It also didn’t give me a moment’s pause that everyone was against me. Still doesn’t.
It also didn’t give me a moment’s pause that everyone was against me. Still doesn’t.
@Paladin742 @CHSommers The idea that Dignity supersedes Honor in such a way that Honor can be simply dismissed or done away with and that this is good is rendered even more questionable if Dignity gives rise to Victimhood cultures.
The attenuation of Honor is still, in my view, a great ethical evil.
The attenuation of Honor is still, in my view, a great ethical evil.
@Paladin742 @CHSommers To hold some acts as simply beneath one’s Honor, without needing to or necessarily being able to, provide a discursive argument, seems to me to be a great moral good. Virtue does NOT depend on discursive rationality.
Nietzsche makes the point masterfully:
Nietzsche makes the point masterfully:
@Paladin742 @CHSommers C. S. Lewis also makes the point: Virtue requires not merely the HEAD but the CHEST, that is, the θυμός, which is the seat of τιμή, Honor.
@Paladin742 @CHSommers "I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe ‘a gentleman does not cheat, than an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.”
