Honor For Us: A Philosophical Analysis, Interpretation and Defense

Honor For Us is the first contemporary philosophical inquiry into the concept of honor. It is unique not only in its analysis of six distinct concepts of honor, which includes an investigation into the place of honor in religious thought and ethics, but also in its interpretation of honor’s prevalence in our own culture. Many would like to discard honor altogether as ‘obsolete’, but Sessions contends that the concept of honor is poorly understood, standing sorely in need of clarification. He argues that the notion of honor remains viable in the face of powerful criticism, and that it has important features which warrant our normative interest. While not downplaying the ‘dark side’ of honor (violence, sexism, inegalitarianism, its abuse in religion), Sessions shows that honor not only constitutes a descriptively useful concept but also remains a potentially valuable concept for us today.