Honor

Honor is a treacherous term, full of ambiguity and difficult to translate from one language into another. Nevertheless, one can point to certain problems of honor that afflict legal systems worldwide. Those problems can be usefully broken down into three classes: problems of sexual honor, problems of personal honor, and problems of hierarchical honor. All three involve honor in similar ways: Persons who feel their honor has been attacked commonly feel that they have been degraded or treated as inferior.

There are certain recurrent issues in the treatment of honor by the law. First, honor is regularly associated with violence. Persons who feel that their honor has been attacked frequently lash out violently; the sense of honor and the propensity for violence are closely linked among human beings. Indeed, some scholars have gone so far as to maintain that all acts of human violence are responses to perceived insults or other violations of honor. In some societies, honor is also associated with violence against the self. Persons whose honor has been lost are sometimes expected to commit suicide. Second, when confronted with problems of honor, the law often takes an ambivalent or hands-off approach. Indeed, people frequently assert that injuries to honor should not be repaired through resorting to the law at all, because honorable persons settle their affairs themselves, without relying on the machinery of the state. This attitude is closely associated with the culture of dueling, in particular, but duelists are by no means the only actors who believe that honorable persons must take the law into their own hands.