Making Sense with Sam Harris - #126 — In Defense of Honor

Episode Date: May 8, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Tamler Sommers about cultures of honor. They discuss the difference between honor and dignity, “justice porn,” honor killings, honor and interpersonal violence, prison and gang culture, collective responsibility and collective punishment, retributive vs restorative justice, the ethics of forgiveness and redemption, #metoo, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Tamler Summers. You might know Tamler as one of the hosts of the Very Bad Wizards podcast. He's also an associate professor at the University of Houston. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University. And he's the author of a very interesting new book titled Why Honor Matters. And today Tamler and I get deep into the author of a very interesting new book titled Why Honor Matters.

And today, Tamler and I get deep into the topic of honor and why it might still matter. He certainly thinks it has more value than I do, so 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 with Tamler Summers. Tamler, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. We've done a bunch of podcasts together. I think mostly you and David Pizarro have been on mine once, and then I've been on yours at least twice, I think.

There were two marathon sessions, and then there was, you came on when we had just a bunch of guests on to say what you'd changed your mind about. Right, right. So for those who aren't aware, although I will have introduced you before this, you are one of the hosts of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, which I love and widely recommend. And you are a philosophy professor and the author of a book that was just published this month, Why Honor Matters. Yes, Why Honor Matters. We'll talk about the book mostly. I guess we could also wander off the book, but the book I just got a couple of days ago,

so I haven't finished, but I've read enough of to know that it's quite interesting and relevant to many questions of how we live both personally and how we organize society. You're especially concerned about the justice system, so we'll get into all of that. But before we do, I guess, how did you come to this defense of honor? Because there's something rather archaic about waking up one morning, deciding that we need more of an honor culture rather than less. How did you stumble on this problem? Yeah, I mean, this was one of those happy accidents that sometimes you get in academia where I did, as I think you know, my PhD work, my dissertation on moral responsibility and

free will, and I defended a skeptical view, much like yours. And I was particularly concerned with how our retributive intuitions evolved, our intuitions that people deserve to suffer, that people deserve to be punished, deserve to be blamed. And so I was looking at a lot of kind of cultural and genetic theories in evolutionary biology, and someone recommended to me a book called Culture of Honor by Richard Nisbet and Dov Coen. Richard Nisbet, a now kind of accidental rival of yours. But this is just a fantastic book that they wrote. And their idea was that people in the American South, because they are descendants of the

Scotch-Irish herders, they tend to subscribe to more of an honor culture than people in the North. And they presented a bunch of experiments that showed this. And so I read the book and their idea was, is that these norms and these values tend to emerge in certain kinds of environments with a particular ecology, with a particular kind of social arrangement. And that just led me to kind of explore those norms and the differences in the values that they had compared to non-honor cultures as it related to responsibility. And one of the things I found was they really don't emphasize control as much as a necessary condition for being responsible or blameworthy. In fact, you could be responsible for something that you didn't even do, but a member of your

group did or a member of your family did. And so this became for me this huge project of looking at cultural diversity in people's attitudes about responsibility and freedom. And so I wrote a book about that. It's called Relative Justice. It's more of an academic book than this one. But at first, it was just sort of a kind of a curiosity. It was something that I thought was really interesting. And then I found myself getting drawn to some of the values in these cultures and recognizing the absence of some of those values in my own life and in the life of the United States for better and for worse. But I started to think for the first

time, maybe for worse in a lot of ways. And that led me to actually start exploring the idea of a defense of honor, like an honor comeback, reclaiming honor in a way that will sort of contain some of its dangers, but harness some of its virtues. It's interesting because the dangers are so salient to me that I think we'll disagree on many points throughout this conversation what has been lost in our current conception of justice. Certainly, retributive justice has a lot that can be improved about it. The notion of honor does appeal to something very deep in us, and to forsake that appeal across the board comes with a price. I think we have to acknowledge that we pay a psychological price and a social price for just jettisoning these apish values. So it'll be interesting because I think there'll be clear disagreement here, but there is a gray area, and I think perhaps even most of it is gray, and we'll converge on some points.

So before we get into the details of honor culture and its application to justice in particular, what is honor, and how does it differ from its counterfeits like dignity or self-esteem, which really anchor more of our modern liberal values? That's unfortunately for me, not the easiest question to answer. I think that part of the problem with honor, one of the reasons that people don't talk about it that much, even to criticize it, is that it's very hard to pin down exactly what it is. And this is especially true in philosophy. There's so little philosophical work on honor that it was hard to even find kind of a target or a critic that I could hone in on in trying to write the book. It's a messy concept and it can mean a lot of

things in a lot of contexts. Philosophers especially don't like their concepts messy, but I think this is one of its virtues actually is because I to the messiness and complexity of the choices we have to make and the relationships we kind of have, the social relations. But that's dodging the question. Let me just at least try to give some characteristic features of communities that are honor-oriented. of communities that are honor-oriented. So one of the things you find across various honor communities is a heightened concern for personal reputation and a heightened concern for group reputation. So there, I mean, we all are, we all value our reputation to some degree, but in honor cultures, that is ramped up quite a bit. And along with that comes a heightened sensitivity to insults and a heightened sensitivity to slights or challenges to your reputation. Because if somebody challenges your reputation and you back down, then that's a source of shame in most honor communities.

So there is this strong conviction that people should handle their own business in honor cultures, that they should stand up for themselves when they're challenged and not turn to third parties to resolve their own conflicts. And so that's why you have like stop snitching campaigns in the honor culture of the inner city and urban gangs and baseball and hockey players. I talk a lot about baseball and hockey because those, I think, are the most honor-oriented sports. When they get into their beefs or feuds, they don't speak to the media. They don't speak to the league. There's a strong code that you have to handle any offenses against or challenges or insults to the team themselves. You keep it all in-house. I don't know enough about baseball. I was surprised

in your account of the beaning of a batter by a pitcher, intentionally throwing the ball at him, is part of the culture of baseball to a degree that I didn't realize. I mean, baseball is a lot more like hockey than I realized. That's right. It really is. And it's kind of fascinating, all the unwritten rules. And this is another feature of a lot of honor cultures is there's just a lot of unwritten norms and codes that go along that just that are part of the what governs the way people behave in these cultures. And they're constantly evolving. They're they're flexible. But but but they're very internal. And so from out from an outsider's perspective, they can be difficult to understand. But yeah, I mean, you can hit hit home run in baseball and walk a little too slowly, run a little too slowly around the bases,

and then that will make you a target for the, you know, the next time you come up to the plate. There's just so many, it's a pretty Byzantine kind of and dramatic and kind of fascinating set of rules that govern, you know, when you're supposed to get payback, when you're supposed to just take, you know, just accept that you're being hit by the pitcher because you understand that they have a grievance and they need to they need to get their revenge and then get it over with and you can move on. And that's very typical of honor cultures. And I think baseball and hockey are examples, in my mind, of successful honor communities because they're able to contain the conflicts and not let them spin out of control.

and not let them spin out of control. Other features of honor communities, they tend to place higher value on virtues and character traits like courage, hospitality, loyalty, integrity, and maybe this is one of the problems you're going to have with them, solidarity with a particular group. There's a real sense of collective identification and collective responsibility in honor cultures. And there's a sense of tribal, like they're tribal. There's a real tribalism to honor cultures. But I think that word right now,

the way it's tossed around today doesn't capture the sense in which honor cultures are tribal. Today, when we speak about tribalism, we often mean, and I think sometimes when you speak about tribalism and people like Pinker, we often mean people identifying with an ideology, like a political ideology or a racial or ethnic ideology. But in an honor culture, there is this sense of collective identification. There is this tribalism, but you're identifying with actual people, not an idea. Actual people, the people in your community who you know and who you interact with on a day-to-day basis. And so that's the sense in which honor communities are tribal. There are two examples that come to mind that really crystallize what is attractive about honor

and what is obviously pathological about it. I guess I'll just float both of those to you, because they seem to articulate psychological extremes for me. There's one you reference in the book. You might reference both, but I saw one. You talk about the satisfaction that awaits anyone who watches YouTube videos where bullies get pounded by the people they were targeting. There's actually a site or a thread on Reddit called Justice Porn, which wraps up some of these videos. So if you watch these, especially if you're a guy, being a guy, I only know what it's like to actually see it with the brain of a man. but I imagine women feel some of the same, if not the same, satisfaction here. So the prototypical case is, you know, there's some thug on the sidewalk who

is harassing people as they pass, and eventually he picks the wrong person, you know, who turns out to be a professional boxer or an MMA fighter, and just gets destroyed. It's a perfectly encapsulated moral circumstance. It's really like just a mini morality play in like two minutes, because this person's culpability is absolutely clear. There's no question that this guy, if anyone deserves to get pounded unconscious, it's this guy. And then it happens, and it seems like a perfect result morally. And again, so it has the feature of there's no appeal to a third party. The person who was threatened is defending himself, in some cases herself. There's some great videos where women wind up destroying the guy who was harassing them. Those are especially satisfying. And it's hard to see what's wrong with it except when you scale it to the rest of society. If you're going to run a society this way, you have to acknowledge that the full chaos and dysfunction of vendetta and vigilantism is

the result. And civilization, as you mentioned Pinker, as he's pointed out again and again, in large part depends on our outsourcing the use of force to the state. And yet these videos would be very different if they just entailed somebody getting on the phone and calling the police and watching the police show up and arrest the guy, which is how it has to work in an orderly society. As a counterpoint to this, I would say that almost the reductio ad absurdum of honor as a force for good is that the concept of honor killing, which you see and it's very widespread in the Muslim world, it's not only there, but in traditional societies, it's often imagined that the honor of the family is fatally threatened by any sexual indiscretion

on the part of any of the women in the family. So if a man's daughter refuses to marry the person he's chosen for her, or has sex out of wedlock, or just is caught holding some guy's hand to whom she's not married, in these societies and in these communities, even within our own societies, you often hear about a father or a father and a brother killing a young woman for the imagined offense to the family's honor that has been given here. And so, you know, if you could see a YouTube video of that, there'd be none of the satisfaction for anyone standing outside of that circumstance. You know, I'll just give you both of those examples to react to. Yeah. Okay. So let me take the justice porn one first, and then I'll address the honor killings. I mean, certainly nothing in this book is anything but horrified by honor killings. And I take it really seriously as a problem. But let me first go back to what makes those videos so satisfying. I think the way you framed it is that it's perfect justice because this bully gets exactly what he deserved. I mean, assuming that it is a guy, which it almost always is. And I think that it's even a little bit more than that, or it's significantly more than that, because you could imagine just a stranger punching the bully, just kind of a victim, who's going to be bullied, stands up for themselves. And the sense of respect that comes with that, self-respect,

respect from the community, respect from the people who are watching, I mean, it's palpable and you can see it. And it actually, it's tangible. And sometimes it even comes from the people who are watching. I mean, it's palpable and you can see it and it actually, it's tangible. And sometimes it even comes from the bully. Sometimes even the bully respects the person that just knocked them out because they stood up for themselves. That's a very common dynamic and that is exactly what is lost

when you marshal out these kinds of conflicts to some impartial third party. That's why, you know, I say in the book, it's not justice porn. It's not even remotely justice arousing to, you know, have the bully be taken away by a security officer or the principal and get suspended or even expelled. You know, at that point, it's like, well, maybe the bully, maybe the school needed to do that because of the harm that he was causing. But that's sort of the lesser of evils rather than an assertion of self-respect. Now, sometimes that's not possible. And that's the problem.

That's the problem with honor cultures is sometimes the power imbalance is too great and you can't stand up for yourself. And you need third parties to come in and prevent great injustice. And that's where this idea of containment comes in. But we shouldn't lose. And this is one of the things I feel like we've lost. We shouldn't lose or reject the value of standing up for yourself, of being willing to take a risk that maybe you will get your ass kicked or something, but at least you are showing that you can't be pushed around and you're not immediately turning to a third party to handle a conflict that directly involves you. Okay. So that's the justice porn one. That's the easier example for me. Honor killings, I think, are an extreme example of one of the problems with honor,

which is that there is very little restriction on the content of honor norms. So all honor groups have norms and codes that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated within the community. And those, there are some commonalities, but there are also a lot of differences. And there's nothing within the sort of honor morality that constrains what those codes are. So if you have a community like certain cultures where just the suspicion or the reality of extramarital sex on the part of a family member will reduce the honor of the family that will make the family dishonorable. And you called that imaginary and it's imaginary. It's not imaginary for them. They are dishonored and they are treated poorly by the people in that community. Now that's a fucked up. Are you allowed to swear on this podcast? Yes, indeed you are. That's a fucked up norm, right? That's a fucked up way of allocating

honor and dishonor. Um, and especially dishonor or shame in this case, but that's, but that's what happens in these communities is that the family honor and all the privileges that come with being an honored member of the community and all the shit that comes with being a shamed member of the community. That will happen to the family unless they act in the way that they feel they need to act. And often they don't want to do it. You know, often it's like a duty. It's like some sort of weird, perverse duty, moral duty that they feel like they have to kill the sister that they love or the daughter that they love in order to preserve the family's honor for generations. And so this is a huge problem with honor that we don't have those kinds of restrictions about what the norms will be that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated. And that's another goal of containment is to make sure. So, you know, in my world, if you find an honor community where this is their way, this is their value, this is their way of allocating honor and dishonor, then you don't allow that. So you do need some kind of higher authority that will enforce a

minimal respect for human rights in a way that would rule out honor killings. But again, that doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater. That doesn't mean that you, the fact that there are honor killings in the vast minority of honor cultures across the world and throughout history, I mean, it's a tiny, tiny percentage of cultures that find this to be morally acceptable or not dishonorable to kill a family member. The fact that that exists doesn't mean we should throw out honor and all the motivational benefits that come with it. its perversions would be some kind of consequentialist understanding of its effects on individuals and on society. So, I mean, the reason why it's bad to have notions of male honor that extend to the sexual behavior or even the sexual misfortune of women in the family. So,

I mean, as you know, honor killings even happen when a girl gets raped because she is viewed as sullied by having been raped. I mean, that's like the perfect case of moral lunacy, where a father kills his daughter because of the shame that has been brought to the family over her rape. So you would want to argue that that kind of honor is pathological on the grounds that it creates immense human misery for no good reason and doesn't create any benefit that outweighs that misery. Whereas in other cases where you're talking about things like hospitality and the

kinds of moral heroism that can be motivated by things like honor and can't quite be motivated by its cousins like self-esteem or dignity yeah or dignity yeah so then you want to argue for its place because it does good for us but again like even going to the the best possible case or at least the best case we've mentioned so far, which is these justice porn videos, there you can argue that there's a higher norm to which even people who are chock full of honor would adhere in those circumstances. So, for instance, I've spent a lot of time thinking about self-defense and violence, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about self-defense and violence, and I've spent a lot of time training in martial arts, and I'm surrounded by people who have a

tremendous amount of martial honor. But because they have so much honor and so much experience, these are world champions in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and SWAT team members and Navy SEALs, people who have absolutely no doubt about their ability to handle situations of interpersonal violence. These are people who, when they walk around in the world and see behavior of the sort that we're seeing in those videos, they're not the guys who run up and punch the bully in the face because, one, they have absolutely nothing to prove from that contest. I mean, they know they can punch the bully in the face. If they decline to punch the bully in the face, they will not lose sleep that night wondering what it says about them, right? They're not going to be racked by doubt about their own martial abilities.

doubt about their own martial abilities. They see these things in very pragmatic terms, and they just realize they have a lot to lose if things go haywire. You know, they've been in enough fights themselves that they know what follows. They know, you know, you punch a bully in the face, and, you know, your hand gets cut, and you've got his blood in your wounds, and now you have to worry about whether or not, you know, you need an AIDS test. There's the possibility of getting arrested and having witnesses misunderstand what happened there. And now you have, you know, criminal or, you know, civil charges against you. There's a huge hassle awaits you if you get involved in any of this stuff. And so when you talk to people who understand human

violence really deeply, these are not the people who you see meeting out vigilante justice in those kinds of videos, nor would they if when you talk about what they would do in those situations. This becomes especially true when you imagine what it's like to walk around armed. I mean, people who I know who carry concealed weapons, you don't get into shoving and punching encounters with strangers when you have a gun on your belt because you're then two steps away from having to decide whether you're in over your head and now it's escalated to a lethal encounter with all of the legal ramifications. So people who are walking around armed are often just the first to just dial 911 and not go near situations like that.

Right. And that, I mean, at a certain point, the consequences do become too dire to do the thing that I think honor cultures and honor codes tend to promote, which is to handle your business and not involve some sort of stranger or a third party. I mean, I want, but to respond to your claims about the Navy SEAL people, the jujitsu experts that you know, that's a very common feature of honor cultures that if it's clear that they can, if they needed to, if called upon, respond to some sort of insult or challenge to themselves, then they often don't need to. I mean, the whole reason some of these honor norms on this aspect of honor norms evolved is to give people an incentive to preserve a reputation that means you can't be messed with, right? And they have that reputation already. They have nothing else to prove, as you say.

But Tamla, except they might only have it in their head in that context. I mean, so if you imagine you're just, you're traveling with your wife and you're in a bar that you've never been in before and will never be in again, and you don't look like some colossus who would scare people at a glance, but you're a, you know, a Navy SEAL or whatever who has no doubts about his ability to protect himself and his wife, and you might even be armed, say, right? And so somebody at the bar challenges you and even insults your wife. Like the prototypical case where you would have, as a man, you would feel tempted by a million years of hominid evolution at your back to defend yourself and your partner. a situation where it's most tempting where people who have this kind of discipline see the downside and just walk away and actually don't save face in that context. The bully has the satisfaction.

But there's nothing, there's no community to save face to there. These are strangers, as you say. So there's no real incentive to save face because nobody knows who they are in the first place. There's no reputation to either lose, preserve or augment. Right. And I don't know, like I want to interview one of these people right now and ask what would happen if they're at a bar with their wives or their daughters and somebody does insult them or seems physically threatening or starts to hit on one of their wives, I don't know if they're going to, if they're really going to walk away from something like that. If they feel like the consequences of engaging aren't, it's not going to lead to a gunfight, which most bar fights don't lead to gunfights. And most conflicts don't lead to

anything worse than just somebody getting their ass kicked. Obviously, there's what they think would happen or should happen, and then there's what would actually happen when push comes to shove, literally. But I've had many of these conversations, and I know what people aspire to do in those situations based on what they consider to be a higher ethic that even does preserve this notion of honor. I mean, if you've come out of an honor culture like, you know, the Navy SEALs, right? I mean, so the Navy SEALs are badasses. They have, you know, their training has many of the features you describe of an honor culture. Yeah, I talk about them a lot in the book, actually.

But the net result, when you try to, when you export that to living in a more cosmopolitan society, it becomes reduced down to a kind of higher ethic, which is, it would be a kind of failure if, it's a failure to have avoided conflict that was in fact avoidable. And avoidance is still a kind of master principle there, given all of the uncertainty that comes with conflict. And yet there is a kind of, I mean, if you're honorable enough, if you're secure enough, and I guess this is where self-esteem maybe swallows honor, if there really is no threat to your view of yourself when backing down from a challenge, then you're free to do it in a way that somebody who is more threatened isn't. The person who's easily goaded into a fight that he can't win

just because he finds it so intolerable to lose face, you know, that's a person who's just a monkey being manipulated by eye contact and insults. Yeah, I mean, so I think we agree about this in this sense where there's nothing about honor that suggests that in every context, you need to act in a certain way. I mean, this is one of the best things about honor codes and honor values is how flexible they are. And so in contexts where standing up for yourself or standing up for your family or standing up for your friends isn't appropriate according to their codes, then they're not gonna do it. And you're right also that you need a certain level of self-regard and confidence in your abilities

that you won't be lying awake in bed for the next two weeks kind of thinking about how you should have stood up to the person or how you should have said something or how you shouldn't have just walked away and listened to them taunt you or whatever it is, you know, if you have that level, this is, I think it's, this isn't just true when it comes to violence. This is true in most aspects of life. When people insult you in a way that you don't feel like they have the standing to really affect your reputation and the way you view yourself, then it's easy for that to just glide

off of you. But when you're in a situation where you do feel like your self-respect is at stake and you do feel like your reputation amongst people you care about is at stake, well, then that's a different story. But in the kinds of situations you're describing, it doesn't seem like either their self-respect or their reputation is at stake here. So, yeah, you absolutely in those kinds of situations can do the thing that will, you know, not lead to some kind of unpredictable calamity or something 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 have the kind of self-control that you don't get triggered like that in situations when it's not warranted. I mean, that is a big part of warrior culture, a big part of

a code. I mean, you see this with samurais is restraint. Not giving in to violence when it's not called for is as much of a virtue as being violent when it is called for. The real concern with honor as a major plank in one's morality is that it creates a kind of attractor state where incentives get all screwed up. And the problem is that it is dependent on how others view you, or at least how you imagine they will view you. And then that begins a kind of spiral of needless norm enforcement, which becomes highly non-normative if you stand back outside of that culture and look at the consequences. And so there are many examples you give in the book. One example, which I often think of here, is prison culture, where incentives are so badly aligned that even good people will reliably turn into monsters simply because there is no alternative, given what everyone else will do to them if they don't prove that they can be monsters.

Right. You have to project a kind of almost insane toughness so that you're not taken advantage of and, you know, and punked. and, you know, and punked. And that's true for people who just aren't like that, who aren't disposed to that, but that they have to make that part of their identity. This is true. Elijah Anderson, a book I quote a lot in the book, the sociologist Elijah Anderson and his book, Code of the Street. But this is also true, I think, of young kids in certain urban neighborhoods. And these are kids that they want friends and they want to have a normal high school experience. They want girls, but they also want to not be sitting ducks for the more aggressive kids in the neighborhood. So they have to establish some kind of reputation for toughness so that they're not taken advantage of and thought to be weak. And again, even if that's not who they are, even if that's, even if they don't have a kind of disposition for violence

or aggression, they have to, they have to project that and they have to do it. This is just their environment. This is just the environment in prison. You have to project that kind of image. And when it's successful, they can do it and not have it swallow up their identity entirely. Because there is this kind of tricky point, equilibrium point, where you've shown that you're tough enough that you can handle any challenges and insults that come at you, but nobody feels like you need to go any further than that. And then they'll just leave you alone. So if you can project this image of being violent, if called upon to be violent, then you don't actually have to engage in acts of violence and you won't be the victim of violence. But if you're not able to do that, then you're more likely to be a victim.

Right. But so all of that seems to be an advertisement for some prior stage of humanity that we are wise to have outgrown, at least outside of a prison or outside of a gang or outside of a ghetto that's crime-ridden. These are all places we are busily leaving, both as individuals who are lucky and as societies which are structured along different lines, and yet you seem to worry we're leaving something critical behind in that flight. We're leaving the values that come from how to survive in those kinds of environments, because we have not, as a society, figured out a way to extinguish all these kinds of scenarios and social environments where people will be threatened in this way and where your reputation can ensure that you'll either be left alone or that you'll be a kind of a victim. And, you know, while the fact that there are prisons

and the conditions in prisons, which are abhorrent, and the fact that there are these really poor neighborhoods where people are desperate, that's obviously that's a bad thing. But that doesn't mean that every value that comes from those kinds of environments and how to handle yourself in those kinds of environments, that can actually be a real positive that we shouldn't lose just because we're so worried about the kinds of conditions conditions that these environments have, poverty or prison. I mean, a good example is, I think, the military and the soldiers there, they develop a kind of code and a strict honor code in the Navy SEALs you were talking about, right? They have a code that is crucial to them, important to them, involves collective accountability, collective responsibility, never leaving a brother lying out in the field, right? They leave those kinds of environments, but they retain the values that they acquired in those environments. And the kind of environments they go into and the kind of environments that necessitate having those kinds, embracing those kinds of values, they're often really dangerous and something normally we would want to avoid.

really dangerous and something normally we would want to avoid. But the values that they bring out of that is something that stays with them for the rest of their lives. And I'd be surprised if you found any Navy SEALs or really military anywhere saying that they want to turn away from honor and the kind of honor values that were instilled in them when they were at war or in boot camp or wherever it is that they really started to internalize it. There are just these other parts of the honor picture that seem dispensable in the end, and maybe we can purify this notion of honor to something that is compatible with a more modern, liberal, consequentialist value system. of kind of collective responsibility for things. So that even if you do something terrible to another person, he or even a member of his family could retaliate against you, obviously, but not even necessarily just against you, but anyone close to you. So if you kill someone, well, then their family can kill your brother, say, in retribution. And then somehow honor makes sense of that instrumental violence, where you're targeting someone who's

actually not responsible for anything here, but because of their association with the responsible party, it's deemed legitimate to target them because of the effect that will have on the person who you actually do have a grievance with. See, I disagree with that interpretation of collective punishment and collective responsibility. I don't think it's instrumental. It often achieves instrumental goals like showing that the family is not to be messed with. But I think in honor cultures, in true honor cultures, they think it's just. They think if someone from your group, I mean, in an easier to relate to example, when you get into a beanball feud in baseball and the opposing pitcher hits one of your batters if you're in the american league that 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 instrumental value in doing that to show the other team that you can't throw at your players. But there there is 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 that will do that, then everyone on that team is accountable for that. And I think, you know, that maybe seems irrational, certainly from a perspective that we come from where individual responsibility is the only thing that can possibly matter. And as you believe, and I used to believe, you can't even really make sense of individual responsibility, moral responsibility, the kind of desert entailing sense. That just seems totally insane. But I think there's a lot of moral advantages to that kind of attitude. And I think you can see them when you think, look, it's not just about punishment. It's not just about getting revenge on some family whose brother may have injured or killed your family member.

It's also about making up or compensating somebody for something that your family member did, right? for something that your family member did, right? It's that same instinct, that same norm that encourages, that motivates people to say, look, I know it was my brother who harmed you, but my brother can't make it up to you. My brother can't make this right, but I can. And I feel obligated to do it.

Yeah, that resonates with me. And the only reason they feel obligated is because they feel that sense of collective identification, that sense of collective responsibility. Well, even though I didn't do it, I had no control over whether my brother did it or not. I still feel an obligation to try to make it right, to try to make up for what my brother did. And you see that in honor cultures quite a bit as well. to try to make up for what my brother did.

And you see that in honor cultures quite a bit as well. So it's not all of the dark side of these blood feuds and Hatfield and McCoys and these long multi-generational cycles of violence. It's also a sense of justice that, yeah, it's not just you. you're responsible for the people around you. And that also as a side benefit encourages a healthy amount of self-policing within groups, because now you know that if one of your group members fucks up, you're going to have to be, you're going to have to pay for it in some way. I'm certainly open to the utility of all of

these ideas and social structures. Again, the cash value for me morally is always the consequences of thinking in these ways and obeying these various norms. And yeah, so you allude to my view of free will as undercutting any notion of real responsibility in the ultimate sense, or as it's imagined to exist by people who believe in free will. But I would think that's like ultimately just as irrational to think that somebody is individually responsible for an act that they did. It's no more rational to think that than it is to think that you're responsible for what a group member did, right? I mean, according to your view. Except for the consequences of holding people responsible in those cases. And the reason why it makes sense to hold people responsible.

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