harvard bookstore in cambridge massachusetts. the program is a little over an hour. [applause] >> thank you, thank you so much. thanks to all of you for coming out this evening to this, my favorite bookstore in the whole wide world. give it up for harvard oak store. is that a great place? [applause] now it is my pleasure to introduce kwame anthony appiah. he is approached with the rarest combination of break-through, africa and an afghan american intellectual history and political philosophy. poppy is a thinker and a writer. uses our brain and as warm as reflective and as accessible, as challenging and as generous as he is as a friend. a premier scholar of contemporary philosophical thought his work crosses

disciplines as it crosses national boundaries. and celebrates human rights, ethnic and cultural pluralism, individual identity, intellectual liberty and a sublime mode of cosmopolitanism. let me review just a few of appiah's earlier accomplishments before talking for a moment about his new book, "the honor code," how moral revolutions happen. ..

>> in our globalize interconnected and connected world. three smart and entertaining mystery novels, the

discipline crossing and first and last deeply invested in human-rights and individual liberty. but the concerns of the question looking at successful campaigns of practices now considered foreign like foot binding in china or a dual and aristocratic in glendora slavery in the british empire and the united states. through eliminating in currie he helps to understand the appeal to honor plays in what he calls moral revolution. "the honor code" has received high praise from reviewers and high giants to whom i will get to momentarily and paul berman roach in slade to reading "the honor code" is like attending a lecture by a

loose a professor who goes over the colorful anecdotes but is intent on making you think for yourself. celebrating his balance between arguments and storytelling in which he "steers then a spoonfuls of narrative money to help his medicinal tea go down close go. matthew iglesias on think progress.com calls it quote monster fall prey to of all of the stereotypes of academic overspecialization. and "who cares-ism." [laughter] i like that. and nobel laureate who has never shied away from moral complexity or nuance says the book "cow stimulating it is to read the remarkable research of a brilliant mind into the concept of honor as a origin of morality as we know it practice or not.

it is essential and inescapable with the urgent relevance to the embattled human morality that we live within our code of the president. walter isaacson address the importance not only for imports and moral angry but as a guide book for the future. wilson says "he lays out the concept that is not only compelling in its own right does suggest a connection that may help to collate biological and cultural exploration of human morality. fact is a grand complement. isaacson says "even honor is distorted as with honor killings in pakistan, the concept can be a lone star to guide us to a better future and is an amazing and fascinating insight. this concludes is an indispensable book for

honorable citizens. and just two hours ago completed the final of his w.e.b. du bois lectures on the negro and africana and those will be published soon by the harvard university press. anthony appiah will read from his book from a truly remarkable book. please welcome my friend anthony appiah. [applause] >> i am half english. my mother was english and when people say nice things about you when you are english, you are embarrassed [laughter]

but then if you think them. [laughter] so i will focus on that. i am happy to read from the book but i thought i will talk about it. by the end of my talk if you want to read from it i will but then you may want to ask questions. thank you for coming. one way to explain the book is to think of the questions that generate but thinking to strands of thought the melamine was thinking about "cosmopolitanism" of book that i wrote some years ago and i was looking for examples of conversation about moral question. one of the most famous was the dialogue between the missionaries, deletes, women

who were wise to american businessmen and the intellectuals about flat binding as crows with china. i read literature on that but people say the reason the chinese mandarin gave up fled to binding because it was a stain on the national honor of tying up. i don't know you but i can think of better reasons for not causing intense pain to little girls which is what foot binding involves. binding the feet at the age of two or three so tight that they weep and develop abscess, may develop in terrain and in the end in the ideal case with the it is 3 inches long of the adult woman had been wrapped in a beautiful silk shoot

shoot -- shoe. thought of many reasons and i could not fit this into the book but in the back of my mind i thought about that later. then the history department invited me to give the lecture. i have no idea why. that was very kind of them. i thought this is my moment. and in figuring out how to think about it it occurs to me when i was an undergraduate, i have learned how human knowledge works by reading the works of the great philosopher of science about scientific revolution. so from austria and the french students from the revolution i thought had written things to help us understand knowledge.

and it occurred to me there are moral revolution so maybe as it helped us to understand something important, maybe tomorrow revolution tells us about our moral rights. so i say i will do a historical project like the revolution that ended for a binding and it looks like the puzzling thing about what binding to me was the question of honor. i think of myself as a moderate one went to college my father said as the looked over his morning paper and glasses and said remember your family honor. i thought wow.

it was kindly meant a pretty scary tsai was brought up to think not just my honor by the family honor so i think i had a sense of it but did not understand it as they begin to talk to historians the historical episode to start it is a clear moment of honor and where it is another form is dueling and that is what led me to begin inspired by these two unrelated thoughts to think about the dual. and how to think about that? i happen to upon a particular duel in 1829 that struck me as an obsolete fascinating and amazing.

between the prime minister of england and the duke of wellington and demand his style was nottingham. i think he was earl of winchelsea but anyway, these two the duke of wellington is the prime minister of england and the stoop fight a famous duel. what is it about? and $0.1 my answer is i have no idea. [laughter] i have read a great deal about it and i know what they say but in some sense it makes no sense so you cannot think that was reasonable but basically there was a debate in parliament about whether catholics given rights call

catholic emancipation because the majority of the voters in ireland for catholic and then trying to avert a civil war and the british had to figure out what to do that and duke ellington was born in ireland. and earl of winchelsea said in a letter to the newspaper the duke of rawling 10 in favor of catholic emancipation although he had been opposed in the past he was now in favor and leading the charge and made a very good speech was covering up his sympathies the fact he was secretly sympathizing and the way he cover this up was by pretending to support the king's college of london which was founded as the anglican university in

competition with the secular university that was just founded. good to go falling 10 setup the university does this help? i don't know. [laughter] but duke of wellington is very boring and it was a big deal for him he was only in favor because of the war in ireland so he says to earl of winchelsea you have to apologize and he says i cannot so earl of winchelsea calls the second he lost his arm a few days before waterloo but went on to be

commander in chief a very distinguished man and talked to 217 and then they have the duel. what happens? a lot of comical things but by the way the fact is from our point* of view their ridiculous and funny even though this is serious an episode that the prime minister could have been shot in the middle of a constitutional crisis they thought it is good reason so they have the fight and earl of winchelsea, duke of wellington is challenge first and fires and mrs. which is not surprising because he was a famous bad shot everybody expected him to miss but what is really amazing is what happened next and now earl of winchelsea what did he do? e points the gun in the air and fires in the air this is the man who did not have to

have the duel. [laughter] why does he do that? we don't know but then he takes the apology out of his pocket and now apologizes. why? earl of winchelsea felt once the duke of wellington asked him to apologize it was effective people thought earl of winchelsea was not fighting because he was afraid of the duke said he had to have the duel to be shot at now this may make sense to you but not to be but is certainly makes sense to them. by the way earl of winchelsea is the grandfather of a guy from out of africa. [laughter] you could ask me more if you like but here is what i

learned and i am so glad and this is what i learned about honor. you may not know this but doing was illegal in england and it was against the common law. they say if you kill someone in a duel it is ordinary murder and a capital crime and is illegal and unchristian it was condemned by the christian church in the ninth century and that was repeated and was commonplace of the protestant churches when they came into being as well as the catholic no christian thought they were good rebut the thought that argument that for it to make sense there has to be some connection between who is

right and the only person who can make the connection is him and if you use the tools to force him you are attempting god and not doing that is something christ himself said not to do and he says thou shall not attempt the lord thy god city is tempting god and makes it unacceptable but there is this good of the jewish reason it is unchristian and in a legal plainly immoral because one reason for having a duel what is somebody accuses you but now falsely accusing you of being dishonest is bad but not a capital either end. it does not take the appropriate punishment to

think it is death. it is illegal and often crazy. [laughter] because there is no connection between who wins or who was right. trying to tempt god but he will not succumb so you have the irrational and moral and at 300 years and a gentlemen in england who is charged said yes. the beginnings of resistance happen the late 18th century when people like wilbur have a new kind of morality and he would not have accepted it and he thought it was wrong so he thought that was a good enough reason but everybody else say i know it is not

crest -- kristian but i have to defend my honor but what you learn is honor will make people do things that is illegal and immoral and of christian and crazy does not make sense to the point* of view of reason but they will do it. that is a very important lesson and discovery at least for me. that duke of wellington fights to fight and 1850 if you challenge somebody to a duel in england, people laugh. it is ridiculous. in 20 years it goes from being something a gentleman should do to not just recognized to be wrong but as a source of this honor and going from being honorable to ridiculous

nothing more dishonorable than being ridiculous it goes from honorable to ridiculous. why? that is complicated story. read the book. [laughter] but a great deal of it has to do with the fact it was the first direct -- aristocratic practice if anybody can do it than it does not distinguish you and one of the things that happened is and in predicting this they said butchers and barbers and other rude mechanicals i remember that is what shakespeare calls his characters in the rude mechanicals and says already 300 years once regular

people start to do what it will not work anymore he says he thought it would happen sooner but not tell the 19th century but it did happen but another thing is they started to democratize the aristocrats were regarded as ridiculous and by 1850 you get knocked in the "london times" if you do o am by the end of the century, this is where an english officer as background and asked what he would do if he was challenged to radio and he has a one word sentence. laugh. [laughter] some of this says is honor

is reformed and you have new ideas then you can turn on and the right to direction talk about the idea of the university to say it is somebody who will do no harm see you come from the model of good gentlemen to warrior noble as a victorian high spectacle person if you have a stiff upper lip you can insult to think that it reflects badly on you. this happened very fast i have talked too long about one case and there are three others in the book maybe you could ask questions but i want to make one final point* about how this applies to the present if you want to defend honor honor, there are obvious

objections first i argue it can be democratized and the second to that it is associated with violence and i say can be turned against violence but third, look at what it is doing in the world today, killing 1,000 women in pakistan per year but at least 5,000 women in the world and that is terrible but much worse than that is the fact millions of women are there by terrorized only small proportions of the victims because of our times in this situation today i talk about honor killing in pakistan it is a muslim country is not a muslim practice and is condemned by the ayatollah and scholars and 40 pakistani religious leaders and indeed it is still

carried out in the mediterranean world it is pre-kristian pre-muslim practice of course, large parts it does not happen at all. that is important to my argument because what i want to say is first there is internal tension to the notion of honor that leads to honor killing in associates the honor of men with the sexual purity voluntary or not. you could be killed because you were raped and has nothing to do if you are a good% but if you have a mark or a stigma but those very same thing say men are responsible for the sanctity of their when been so the

first thing that it is happening already like and pakistan to one very distinguished woman lawyer to say there is no honor in honor killing. if you think a woman in your family has done something that is prohibited then the method described is to go to the court but not to kill your daughter or mother or sister or wife. trust me. the level of individual and family honor there is a huge argument to be made against honor killing that pakistan was created to be the country of the women it is muslim by definition and it brings dishonor to islam to

allow this and muslim practice that damages the muslim women pakistani honor are al-qaeda it seems to me. i don't think anyone in pakistan should take notice of me saying that but they say it there and if you want to support somebody against on a killing support the people that say lookout it makes us look and notice that you have to understand it is wrong the honor is working to reinforce not working against it so collective monarch could be mobilized pledge to honor its self can be reformed and

those two i am hopeful will lead to the end of honor killing in about the same amount of time of the binding which is about 20 years if we do it right. a similar process of west africa led by an organization has led to the abandonment of the male to mobile cutting in thousands of villages. it can be made to work in defense of the lives in the bodies of women although i reject the idea that honor cannot be turned and finally if you think it should be rejected then you have no chance. honor is too deep we do not abandon but reform it and restructure to serve the purposes that we can applaud. thank you.

[applause] >> i did not mean to end on the word applied. [laughter] -- applied thank you. [laughter] you are very suggestible. >> when we were at cambridge we heard a story about it a british soldier who gave his life by sacrificing himself nine shipload blowup and the only way off the coast of nigeria and that night he went up to his room at churchill college and saw winston churchill and he wrote about how man's best friend the enforcement of the keying the chief noble has to commit ritual suicide

30 days after the keying dies to leave his horse to the other side. my first question is where do we draw the line? and what is honorable and what is not? how do we know how we are supposed to feel about defending the homeland against innovators or killing someone in the name of the country that we love and value? and second, i know you have written about i thought you may share this with your audience it is easy to look back at foot binding to think what were they thinking and doing but maybe will share your list that the next generation will say what they thinking? [laughter] >> first is a question about

how honor is reformed because the right question to ask is is what they are demanding consistent? and i think self sacrifice of foyer country is consistent there may be the objection of prudence of a different kind of value that it is not in your self-interest to throw yourself on the grenade but i don't believe that is not just the honorable thing to do but also good in the context of a war. the first saying it is we should look at honor practices and ask how can we reform them to be

consistent? not the same as morality but consistent and as in the case of honor killing egregiously immoral then reform is in order but and focusing on the moral case as they do in the book, you may lose track of something else that it does serve to support all kinds of values that have nothing to do with it we give honorary degrees one of those is for a philanthropist so i guess that is superior but who was worried? when we give an honorary degree it is not because we think he is a good person but because he is a great scholar or writer.

honor is used to sustain values other than that in redo honor great movie makers and actors excellence is not all moral but it does seem to me i should tell you i think honoring is involving rights to respect to be entitled and to care about your honor is about respect then you want to be respected two but it is the entitlement that comes first for the honorable person is so they just want to be respected like bernie madoff he was to be respected he does not care if pete deserves the respect the honorable person was to be respected because she is

entitled and i think that means when you care about something and have a value that shared respect the scholarly values were great achievements one way to manage that to is by honoring those who achieve beyond the norm in that demand and indeed i would not understand somebody who's at the respective value of the music but not the people who are good at it what does that mean? honoring great athletes are musicians are scholars nurses who go above and beyond the call of duty with their work and honoring those people and soldiers not just what they have to

do but sit beyond but it is the ideal way and think about this we ask soldiers to do things you could not purred-- possibly require because offering your life is not something you can be required to do. but it is said good thing if they're willing to risk their lives we cannot punish them for not giving up their lives because they don't have that duty nor is it possible to get people to risk their lives by offering money at least the kind that we have available. [laughter] i suppose if we said to every soldier for a million dollars or a medal of honor that many would take the metal and we cannot command

them to do that are tell them but they will for honor and is the cause is just not honor is serving to get people something that we cannot possibly require them to do it it is always going beyond the call of duty. >> so now one of the thing this i'll say it what are they thinking about? there is a lot but here's a couple and one that you could all come up with that i think there's a revolution of our attitude with treatment of animals their

production of food and it has already begun. i.e. to meet and i have sheep but the cruelty involved of pork and beef beef, if you look at it you cannot endorse it. i think our grandchildren a comeback to say what were they doing? they will see videotapes -- videotapes never mind the environmental disaster adjust the suffering of the animals. they'll also worry about the environment and a lot of environmentalist animal-rights issues to say why couldn't they get their act together? but the other ones that i

think the fact 4% of humanity with citizenship and 25% of the world and cursor rated is preposterous and never mind and forget about the morality. [laughter] it is immoral it cannot be right to set up a system with those numbers and it cannot be right to produce that result to not do anything about it. maybe we stopped our way into it but we better get our way out of it but forget about that but the waste of human lives and what they could be doing for the rest of us are contributing to our gdp so i think people will look back to say we have no idea how it could have been that a society

could and net gain the largest in cursor greater on the planet or the history of the planet nobody else has ever locked up this largest proportion of its citizens citizens, we have a lot of people who have been in prison and whose lives have been ruined i don't need to go on but they will say what we were to say about slavery and shame on you for allowing this. shame on us. there are others and there are disputed cases i did not include abortion i have a different view of the right answer but many people think that maybe they will the support -- disappear but not for technological reasons.

>> quickly eight klein incarceration, there are some efforts to use electronielectroni c monitoring which may have other problems. >> it is an improvement. >> there is some evidence that people are better served. but since honor depends on a consensus where does the authority come from to change the consensus? >> if it is moral? >> in the cases that i looked at and nobody would argue the other moral side they could have a moral defense there's some propaganda in the south people like you know, the guy who wrote campbell's but

i don't think they believe what they were saying and other people did not believe them that they only said what a reasonable person could believe so there was a sense of a necessity of the practice to the plantations that is the life of a society but the adrs, what happens when people realize it is wrong is not that they defend its but say things they don't believe. that is a kind of defense the other thing is they try very hard not to think about it. they engage in strategic deterrence and incarceration is something there is a vast amount of ignorance and people don't want to think about the fact in the presence of this society they're more likely to have

tuberculosis or aids or to be raised to in the present when you come out then when you went in. that is the most likely place to be raped but when we sentence them to prison we're sentencing them to be raped and then there they are our responsibility and they should not be and then we have to accept responsibility. >> is something like to name two people sense that change over time? that was equally morally wrong when it started. >> but this is a complicated question because this notion of morality i am using is a bit technical and what i mean is a set of norms of what we hold four other people is what i mean.

tulane is complicated if understood that way because whatever you can say about doing is in the end between consenting adults and normally while we think what consenting adults do it is crazy are silly or wrong, we are inclined to think it is up to them so it is complicated but i will try to answer your question about shifting the norm. the best example is what happened in the foot binding case you have to have a social movement. they had fled to binding societies -- foot binding society saying i will not

vote for someone lowered eat food produced through this means of production. we. they got together and societies were modeled on what they had done before like the anti-opium societies to make good double promise if you join this i will not bind the feet of my daughter or a very my son to a woman whose feet our bound then in getting rid of -- foot binding which was a condition now you create the husband's at the same time is changing the practice and it was brilliant. i don't know who thought of this is unclear but it was a brilliant designed in similar to west africa when these women and men commit

themselves to female genital cutting first they only do it at the same time in the village from which the husband's, the daughter of the village they have a conversation together then they say we will not do it and will not very into families that do it and if enough people do it and it is called the tipping point* and at some point* there is a new normal and when there is a new normal then all the social pressure like to link or foot to binding flips and suddenly you feel better about yourself this is a book about honor and its role but if you want to make changes there are things you have to do and among those israel social organization

and groups of people who commit themselves to a new convention or near normal and one cnf people do it to you can stop talking about it because nobody will do it anymore except to the weirdos [laughter] >> talking about the paradigm shift, what are the prospects of the movement, in other words, scientists say we will look back and 20 years to ask the question what did they think? using a day finite resources as if it was infinitely available but it it will probably destabilize the human enterprise, what were

they thinking? we just had elections in the last 48 hours where the public thinking is to reject any self-imposed self restraint. but anthropologist have not written about that as a duality with a flip situation and just as the draconian revolution occurs people can flip from honored to shameful very quickly. >> that is one of your chapters. what do we need to do to move the carbon where we have muscular suv drivers to say i will drive this until kingdom come and in the process hastening kingdom come? how do you get them to flip where they say what was i thinking? >> the question is what will

make the flip have been in relation to moving to post card been a economy to the world where he essentially we're making get much harder for the biological survival which is the sort of thing our grandchildren in particular, if there are any should be particularly inclined what were they thinking about? this is a little different from some of the others in the sense that it has a collective action problem in the way that the others don't to say it is true my a suv isn't doing it and everybody else sops everything would be fine. when you have to listen to the sound of your daughter weeping or have to see the

slave at your table or watch him be whipped, harris is a direct feedback to you and when you are wounded or killed or lose a friend in a duel there is a direct feedback so there is an extra dimension of difficulty in this case which we have to solve a of course, and we have to figure out and honor is the ideal mechanism because notice what happened in the doing case. the reason, what was it about? it was defining the distinction of gentlemen but another was maintaining civility because the idea was with all of these people who are worried about their honor you like it were you

end up on the end of a sword. but why should i risk my life in order to make my friends polite? once you have me concerned about my honor i forget i have the side effect. if we can make it dishonorable or shame that people than each time the people drive, there is a lot of cases we all do something we should be ashamed of and this is just a monstrous visible example but none of us can excuse ourselves we're all in gays and practices that are part of the problem. if we can get ourselves to see or have the feeling azide drive down the street people think what kind of a schmuck is that?

[laughter] but the trouble is the driver thinks it is not that bad and does not care. [laughter] because he has not yet been converted to the norm of which there is a problem the plaintive collection days collective action is not a matter of telling people you do have to produce a social cost and we can do that but only collectively not one at a time we have to create a movement that is willing to say to people you are poisoning the human nest. >> especially slave trade and the flip that occurs there the past to do with dividing a positive alternative if the free

labor provision endure it moves out of the need for plantation two industrial capital why not keep them in africa to grow palm oil? >> it is crucial the question is isn't it important in the slave case the free labor was a genuine alternative to produce. yes. that is the other thing to tell people what they're doing is bad or shameful is not helpful unless you tell them there's something else they can be doing that is honorable so it is not enough. you are right i should have said this it is an important part of the argument at the end of the book you cannot just tell people they are bad. that is so plus they will ignore you and is like you

but you have to say you know, you're doing a bad thing but here is a good thing instead to satisfy the same interest but in a way that is morally preferable and when we think about these things we have succeeded the toyota prius is sexy and not be all and end all but we have made slightly more environmental when you can be proud those who are proud of driving the suv. >> i saw your piece in "the

new york times" magazine about eight couple of components when people from the exterior with looked binding it -- foot binding and with the significant involvement of people with respect so the missionaries who work on the anti-foot binding campaign immerse themselves in chinese culture and tried to avoid coming in from a position of her again source superiority is how might understand it. wondering how it can be done it seems like a delicate balance to be approaching the issues that are get about in the framework. >> just for some feedback

talking about reading in the near times and helping to bring about change in the chinese case because outsiders have a a deep respect of the chinese civilization and the baptist minister one of the important people, he knew his confucian texts and roche beautiful classical chinese and published it. they could not think this is an outsider who do-- to does not respect us. so the first duty of someone to be helpful from the outside is to make sure you know, what the heck you are

talking about. not only that the but knowing it is rooted not in contempt for other people but as a concern for the girls whose genitalia are being cut or the women's foot binding are those who are risking being assassinated by members of their family but also the family by killing your daughter you have lost something and you have lost something to so the whole society would be better off. unless the outsiders look like that, you will get the opposite reaction and the backlash that we got in relation to female genital cutting when the

missionaries who led a massive campaign and then it became the item of faith that you had to maintain this product -- practice. profoundly counterproductive intervention. but now given what most muslims in the world reasonably believe right or wrong about many americans our voices don't sound like they come from a place of respect or concern but from a place of disrespect and contempt and ignorance and we have to admit that they are. so those of us who believe, i am glad to be an american citizen and unlike

q i chose to be. but it is very important for those of us to represent our country in a different way but very important for us with the idiots want to burn the q'uaran or oppose the creation of prayer centers between which the world trade center many have in now tops on and then to be regarded as a great place of sanctity and daughter? when they do things like that we have to make it clear that some of us are in a different place. and those of us they may want to seek help or maybe even discuss. i do not want them to talk to the guy in florida.

of course, they don't. [laughter] but i don't them to talk to him. there is no reason at all they should ignore him and they should have contempt for him but it would be better if they change their ways and then i tried to have respect i cannot respect the traditions may cannot pretend but manifest in respect. >> by the way in this conversation that i am not modeling very well, we don't hear anything