.the caribbean. any idea on what other plays were indians were sent from india? >> madagascar. >> some, yes. >> china? >> nope. one more gas. >> breccia? >> nope. >> they were sent to the very bottom of africa -- south africa, okay? one area where there's quite a lot of sugar is called nepal. and there was plenty of sugar that was growing there. and one day a man came in to the office of the barrister. a barrister is a lawyer and he

has rogan rants, rants, teeth were broken and he was weeping. he was weeping because his owner, the plantation owner had treated him so poorly. and the lawyer thought to himself, what is this system that was so mistreated sort this? is this not a form of slavery? now, this lawyer is someone who we have come to notice and. if anybody knows, he was in south africa. he was in south india. does anybody know who this man was caught >> mohandas gandhi? >> exactly. so then we became to call mahatma gandhi. why do we consider him gondi? why would we call gondi the

great? what would we say he did for us? anybody? >> he hoped people that were working for those people to get their rights back. >> and how did he do that? in what way? what was his need? >> he once said i for the eye. wonderful. >> he went on strike. >> he was in favor of peace. >> every one of these things is trees. and eye for an eye makes everyone blind. you go on strike, you march. he preached. he developed this idea of nonviolence.

he developed the idea that you must be pure insole. and this is how we shall fight this injustice. and that is what we call sacha grau, the name of the movement, which means truth force. and for year after year, he fought these poor people who were working marched with him and they managed to abolish the indenture system through this philosophy. >> and so gandhi succeeded in south africa. he brought his idea of statue across the common nonviolence resistance to india. he brought india to independence. who's studied the idea of mahatma gandhi? who in america study the idea of mahatma gandhi?

>> martin luther? >> martin luther king saw that gandhi succeeded. so if we think back to sugar everything back to this idea that a product can link you to the person who produced it, sugar is responsible again for most of atlantic slavery, for millions of, for horrible brutality, foreign indentured system that left many, many casualties. it also led to the ending of slavery, the first in the world and inspired mohandas gandhi to develop the concept of nonviolent resistance, which would then be used in india and come back to america. so if you go -- now when you go and look at the label at the candy bar you eat with the

serial hub in the morning and it says sugar, you will know that i'm not one word is magic, insights, is slavery, is freedom, and science. that history is right there and it's fair for you to know this they are for you to know when the. what am i using? what price of my pain? who is paying the price for what i enjoy? but thinks me? i will tell you on the cover are both, these children. chains is now. this is in the dominican republic today. this is not 100 years ago. this is now. so when we talk about the price of the things we enjoy, if we honor those people who ended slavery and if we honor those

people who thought with nonviolent for change, we can also think about the products we use and what choices we can make to honor those who suffer to give us pleasure. and martin luther king wrote in his letter from the birmingham jail that we are all linked in a web. we are all linked in the web and we see that in this product, which we eat every day. and that was the story we tried to tell him "sugar changed the world." so i hope it has been useful for you. [applause] >> we have time for a few questions. we have time for a few questions. then the academy and three from fn 61 perhaps.

>> yeah, go for it. >> marina budhos, how did you feel when you went past were used to work and it was a car place? >> where my family's home once was? he is referring to the story that i don't always heard about my beautiful, beautiful family house that was built with my family success rate in the sugar land. and the houses gone. it'd been touring down. and of course i felt very, very sad because there was no house. and yet at the same time, there's two things. and the tropic, and sought out pretty quickly. they don't last as long as -- we have houses of bricks to last forever. the other thing i had to accept is that with history.

my family did well. my father found out immigrating and coming to the united states. we did move on and its time for the next generation to do something with that lot of land. >> if you count your website have something to a link called google that trip will take you on google and you can go to the village -- the where marina's ancestral home is in the beach. >> how were you able to link your life to this story of sugar? >> we started with the story of my aunt in the remus family, so that began us on the journey and then we just started tracing all the connections from there.

>> what is the most significant thing that you guys learned from writing the book? >> enough for me it wasn't that 96%. i did not know that 96% of the enslaved africans went to the sugar lands. that really changed my view. and i actually felt at that point it was criminal that we don't know that. what other part of our life to be saved but study 4% and eight or 96%? no other part of our life. so that was true for me. >> i think what was true for me is that it always known about the nonviolent movement, but i never realized it was linked to sugar. we know about gandhi and nonviolence, but i never linked it to sugar. i was a revelation for me. >> i have a question for both of you out. what inspired you out to right

"sugar changed the world"? >> well, i think it was learning about her relatives, but also we are has condemned wife. i am mostly and historian. marina is mostly a novelist or we wanted to combine their talents and study something together. >> did you come to a dead end? >> the one dad and i can do as i was looking for more remission about when the ship or because i think the play sound so fascinating and i had trouble getting as much information about it as i wanted. the other dead end is in the 1930s, people went to interview people who are still alive who would then waved in america. so we do have some interviews with people who worked in sugar slavery and louisiana, which we mentioned in the book. but we could not find the same voice as for the sugar lands.

we couldn't find people talking about what was it like to live under sugar plantation in haiti or brazil. >> it's mind-boggling to think that 12 million came across some that don't have their voices. that is quite a dead end when you think about it, which is what inspired us to do the website where you can hear the music and the songs and the rituals and the things they were able to develop since of course they could not write their thoughts down about their experiences. >> do you plan to make this book into a movie or documentary? >> if someone wants to do it, we thought it. >> how was it to write the book together with your different

ideas? >> great question. as you know, we still argue about the one paragraph in that one sentence. we actually really enjoyed it. because when we went into the process, we knew we were very different writers. march training as an historian. i am very interest in storytelling and narrative syntax chair and sat in and cared for. that's what i think about. but i do also love history. so we went into it knowing that we each brought something different. you know, it's like having a meal where you have the sweet part in this our part. we knew we would bring different things to the table. >> marina is a professor in college who teaches english and she is a really tough editor. so i would write something and she would criticize it and note the angry and they know this is great to know what are talking

about? and a day later, man, you are right. we would go through it that way. >> is storytelling -- the story and of writing this old book? >> we tried wherever we could to include personal stories. as i said at the beginning, this is so huge it can be overwhelming, but we want to make it personal whenever we could. >> as an african-american and other part of my heritage is storytelling. it's about word was in the point they try to command above? in particular, we keep talking about one thing is all know that's happening now is more and more people are coming to

america from the caribbean. more of our people that have the caribbean background. more and more are coming are hispanic but also can mean this background that we wanted these stories to begin to be told. we're also hoping that people who performed these musics, who danced in the calais would bring their hearts into the schools so we can all share disputed that came out of so much pain. >> wended slavery start to be about race? >> at the great question. i happen to have written a whole other book i'm not. basically in the initial years when africans were sold into slavery, the europeans actually used one group of africans to guard another because the africans had no sense of reese. they just have their old i don't like the next group over, just

like the europeans didn't like the next group over. it was only after hundreds of years that defensive difference became attached to skintone rather than language, religion, belief, kingship, geography, all the other ways that we divide. so actually, race and its modern sense, the way we think about it was only in rented in the late teen hundreds. it's a very, very late in new ideas. >> lads give mr. aaron then and ms. budhos another round of applause. [applause] and the teachers for bringing you today, please. [applause] >> for more information about "sugar changed the world" and the authors, visit "sugar changed the world".com.

>> here are a couple upcoming book fairs and festivals from around the country. on march 4th and 5th as the washington antiquarian book fair in arlington, virginia, where books, maps and illustrations are available to see and purchase. you can also be of rare books and materials of praise. booktv will be life in the tucson festival of books on march 12 and 13. our coverage will include presentations and interviews and take your calls and sending tweets from the event using cache tag tsop. follow us on twitter at the tv. for more upcoming book fairs and festivals, visit otb.org and click book fairs on the top of the page. >> up next, call me anthony albeit, philosophy professor at princeton university says that moral revolution in the arrest

tool to solve personal evidence to foot binding in china succeed when a population comes to dispute with the idea of honor. the author discusses his book at the harvard bookstore in cambridge, massachusetts. it's just under an hour. [applause] >> thank you. thank you so much to all of you two coming out this evening to my favorite bookstore in the whole word world. give it up for harvard bookstores. is that a great place. [applause] now it is my pleasure to introduce kwame anthony appiah. kwame anthony appiah has approached with the rarest combination of rigor in humanity african and african-american intellectual history history and political philosophy. he is the anchor underwriter. he is our bane and a swarm, reflective and accessible, challenging and generous as he

is as a friend. a premier scholar contemporary philosophical thought is where it crosses disciplines at the crosses national boundaries. and celebrates human rights, ethnic and cultural pluralism, individual identity, intellectual liberty and the sublime mode of cosmopolitan this. let me repeat just view of his earlier accomplishments before talking for a moment about his new book, the honor -- "the honor code: how moral revolutions happen." educated and got any good where we met some dirty seven years ago and clear college at the university of changes. he rose to prominence as a philosopher of semantics at the intersection of the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. he is now the lawrence s. rockefeller university philosophy and center for human

values at princeton. or you're too arriving at princeton, utah at yale, cornell and duke. he and i collaborate along with the bow shall he to recognize the beauty beat the boys copy which published in 1989th and second edition by the ester university press in the year 2005. the heaviest textbook called thinking it through published in 2003 as a standard introduction for students of contemporary philosophical thought. his 1992 book, in my fathers house, which i have to confess is my favorite is essential reading or anyone interested in contemporary thought to which a globally connect to. "cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of stranger" prescribes a pragmatic and wholly ethical philosophy of how we can get a log and are globalized,

interconnected, but also divided world. obvious work including three smart and entertaining mystery novels is discipline crossing and his first and last, deeply invested in human rights and individual liberty. the honor code brings that these concerns to the question of how moral progress happens. he looks at successful campaigns against practices now considered a, foot binding in china, for example, or dual and aristocratic and most powerfully for me, slavery in the british empire and the united states. enter intricate and illuminating inquiry, he helps us to understand the rule that the appeal to honor players and what he rightly calls moral revolution. "the honor code" has received high praise from reviewers and also giants in the field of moral inquiry, will get to

momentarily. paul berman of slate wrote in a review they read in the honor code is in a lecture by a lucid and a professor who chuckles over it and it does, but is ultimately intent on making you think for yourself. joy garner in "the new york times," celebrated his quote, malcolm gladwell like talents between argument and storytelling in which easterners and sinful as a narrative honey to help as medicinal p. go down. matthew iglesias unfeigned process called the book monstrously interesting in the exact reverse of all the stereotypes of academic over specialization and who cares for them. i like that. and now for the giant. no offense to my fellow journalists. he says that the book and i quote, house to emulate the

dentist to read the remarkable research of a brilliant mind into the concept of honor as the margin of orality as we know it practice or not. the book he continues his essential for us. inescapable in its version of events to be embattled human morality, we live for dinner codes of the presidents. walter isakson addressed the importance of "the honor code" not only for current moral inquiry, but also as a guidebook for the future. wilson says that i quote, populate that a concept that is not only compelling in its own right, but also suggests a connection that it may in time help to collate biological and cultural exploration of human morality. the supreme compliment. and isakson says even the honor is sometimes distorted and pakistan, dofasco concept is the lone start guiding the jupiter

future. it's an amazing and fascinating and i heard this he concludes is an indispensable book for moral philosophers and honorable citizens. just delivered two hours ago, he completed the final of his three lectures on w.e.b. du bois, the and africa and those i'm pleased to say will be published soon i am hope. anthony appiah will reduce this evening from this remarkable new book on the latest contribution in a truly, truly remarkable career. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my friend, anthony appiah. [applause] >> so, i am half english. my mother was english. and when people say nice things about you when you are english,

you feel embarrassed. [laughter] people say nice things about you. so i think i'll focus on that. thank you very much indeed. i'm happy to be from the book if you like, but i thought they just talk about it first. then by the end of my talk if you want me to read from that, but then you ought to ask questions, so we'll see. thank you all very much for coming. so one way to explain the book is to think about the intersections of questions that generated it. let me just a little bit about two strains of talk that led me to the work in this book. one was thinking about cosmopolitanism, which i wrote a book about some years ago and i was looking for examples of conversations across a site about questioning. one of the most famous

conversations with the dialogue between evangelical christian missionaries, delete women and chinese intellectuals in china in the late 19th century about buying the no growth in china. i read some of the literature on not aired regularly, people say they reason that the chinese mandarins, liberality gave a quiz because it was on the national honor of china. i can think of a lot of better reasons for not causing intense pain to little girls, which is what it enrolls. it involved finding the fate of these girls at two or three and so tight they may develop abscesses. they may be angry. and in the end, and the ideal case on the system, two or

three inches long in the adult woman and wrapped in a beautiful silk shoe, which she has made herself. so anyway, i thought there were lots of reasons not to do it and honor seemed like a good one. i couldn't fit this into the book, but in the back of the mind to think about that later. then, the history department for some reason could give some lectures. i have no idea why. and i thought, this is an historical question, so better think about it. and in figuring out how to think about it, when i was an undergraduate student, i have learned a lot about thinking about how human knowledge works by reading the work of the great philosopher of science and historian affairs, thomas kuntz, which was about scientific resolution. the people from austria, the

great french student inside the revolution had my fabric and things have helped us to unders and knowledge by studying revolutions. because of me there are moral resolutions, so maybe this helps us to understand something. maybe moral revolution can help us understand something about moral life. now those all come together. and i sang going to do unhistorical project like the revolution. and alexei puzzling thing to me was this question of honor. so i needed to understand honor. this is a moderately honorable person. when i went to college, my father said to me about reading the morning newspaper, looked up

over his glasses and said to me, remember you are the family on a rainy go to university. it has kindly meant, but it was a scary thing to say. so out of spite up to think that there was not just my honor ,-com,-com ma but the family honor. but i didn't feel i really unders to. and the way to understand it from beginning to talk to historians is to examine some historical episode. and the other one is very clear involvement of honor and with the honor involved is a relatively pragmatic view of this. that is what led me then to begin to be inspired by these two operated dots to think about the dual. in how to think about the deal, i happened upon a particular deal, which had been 1829, which

struck me as absolutely amazing, absolutely fascinating. as fascinating as the fact that honor might have ended with me. and the duel between the prime minister serving the duke of wellington and demand that the marvelous english name, but his style was that wintry day in nottingham. anyway, so these two guys, most obviously members of the house of lords, the duke of wellington as prime minister of england. these two guys had a famous deal. what was it about? in one sense my answer to that is that no idea. i mean, i read a great deal about it. cannot decide. so i can tell you that something

that makes you think okay that was a reasonable thing to do. but here's what they said it was about. there was a debate going on in parliament about whether catholic should be given the vote. very important to britain so much but because the majority of those at that point the british had to think about something to do about it. the duke of wellington was born in ireland. and he said in a letter to the newspaper that the duke of wellington who is in favor of catholic emancipation, even though he was a devout anglican who was opposed in the past, the duke of wellington who was in favor of it was charged with having it happen them into very good beach about it in the house of lords with covering up his crib to pieces and the common the fact that he was secretly a sympathizer with rome. and the way she was covering

this up which was an anglican university in competition with the secular university. the duke of wellington are both involved in setting up this university. is this going to help you understand to? i don't know. so he chooses on 10 of wellington is naturallyspeaking a bowl and agreeing to catholic emancipation was a big deal. he was only in favor of the accounts it was of the civil war in ireland, which was reformed. so anyway, he says to the british, you have to apologize. ..

a lot of comical things. and the fact from our point of view duels look ridiculous and funny and even though this was furious and it is prime minister of england could have been shot in the middle of a constitutional crisis nevertheless it looks ridiculous to us i think for good reasons. so they have this fight. but you'll see -- in wellington the person who is challenged he fires and misses. this is not surprising because wellington was one of the great soldiers of his time. he was a famously bad shot. nobody would have expected him to hit anybody. but the -- what's really amazing

is what happened next. it's now his turn. what does he do? he points the gun in the air and fires in the air. this is the man who didn't have to have this duel. right? why does he fire in the air? we don't know but as soon as he fires in the air he takes it out of his pocket and i will apologize. why? well, there's a way to reconstruct it. winchell felt that once he was dodd apologized people could have thought he was not fighting because he was afraid of the duel. so he had to have the duel and be shot at in order then to be able to apologize. okay. now, this may make sense to you but it doesn't make much sense to me but it certainly makes sense to them. because, finch, the earl of nottingham, he's the grandfather of the guy that robert redford plays in "out of africa."

[laughter] >> so you could ask me more if you would like about what exactly happened in this case. but here's what i learned and i'm so glad i started with this. here's what i learned about honor from thinking about this case. you may not know this but dueling was illegal in england from the time queen elizabeth. if -- it was against the law in common law. it was murder. it's a capital crime. it's un-christian. dueling was condemned by the christian church in the ninth century. not the nineteenth but the ninth and it was repeated at the end of the reformation and was a common place of the protestant churches when they came into being as well as the catholic church. no christian thought -- every christian thought there was a

serious christian argument against dueling, why? because for dueling to make sense there has to be some connection between who's right and who wins. and the only person who can make that connection is him. and if you use the duel to force him to make his choice you are tempting god. and not tempting god is something himself said he must not do. and he said, no, thou shalt not tempt god and by this christian good and jewish reason. so it's un-christian. it's illegal. it's plainly immoral. plainly immoral because one reason for having a duel is because somebody has accused you of being dishonest.

falsi falsing accusing you is bad but the punishment of lying about somebody is death. so it's illegal. un-christian and immoral and as i've said it's also crazy. [laughter] >> because there's no connection between who wins and who's right. god isn't going to make it happen. you can try to tempt god but he's not going to succumb. so you have this practice which is irrational, un-christian, illegal and immoral. and yet for 300 years any gentleman in england who was challenged to a duel said yes. the beginnings of resistance happened in the late 18th century when people for other reasons -- the new surge -- the new kind of morality the evangelical christian realm winchell wouldn't accept it. he was a gentleman he was entitled to fight duel but he would deny that. he was very cross with his friends when they accepted and he thought it was wrong for the

christian reasons and so he thought that was a good enough reason to do it and all these people say i know it's not christian but i have to defend my honor. so what -- the really important first lesson of the duel is that honor will make people do things that are illegal, immoral, un-christian, un-jewish and are crazy. it doesn't make sense and nevertheless they'll do it. that's a very important lesson about honor. it's a very powerful discovery, i think, for me 'cause i haven't thought about it before. and the second thing he learned is that -- the duke of ellington fights this fight in england. in 1850 if you challenged somebody to a duel in england, people laugh. it's ridiculous. in 20 years and this is why i talk about moral revolution, it goes from being something that a gentleman can and probably should do to something that is

not just now recognized to be wrong, it's recognized to be a source of dishonor. it goes from being the honorable thing to do to being the ridiculous thing to do and there's nothing more dishonorable than being ridiculous. so it goes from an honorable thing to a ridiculous thing just like there. why? that's a complicated story. read the book but a lot of it has to do -- but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that people are demock tiding and it only works to sustain your honor if only aristocrats do it. if anybody can do it, then it doesn't distinguish you from it. and one of the things that happens in the early 19th century is what francis bacon had called earlier -- had called in predicting this, he said once butchers and something like barbers and butches and other rude reman cals he said. you remember that's what shakes calls the characters in the

midsummer's night dream the rude and mechanicals. and bacon says already 300 years before it comes to an end once regular people won't start do it it won't work anymore and so it will come to an end. he thought it was going to happen a good deal sooner. it didn't happen until the 19th century but it did happen and that's one of the things that happened. he couldn't do its job anymore. they started democratizing these are considered not just wrong but ridiculous and so as i say by 1850, you get mocked in the london times if you duel and, of course, by the end of the 19th century there's a roughly line in the officer and an gentleman an english officer from a background is asked what he would do if he were challenged to a duel and he has a one-word

sentence answer. he says laugh. all right. so the story teaches another thing which is that if honor is reformed as it was, if you have new ideas about what it is to be a gentleman then you can turn honor in the right direction. in the 1850s cardinal newman laughing about the idea of university says attempting a bubble is someone who will do no harm. so you've come from the model of a gentleman is a warrior noble to a warrior as a victorian high bourgeois respectable person who has a stuff upper lip, you can insult him and you can think it reflects badly on you. there's this going and they happen very fast so i took much too long about the case and there's two or three other cases in the book and maybe you can ask me questions about the case. i just want to make one final point about how this applies in

the present. if you want to defend honor, there are sort of some obvious objections. the first obvious objection it looks undemocratic. the second is that it's associated with violence. i've argued that it can be turned against violence. but the third is look what it's doing in the world today. the third of his arguments from cases. what it's doing all today it's killing a thousand women in pakistan in honor killing. it's killing at least 5,000 women in the world that way and that's terrible but much worse than that, i think, is the fact that millions of women are terrorized. 'cause the dead woman are a small proportion of the victims. and because of our times and because of the world's situation today, i should say i talk about honor killing in pakistan which is a muslim country and i talk about muslim honor killings. if it's not a muslim practice. it is condemned by islam.

it's condemned by grand ayatollahs and in cairo and condemned by a fatwa and muslim leaders and it's not a muslim practice and indeed in other parts of south asia and it's carried out by others. and in the mediterranean world in the 19th century it was done by christians. it's a pre-christian, pre-muslim practice which survived in some places. of course, there are large parts of the muslim world where it doesn't happen at all. it doesn't happen in indonesia. so i don't want to say it's not a muslim practice. indeed, that's important to my argument because what i want to say is this, first, there's an internal tension in the notion of honor that leads to honor killing. the notion that leads to honor killing associates men with the honor of men with the -- with the sexual purity of their women. voluntary or not. i mean, you can get honor killed because you were raped but it has not only to do whether you were a good person. it has to do whether you have been -- you've been marked with the stigma of this kind of

dishonor. but those very say those of honor are the men are responsible for the safety of their women and this is happening already and in pakistan, a very distinguished woman lawyer say there is no honor in honor killing. if she's not saying there's no honor. she's saying there's no honor in honor killing. if you think that a woman in your family has done something that's prohibited by islamists, then as they say, then there's mechanism that is nonprescribed in dealing with it. it's to go to the courts. it is not to kill your daughter, your mother, your sister, your wife. first thing. second thing, that's individual -- the level of individual and family honor. but there's another huge argument to be made in the name of honor against honor killing. pakistan was created to be the country of the muslims.

it's a muslim state by definition. it has an established religion. it brings dishonor to islam for a museum state to allow this un-muslim practice which damages the muslim women of pakistan. so it's so pakistani honor and muslim honor are all tied up it seems to me. now, i don't think anyone in pakistan should take any notice of me saying that. i'm not saying that. but they're saying it there. and if you want to support somebody who's fighting against honor killing in pakistan, support the people who are making these arguments. support the people who are saying, look, how it makes us look. and notice that in order to see what's bad about -- how it makes us look, you have to understand that it's wrong. to honor here is working to re-enforce moral argument. it's now not working against morality. sort of collective honor i believe can be mobilized against

honor killing. i think honor itself, the concept of honor killing can be reformed and those two moves i'm hopeful will lead to the end of honor killing in about the same amount of time which it took to end foot binding 20 years if we do it right. similar process in west africa led by an organization has led to the abandonment of femalent -- female genital cuttings. thousands. it can affect the lives of the bodies of women and i reject had idea that honor can't be turned to good service and finally, if you think it should be rejected, i tell you, you have no chance. honor is too deep in us. what we have to do is not abandon it but reform it.

to restructure it so that it's serving purposes that we can applaud. thank you. [applause] >> i didn't mean to end on the word applaud. i'm sorry. [laughter] >> but you're very suggestible. [laughter] >> when we were at cambridge, i heard a story about a british soldier who gave his life by sacrificing himself. he knew the ship was going to blow up and the only way to -- it's off the coast of nigeria in lagos and the only way to save himself was to sacrifice himself and he was going up to the church of college and he saw a bust of winston churchill. and that is how man's best

friend, the horse many of the king the chief noble of the court has to create ritual suicide 30 days of suicide to lead his soldiers to the other side. where do we draw the line? where do you draw the line in what's honorable and what's not? how do we know how we're supposed to feel about defending the homeland against invaders or you know killing someone in the name of country that we love and we value. and the second thing, and i know you've written about and you've read. i thought you might share this with your audience in the "washington post," things -- it's easy to look back at foot binding now and think that's ridiculous and what were they thinking, et cetera, and dueling

and maybe you'll look at the next generation and say what will the next generation think? >> on the first question -- this is really a question about how honor needs reform. because the right question to ask when an honor practice demands someone of a person. is what they're demanding consistent with morality? now, i think that self-sacrifice for your country is consistent with morality. i don't think there's a moral objection to it. there may be an objection of prudence to it. a different kind of value that is not in your self-interest to throw yourself on the grenade in order to protect your buddy but i don't believe prudence is the right way for morality and i think -- it's not just an honorable thing to do so save your buddy, it's good thing in the context of the war that is itself just and so on. so the first thing is, we look

at honor practices and i think we should look at honor practices and ask, how can we reform them to be consistent with morality? not the same as morality. they don't have to be the same as morality. they wouldn't be interesting if they were the same with morality and consistent with morality as in the case of honor killing egregiously immoral then reform is clearly in order. that's the first point. the second point is that in focusing on the moral cases which i do in the book, you may lose track of something else that honor does which is that it does -- it serves to support all kinds of values that have nothing to do dod with morality. we give honorary degrees. one of the honorary degrees each year is for the philanthropists so i guess that person gets to be regarded as morality superior. but the rest of honorary degrees give to people where nobody is guaranteeing. when i give -- when we give, you at ready harvard to a nobel

lawyeret. it's not because we think he's a great superior person it's because he's a great scholar or a writer, he or she. so honor is used to sustain values other than moral value. it's very important i think about honor that we honor great -- we honor great movie makers, we honor great documentary writers and we honor excellence. and excellence is not all moral excellence. there's all kinds of excellence. all kinds of values. indeed, it seems to me -- i should say a little bit as it were a little bit of theory on the right. i think honor essentially is involving rights to respect. so to be honorable is to be entitled to respect, to have a right to respect. and to care about your honor is to care about being entitled to respect. now, of course, if you care about being entitled to respect you'll want to be respected, too. but it's the entitlement to respect that comes first for an honorable person, right? someone who just wants to be respected is just, you know, of course, is bernie madoff.

bernie madoff wants to be respected but he doesn't care if he deserves the respect he's getting, right. an honorable person wants to be respected because they want to be respected because she's entitled to the respect. and i think that that means that when you care about something, when you have a value like scholarly -- like our respect for scholarly values and the respect we all have for create artistic achievement, one way you manifest your respect for that value is by honoring those who are -- who achieve beyond the norm in that domain. indeed, i wouldn't understand someone who said i respect the value of music but i don't respect the people who are good at it. what would that mean? so honoring great athletes, musicians, scholars, nurses who go above and beyond the call of duty in their work as nurseds

and so on -- honoring soldiers, who do what they have to do and go way beyond what they have to do, honor is the ideal way of responding to these people. think about this. we ask soldiers to do things that you couldn't possibly require them to do. because offering your life is not something that you can require someone to do. but it's, as it were a good thing if soldiers are willing to give or risk their lives so we can't punish them for not giving us their lives because they don't have a duty to give up their lives. you can only punish people for what they have to do. nor is it usually possible to get people to risk their lives by offering them money. i mean, at least not the kind of money that we have available. i suppose if we said to every soldier in the world, you know, for a billion dollars -- you want a billion dollars or a

medal of honor, maybe would take the million dollars but many would take the medal of honor. honor gets soldiers we can't command them to do. we can't tell them to give up their lives but they will do it for honor. and if it's in a good cause, if the cause is just, then it seems to me honor is now serving to get people to do something that it's worth getting people to do by which we couldn't possibly require them to do because giving up their lives is not the kind of thing you can require someone to do it seems to me. it always as the philosophers it's going to going beyond the call of duty to offer your life. >> the list of things in retrospect. one of the things i think what they will be thinking about in 100 years or less. well, there's a long list but here's a couple that i think you might find interesting. one i think is, i think, you

would all come up with is -- skip asked the question 10 minutes ago you would have come up with it now. i think there's a revolutionary going to our attitude of the treatment of animals in the production of food. it's already begun. many people who eat meat, i eat meet i have sheep actually but i think the cruelty involved in the production particularly of pork and beef so if you look at it, you cannot endorse it. and i think our grandchildren and great grandchildren notifies and nieces are going to look back what do they think they were doing? they'll say videotape of a feedlot and they'll just say -- i mean, never mind the environmental disaster that feed lots are. just the suffering of the animals, right? they'll also worry about the environment, too. and they'll wonder why we won't say more about that. so that's one example and i think lots of environmental issues. animal rights issues i think there are environmental issues why couldn't they get their act together?

but the other one that i think perhaps people won't necessarily come up with at least quickly by themselves is this one. i think that the fact that the home of the free is 4% of humanity with american citizenship has 25% of the world's incarcerated people is just pre- -- preposterous. it cannot set up a system that ends with that result and it cannot be right having produced a system with that result not to do anything about it. i mean, maybe we sort of -- we slumbered our way out of it. just think of the waste, the waste of human lives in those prisons and the waste of those things they could be doing for the rest of us. things that they could be contributing to our gross domestic products. so i think it's completely --

and i think people will look back and just say we have no idea how it could have been that a society -- one of whose essential values is liberty could end up being the largest incarcerator on the planet. actually on the history of the planet. nobody else had ever locked up this larger proportion of its citizens and it's not just that we have a quarter of the world's prisoners. we have lots of people who aren't in prison who have been in prison and whose lives have been ruined because -- well, i don't need to talk about this. they will look back and we will -- they will say, what we would say about slavery. they would say shame on you. shame on you for allowing this. shame on us. so there are others obviously and there are disputed cases when i wrote the speech on abortion. i have a different view on what the right answer is on that case but there's many people who

think people -- and it may be the abortions will disappear, i think, but not, i think, for this reason. but for technological reasons. >> thank you. >> i'm sorry. just quickly, on your thing about incarceration, there are some efforts now to lose electronic monitoring is an alternatives to lock other people up which may have other problems up -- >> it's an improvement. >> yeah, and there's some evidence that people are better served, both the public and the prisoners. but the other question i want to ask was, since honor depends on a consensus, how do you -- where does the authority come from to change that consensus? and if it's moral, we can argue the moral? >> see what i think in the cases at least when i looked at nobody was going to argue the other moral side. people weren't going to argue a moral argument to slavery.

there was a propaganda movement in the 1800s. but i don't think they believed what they were saying and certainly other people didn't believed them. they just said things that no reasonable person at the time could believe. there was no serious -- what there was was a sense of the necessity of the practice, right? to the life of plantations and, therefore, from the point of view and to the life of the society. but the idea that it was morally -- so i don't think -- what happens when people realize that it's wrong is not that they defend it as they do two things. one is they say things that they don't believe, which isn't -- i mean, that's a kind of defense but it's not insincere defense and the other thing they do is they try very hard not to think about it. they engage if what i call strategic ignorance. and i think -- i mean, incarceration is something where

there's a vast amount -- that in the prisons of this advanced industrial society you're more likely to have t.b. when you come out than when you come in. you're my likely to be raped in a prison -- as a woman but from men it's the most likely place to be raped in the united states. now, i don't think that -- when we send these people to prison we're sentencing them to being raped and once they are in our prisons they are our responsibility and they shouldn't be raped and if they are, we have to accept responsibility for doing something about it. [inaudible] >> do people sense morality change over time because the dueling was equally and morally wrong when it started. >> it was. >> i don't think -- i think from -- well, this is a complicated question because this notion of morality that i'm using is a bit of a technical as it were notion what i mean by morality is the set of norms we habo