Description
How does moral progress happen? How are societies brought to repudiate immoral customs they have long accepted? In this groundbreaking work. Kwame Anthony Appiah categorically changes the way we understand human behavior and the way social reform is brought about. With a storyteller's flair and a philosopher's rigor, he brilliantly argues that new democratic movements over the last century have not been driven by legislation from above, but by a long-neglected engine of reform: honor. Intertwining philosophy and historical narrative, Appiah explores the end of the duel in aristocratic England, the tumultuous struggles over footbinding in nineteenth-century China, the uprising of ordinary people against Atlantic slavery, and the horrors of "honor killing" in contemporary Pakistan. The result is "an indispensable book" (Walter Isaacson) that demonstrates the critical role honor plays in the struggle against man's inhumanity to man.ISBN:9780393340525
