The Honor Code (Kwame Anthony Appiah)
“Now to be respected is to be respected by somebody; and usually, honor does not seek the respect of people in general.
What matters is the respect of some particular social group, what you can call an honor world, a group of people who acknowledge the same codes.
But while honor is, indeed, an entitlement to respect, a person of honor cares not (or, at least, not only) about being respected, but about being worthy of respect.
For the honorable person, honor itself is the thing that matters, not honor’s rewards. It is something you care about for its own sake.
You want respect, but only the respect you are entitled to.
Confucius, in Analects 4:14, expressed exactly this basic contrast long ago: “I am not concerned that I am not known, I seek to be worthy to be known.”
A final element of the picture, then: an honorable person wants to do what is worthy of respect according to the honor code, and doesn’t conform to the code of honor merely in order to get respect from the honor world (let alone, any other social rewards).
When someone is concerned to be worthy of respect, we can say she has a “sense of honor.””
