The honor code

What Hacker News says

1. kthejoker2May 2020
   You should read The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah, it talks exactly about why Codes of Conducts are necessary, even for things which are not "breaking the law."

   Moral stances have a place.

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2. panicMay 2018
   I thought this was an interesting point:

   > In his 2010 book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah shows that arguments are not what change people’s minds on moral questions — honor is. The end of dueling, or Chinese foot-binding, or the Atlantic slave trade, did not come about, Appiah writes, because of new or more convincing arguments — the arguments against these practices had been in place, sometimes for centuries, before most people were turned against them. What changed was the “honor world” — the group of people who understand and acknowledge the same codes of behavior. Dueling was illegal before it came to seem dishonorable, in part because a newly created popular press brought the aristocracy’s honor code into discussion in lower class circles. This exposure to ridicule or mimicry put a new complexion on a practice that had persisted despite all logical argument against it.

   It seems like the culture of rationality, logic, and debating is itself one of these "honor worlds", where defending your positions against logical attack is an expected code of behavior. If you're not part of this culture, you may not be prepared to defend yourself, even if what you're saying is totally true.

   I think this is really what the article is talking about -- not that debate is intrinsically bad, but that it only operates well within a particular cultural context. Since most important decisions affect more than just rationalist debaters, the tools of rationalist debate may not be enough to make a correct decision.

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