Honor

Honor is a treacherous term, full of ambiguity and difficult to translate from one language into another. Nevertheless, one can point to certain problems of honor that afflict legal systems worldwide. Those problems can be usefully broken down into three classes: problems of sexual honor, problems of distinctive honor, and problems of hierarchical honor. All three involve honor in similar ways: Persons who feel their honor has been attacked frequently feel that they have been degraded or treated like inferior.

Specifically honor fulfilled the role for a long period of the history of Western civilization, with previous concepts in Classical Antiquity Greco-Roman and the Germanic peoples, reaching a strong coding from the formation of feudalism in Europe West in the middle Ages. They continued active in the societies of the Old Regime (the Modern Age in France, Spain, etc.), while the nobility remained dominant class in the society of estates. The concept survived in historical social formations that turn into class societies or bourgeois (England) during the Modern Age, but its function is yet another, more sentimental exaggeration ends (Whitman, 1288).

Honor, in primitive times, was observed until the end to the ridiculous (as exemplified by Cervantes in Don Quixote), while others took it quite seriously even call into question their limits, exposing critical socially accepted concept that intellectual elites see it as a hindrance to discard (Whitman, 1288).

At present, the right to honor, associated with other rights, such as those relating to self image and intimate personal and family (including the right to data protection), and especially the concept of human dignity, is being legal protection both in the various state laws as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Honor has a relatively long history in cultural anthropology, with detailed ethnographies focusing on Mediterranean and Middle Eastern honor cultures. ...