MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. It was America's original sin for much of the early history of this country. One person could legally own, buy and sell another person as property. Black people were counted as 3/5ths human beings. From today's prospective, the institution of slavery is one of America's darkest historical chapters. But 200 years ago, its defenders, and there were many, saw slavery as a righteous, even honorable cornerstone of American society.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIThen something happened midway through the 19th century that rewired the way Americans saw their institutions. Kwame Anthony Appiah says we underwent a moral revolution. He says all societies and cultures are constantly rethinking and reexamining their ideas of what is honorable. In his new book, he explores how and why moral revolutions happen and he asks what issues future generations will likely judge us harshly for. He joins us in studio. Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurence S. Rockefeller professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of the book, "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen." Kwame, thank you for joining us. Good to see you again.

MR. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAHVery nice to see you, Kojo.

NNAMDIWell, in this book, you deal with slavery and the practice of foot binding in China to cultural conventions that are most -- are almost incomprehensible in retrospect. But you begin the book with a look at dueling, a convention that was explicitly about honor and seems almost absurd, even funny, looking back. You identify a specific moment when dueling was dealt a mortal blow. Tell us about the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Winchelsea.

APPIAHIt's -- this is one of the great duels of the early 19th century and one of the last duels that anyone was able to take seriously. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister of England at the time so he was the first minister of the king. And the important thing to understand about dueling, in this context, is that it was illegal. It was proscribed by the church and it was obviously crazy.

APPIAHIt was obviously crazy because a duel is a dispute about something, but who wins the duel doesn't depend on who's right in the dispute. It just depends on who's a better shot, or a luckier shot. And everybody knew all this. Everybody knew that it was immoral and illegal and yet here is this guy who's the Prime Minister...

NNAMDIThe Prime Minister.

APPIAH...so Prime Minister breaking the law. Prime Minister of the King of England, who's also the head of the Church of England. So he's breaking the church's law as well. And what does he do after the duel? He goes off and tells the king and the king is delighted. So it's an absurd institution. Even in its own terms, it's absurd. And yet, the Duke felt that because Lord Winchelsea had accused him of being dishonest in a very complicated dispute about who funded which part of Kings College London, a dispute that nobody could remember the details of, even at the time. Because of that, he felt he had to challenge him to a duel.

APPIAHAnd so he -- what happens in the duel, he takes his pistol, he points it at Winchelsea, he fires and misses. He was a famously bad shot. And the amazing thing that happens is that then, Winchelsea, who is the person who causes the duel, fires in the air making it perfectly clear that he's not going to try to kill the Duke at all. So you might wonder what on earth was this all about? And then, they have a little exchange with one another and...

NNAMDIYeah, but they don't have the exchange themselves?

APPIAHNo, they -- you're right.

NNAMDITheir assistants have the...

APPIAHThat -- yes, because you have to do everything through your seconds. You're not allowed to talk to each other. Another one of the rules of the deal. And the assistants discuss whether or not they're seconds and they agree on a form of words of an apology, which was then published in the newspapers and the thing was over. So now, it's sort of obviously ridiculous. And even at the time -- even at the time when this very honorable gentleman did it, some people thought that it was absurd, but many people thought he had to do it.

APPIAHWithin a generation, I would say 20, 30 years later, anybody in those circumstances who had fought a deal would have been literally laughed out of court. People would've written funny articles about it in the times. There were in fact -- there were in fact -- there was a famous duel in the 18 -- 'round about 1850 between two members of Parliament. And they were mocked mercilessly in the London Times. So in a generation, it goes away. And the main reason it goes away, I think, is that there's just a shift away from these sort of aristocratic values.

APPIAHThis is the period when Britain's parliament is, for the first time, moving towards the adult suffrage for men, at least. Not for women yet, but -- in 1830 or so when this duel goes on, it's still the case that the vast majority of people -- men in England don't have the vote. Gradually, they get more and more votes and by sort of 1860, early 1860s working class people have the vote. So the whole culture is changing. The aristocracy with its weird practices is becoming less and less important. After the Duke of Wellington, most of the prime ministers of England are not in the House of Lords.

APPIAHThey're in the House of Commons. They're elected. They're not hereditary and so on. But the main thing that happens is that in -- from being a way of acquiring honor, the duel becomes a way of becoming -- of being ridiculous. And obviously, if you care about your honor, you're not going to do something ridiculous. And so the duel comes to an end.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call. I remember early in the 20th century reading P.G. Wodehouse mocking the British aristocracies. But that's a whole other story. 800-433-8850 is the number to call. Our guest is Kwame Anthony Appiah. His latest book is called, "The Honor Code." He's also the author of cosmopolitanism and this is about his third visit on this broadcast. "The Honor Code," is about how moral revolutions happen.

NNAMDIWhat practices are common now that will be considered deplorable in 10 or 20 years? You can call us with your opinion about that at 800-433-8850 or make that suggestion at our website, kojoshow.org. You're trying to figure out exactly how and why these moral revolutions happen and you came to focus on honor. What exactly do you mean by honor?

APPIAHThe basic idea of honor, I think, is that honor is to be honorable, is to be entitled to respect. So that the core idea of honor is an entitlement to respect. And different societies assign respect to people, entitlement respect to people through different codes, which is why I talk about honor codes. But all societies and all human beings have things that they honor. Things that people -- if people do those things, they think of them as entitled to be respected and so they respect them because they're entitled to it.

APPIAHAnd honorable person, therefore, is someone who cares, not just about being respected, but about being entitled to respect, about getting the respect that is their due. So Bernie Madoff is not an honorable person. Bernie Madoff got lots of respect. He gave away a lot of his -- a lot of the money that he stole from people to charitable causes. He got to be on many charitable committees. He got to be on the board of many charitable institutions. Lots of people were very polite about him. He got lots of respect, but he wasn't entitled to it.

APPIAHAnd so there's a difference between caring about respect and caring about honor. Because caring about honor is caring about respect, getting the respect you deserve. And roughly speaking, there's sort of two main kinds of honor. One is the individual honor, the sort of thing that the Duke of Wellington was trying to protect in that absurd way. But the other is -- which, I think, is extremely important for moral change, is collective honor.

APPIAHSo you mentioned the case of foot binding in China. One of the reasons that the Chinese Intelligencio, who were the leaders of that society, the educated people who ran the society, gave it up was because they saw that what they were doing was something that lead to disrespect for China. And they realized that that disrespect was warranted. That is, it was a bad thing to be causing terrible pain to your daughters by binding their feet so tight that they, you know, they had pus and, you know, gangrene and the women couldn't walk around properly.

APPIAHAnd what drove them to make the change wasn't just the recognition that it was wrong, though they did recognize that it was wrong. It was the recognition that it was leading to disrespect of a kind that they deserved. If we had disrespected them for a reason that they didn't agree with, that wouldn't of concerned them. But they realized that we were -- we and the rest of the world, they learned this through mostly English-speaking protestant missionaries in China, they learned from them that the world knew about foot binding and it was a source of disrespect. And so they felt they had to give it up in order to maintain national honor.

APPIAHAnd, you know, if you think about why many of us care deeply about what has gone in Guantanamo, it's because it -- it's a source of national shame for the United States. And I, as an American, participate in the shame that the United States is -- rightfully gets for doing that thing, just as I participate in the pride and honor that the United States gets when it does good things.

NNAMDILet's talk about that for a second. Shame, in particular, which some ways is the opposite of honor, at times is the best way to awaken a nation's sense of honor through shame and ridicule? Is that how shame relates directly to honor?

APPIAHYeah, I think -- I think that shame is a very powerful motivator and that the threat of shame, of being shamed, is one of the things that can lead, as I say, both individuals and groups, to engage in reform. To say look, we can't go on doing this thing because it's shameful. Shaming someone then is drawing attention to the shamefulness of what they're doing. And if they don't recognize it's wrong, it won't work. Or if they don't feel the pressure of shame themselves, it won't work.

APPIAHAnd you have to be very careful with shame because very often if you just sort of tell people that they're -- what they're doing is shameful, you risk simply creating a kind of nationalist backlash where they say, oh well, these foreigners are abusing us so we have to -- we have to stick with it. And there are famous cases in history, one of them, which I don't discuss in the book, is the case of what happened in Kenya when the Presbyterian church -- the missionary Presbyterian church of Scotland in the 1930s began to argue against female genital cutting, female genital mutilation in women.

APPIAHThat actually lead to a backlash. And a practice that was pretty much dying out, was actually resurrected by this attempt because these people tried to shame them out of doing it. So you have to manage shame carefully, both with groups and with individuals. If you just sort of shout, shame on you, on someone, you risk a kind of defensive stiffening of the spine and saying...

NNAMDII have seen that in the 21st century with regard to female genital mutilation in certain cultures where, because it was being attacked, people felt a need to defend it. So there's not yet universal agreement in those cultures on the shame that's associated...

APPIAHNo.

NNAMDI...with that.

APPIAHNo. And shame only works when the person you're trying to shame agrees that what is -- they're doing is wrong. I mean, this is what's -- agrees in some since because, of course, people can be shamed who, at the deepest level, don't think that what is wrong -- what you're accusing them of is wrong. I'm thinking the obvious example here is the -- clearly the kind of shame that poor young man at Rutgers felt which lead him to...

NNAMDITyler Clementi.

APPIAH...Tyler Clementi, which lead him to jump off the bridge. I mean, he -- they shamed him by doing something...

NNAMDIFor those who may be unfamiliar with the it, Tyler Clementi is the college student who killed himself after his college roommate covertly recorded him with another man in an intimate situation then posted the video of the internet.

APPIAHRight. Now, there's two things going on there, of course. It's embarrassing for anybody to have their sex lives exposed to the world and you shouldn't, obviously, do that to anybody. But to do so in a way that is combined with mocking their sexuality is obviously particularly cruel and unwarranted. In that case, we don't know much about Tyler Clementi's thinking, obviously, 'cause he's -- I mean, the tragedy is that he's no longer with us.

APPIAHBut we can reasonably conjecture that he felt shamed by this. And I want to be clear that I don't think it follows from that that he had to think that being gay was wrong. But he was in a frame of mind where he didn't want his sexuality to be public. He was still, as they say, closeted. And that means that there was something about it that he wanted to keep private and exposing him to the public gays, in this dimension, produced this sentiment of shame.

APPIAHAnd it's so powerful a thing that a young person can think that it's better to be dead than to be shamed and alive. So shame is very, very powerful. You have to be very careful with it, both because it can produce the nationalist's backlash and therefore be highly counterproductive and because it's -- you know, you've got to be right that the person has done something shameful because if you do shame someone in an inappropriate context, you can lead them to...

NNAMDIIn this case...

APPIAH...for example, take their own life.

NNAMDI...suicide. We're talking with Kwame Anthony Appiah, he's a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of the book "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen." We're going to take a short break. When we come back, we'll continue the conversation. We'll take your calls at 800-433-8850. What do you think the practices that we now have in our contemporary society that might be considered deplorable in the next generation? 800-433-8850. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWe're talking about honor and moral revolutions with Kwame Anthony Appiah. He's a professor of philosophy at Princeton University. His latest book is called "The Honor Code: How Morals Revolutions Happen." Today, many people consider slavery America's original sin. That was an institution that retained its strength in large part because practitioners often believed they were upholding something that was honorable. How so?

APPIAHWell, I think that one is sort of morally remote enough from us that it's extremely hard to get into the frame of mind in which you think that it is an honorable thing. But I think it's important to realize about slavery that the sense that there was something morally wrong with it was there long before the society was turned around into giving it up. You can see this in the anxiety that you read in -- say, Thomas Jefferson in the notes on the state of Virginia, there's this amazing passage.

APPIAHThe sentences suddenly become hundreds of words long and it's rambling and -- where he's talking about slavery and trying to think of things to say to justify it. And in the end, you realize that he just -- he can't -- deep down he knows that it's wrong. And indeed, to do him credit, I mean, Jefferson did argue for the abolition of slavery in Virginia and he was against the compromise in the federal constitution. So -- but in a culture with slaves, honor, that is the perceived entitlement to respect, is allocated -- in a system of racial slavery, it's allocated to white people pretty much in virtue of being white.

APPIAHI mean, not because of any further achievement, just as honor in England could be a sign to a gentleman just by being born. You didn't have to do anything, you just showed up. You came from good family, you got honor. Well, white people, in a system of racial slavery, one of the things that makes it attractive, as it were, from the point of view of the dominant group is they get honor just by being white. And black people, whether they're slave or free, in our society, got a kind of dishonor simply by being black.

APPIAHThat dishonor was associated with the fact that the majority of them were enslaved. But remember that -- but not all of the black people in America were enslaved, at any point. There were always some free blacks and there were more as time went on. And among them, there was a kind of dishonor which just went with the association with slavery. So I think, you know, the people who thought about it, could see that it was wrong, both for kind of general moral reasons also, again, for Christian reasons.

APPIAHI mean, the Christian arguments against slavery were pretty clear, were made very nicely by the Quakers and people like that, by -- and by people like Benjamin Franklin early on in the history of the American republic and in the colonial period. So the shift had to come not just in thinking that it was wrong, but in thinking that it was a source of shame, a national shame. And in the dialectical debates between Britain and the colonies in the lead-up to the revolution, one of the things the British keep saying, and it really rankles, is you guys keep talking about freedom, but you're the ones with slaves. We don't have slaves in England. You got...

NNAMDIGot rid of them 60 years ago.

APPIAHWe got rid of them. Black man stands on the shore of England, he's free. And this really rankled, I think, with some of the -- many of the colonists. They thought, they've got a point there. And their response was to say, well, it's true that you don't have slaves, but you run the slave trade, right? And that's your shame. And that was part, I believe, of the process that led the British to abandon the slave trade.

APPIAHIt was this argument during at which they did in about 1806, so not long after the end of the American Revolution -- successful American Revolution because they had got it in their heads, in the debates with the Americans, that slavery was shameful.

NNAMDIAllow me to go to the telephones. We will start with Lucilla in Washington, D.C. Lucilla, you're on the air. Go ahead please.

LUCILLAOkay. I would like to say that I think that war is shameful and I have long believed that duels would be preferable to taking a whole nation to war. And so if Bush had challenged Saddam to a duel, then chaos for a whole region might have been averted.

NNAMDIHere's Kwame Anthony Appiah. I won't touch that.

APPIAHWell, that's the idea of having a kind of -- settling disputes between nations by having champions. And that was a practice in the past, as you -- in fact, of course, you can remember that's what David and Goliath were doing. Each of them was -- rather than fighting the two armies, each sent out a champion and they agreed that whoever's champion won would be the winner. They wouldn't have to risk the lives of the whole army. And because little David beat big Goliath, they didn't have to have the fight.

APPIAHWell, I must say that I have some sympathy with your application of that idea. But I think in the modern world we've got to figure out how to just stop having wars all together and finding champions, while it would be preferable to having real wars, is really not a solution. What we have to see, I think -- and this is something I discuss in the book, is that one of the main things that drives warfare is a sense of national honor lost or at risk. And we -- I think military people are inevitably going to have notions of honor.

APPIAHI think it's hard to run an army without honor. But our military, we're lucky to say, is under the control of civilians. And they have to fight wars only when we -- when our civilian leadership decides that they should. And our civilian leadership should be much more guided by the recognition that warfare is, in general, an incredibly bad way of settling matters in the modern world.

NNAMDIWhich brings me up to Bob Woodward's latest book about the discussions that President Obama had with his military leaders over how to pursue the war in Afghanistan. It really points out the difference between how the military perspective and the civilian perspective can differ, based on the perception of what honor is.

APPIAHYes. I do think that it's very important that we recognize the importance of honor as a military -- part of the military institution. It's a very -- one can think about many ways in which honor makes armies more effective, allows you to get people to do things that very few other forms of incentive will get people to do. You can't pay people to risk their lives in the way in which honor makes people risk their lives.

APPIAHSo honor -- if you're going to have armies, you're going to have honor. But you got to have them under the control of people -- the armies have to be under the control -- not of generals, who will also be -- not just of generals, who will also be mobilized by honor, but of civilian leaders who understand their task in the modern world is to seek peace. And that while we may need armies, we should use them with very, very great circumspection and -- as I say, I agree with Lucilla, that we shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq.

APPIAHThe costs -- the predictable costs, as well as the many unforeseen costs of that kind of warfare, simply don't, I think, warrant the alleged benefits. And, of course, there are real benefits. I'm glad Saddam Hussein is gone. But in the course of getting rid of him, not only have we lost many of our own soldiers lives, not only have we ruined the lives of many people because we have many, many, many disabled soldiers coming back from these wars, we've also spent trillions of dollars and we've killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

APPIAHSo the costs -- if you put all those costs on one side and ask whether the world is sufficiently a much better place as a result of those costs, I don't think the answer is yes. So we need a civilian leadership that makes sane and careful judgments about these things and isn't too driven by a preoccupation with the kind of honor that does drive military people.

NNAMDISpeaking of military honor, here's Matthew in Northern Maryland. Matthew, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MATTHEWHi, Kojo. Just want you to know I'm a huge fan. But in way of our speaker, I believe and agree with most of what he's saying, but what I don't agree with is that -- I'm a veteran of the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. With that being said, those words were necessary to defend our shores, but at the same time, as me being a veteran, I take extreme honor and respect of all my GIs, although I would be interested in reading our speaker's book.

MATTHEWBut the military and our government has to face certain political theories and dignitaries, our different societies and defend the countries that are not able to defend themselves. But in my opinion, these wars within the last 20 years were very necessary. But, of course, we've had problems with casualties, but no more than Vietnam, no more than Bosnia or World War II.

NNAMDIKwame Anthony appear -- I don't know if you want a response specifically to that or if I -- go ahead 'cause I want to move...

APPIAHI just want to say that, look, I -- when I said that military honor is important to the functioning of military institution, I include the obligation of civilians to honor those men and women who take these risks for us. So I take very seriously the -- I think that people who take these risks for us are entitled to our respect and therefore I honor them, just as they respect the codes of honor that govern military behavior.

APPIAHBut when it comes to thinking about when you should use military power, I agree that it's reasonable to use it in defense of your country. But I have to say that there's very little evidence, in my mind, that the country -- that the regime of Saddam Hussein, horrible as it was and bad as it was for the Kurds in the north and for ordinary -- many ordinary Iraqis who were regularly abused and tortured and it was extremely undemocratic regime, very bad, but I don't believe it's fair to say that it posed a threat to the United States, nor did the regime in Afghanistan.

APPIAHIt is true that an attack on the United States was launched by someone who was in Afghanistan on 9-11, but he didn't, in my view, pose the kind of threat to us after 9-11 that could've been met by -- I mean, you know, if we had gone in and been able to capture him in a few days and take him out, that would've been fine by me. But we've been stuck there in a long war ever since.

NNAMDIHe's not even there.

APPIAHAnd as far as we know, we don't know where he is. And anyway, it's no longer one of our war aims to capture him. We've moved on. So I respect your view and I'm -- I respect your service. And I think we should honor you, we civilians, because you, in the military, do this very important service for your country. But I can -- I hope you understand that I can respect you while disagreeing with you about the question whether these particular wars were warranted.

APPIAHI should say, by the way, about the Iraq war that I'm a reformed thinker on this question. At the beginning of the Iraq war, I have to say -- I regret to say, I hadn't thought it through properly and I was, in fact, in favor of it. But I've come around to the view that I was wrong then and that it was a mistake.

NNAMDIWe think of philosophers, people like yourself, as folks who are well suited for the ivory tower. We really don't tend to view philosophy as having any immediate real world applications. What you're trying to do right now, using philosophy and a deep tradition of thought about honor, trying to figure out why societies change. Why did you decide to embark on that question?

APPIAHWell, first, let me say that I think it's -- there's a -- the ivory tower is an important institution. It's important for people to reflect with a little distance from society. And my own view is that what philosophers bring to the rest of society isn't really answers to these practical questions. I'm not -- I don't think you should take any special interest in my views about whether we should go to war with Iraq or not. I'm just speaking as a citizen. What I think we can do is to provide useful ideas with which to think about the problems that face us.

APPIAHAnd I think the concept of honor is a useful idea for thinking about the problems that face us, whether they're the problems of war and peace, whether they're the problems of the results of homophobia in the United States, which leads to many suicides, unfortunately, in our country, whether they're the problems of honor killings in many parts of the world, in south Asia, in Muslim and non-Muslim parts of south Asia or in Turkey and in other countries and among some migrant communities in North America.

APPIAHAll of these are problems that we have to think about. And I believe that the concept of honor is useful in -- understanding how honor works is going to help us deal with these things. But that's -- as it were, that's our contribution as philosophers. I'm not telling you what to think about any of these things. What I'm trying to do is to provide the vocabulary with which we can think about them productively.

NNAMDIYour own life, crossing a variety of cultural and geographic lines. You were raised in Ghana, in the royal court of the Ashanti. You went to school in England. Today, you teach in the U.S. What effect has that had on either your study of or your observations about these subtle codes of conduct that effect the way different cultures interact?

APPIAHWell, I realize, looking back, that one of the things you learn -- and the world is full of people who are in that sort of situation. And one of the things you learn by moving back and forth between societies -- lots of kids now grow up between places, more perhaps than ever. One of the things you learn is to kind of switch codes. We do it with language. It's called code switching when you do it with language. But I think -- so just to give a very simple and trivial seeming example, where I grew up in Ghana -- and I spent about half my childhood in Ghana and half in England. But where I grew up in Ghana, you would never touch somebody with your left hand. That's very insulting.

APPIAHThe left hand is kind of taboo. It's dirty. And the right hand is sort of positive and if you want to touch somebody, you touch them with your right hand. So if I was sitting next to Kojo in the studio here in Ghana and I wanted to pass him a cup of water and he was sitting on my left, I would use my right hand and pass it across my body. I wouldn't hand it to him with my left hand. Now, I just knew that when I was growing up. And I suppose a few times I did it and my -- somebody -- some adult...

NNAMDIWhacked on the knuckles.

APPIAH...grabbed my hand and said, stop that. And so -- but I didn't have to think about it very much. And then, I went to England, also as a child, and I realized, again, not without a -- no one told me that it didn't matter in England, but in England, it didn't matter. And so in England, I would, you know, after a few days, I would be handing people things with my left hand and when I was in Ghana, I didn't. So we switch all the time.

APPIAHBut one of the things I feel that I sort of picked up without realizing I was picking it up in these transitions is that there are very different notions of different codes in the two -- in those two places. One of the things about my father's culture and about the society that I grew up in in Ghana is that people really explicitly talk about -- the word is (speaks foreign language) but it means something like honor.

APPIAHThey explicitly talk about it all the time. And depriving somebody of honor or making their face full, as we say in our language, is a terrible thing to do to someone and you shouldn't done it unless they've done something really bad. So I lived in one place where it really was a kind of -- very explicit part of everyday life and the regulation of behavior. I remember when my -- went to University, I was leaving. I went to see my father who was still in bed.

APPIAHIt was early in the morning and I kissed him and I -- he was doing what he did, was reading the newspaper and smoking in bed. And I kissed him and he looked up at me over his glasses, and I can still remember the look to this day, and he said, don't disgrace the family name. Now, that was a kind of heavy message, but it was meant gently. He was just reminding me that this is one of things we cared about and that I wasn't just me.

APPIAHI was taking the family honor with me and I should bear that in mind. Now, a Victorian father might have said that to an English boy, but I don't think anybody -- when I -- you know, this is in the late '60s. I don't think anybody would have said that to an English boy in the late '60s, except somebody maybe from one of these -- maybe the Duke of Wellington.

NNAMDIFrom his family.

APPIAHFrom his family. So there are these differences. And I think that sensitivity to the fact that what brings honor and shame is different from place to place is probably one of the things that I brought to this book. And it's one of the reasons why it was very important to me that I explore this in more than one place. So I talk about Britain and I talk about aristocratic Britain in the chapter in dueling. I talk about China and the elites.

APPIAHAnd then, in the chapter on slavery, I talk about the British working class and how they turned against slavery. And then, in the forward-looking chapter, I ask about how we can bring an end to the honor killing of women in Pakistan. So I'm trying to work in different places because I want to say, in a general way, this is a human thing. It's a phenomenon in all societies. All of us can recognize the basic structures of honor, but it's -- the codes are different.

APPIAHAnd one of the things -- one way in which moral revolution happens, one way in which moral change happens, is by shifting the codes. In the case of dueling, duels moved from being a source of honor to being a source of ridicule. The shift in the codes means that by the mid-19th century in England, a gentleman is, above all, someone who is gentle, who doesn't use violence, who is polite, quiet, soft-spoken.

NNAMDIShifting of the codes.

APPIAHIt's a complete shifting of the codes. And the same things happen in -- with foot binding. In 1890, in elite Chinese families, you couldn't have married your daughter to an honorable man unless she -- her feet were bound. In 1910, in most places, you couldn't have married her to an honorable man if they were bound.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. When we come back, if you've called, we'll try to get to your calls. A lot of people would like to talk with Kwame Anthony Appiah. His latest book is called, "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen." If the lines are busy, go to our website, kojoshow.org. Ask a question or make a comment there. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWe're having a conversation with Kwame Anthony Appiah. He is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of the book, "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Change." This tweet we got that says, "I hope future generations will view factory farms and the cruelty environmental damage and disease they cause as dishonorable."

APPIAHI think that your hope will be realized. I did write a little piece for the Washington Post the other day about -- giving examples of practices that I think, looking back, will be a source of -- our grandchildren will think we're shameful. And I think -- I mean, I mentioned industrial meat production. Of course, there's a whole range of issues about animals and animal rights where I think people will be scandalized when they discover what their grandparents got up to.

APPIAHSo, yes, I think that's right. And if I may say, I mean, one of the interesting things about the pattern here is that this is like my historical cases. We already know that it's wrong. What has to shift is we have to persuade ourselves that it's, as it were, wrong enough that we're shamed into doing something about it. So honor -- the national honor, the honor of the citizens of particular states -- because much of the law, as it relates to animals, has to be done state by state.

APPIAHThe honor of particular states, I think, maybe even the honor of our species, I don't know, is somewhat at stake in all this. And once people grasp that, I'm hoping that we'll move -- and if these historical examples are anything to go by, we may move quite fast.

NNAMDIThis posting we got on our website from LCC in College Park. "Senator Jim Demint recently declared that homosexuals should be banned from teaching in public schools. I predict that the senator's grandchildren, indeed most Americans, will be ashamed of him and others of his ilk for their bigoted views of homosexuals."

APPIAHYeah. I think this is another one where we're living through a very important moral shift. When I came to the United States, if you said you were gay when you arrived at the border, they were obliged, by law, to deny you entry. They -- I'm glad to say that Congress changed that so now that's not true. Now, it turns out, that a majority -- something like 70 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 think not only that we shouldn't discriminate against homosexuals, but that gay marriage should be recognized by the state.

APPIAHThat means that, you know, as the generation before disappears, dies out, we're going to be in a country where the vast majority of people hold that view. This is a very interesting case, I think. Because the recognition that there's some difficulty about hatred for homosexuals is kind of pervasive, even among people who feel it, I think. And yet people often say, well, you can't treat this just as a kind of irrational hatred because it's grounded, in the case of Christians, for example, in the texts.

APPIAHAnd Christians are stuck with the fact, they say that the text of the Bible proscribe homosexuality. I'd only say that we've -- that the Bible also says that you should stone adulterers to death. And as far as I know...

NNAMDIAnd that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

APPIAHYeah. So I think that it's very hard to say that most contemporary Christians in the United States -- whatever -- even if they came to be Biblical literalists or fundamentalists, really do feel constrained by every word of that text. And the text of the Bible says, as a matter of fact -- I always say to people, look, if God had had strong feelings about homosexuality, the Bible would be much clearer than it is about these matters. If you go to the passages one by one, it's clear that there are other ways of reading them.

APPIAHBut whatever your view about that question, the fact is that there are unequivocal passages in the Bible that we no longer feel we can build into the law. We no longer feel that because the law of Moses requires stoning for adultery, we should stone adulterers.

NNAMDIHere is Clay in Clinton, Md. Clay, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

CLAYYeah, how you doing?

NNAMDII'm well.

CLAYYou can't imagine the shame I feel when I'm out and I hear other black people calling each other the N word, and calling their women the B word. I mean, when is this going to change, and it was a time when that word was revealed as being totally negative, but now it's used as a term of endearment. But as a 50-year-old man as I am, I'm totally ashamed. And when I'm with other people from other cultures and I go to the movies or go to plays or I listen to music and this word is used, I'm totally embarrassed.

CLAYThe shame is not changing anything. And I'm not the only person that feels that way. And it seems like the young people in my culture, in my race -- well, if you want to call us a race because we're all mixed, they seem to miss the whole point.

NNAMDIDo you notice...

CLAYI mean...

NNAMDI...do you feel, Clay, that some people feel that by using the word, they have attached honor to the word?

CLAYYes. It's just like jail culture. You know, like these kids, they wear their pants down, we can see their underwear. It's coming from prison. And we know in prison these things -- these negative things are going on in prison and looked at as positive things.

NNAMDIKwame Anthony...

CLAYAnd it's coming out in -- and it's coming out in our streets and -- I don't know. I just want -- I want the guy to reflect on...

NNAMDIOkay. Allow me to...

CLAY...where is -- where is the shame in that?

NNAMDIAllow me to have Kwame Anthony Appiah respond.

APPIAHWell, I think this is -- I mean, both the use of words that are derogatory about a group by members of the group and the whole question of the reversal of values that you often get in prison culture, these are, I think, indications of the gap between codes of honor in different parts of our society and one of the ways in which our society is deeply divided. And there is a deep divide, I think, for example, between the culture of much of the imprisoned and the post-imprisoned, the people who have been in prison and come out and the rest of us.

APPIAHOne of the differences is in the things that bring you respect. And as I say, honor is about entitlement to respect, and if you have a code that grants respect to people who behave in these ways that I myself find counterproductive and unhelpful, and I think they are effectively counterproductive and unhelpful, then that will make you do those things because honor is this very powerful motivator. One of the oldest proverbs about honor is that there's honor among thieves.

APPIAHAnd it's true. They have a different code from those of us who think that thieving is wrong, but they have a code. And one of the things I think we need to work on more is making sure that we have more shared codes around certain things. Now, when it comes to the N word, I mean, I know how you feel. I guess I feel the same thing. I kind of, sort of, you know, I feel a little blush coming up when I hear people talking like that and I feel embarrassed and ashamed, myself, as a black person.

APPIAHBut there's a thing that they would say in defense of what they're doing, which is that they're trying to take the poison out of the word, right? It's the same way in which gay and lesbian Americans have appropriated the word queer, which used to be used as a term of abuse against homosexuals. They've said, look, if you keep calling us queer, we're going to take the name back and we're going to give it a new valuation.

APPIAHAnd so while I, myself, find it sort of unsettling even when people use the N word as if it were a word that you could use with affection and so on, I understand, I think, that the cultural motive is to say, we are taking this word back. We're trying to take the poison out of it. We're trying to make it so that you can't use it to harm us. And while I may not agree that -- while I may think that the costs outweigh the benefits of that strategy, I understand that impulse.

APPIAHI mean, we've got to find a way -- ideally, right, when we get things right about race in this country, you'll be able to use the N word and it won't hurt anybody because people will say, shame on you for being a stupid racist.

NNAMDIWe got this e-mail from Jennifer. "If dishonor only works when the people being shamed know the practice is wrong, isn't a key element how they come to think it's wrong? Could you address this specifically with regard to honor killings? And thank you for your fascinating approach."

APPIAHI think it turns out -- you're completely right that on my analysis, the -- you have to begin with the recognition of the wrongness of it because it's only in seeing that you've done something wrong that you can be persuaded to experience shame -- genuine shame. But that isn't actually the problem in the case of honor killing and here's way. People already know -- in the societies where they do it, they already know there's something wrong with it. If you look at the weeping father who's just killed his daughter and who says, I had to do it for honor, you can see that it pained him.

APPIAHIt wasn't like -- well, it wasn't easy for him. He already has a sense of the wrongness of what he's doing. Furthermore, and this is one of the reasons why I talk about in Pakistan, it is absolutely clear that the vast majority of Muslim authorities declare honor killing to be not just not Islamic, but anti-Islamic. It's a breach of proper Muslim behavior, clearly. And this is -- I don't just mean in Pakistan.

APPIAHThere's a fatwa issued by 40 Muslim clerics in Pakistan a couple of years ago saying this, but the Grand Ayatollah in Syria has said so, the experts on Muslim -- or the Mosque in Al-Azhar in Cairo have said so. So we've got Islam on our side on this one. We've got the moral recognition of people that in -- people understand that they shouldn't be killing their sisters and their daughters and their wives, right? People know that that's wrong, in general.

APPIAHWhat we have to do is to get them to see that the honor stakes that they think they are serving, by doing this thing that they deeply understand to be wrong, are not worth it. And the way to do that is to do exactly what the leading anti-honor killing campaigners in Pakistan are doing. People like Asma Jahangir, who is wonderful human rights lawyer. She and her sister, Hina Jilani, are wonderful people.

APPIAHWhat they're doing is to point -- is to say, look, far from bringing you honor, we say that killing a woman in your own family brings you shame. Far from being honorable, it's dishonorable. And this is beginning to work. And I think that if you -- just as with dueling, if you turn dueling from a source of honor to a source of dishonor, so with honor killing. If we can turn it from a source of -- a way of resurrecting your honor to just a way of making your honor go even further way, then people will stop doing it.

APPIAHAnd there has been progress on this, I'm glad to say, in Pakistan. The law has moved in a good direction in Pakistan. It's always been un-Islamic.

NNAMDIHere's a difficult one. This we got from Jen in D.C. "I wonder how important it is to have the ability to shame a nation that people identify strongly with their nationality. I personally feel no sense of patriotism as an American and I'm hoping that the world is becoming more an internationalist place than a nationalist place."

APPIAHWell, it's absolutely right that when -- if you ask me what patriotism is, I would say patriotism is an investment in the honor of your country. That's the heart of patriotism. So if you don't have that investment, if you don't feel pride when America does good things and shame when it does bad things, you're not a patriot. I don't believe that patriotism is morally obligatory, but I don't believe that it's morally objectionable either. And I happen to be an American patriot.

APPIAHI'm a -- that is to say, I feel honor and shame when America does bad and good things -- good and bad things. But if you don't feel that, I agree, we have no -- those of us who want to appeal to American honor in order to get us to do the right things have no pull on you.

NNAMDIAnd I'm afraid we're almost out of time. We asked in the early part of this discussion, what will future generations condemn for us? The Turtle tweeted back "Electing George W. Bush twice." (laugh) We're talking with Kwame Anthony Appiah. He is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and his most recent book is called, "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen." He's also the author of "Cosmopolitanism" and several other books. Kwame Anthony Appiah, thank you very much for joining us. Always a pleasure.

APPIAHIt's always a pleasure to talk to you, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.