IntroductionFootnote ¹

On a blank page in his own copy of Observations published in 1764, Immanuel Kant wrote a note that revealed a touching moment of his early life:

From this note, we observe how a condescending genius who once despised the ignorant masses came to see his duty to respect other human beings and commit himself to the establishment of their rights. The trigger of this turn was the transformation of Kant's honor (Ehre), and Kant allowed himself to be motivated by his sense of honor but replaced his old code of honor with a new one. Given the enormous, positive impact of Kant's practical philosophy on the modern view of the morality of mutual respect, it may not be hyperbolic to say that we are indebted to the transformation of Kant's own notion of honor.

ScholarsFootnote ² occasionally revisit the above passage, and there have been multiple recent attempts at defending Kantian honor.Footnote ³ These attempts are justified because, as “the constant companion of virtue” (Anthropology, 359 [7:257]), honor occupies important positions in both Kant's aesthetic and his ethical writings. However, they have not yet changed the view that Kant's morality of autonomy is an alternative to and even in conflict with the ethics of honor—even among defenders of honor.Footnote ⁴ The orthodox view remains that Kant helps replace the outdated aristocratic ethic of honor with the modern democratic morality of autonomy and equal respect.Footnote ⁵ This view is equally justifiable, as Kant indeed depreciates the value of honor, claiming that honor's “maxim lacks the moral content of an action done not from inclination but from duty” (Groundwork, 11 [4:398]). Moreover, the notorious eighteenth-century practice of dueling exacerbated the moral unworthiness of the quixotic quest for honor. It is unsurprising even to see the claim that Kant regards honor as “the root of all evil.”Footnote ⁶ The debate thus reaches an impasse: both sides have justification for insisting on their position.

Despite this interest in Kant's attitude toward honor, the political implications of Kantian honor remain largely unexamined. As a criticFootnote ⁷ of many ultraconservative political views of his contemporaries, Kant believes that honor helps us attain a politics of mutual respect in an imperfect world where such respect is not commonplace. As he claims in CF, in a rightful political society, “there will arise . . . perhaps more charity and less strife in lawsuits, more reliability in keeping one's word, etc., partly out of love of honor, partly out of well-understood self-interest” (CF, 167 [7:91–92]). Of the very few scholars who address the political relevance of Kantian honor, Rachel Bayefsky is the only one studying how this “love of honor” contributes to the formation of a rightful society.Footnote ⁸ Similarly, the recent literature on Kant's virtue ethics does not guide scholarly attention to the connection between Kantian virtue and politics.Footnote ⁹ Given the resemblance of honor to virtue, this fact further reveals the underestimation of the political relevance of Kantian honor.

In light of the ongoing debate concerning Kantian honor and the lack of attention to its role in politics, this article has two aims. The first is to resolve the debate. While Kant uses a variety of expressionsFootnote ¹⁰ to depict the ways in which human beings are attracted to honor, they eventually boil down to two distinctive types. One type is honor as a natural desire, most notably discussed in his aesthetic and anthropological writings. The other type is honor as a transcendental virtue, most notably discussed in his ethical writings. For the sake of simplicity, I call the former type “natural honor,” highlighting its pertinence to nontranscendental human nature, and the latter type “ethical honor,” highlighting its pertinence to Kantian ethics based on the universal moral law. While both types are characterized by fundamental equality and an admirable moral strength necessary for any virtuous actions, the major conflict between natural and ethical honor lies in their relationship to social opinion. Whereas natural honor heavily depends on public approval, ethical honor demands independence from such approval. A dilemma of honor arises, which is responsible for the persistence of the debate concerning Kant's attitude toward honor. While there is no way to solve this dilemma in Kant's ethics, where morally inferior natural honor cannot be compatible with ethical honor, a reconciliation between natural and ethical honor remains possible in his political theory, which attempts to reconcile the normative ideal of a rightful society with empirical and contingent assumptions concerning human nature.

My second aim is to reveal the political implications of Kantian honor. The reconciliation between natural and ethical honor suggests a reform of honor in the political context. Kant claims that “Cervantes would have done better if, instead of ridiculing the fantastic and romantic passion, he had directed it better” (Remarks, 72 [20:9]), and his own account of honor can indeed be understood as an attempt not at ridiculing but at better directing “the fantastic and romantic passion” of honor. I argue that this reform amounts to a particular combination of ethical and natural honor conducive to the politics of mutual respect, as it can serve as a motivation for citizens to fight disrespect in an imperfect world where political authority is for various reasons ill-equipped to punish disrespect.

I begin with the problem that disrespect poses to Kantian politics and how honor is involved in this problem. While legitimate coercion plays an important role in Kant's political theory, the state and its legislation have difficulties in properly punishing disrespect in the form of insult and offense. Kant's discussion of honor and duels not only exposes these difficulties but also suggests the need for a reformed honor to tackle them. I then reconstruct Kant's account of natural and ethical honor, expose its dilemma, and critically examine current efforts to tackle this dilemma. After this I provide my own solution by reading the Kantian account of honor as a reform of honor in the political context. On the one hand, ethical honor, which confirms that the content of true honor is human dignity, discourages murderous actions as a way to fight disrespect. On the other hand, despite the bloodshed often linked to it, natural honor remains effective in motivating citizens to fight disrespect in an imperfect world. To reform honor, it is necessary to introduce the content of ethical honor into natural honor and to utilize the motivating power in natural honor to remedy the absence of such power from ethical honor. In conclusion, I discuss the relevance of Kantian honor to the current discussion of the role of honor and sentiments in contemporary politics and specify two limitations of this article.

Kantian Politics and the Difficulties in Punishing Disrespect

Before investigating the relationship between Kantian honor and politics, we must show that this very relationship is meaningful. Since Kant insists on the separation between politics and ethics, between right and virtue, it is not immediately clear how honor, which may seem to be an ethical concept, matters in politics. I establish a link between honor and politics by exposing a political problem in which honor is involved: political authority is ill-equipped to properly punish disrespect in an imperfect world.

Scholars have demonstrated that Kant's political theory, though in harmony with his system of moral philosophy, does not neglect the unique nature of political reality,Footnote ¹¹ and one distinguishing aspect of Kantian politics is the necessity of coercion. As Arthur Ripstein claims, while Kant's account of coercion is premised on his moral philosophy and thus firmly rejects punishing individuals for instrumental purposes,Footnote ¹² Kant “formulates many of his arguments in terms of coercion.”Footnote ¹³ This claim is unsurprising. Kant's political theory assumes an imperfect world with imperfect human beings. On the one hand, as he argues in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, human nature is constantly troubled by radical evils. On the other hand, he claims that a rightful political society remains a practical possibility despite human nature: “Man, even though he is not morally good, is forced to be a good citizen. As hard as it may sound, the problem of organizing a nation is solvable even for a people comprised of devils” (PP, 124 [8:366]).Footnote ¹⁴ Given this evil human nature, crimes and offenses are precisely what politics is supposed to confront. It follows that legitimate coercion, which is necessary only when there are crimes and offenses to be punished, is central to Kant's political theory. Coercion is “a hindering of a hindrance to freedom” that remains “consistent with freedom in accordance with universal laws, that is, it is right” (MM, 25 [6:231]). Its purpose is to protect individuals’ rights when citizens’ self-constraint (i.e., virtue) can be neither relied on nor enforced. In a civil society, the sole legitimate source of coercion is political authority: “punishment is not an act that the injured party can undertake on his private authority but rather an act of a court distinct from him, which gives effect to the law of a supreme authority over all those subject to it” (MM, 207 [6:460], emphasis Kant's).Footnote ¹⁵ Without this authority, citizens return to the state of nature, where neither private nor public rights are guaranteed.Footnote ¹⁶

Although coercion is not the only feature of Kantian politics, it is most pertinent to the discussion of honor and disrespect. At first glance, disrespect may not appear to be Kant's primary theoretical concern. What he cares about is its opposite, respect, which is famously captured in the duty to treat others not merely as a means but also as an end (MM, 209 [6:462]). Indeed, in Kant's moral genealogy, this duty originates not from restraining disrespect but from the moral feeling of respect necessitated by the universal moral law (MM, 210 [6:464]). Thus, any failure to fulfill this duty may seem to be defined as disrespect. In practice, however, Kant holds that the duty of respect requires us more to avoid showing disrespect toward others than to actively exhibit respect (MM, 211 [6:465], 213 [6:467]). The active exhibition of respect is called reverence, which we cannot exact from others: “The respect we are bound to show other human beings . . . is only a negative duty. I am not bound to revere others (regarded merely as human beings), that is, to show them positive high esteem” (MM, 213 [6:467]). In this sense, disrespect precedes respect, and understanding disrespect is important to understand the duty of respect in the political context.

In Kant's enumeration, disrespect includes arrogance, defamation, and ridicule (MM, 211–13 [6:465–68]). They are distinguished from crimes such as murder. In theory, since both disrespect and crime violate the rights of others, citizens can be legitimately coerced to refrain from showing disrespect toward others. According to Kant's principle of punishment and retribution, “whatever undeserved evil you inflict upon another within the people, that you inflict upon yourself” (MM, 105 [6:332]). Based on this principle, murderers shall be put to death. Similarly, disrespect, which amounts to insult, shall be met with punitive insult. However, Kant reveals in MM that political authority experiences three difficulties in punishing disrespect in practice.

First, Kant argues that whoever injures others verbally shall apologize publicly, but a punishment for disrespect can be effective only when it leads to shame. A fine, for example, can be imposed on disrespect, but if the disrespectful person is rich, then the fine means nothing but that he can simply pay to insult others (MM, 106 [6:332]). The first difficulty thus arises: the effectiveness of punishment in the form of shaming hinges on the assumption that the punished person has a sense of shame. This assumption is precarious, as we cannot be certain that, in an imperfect world, villains are not shameless. This is why Kant demands that moral education emphasize “the shamefulness of vice” (MM, 225 [6:483]). Otherwise, individuals may have an even weaker sense of shame and believe that their dignity is exchangeable with goods of equal prices, making it more difficult to effectively punish disrespect.

Second, Kant argues that the dead have the right to a good reputation. Thus, whoever attacks this reputation injures the right that belongs to the dead and shall be punished by shame. However, although the person who attacks my posthumous reputation is “as punishable as if he had done it during my lifetime,” he is punishable “not by a criminal court, but only by public opinion, which, in accordance with the right of retribution, inflicts on him the same loss of the honor he diminished in another” (MM, 76 [6:296]). Unlike the punishment of public apology that a court issues, punishments for defiling the dead should not involve any court at all, casting doubt on the legitimacy of legal punishment for disrespect. The second difficulty is thus evident: Kant hesitates regarding whether it is always proper for political authority to punish the disrespectful at all.

The third difficulty is that disrespect, whether punished or not, may lead both the disrespectful and the disrespected to commit crimes. Arrogance, for example, which is one of the three forms of disrespect and appears to be an unreasonable object for political authority to punish, is a common source of malice that leads to vengeance and crimes: “It is the haughtiness of others when their welfare is uninterrupted, and their self-conceit in their good conduct . . . that generate this malevolent joy. . . . The sweetest form of malice is the desire for revenge” (MM, 207 [6:460]). Not only is it difficult for political authority to properly punish the disrespectful person, but even if he is punished, his disrespect can still hurt his victims and may motivate them to commit horrific crimes for revenge.

All three of these difficulties reappear in Kant's discussion of defending one's honor in a duel. A duel may end with the death of its participants, but rather than a willful murder, this violence is a reaction of the offended to the humiliating disrespect that he receives from the offender. Kant admits that dueling leads to a “quandary” for penal justice. First, the disrespect of offense provokes the offended to resort to the crime of manslaughter, which Kant believes must always be punished by death. This matter echoes the third difficulty described above. Second, penal justice against the offender can never be proper since legal punishment cannot “wipe away the stain of suspicion of cowardice” if the offended fails to respond to the offense. Political authority, even a just one (or precisely because it is a just one), is thus not the proper agent to punish the offender. Therefore, in a civil society, the offended still finds himself “in the state of nature” with the offender, seeking “punishment of the offender not by law, taking him before a court, but by a duel” (MM, 109 [6:336]). This matter echoes the second difficulty described above. Finally, although the authority may claim that his honor “counts for nothing” to deter the offended from resorting to a duel, Kant firmly rejects this solution because it is an unfair treatment of the honor of the offended, which “is indeed true honor . . . incumbent as duty on” him (MM, 108–9 [6:336]). After all, attacking the sense of honor is equivalent to attacking the sense of shame, and individuals who lose their sense of honor also lose their sense of shame, leading to the ineffectiveness of punishing disrespect. This matter echoes the first difficulty described above.

Thus, while political authority is supposed to force even “devils” to respect the rights of others, it encounters difficulties when punishing disrespect. If left unpunished or punished improperly, disrespect can lead to crime, threaten the sense of shame, and thus endanger the order of civil society. Surprisingly, when judging the cause of these difficulties, Kant blames legislation instead of honor: “the legislation itself (and consequently also the civil constitution), as long as it remains barbarous and undeveloped, is responsible for the discrepancy between the incentives of honor in the people (subjectively) and the measures that are (objectively) suitable for its purpose” (MM, 109 [6:336–37]). Thus, Kant defends honor even in its least favorable case. Disrespect must be fought, but political authority is not always the best enforcer of the moral law. As I will elaborate in the remainder of the article, given the ineffectiveness of legislation in punishing disrespect and Kant's insistence on honor even when it goes against the moral law, an improved honor is no less important than improved legislation for citizens to confront disrespect in an imperfect world.

Two Concepts of Honor

Having explained the political problem in which honor is involved, I now explain what Kantian honor actually is. The ethical account treats honor as a virtue exacted by the universal moral law, and the natural account studies honor as a pathological desire.Footnote ¹⁷ This difference reveals a dilemma that gives rise to the persistent debate concerning Kant's attitude toward honor, but the similarities between the two types of honor also prepare for the possibility of their reconciliation.

The Dilemma of Kantian Honor

Regardless of the similarity between ethical and natural honor, their difference remains substantial. Whereas the source of ethical honor is the universal moral law that transcends social opinion, the source of natural honor is social opinion. A focus on this difference gives rise to a dilemma for Kantian honor that is responsible for the persistence of the debate concerning Kant's mixed attitude toward honor.

On the one hand, viewed from the perspective of ethical honor, an honorable individual ought not to judge the value of an action and henceforth whether he should take this action or not according to how social opinion would judge. Rather, the only authority that he should follow is his pure practical reason, which amounts to the universal moral law. Thus, even if social opinion takes as ridiculous what his pure practical reason judges to be worthy, this individual must remain unperturbed. As Kant explains in Anthropology, genuine courage is “aroused by reason,” and “to venture something that duty commands, even at the risk of being ridiculed by others, requires resoluteness, and even a high degree of courage; because love of honor is the constant companion of virtue, and he who is otherwise sufficiently prepared against violence seldom feels equal to ridicule if someone scornfully refuses this claim to honor.” Such an individual possesses the moral courage that “many who show themselves as brave figures . . . in a duel do not possess” (Anthropology, 359 [7:257]). Therefore, he must be indifferent to disrespect, and social opinion in general, from people who attempt to lower his social status: “The virtuous one looks upon the rank of others with indifference, although if he refers it to himself, he looks at it with contempt” (Remarks, 76 [20:16]).

On the other hand, viewed from the perspective of natural honor, an honorable individual ought to be sensitive to social opinion. Particularly in the case of dueling, “when a junior officer is insulted he sees himself constrained by the public opinion of the other members of his estate to obtain satisfaction for himself” (MM, 109 [6:336]). The universal moral law that prohibits killing does not speak to him. On the contrary, he must act against this prohibition to defend his military honor in the face of the offender and his fellow soldiers. In fact, Kant holds that the opinion of others is definitely not irrelevant to one's honor. Our total indifference to disrespectful opinion and treatment is a sign not of any honor but of its forfeiture (MM, 186–87 [6:435]). It reduces us to the status of a slave who voluntarily accepts his master's disdain and becomes a “worm” that “cannot complain afterwards if people step on him” (MM, 188 [6:437]). Thus, a virtuous individual must be sensitive to social opinion and stand up to it when disrespect threatens his honor.Footnote ²⁴

Therefore, the dilemma of Kantian honor is formulated as follows: an honorable individual must be not only indifferent but also sensitive to disrespect from others. In this formulation, what I am calling ethical and natural honor necessarily conflict with each other, and scholars participating in the debate concerning Kant's attitude toward honor are largely divided because of this dilemma. This division is seen not only between defenders and opponents of Kantian honor but also within the defenders and within the opponents. Whereas the defenders either emphasize the positive effect of natural honorFootnote ²⁵ or show the moral superiority of ethical honor,Footnote ²⁶ the opponents either criticize the corrupting effect of natural honorFootnote ²⁷ or explain how ethical honor is itself a sign of the corruption of modern morality.Footnote ²⁸ Most of them presume that the gap between natural and ethical honor is insurmountable and thus find it necessary to take sides. A reconciliation between natural and ethical honor thus appears impossible.

Among the attempts at confronting the dilemma, the most intuitive one leads to its dismissal on chronological grounds. Accordingly, while what I am calling natural honor is developed in Kant's earlier works such as Observations, what I am calling ethical honor is found in his later works such as MM. The thirty-year gap in between the two works indicates that Kant might have changed his mind and abandoned his earlier affinity for natural honor. However, as shown above, Kant criticizes natural honor in Observations and defends it in MM. Thus, it is questionable that Kant replaces natural with ethical honor as the sole legitimate understanding of honor.Footnote ²⁹ This dismissal of the dilemma of honor is based on the theoretical distinction between Kantian anthropology and morality. It ignores the fact that this distinction does not always apply to Kantian politics, in which pathological motives do not have to be dismissed simply because they are not virtuous.

Among scholars who provide solutions to the dilemma, David Sussman attempts to capture the reason that Kant cannot sustain honor as complete independence from social opinion: “Kant considers contempt always to be morally inappropriate, but lack of objective justification will not change the social fact that someone who is disgraced will no longer be taken seriously as an agent, as someone towards whom justification might be owed, and who needs to be kept in mind as a significant source of challenges, protests or approval.”Footnote ³⁰ In response, Sussman distinguishes between an “ordinary insult” and “disgrace” and claims that while the former “do[es] not diminish what is ours without our acceptance,” the latter diminishes our freedom “in that we lose a certain power to act regardless of our own ‘inner’ attitudes or acceptance.”Footnote ³¹ Thus, an honorable individual should ignore an ordinary insult and stand up to disgrace. This solution makes sense but is difficult to apply to particular cases because the line between an ordinary insult and disgrace can be obscure. Nor does Sussman suggest in concrete terms how we can discern this line. Moreover, Sussman's view lacks textual evidence. Kant never makes distinctions between one form of ridicule and another in his discussion of disrespect, and the reason is obvious: from the ethical point of view, disrespect is always vicious and must be tackled without compromise.

Krista Thomason argues instead that contempt from others is not necessarily bad in Kant's view. Referring to Kant's claim in the Critique of Practical Reason that individuals ought to feel a certain type of humiliation before the moral law, Thomason argues that an individual deserves public contempt if he places himself in a dishonorable position by violating the moral law, and that the sense of shame aroused by such contempt is morally sanguine.Footnote ³² This argument suffers from three problems. First, Thomason argues that the dishonorable individual rightly feels ashamed because public contempt and the violation of the universal moral law converge with each other. This argument seems to indicate that the origin of shame is fundamentally the moral law and that public contempt merely triggers shame, but it is questionable whether this “shame” is shame at all or merely a synonym for guilt. After all, shame seems to be shame proper when it originates from the judgment of social opinion. Second, it follows that Thomason's interpretation cannot explain Kant's defense of natural honor where codes of honor and the universal moral law do not converge, such as in the case of duel discussed above. Third, put in the political context, the convergence of social opinion and the moral law becomes even more problematic, as this convergence amounts to the premise that social opinion is always upright, which conflicts with the premise of Kant's political theory that civil society can remain rightful despite evil human nature.

Bayefsky speculates that Kant's toleration of natural honor even in the case of honor killings marks his acknowledgment of the status quo of an imperfect world and that he aims at “the eventual phasing out”Footnote ³³ of natural honor. This interpretation correctly treats Kant as a reformer of honor who is sensitive to social reality, but in her fundamental rejection of natural honor, Bayefsky underestimates its moral potential and thus finds it difficult to understand Kant's “genuine approbation” of the duelist's honor.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, Bayefsky also overestimates the political potential of ethical honor. While she correctly argues that ethical honor is compatible with proper social recognition,Footnote ³⁵ her argument that ethical honor better helps us avoid the “risks” of the quest for recognition than natural honorFootnote ³⁶ is problematic, as these “risks” are intrinsic not to natural honor but to Kant's politics, where some individuals may willfully deny this recognition to others by disrespecting them, as I discuss below.

The Kantian Reform of Honor

In contrast to Bayefsky's speculation, I argue that, while natural honor is morally inferior to ethical honor, it should not be replaced by ethical honor in the Kantian political context. I have argued above that Kant's political theory assumes an imperfect world, where punishment for disrespect is necessary and political authority is ill-equipped to punish disrespect. In the conflict between the legislation of the state and the honor of citizens, Kant sides with the latter—but with a critical eye. Citizens should fight disrespect, as honor demands, but they also should refrain from exhibiting the same disrespect in their fight, as the moral law demands. This prescription amounts to a particular fusion of ethical and natural honor, as ethical honor achieves better results in restraining disrespect, whereas natural honor is more powerful in motivating reactions against disrespect.

On the one hand, in the ethical context, ethical honor is superior to natural honor because it is noncontingent and motivates our genuine respect toward others. Ethically honorable individuals do not rely on social opinion to make moral judgments. Otherwise, even respect toward others can be mere subjection to social opinion, but “a human being cannot carry his giving an example of the respect due others so far as to degenerate into blind imitation (in which custom is raised to the dignity of a law)” (MM, 210 [6:464]). Owing to the moral strength inherent in ethical honor, individuals can insist on their own values even when popular mores push them to betray these values, and interpersonal comparison thus loses its moral importance: Since my own value is universal and absolute and thus does not rely on the opinion of others, why do I need to compare myself to others to see my relative value?Footnote ³⁷ It follows that ethical honor can free individuals from a vicious form of reciprocity, namely, deciding whether I should perform a certain virtuous action to you according to whether you have done it to me. As Alexander Welsh claims, “in Kant reciprocity is sometimes absent, and respect need not be mutual.”Footnote ³⁸ If I willingly respect you because doing so is honorable, then I will respect you even if you do not respect me. From this nonvengeful attitude toward disrespect, it is clear that ethical honor can inspire a response to disrespect that is not necessarily equally disrespectful.

On the other hand, when placed in the political rather than the ethical context, ethical honor is ineffective at deterring disrespect and needs the assistance of natural honor. The sources of this ineffectiveness have been developed above concerning the nature of Kantian politics, disrespect, and ethical honor. First, even if it is not completely out of reach, as a virtue, ethical honor remains rare among citizens. This rarity, which Kantian politics presumes, means not only that not all citizens take virtuous actions but also that, even when they do, they seldom do so out of the most virtuous motive alone. In terms of its nature, virtue demands nothing less than the purest good will as its only motive to the extent that it is “an ideal and unattainable” (MM, 167 [6:409]). Thus, our best attempt is to keep our pursuit of virtue “in progress” (ibid.) and try to “approximate” (MM, 148 [6:383]) to it. In terms of anthropological observations, Kant claims that “few” people act out of principles (Observations, 34 [2:227]). In contrast, natural honor “is distributed among all human hearts” (ibid., emphasis mine). Thus, natural honor is a more common and hence more reliable motivation than ethical honor. Again, this difference does not suggest the moral superiority of natural honor, but if natural honor is not necessarily evil and if it is more widely spread than ethical honor as a motivation to the reaction against disrespect, then there is no reason to reject natural honor in the political context.

Second, even if ethical honor could be widespread, the reactions that it can motivate against disrespect are limited and often impotent. Driven by natural honor, the insulted soldier cannot tolerate the shame and thus attempts to kill the offender. For an individual who subscribes only to ethical honor, this reaction is unthinkable because ethical honor demands that he unconditionally respect others by refraining from disrespecting them. Thus, an ethically honorable individual would vindicate his honor neither by killing the offender nor by taking any other disrespectful actions. Indeed, he may respond to disrespect by openly condemning it or by going to court. Neither response involves disrespectful actions on the side of the offended. However, these solutions only drag us back into the Kantian “quandary” for penal justice when the defense of honor is at stake. Since “devils” in the imperfect world of Kantian politics may not even blush when condemned only with words, the effect of mere words on defending one's honor and deterring disrespect is weak. Since the court is a third party, relying on its intervention rather than one's own actions to vindicate one's honor may still appear to be a less honorable response.

Finally, a key feature of ethical honor may even render an honorable individual more vulnerable to disrespect. Since his honor lies in his dignity as a rational being, which remains undamaged despite disrespect, he can be indifferent to the opinion both of people who disrespect him and of people who think he has not done enough to vindicate his honor. However, in a world permeated by social opinion, individuals who are indifferent to social opinion may not always be perceived as honorable individuals. Rather, their failure to be bothered by disrespect may only motivate offenders to keep exploiting their principled insensitivity. In contrast, natural honor drives us to take effective actions against disrespect. As Kant claims, “The opinion that others may have of our value and their judgment of our actions is a motivation of great weight, which can coax us into many sacrifices, and what a good part of humanity would have done . . . out of principles happens often enough merely for the sake of outer appearance, out of a delusion that is very useful although in itself very facile” (Observations, 25 [2:218]). Natural honor influences us through the social opinion about honor and shame that we care about and thus motivates us to fight disrespect. Such a fight may not be driven by the most sublime motive, but it remains better than the vulnerability to insult and the cowardly acquiescence to disrespect that Kant rejects as slavish (MM, 187 [6:435]).

Nevertheless, as the quotation above confirms, natural honor involves “delusion.” Even if the intention behind honor killing is not evil, unlawful manslaughter as its consequence is always morally wrong, and the usefulness of natural honor cannot justify the accompanying atrocities. Thus, natural honor must be informed by ethical honor such that citizens realize that killing is never genuinely honorable despite the importance of fighting disrespect.

Therefore, in the political context, the Kantian reform of honor does not mean the replacement of natural honor with ethical honor. Rather, it amounts to a particular reconciliation between natural and ethical honor. While Kant consistently maintains the gap between politics and ethics and between right and virtue, nonmoral motivations with moral effects can help bridge the gap. Admittedly, actions taken out of the concern for social opinion are fundamentally heteronomous and lack moral worth, but they do not have to be morally wrong.Footnote ³⁹ As “the constant companion of virtue,” natural honor is not only useful in an imperfect world for individuals to fight disrespect but also more compatible with virtue and morality than other nonmoral motivations, such as self-interest, which may devalue dignity and thus conflict with morality. Therefore, even if we resort to natural honor as a motivation to fight disrespect, it does not block our path toward true ethical honor. Natural honor becomes morally wrong only when its content is misidentified with vicious maxims. To avoid this misidentification and keep the justifiable fight against disrespect from violating moral principles, what is necessary for the reform of honor is to combine the content of ethical honor, namely, the equal respect toward others, with the form of natural honor, namely, the strong motivation to defend oneself from disrespect. Not all citizens are virtuous, and some may even be devilish, but when the reformed honor of at least some groups is consistent with the moral law, social opinion combines both the motivating power of natural honor that provokes firm responses to disrespect and the moral content of ethical honor that constrains such responses from deviating from moral principles. If Rousseau inspired Kant to retain his sense of honor but replace his old and disrespectful code of honor with a new and respectful one, then Kant could inspire us to do so too. In fact, one reason that dueling is no longer justifiable among Westerners is neither that they have become virtuous nor that they have lost their sense of honor but that their codes of honor have changed for good.Footnote ⁴⁰