Legal and religious systems provide rules for living, telling us – often in very concrete terms – what we are and are not permitted to do. Break the rules and you go to jail, get fined, face censure, either on Earth or in the afterlife. By contrast, honour codes inform human action by trafficking in that intangible – but essential – currency: respect. In The Honor Code, the British-born Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah outlines a plan for social change that targets the concept of honour.
Director: Katy Chevigny
videoThinkers and theories
The prison abolitionist who dares to envision a world without ‘unfreedoms’
16 minutes
videoValues and beliefs
Why a single tree, uprooted in a typhoon, means so much to one man in Hanoi
7 minutes
videoMeaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes
videoMeaning and the good life
Leading 1950s thinkers on the search for happiness in trying times
29 minutes
videoWar and peace
Two Ukrainian boys’ summer unfolds just miles from the frontlines
22 minutes
videoFairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
videoFamily life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
videoWar and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
videoThe ancient world
Petty squabbles and bloody battles – the life of an ancient Roman soldier
18 minutes