Status in an honor culture, ironically, seems to be about how much you can cheat 🤔
The gods are seen to favor you in proportion to how much cheating they let you get away with.
This is a big theme in the Mahabharata. 90% of the cheating in it is by the god-favored ‘good guys’.
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...I do think you make a great point and find this stuff fascinating.
I generally see it as a problem to be solved rather than a condemnation of honor itself. But Mahabharata did deeply offend my sensibilities when I was first introduced to it, so there is that. 😀
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Well you’re strongly deontological plus some virtue iirc. The Mahabharata is unabashedly consequentialist.
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I am pretty much on the side of virtue ethics, but I think you are right that I have strong deontological roots. Those damn consequentialists and their epics... 🤮😜
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The defense in Indian epics tends to be interesting: we have to violate the rules to defend them, and intrinsic sense of personal virtue is what justifies it. The most famous verse of the Gita makes exactly that argument. Basically Vishnu incarnates to intervene in moral decay.
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Yep. I suspect there were no real traders in the Axial Age in the Jacobs commerce syndrome sense. I think that’s really traceable to 1400-1600 and early-modern mercantile cities. Spinoza might have been the first true philosophical trader.
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