HUMA 1825 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Nanny, Superiority Complex, Stanford Prison Experiment
20 Sep 2020
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In his view, the concern over family name and status should be replaced with the protection of liberty and equality under law. Summarize his criticisms of honour culture in chapters 9, 10, 21, 23 and 26. He mentions that when laws were incapable of keeping society in check and too useless to deviate humans from their internal selfish desires, the only thing that protected people from alienation was honour. Opinion afflicts both the wise man and the vulgar (pg 27) which means that it is the only thing that can cause people to alter their behaviour. Due to this value that humans put on behaviour, it became necessary for people to show off how honourable they are. However, the issue with that is that seeming virtuous does not necessarily mean that a person is virtuous. Beccaria talks about the fact that when civilization settled matters with duels, it was to feed their own inherent selfishness and ego.
