On one of my author discussion groups, someone has asked whether honour is a lost virtue for today’s readers. Her general thesis was something to the effect: In today’s society, every one is out for themselves, without thinking of the impact on others. This makes for selfish heroes in romance, who pursue their own wants and needs without thinking of others.

Honour doesn’t have quite the same ring to it for me. It all depends what it drives people to do. Do we agree with Richard Lovelace, poet of the English Civil War, who wrote, in To Lucasta, Going to the Wars, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more”? To our ears, formed by the culture of our times, it sounds like he’s using honour as a convenient excuse to do what he wanted to do.

What about the touchy aristocrats of the eighteenth century, duelling — even killing — because of a perceived insult?

Or, in our own times, look at honour killings. A loved sister or daughter, murdered to restore the reputation of the family.

I’ve been thinking about this in the light of the hero I spent the last couple of days creating for a newsletter subscriber short story. I wanted someone almost ethereally beautiful and brimming over with charm and seeming confidence. He lives a life of hedonism, and appears to care for nothing and no-one, himself included. That isn’t the whole story, of course — he is a Jude Knight hero, and a fundamental decency is a given. But it got me thinking. He is not so much selfish as self-centred — an issue that afflicts some of my other heroes, and that they need to overcome for their lives to take a turn for the better.

I’ve long seen human behaviour in terms of care circles. People behave differently to those they regard as human (and for human, read ‘like them’). People will make tremendous sacrifices and do incredible tasks for those within their closest care circle. For most people, this is their partner, parents, and children. For others, it might be comrades-at-arms, or best friends. In the next circle out might be casual friends, and then (perhaps) work colleagues, or neighbours. Beyond that, depending on the person, are those of the same ethnicity, or belief system, or gender, or some other classification. Or, it might be, animals, or the amorphous network of life people most commonly mean when they say ‘the planet’. (The actual planet is not at risk from human activity, short of some as yet unknown technology for blowing it to smithereens — otherwise it will survive, even as a vaguely spherical inanimate object, with a crust of lichen covered rock and dead seas.)

Some poor unfortunates have a single care circle, and it comprises one person: them. But even those with an every increasing number of circles encompassing the universe still rank some circles closer than others.

In many historical novels, we leave the poor, people of colour, those with a different religion, even servants, outside of the care circles of our hero and heroine. Or, we include a single representative of those groups, or political action on behalf of those groups, as signs that the protagonist is morally responsible.

My protagonists do their best for others, but only because I have to make them that way. I don’t see it as a virtue, but as a part of being human ourselves. Virtue is stepping outside our care circles to look after those we don’t love. Those who ignore the problems of others just because they are not me or mine are a step closer to the other end of a continuum that leads to terrorism and genocide.

Thinking about honour has led to me to envisage another circle entirely. The brother who kills a sister for action that brings the family into dishonour (or the Regency father who claims to have thrown his daughter into the street for the same purpose) believes they are doing it out of care — care for other members of the family that overrides care for the ousted sister. Lovelace and the motor cycle gangs give me a different perspective. When we talk about honour, whether in the current day or the stories we love to read (and write), we see an ethic that transcends the care group.

I call it an ethic, but I’m not entirely sure it is ethical. At its base, honour is about being true to one’s sense of self — “I am the sort of person who…” the hero or heroine says, when they are impelled take a certain action, even if it hurts those close to them. Their honour circle includes those who agree with the value of being that sort of person, and who therefore support the actions.

So no, I don’t think honour is a lost virtue, because whether or not it is a virtue depends entirely on what it causes us to do.

What do you think?