Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 254
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literature. Honour, although the most important of external goods, is what
the virtuous person deserves; correctly judging his desert, the virtuous
person is ipso facto magnanimous and conscious of his own great worth.
But he does not act for the sake of his honour in any straightforward sense,
nor does dishonour move him in the least; it creates no shame. to be sure,
shame would move him (just insofar as he would fail to be virtuous – per
impossibile), but that shame has little to do with social expectations; dishon
our does not affect him, but that is precisely what affects the characters of
the sagas (as it does those of the Homeric poems).41 Hence, when Bernard
Williams defends the importance of shame, Aristotle is only mentioned as
one of the builders of that peculiar institution of morality.
the analytical tools of moral thickness and thinness that Bernard Williams
has used on Greek culture have not gone unchallenged; their soundness as
philosophical concepts has been questioned.42 Their usefulness, however,
is to my mind clear. they help scholars to navigate unfamiliar seas, such as
the morality of saga culture. they help to expose the social embeddedness
of moral terms, how matters of value are, within that culture, matters of
fact. But why should gaining an insight into that culture, for example by
being clearer on the social embeddedness of honour, encourage one to
make its values one’s own or rue their disappearance? In fact, awareness of
this embeddedness should (if anything) prompt one to circumspection
regarding the social embeddedness of contemporary values. But more
importantly for the study of medieval Icelandic culture, these insights offer
the opportunity of clarifying the roles of competitive and cooperative
virtues within the framework of honour, the tensions between them, and
their resolutions.43
41 See especially the Nicomachean Ethics Iv.3.1124a4–29.
42 See jenkins, Bernard Williams, 135–40.
43 thanks to Gunnar Harðarson and vilhjálmur Árnason for corrections and criticisms, as
well as to the journal’s anonymous readers.