The Morality of Honor and the Morality of Respect

While All God's Children is the story of the Bosket family, and Butch and Willie Bosket in particular, it also advances a fairly novel criminological thesis about the causes of violent crime. The author, Fox Butterfield, deliberately declines to give a purely "liberal" or "conservative" explanation of crime as involving largely situational and environmental causes or as largely cultural, familial and vice-related causes. Instead, he thinks there is a complex interaction between the two that begins with the internalization the morality of honor. The morality of honor is common among primitive societies and many societies prior to the modern period. It focuses, particularly for men, on maintaining reputation and being willing to commit violent acts when one's reputation is slighted. Such a code often takes hold among the poor who have little to their name but their reputation. It often...