Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons^™

Honor And Violence: An Account Of Feuds, Duels, And Honor Killings, John Thrasher, Toby Handfield

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

We present a theory of honor violence as a form of costly signaling. Two types of honor violence are identified: revenge and purification. Both types are amenable to a signaling analysis whereby the violent behavior is a signal that can be used by out-groups to draw inferences about the nature of the signaling group, thereby helping to solve perennial problems of social cooperation: deterrence and assurance. The analysis shows that apparently gratuitous acts of violence can be part of a system of norms that are Pareto superior to alternatives without such signals. For societies that lack mechanisms of governance to …