The Ethics of Honor Killing

There is a quaint tribal tradition in the world of Islam called “Honor Killing” that was brought to our attention yesterday by a report on National Public Radio. This is how it works. If a male family member of tribe X is abducted and he is returned alive to his family – “a sheep is killed to celebrate”. If a female member is abducted and even possibly raped and returned alive to her family – “it’s a disgrace”. There is no celebration. Instead she is killed by a brother, a father or a cousin because she has brought dishonor to the tribe, to the family.

How do these men explain this perfidy? In the words of one who had murdered his 16 year old female cousin after being returned from an abduction “It’s in the blood – it’s tradition. How can it change?” The cousin did it because the father and brother couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They didn’t see anything wrong in it just that they couldn’t do it. The women don’t intervene because they are afraid for their own lives and many of them receive regular beatings with rubber hoses by their husbands.

Thousands of girls and women are murdered by male family members world wide but mostly in the Middle East. These honor killings are an ancient patriarchal custom used to control the family structure and hierarchy. So how can we understand this ancient, evil custom today? Why are honor killings based on the primitive concept of tribe being condoned by governments in the 21st century. Tribalism is a subset of a wider phenomenon called collectivism which is the idea that the individual is nothing – the tribe, the race, society is all.

The politics of collectivism are buoyed by the ethics of altruism be it via religion (Islamists) or mother earth (environmentalism) or the race (Nazi Germany). It is the idea that individuals must sacrifice for the greater good of “fill in the blank”. In the Middle East, besides being infected with the commandments of the Muslim religion, there are the mandates of the tribe. All must bow down to the dictates of tribal customs thousands of years old. So a girl is molested by her father – well she has dishonored the family so the child must be murdered.

Observe that there is no concept here of the individual only the tribe. The individual is nothing – the tribe is all. What drives these people to continue such a barbaric custom – the sacrifice of their daughters, sisters and wives? Irrationality or the anti-mind - the “act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness…the refusal to know” (The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand).

When reason is not your guide to action or your means to knowledge then you are left with using emotion, tribal dictate, and whim as your guide. The results of irrationality are strewn throughout the centuries. From Honor Killings to suicide bombers to the killing fields of Cambodia to millions slaughtered by the Nazis and the Chinese Communist Party leaders, irrationality results in only death and destruction.

Is there an antidote to all this misery? Yes. Reason and individualism. The mind as a means to life and the individual as the benefactor of his use of reason.