Honor is social standing.
The US has mixed cultures, and some people will fight and attack if you dishonor them appropriately. That's most of the fights at schools. That's a lot of gang killings. You catch a guy with your girl, you hear somebody disrespect you. It's all honor. When you hear people calling for "respect" and another person from a different subculture just stares blankly, it's because the honor code is different. It's responsible for a lot of ethnic tension. It's one reason that historically murder rates vary by cultural affiliation of the population.
Another view of honor is that it's what you have when you abide by your principles and act with dignity. We had a political skirmish last year. Could a slave have dignity and honor? One side said no, it was insane; honor is what people perceive you as having, and if you're insulted routinely you have no honor. One side side that dignity is abiding by your moral code with equanimity; some Jews heading to their deaths in Auschwitz or some political prisoners in Russian GULags were often described as behaving with dignity and honor and not lowering themselves to the level needed to survive in the camps. Define "dignity" and define "honor" and you get your answer to the question that was brought up by a SCOTUS decision.
Societies have ways of dealing with external dishonor and restoring honor. We don't like them, but they're pretty universal and have been around for thousands of years. They predate Islam. You see it in the Tanach. You see it in cuneiform texts. Honor is personal; it's family; it's clan; it's tribe; it's nation (if there's a difference between that and tribe). For Islam and many Muslim societies, their "nation" is defined in terms of religion; it explains defensiveness and why "Islam" must never be dishonored, and why people kill when Islam is defamed, either by name or by not letting the ummah properly exercise it's God-given role. It's the I/P problem, where the dialog on one side is "rights" and on the other side "humiliation." They aren't equivalent, but many Westerners somehow translate things into their "universal" worldview. External honor requires that any claims of dishonor be denied, right up front: Fessing up is accepting humiliation, and unless it's a humiliation that is inevitable and cannot be withstood, you have to deny it. (If you have no chance of succeeding, to fight and lose is sometimes more humiliating. Hope breeds violence and vengeance.)
For a lot in the US everything is money. Some western subcultures have reduced, atrophied value codes, where instead of 6 or 7 core values there are only 3 or 4, and they're often filtered through $. Religion is money. Honor is money. Social standing is money. Traditions and such are only useful if they produce money. Given a reduced set of values, it's hard to recognize other values or that other values are independent and free-standing. That's a rather important limit for a stunted worldview that really believes it's universal.
One way of restoring honor can be though payment of money. In some cases, it's a ritual sum, to show that the other side has accepted humiliation, and the "deal" is widely publicized to make sure the acceptance of humiliation and restoration of honor is known by all. Sometimes diyah, "blood money," is just a token. Sometimes diyah has to be crushing. Depends on the degree of dishonor. But to have a family member dis her parents in such a severe and public way? Not all dishonor can be redeemed through cash. If the family is wronged by somebody else, $ might work. But in this case, the daughter had to pay to restore her honor. She sinned against her family, to put it in traditional Xian lingo. She didn't repent, she didn't try to find redemption.
= new reply since forum marked as read
