Hello, In Westeros how does honor work exactly? I apologize if this sounds like a silly question but hear me out. I define honor as doing the moral/right thing no matter the inconvenience or difficulty, (admittedly I can fall short of that ideal), but looking over the Vale it seems like it’s more about the family name and “respectability”. I mean look at the horror at some landed knight marrying Alayne Stone. Alayne Stone is way better than Harrold Hardying. Just like Sansa is better. Thanks.

Good question!

I mean, there’s a really wide literature in history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, etc. on the topic of “honor” and the different ways that different cultures and thinkers have defined and argued about it the term. So I can’t really distill all of that down to a single post.

However, I think I can shed some light on this specific topic. Honor has both an interior/individual side and an external/social side; on the latter, it’s about how well the broader community judges you have upheld the code of honor that society has established, it’s about what your reputation is. 

To use a different example: Ned Stark is honorable in two senses of the term. The first has to do with how he acts, the care he takes to behave in accordance with a particular code of ethics. The second has to do with his reputation, that Ned is widely understood to be a “man of honor” by others of his class.