I have lamented before the fact that “gentlemanly” (or “gentleman’s agreement”) is such a useful term with nice specific connotations, and has no gender-neutral.
I’ve heard “gentlefolk” used in communities where outright “cultural re-write” for less sexism and racism is tolerated or encouraged (rather than inducing apoplectic sputtering by some of the reactionary participants). Lesswrong, with the semi-regular and un-commented use of spivak, is one of these places.
On the other hand, to my ear, the penumbra of connotation included by “gentlemen’s agreement” includes elements of feudal virtue and the glamor of evil, where gentlemen on hard times might become highway brigands rather than shop keepers or farmers, because it would be ignoble to work for a living rather than finding some way to prey on the productive members of society “like a proper gentleman”.
Legitimate prey, in that era, only vaguely includes women, because women were mostly just “points” rather than players, formally existing as willing or unwilling chattel, rather than official players of the game. The residuum of this era seems to be what relatively sane feminists are talking about when they speak of “the patriarchy” and “rape culture”.
There were exceptionalwomen, but “gentlefolk” doesn’t make me think of barely restrained rampaging female nobility, the way “gentlemen” subsumes a historical panoply of somewhat foppish, honor obsessed, sociopathic dukes and princes, who had “always winning at ultimatum games and games of chicken” as the essential business model of their caste.
The caste, to persist over time, needed a way to not tear itself completely to shreds through internal squabbling and so develops cultural norms regulating internal strife… hence, a “gentleman’s agreement” could occur between its genuine members. Figuring out a way to identify genuine members (by some method other than never backing down when a peasant tries to get an even deal) loops you back to signaling, completing the circle of game theoretic horror.
With the terminological question, I think its worth comparing a “feudal horror” understanding of “gentlemen” with someone like Jeanette Rankin, the first female ever to be elected to the US House of Representatives, who was a pacifist and the lone vote against declaring war on the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. The word might have no cognate because it is inherently gendered? I think it’s distinctly possible that there are few female gentlemen for basically the same reason that there are few female serial killers.
I’d appreciate links to essays or summat that give a clear-eyed assessment of the extent to which women were or weren’t willing or unwilling chattel at various points throughout history. You seem to be referring to background knowledge that I don’t have—the only “knowledge” of the history of the lot of women (and the culture of gentlemen) I have comes from clearly ideological narratives. Excepting the classical era, it seems like it’d be difficult for me to find analyses that avoided implicit moralizing and stuck to factual description. I’m especially interested in the lot of women during the High Middle Ages, which I tend to think of as a high-point of civilization. I would be surprised to learn that the lot of women then was as bad as it seems like it was in classical antiquity, or as it seems like it is today in much of the world including many Western subcultures.
(Interestingly I notice a small “arguments are like soldiers” effect going on on my part: when you say “yay for progress” you’re specifically talking about women’s rights, but my brain automatically reached for cached counter-examples to “progress” that have nothing to do with women’s rights, and wanted to ask why someone who’s studied complex systems and group epistemology is going along with the progress narrative, even though you never actually said nor really implied that you were going along with the progress narrative in general. I hope this is because I care about historiography and not because I’ve been mind-killed by ideology.)
I’m confused that you linked to the Wikipedia section on the influences of the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. From what it says Prussia’s subsequent reforms were primarily military in nature, and the occupation by France only lasted a few years. There doesn’t seem to have been substantial cultural reform—(should we expect Prussia to have adopted the leftist norms & ideology of France due to such an ephemeral military occupation?)—and politically the primary consequence seems to have been an increase in German nationalism, which doesn’t seem to have been such a good thing given the next century and a half of German history. Is there a primary source that goes into more detail about the relevant cultural consequences of Prussia’s defeat in the War of the Fourth Coalition?
ETA: Just realized how off-topic this is. Also close to mind-killing if not itself mind-killing. Perhaps better suited to PM or email.
My knowledge of women’s history in the high middle ages wouldn’t be very good. However, as an Irish archaeologist, I can tell you that the chattel slavery of women in early medieval Ireland was so abundant that a female slave or cumal was treated as a unit of currency, being equivalent to 6 to 8 séoit (one of which is equal to the value of a three-year-old heifer). If I were still a student I would be able to find you more academic sources, but I’ve lost access to most of the journals I used to use. From what I remember, this practice did fall into decline after the arrival of Normans, though this generally attributed to a decline in economic significance rather than a shift in social conscience. If you can access J-Stor, “Lest the Lowliest Be Forgotten: Locating the Impoverished in Early Medieval Ireland” by JW Boyle will provide you with good background on this. I know it’s not exactly what you were looking for, but it as an area which I am, to some extent, qualified to talk about.
I’ve found the Owning Your Shit blog to provide interesting alternative views for some of the standard feminist narratives, though unfortunately it doesn’t cite any sources and is somewhat ideological as well.
the first female ever to be elected to the US House of Representatives, who was a pacifist and the lone vote against declaring war on the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.
The USA elected a representative that wouldn’t even declare war after a comprehensive military strike by an enemy? Wow. I would not have expected that.
That’s at best redundant. They became the enemy due to that particular military strike.
Not especially redundant and the “at best” has highly dubious connotations ‘at best’. The “comprehensive military strike” is ambiguous without something that indicates whether it is “by us” or “by the other guys”.
Even apart from that I wouldn’t accept as remotely tenable the claim that Japan couldn’t be described as an enemy just because active firefights were not in progress, in much the same way that the participants in a cold war cannot be enemies just because the war is cold. Would you really claim that prior to pearl harbor Japan during that war hadn’t done anything that threatened American interests such that they couldn’t be considered an enemy? Was America really naive enough not to realize that the previous actions of Japan and the positioning of their forces didn’t make an enemy, even if it is one that America was until then able to leave to others to fight? Japan certainly didn’t think so, or they wouldn’t have bothered making a first strike while they were already busy.
I think I’ve heard this phrase somewhere before. Would a ‘womanly understanding’ be the female counterpart of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’? “We had a womanly understanding not to dress too fancily to the event, and I was glad to see that she wore her hemp necklace instead of her most elegant pearl necklace.”
A ‘tacit understanding’ or ‘tacit agreement’ can be the gender neutral in many instances wherein ‘gentleman’s agreement’ is used, but indeed I don’t think the former can denote all that the latter connotes.
Would a ‘womanly understanding’ be the female counterpart of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’?
No. The the ‘nice connotations’ of that phrase are that the agreement can be expected to be kept not because of legal enforceability but due to honor and pride. That is, the ‘gentleman’ who betrays such an agreement will at best lose social standing (itself a life threatening possibility) and at worst will be challenged to a duel or have his entire family poisoned by assassins.
The ‘gentleman’ who is betrayed in such a deal feels honor bound to punish the defection even at cost to himself and will himself lose status and credibility if he does not. The “womanly counterpart” for social competition was based on different competitive strategies and was not of the kind that implicitly enforces honesty.
Perhaps in fiction and history does what you say of female competition hold true, but I think it might not anymore be so much the case in Western countries. Western countries in the past subjugated women a great deal more than at present, and thus subtle machinations were female’s only recourse if they wished to be active agents.
As Western Society weakens its dominion over women, and women are granted more social power, the less necessary manipulative dishonest conduct in female to female interactions becomes. I don’t think it’s inherent to the nature of women to engage in arrangements that they have no intention of upholding—only that doing so is advantageous when all involved parties of the arrangement have low social power anyway: little to lose, a lot to gain. Men in the same situations are just as dishonest.
With more social power, the less reason there is back-stab and connive dishonestly. I think it very likely for women to have developed a reputation-backed honor system that enforces ‘womanly understandings’. That is what I mean by the term: a relatively new social development that has only become possible through recent societal Enlightenment (in the 17th-18th century sense of the word). It could just as well be a very old development that has only recently been revitalized; I refer to ancient matriarchal societies like the Scythians and Sarmatians.
Perhaps in fiction and history does what you say of female competition hold true, but I think it might not anymore be so much the case in Western countries. Western countries in the past subjugated women a great deal more than at present, and thus subtle machinations were female’s only recourse if they wished to be active agents.
Trying to make this about ‘female subjugation’ does the subject a gross injustice—discarding all the relevant parts of the particular honesty enforcement cultural dynamic in order to make points on a largely irrelevant gender superiority battle. The actual relevant factor here is that what I said of male competition does not apply in modern societies. People within a specific caste being permitted to or outright socially obliged to challenge each other to duels or to otherwise act in an aggressively vindictive manner when they are betrayed in matters of honor has various positive and negative effects, one of them being that otherwise unenforceable promises have more credibility. Neither males nor females in general western culture are in such circumstances so our ‘gentleman’s agreements’ are limited to comparatively trivial matters.
Having both set forth our positions, we can only wait for relevant facts to resolve the matter one way or the other.
This form of disengagement does not seem to apply in circumstances where there are no particular ‘facts of the matter’ that are being waited for and no ‘resolution of the matter’ that would provide clear conclusions either way. That being the case it struck me as out of place posturing.
This form of disengagement does not seem to apply in circumstances where there are no particular ‘facts of the matter’ that are being waited for and no ‘resolution of the matter’ that would provide clear conclusions either way. That being the case it struck me as out of place posturing.
You’re right. I was thinking of anecdotes, which aren’t facts, and shouldn’t be used as highly-valued evidence in most scenarios, like this one. Regardless, it was still posturing; thanks for calling me out on it.
My main point wasn’t about power imbalances, but the social dynamics influenced by those imbalances. Honor among gentlemen in 17th century England was only important insofar as a man’s reputation. Thus, outside of those who may be internally motivated by an honorable system of ethics (like Eddard Stark), reputation was the main factor responsible for enforcing gentlemanly honor. I posit that repuation matters more among those that have a lot to lose, but little to gain: exempli gratia an established criminal or the Earl of Essex.
If one has little reputation to begin with, and is of little means, then it is advantageous to connive one’s way into more power. As winning glory and honor for their family through battle or refined arts has in the past been largely outside the realm of accepted female activity, conniving was naturally a reasonable course of action. The same would be true of a London mudlark with grand ambitions—regardless of their sex.
In our day, honorable conduct in business is critical as often one’s reputation will be the deciding factor in whether another will enter into a business arrangement. This is much moreso the case among starting professionals, who might take it as a sign of distrust and be affronted if presented with NDA’s and non-compete forms before even hearing the proposal.
Positive reputation is largely built up by acting ‘honorably’. I think this is equally the case among women now as it is among men. Thus, agreements made and understandings reached that are founded upon that honor might be called gentleman’s agreements and womanly understandings.
To clarify, the above is why I think using a term such as ‘womanly understanding’ is sound, and why I think the term represents occurences that have basis in reality. I just want to know whether anyone’s heard of it before. Also, yes, I know you were initially referring to past cultural dynamics—sorry I didn’t make that clearer earlier.
Perhaps this says more about me than other people, but when you wrote ‘womanly understanding’, I expected it to immediately be broken in some sort of backstabbing way or catfight...
And a gentleman’s agreement would be broken and “resolved” through the gentlemanly art of fisticuffs — in other words, it really hinges on mutual threat of violence rather than on mutual recognition of benefit?
How about we don’t gender it at all? If what you want to say is that a particular agreement optimizes for mutual benefit and against various sorts of defection, just say so. We know some game theory around here; and we know that it is frequently applicable to the moral decisions of daily life. No need to drag (ha ha) gender into it at all.
And a gentleman’s agreement would be broken and “resolved” through the gentlemanly art of fisticuffs — in other words, it really hinges on mutual threat of violence rather than on mutual recognition of benefit?
No. The agreement is based on the mutual recognition of benefit. The expectation that each will honor the agreement if made relies on the threat of mutual violence. If there wasn’t an expectation of benefit they would not enter into an agreement. (The agreement obliges them to either do something or experience negative consequences so if the agreement offered no expectation of benefit to compensate it would be a bad decision.)
A ‘tacit understanding’ or ‘tacit agreement’ can be the gender neutral in many instances wherein ‘gentleman’s agreement’ is used, but indeed I don’t think the former can denote all that the latter connotes.
But what do you think it connotes? The meaning of “gentleman’s agreement” that I grew up with is a tacit agreement of mutual back-scratching, generally to the detriment of those outside the club of insiders. It is not publicly enforceable because it is not publicly acknowledgable, but those on the inside will know when someone defects and discreetly edge them out of the club. It is not to do with honour and pride, in the hurrah senses of those words, but the old boys network.
The Wikipedia article on the subject defines it pretty much along those lines, and gives some historical background I wasn’t aware of.
“Honourable” would seem to catch most of the connotations. Eg. “As an honourable man/woman/person I expect them to fulfill their side of the bargain without coercion.”
It has generally positive connotations but also inferences of old fashionedness and not always taking the best option (e.g. honour before reason). Are there any connotations it is particularly missing?
I have lamented before the fact that “gentlemanly” (or “gentleman’s agreement”) is such a useful term with nice specific connotations, and has no gender-neutral.
laments a bit more
Anyway, awesome post, looking forward to these.
I’ve heard “gentlefolk” used in communities where outright “cultural re-write” for less sexism and racism is tolerated or encouraged (rather than inducing apoplectic sputtering by some of the reactionary participants). Lesswrong, with the semi-regular and un-commented use of spivak, is one of these places.
On the other hand, to my ear, the penumbra of connotation included by “gentlemen’s agreement” includes elements of feudal virtue and the glamor of evil, where gentlemen on hard times might become highway brigands rather than shop keepers or farmers, because it would be ignoble to work for a living rather than finding some way to prey on the productive members of society “like a proper gentleman”.
Legitimate prey, in that era, only vaguely includes women, because women were mostly just “points” rather than players, formally existing as willing or unwilling chattel, rather than official players of the game. The residuum of this era seems to be what relatively sane feminists are talking about when they speak of “the patriarchy” and “rape culture”.
There were exceptional women, but “gentlefolk” doesn’t make me think of barely restrained rampaging female nobility, the way “gentlemen” subsumes a historical panoply of somewhat foppish, honor obsessed, sociopathic dukes and princes, who had “always winning at ultimatum games and games of chicken” as the essential business model of their caste.
The caste, to persist over time, needed a way to not tear itself completely to shreds through internal squabbling and so develops cultural norms regulating internal strife… hence, a “gentleman’s agreement” could occur between its genuine members. Figuring out a way to identify genuine members (by some method other than never backing down when a peasant tries to get an even deal) loops you back to signaling, completing the circle of game theoretic horror.
In the meantime, yay for progress, bringing humans slowly out of the bad old days, one semi-horrible half-cynical compromise at a time :-)
With the terminological question, I think its worth comparing a “feudal horror” understanding of “gentlemen” with someone like Jeanette Rankin, the first female ever to be elected to the US House of Representatives, who was a pacifist and the lone vote against declaring war on the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. The word might have no cognate because it is inherently gendered? I think it’s distinctly possible that there are few female gentlemen for basically the same reason that there are few female serial killers.
I’d appreciate links to essays or summat that give a clear-eyed assessment of the extent to which women were or weren’t willing or unwilling chattel at various points throughout history. You seem to be referring to background knowledge that I don’t have—the only “knowledge” of the history of the lot of women (and the culture of gentlemen) I have comes from clearly ideological narratives. Excepting the classical era, it seems like it’d be difficult for me to find analyses that avoided implicit moralizing and stuck to factual description. I’m especially interested in the lot of women during the High Middle Ages, which I tend to think of as a high-point of civilization. I would be surprised to learn that the lot of women then was as bad as it seems like it was in classical antiquity, or as it seems like it is today in much of the world including many Western subcultures.
(Interestingly I notice a small “arguments are like soldiers” effect going on on my part: when you say “yay for progress” you’re specifically talking about women’s rights, but my brain automatically reached for cached counter-examples to “progress” that have nothing to do with women’s rights, and wanted to ask why someone who’s studied complex systems and group epistemology is going along with the progress narrative, even though you never actually said nor really implied that you were going along with the progress narrative in general. I hope this is because I care about historiography and not because I’ve been mind-killed by ideology.)
I’m confused that you linked to the Wikipedia section on the influences of the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. From what it says Prussia’s subsequent reforms were primarily military in nature, and the occupation by France only lasted a few years. There doesn’t seem to have been substantial cultural reform—(should we expect Prussia to have adopted the leftist norms & ideology of France due to such an ephemeral military occupation?)—and politically the primary consequence seems to have been an increase in German nationalism, which doesn’t seem to have been such a good thing given the next century and a half of German history. Is there a primary source that goes into more detail about the relevant cultural consequences of Prussia’s defeat in the War of the Fourth Coalition?
ETA: Just realized how off-topic this is. Also close to mind-killing if not itself mind-killing. Perhaps better suited to PM or email.
ETA2: This Wikipedia section is pertinent, though lacking in citations.
My knowledge of women’s history in the high middle ages wouldn’t be very good. However, as an Irish archaeologist, I can tell you that the chattel slavery of women in early medieval Ireland was so abundant that a female slave or cumal was treated as a unit of currency, being equivalent to 6 to 8 séoit (one of which is equal to the value of a three-year-old heifer). If I were still a student I would be able to find you more academic sources, but I’ve lost access to most of the journals I used to use. From what I remember, this practice did fall into decline after the arrival of Normans, though this generally attributed to a decline in economic significance rather than a shift in social conscience. If you can access J-Stor, “Lest the Lowliest Be Forgotten: Locating the Impoverished in Early Medieval Ireland” by JW Boyle will provide you with good background on this. I know it’s not exactly what you were looking for, but it as an area which I am, to some extent, qualified to talk about.
I’ve found the Owning Your Shit blog to provide interesting alternative views for some of the standard feminist narratives, though unfortunately it doesn’t cite any sources and is somewhat ideological as well.
Relevant articles for this context might be Can we redefine the terms, please? and okay, getting my shit together. They don’t go as far as to discuss the Middle Ages, though.
I find this an excellent reason to pay it no attention. When I clicked on the links I found my prediction amply confirmed.
The USA elected a representative that wouldn’t even declare war after a comprehensive military strike by an enemy? Wow. I would not have expected that.
That’s at best redundant. They became the enemy due to that particular military strike.
Not especially redundant and the “at best” has highly dubious connotations ‘at best’. The “comprehensive military strike” is ambiguous without something that indicates whether it is “by us” or “by the other guys”.
Even apart from that I wouldn’t accept as remotely tenable the claim that Japan couldn’t be described as an enemy just because active firefights were not in progress, in much the same way that the participants in a cold war cannot be enemies just because the war is cold. Would you really claim that prior to pearl harbor Japan during that war hadn’t done anything that threatened American interests such that they couldn’t be considered an enemy? Was America really naive enough not to realize that the previous actions of Japan and the positioning of their forces didn’t make an enemy, even if it is one that America was until then able to leave to others to fight? Japan certainly didn’t think so, or they wouldn’t have bothered making a first strike while they were already busy.
How would you summarize the difference between the connotations of “gentlemanly” and “civilized”?
“Civilized” people aren’t allowed to stab you if you break your promises to them.
I think I’ve heard this phrase somewhere before. Would a ‘womanly understanding’ be the female counterpart of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’? “We had a womanly understanding not to dress too fancily to the event, and I was glad to see that she wore her hemp necklace instead of her most elegant pearl necklace.”
A ‘tacit understanding’ or ‘tacit agreement’ can be the gender neutral in many instances wherein ‘gentleman’s agreement’ is used, but indeed I don’t think the former can denote all that the latter connotes.
No. The the ‘nice connotations’ of that phrase are that the agreement can be expected to be kept not because of legal enforceability but due to honor and pride. That is, the ‘gentleman’ who betrays such an agreement will at best lose social standing (itself a life threatening possibility) and at worst will be challenged to a duel or have his entire family poisoned by assassins.
The ‘gentleman’ who is betrayed in such a deal feels honor bound to punish the defection even at cost to himself and will himself lose status and credibility if he does not. The “womanly counterpart” for social competition was based on different competitive strategies and was not of the kind that implicitly enforces honesty.
Perhaps in fiction and history does what you say of female competition hold true, but I think it might not anymore be so much the case in Western countries. Western countries in the past subjugated women a great deal more than at present, and thus subtle machinations were female’s only recourse if they wished to be active agents.
As Western Society weakens its dominion over women, and women are granted more social power, the less necessary manipulative dishonest conduct in female to female interactions becomes. I don’t think it’s inherent to the nature of women to engage in arrangements that they have no intention of upholding—only that doing so is advantageous when all involved parties of the arrangement have low social power anyway: little to lose, a lot to gain. Men in the same situations are just as dishonest.
With more social power, the less reason there is back-stab and connive dishonestly. I think it very likely for women to have developed a reputation-backed honor system that enforces ‘womanly understandings’. That is what I mean by the term: a relatively new social development that has only become possible through recent societal Enlightenment (in the 17th-18th century sense of the word). It could just as well be a very old development that has only recently been revitalized; I refer to ancient matriarchal societies like the Scythians and Sarmatians.
Trying to make this about ‘female subjugation’ does the subject a gross injustice—discarding all the relevant parts of the particular honesty enforcement cultural dynamic in order to make points on a largely irrelevant gender superiority battle. The actual relevant factor here is that what I said of male competition does not apply in modern societies. People within a specific caste being permitted to or outright socially obliged to challenge each other to duels or to otherwise act in an aggressively vindictive manner when they are betrayed in matters of honor has various positive and negative effects, one of them being that otherwise unenforceable promises have more credibility. Neither males nor females in general western culture are in such circumstances so our ‘gentleman’s agreements’ are limited to comparatively trivial matters.
This form of disengagement does not seem to apply in circumstances where there are no particular ‘facts of the matter’ that are being waited for and no ‘resolution of the matter’ that would provide clear conclusions either way. That being the case it struck me as out of place posturing.
You’re right. I was thinking of anecdotes, which aren’t facts, and shouldn’t be used as highly-valued evidence in most scenarios, like this one. Regardless, it was still posturing; thanks for calling me out on it.
My main point wasn’t about power imbalances, but the social dynamics influenced by those imbalances. Honor among gentlemen in 17th century England was only important insofar as a man’s reputation. Thus, outside of those who may be internally motivated by an honorable system of ethics (like Eddard Stark), reputation was the main factor responsible for enforcing gentlemanly honor. I posit that repuation matters more among those that have a lot to lose, but little to gain: exempli gratia an established criminal or the Earl of Essex.
If one has little reputation to begin with, and is of little means, then it is advantageous to connive one’s way into more power. As winning glory and honor for their family through battle or refined arts has in the past been largely outside the realm of accepted female activity, conniving was naturally a reasonable course of action. The same would be true of a London mudlark with grand ambitions—regardless of their sex.
In our day, honorable conduct in business is critical as often one’s reputation will be the deciding factor in whether another will enter into a business arrangement. This is much moreso the case among starting professionals, who might take it as a sign of distrust and be affronted if presented with NDA’s and non-compete forms before even hearing the proposal.
Positive reputation is largely built up by acting ‘honorably’. I think this is equally the case among women now as it is among men. Thus, agreements made and understandings reached that are founded upon that honor might be called gentleman’s agreements and womanly understandings.
To clarify, the above is why I think using a term such as ‘womanly understanding’ is sound, and why I think the term represents occurences that have basis in reality. I just want to know whether anyone’s heard of it before. Also, yes, I know you were initially referring to past cultural dynamics—sorry I didn’t make that clearer earlier.
Perhaps this says more about me than other people, but when you wrote ‘womanly understanding’, I expected it to immediately be broken in some sort of backstabbing way or catfight...
And a gentleman’s agreement would be broken and “resolved” through the gentlemanly art of fisticuffs — in other words, it really hinges on mutual threat of violence rather than on mutual recognition of benefit?
How about we don’t gender it at all? If what you want to say is that a particular agreement optimizes for mutual benefit and against various sorts of defection, just say so. We know some game theory around here; and we know that it is frequently applicable to the moral decisions of daily life. No need to drag (ha ha) gender into it at all.
No. The agreement is based on the mutual recognition of benefit. The expectation that each will honor the agreement if made relies on the threat of mutual violence. If there wasn’t an expectation of benefit they would not enter into an agreement. (The agreement obliges them to either do something or experience negative consequences so if the agreement offered no expectation of benefit to compensate it would be a bad decision.)
I did not, and didn’t realize that example was a cliche. I changed the example to be contrary to that expectation.
But what do you think it connotes? The meaning of “gentleman’s agreement” that I grew up with is a tacit agreement of mutual back-scratching, generally to the detriment of those outside the club of insiders. It is not publicly enforceable because it is not publicly acknowledgable, but those on the inside will know when someone defects and discreetly edge them out of the club. It is not to do with honour and pride, in the hurrah senses of those words, but the old boys network.
The Wikipedia article on the subject defines it pretty much along those lines, and gives some historical background I wasn’t aware of.
“Honourable” would seem to catch most of the connotations. Eg. “As an honourable man/woman/person I expect them to fulfill their side of the bargain without coercion.”
It has generally positive connotations but also inferences of old fashionedness and not always taking the best option (e.g. honour before reason). Are there any connotations it is particularly missing?