04 Saturday May 2013
Posted in announcements, political science of honor
I just wanted to alert readers that Laurie Johnson has a new blog, Honor Today. On it, I noticed her new book, Locke and Rousseau: Two Enlightenment Responses to Honor, which I look forward to buying and reading as soon as possible!
It’s great to see more content on honor getting shared out there!
30 Tuesday Apr 2013
Posted in honor in the news
On April 15, the Pentagon decided against a medal for drone operators, which would have ranked higher than a Purple Heart or Bronze Star. (I waited to note this announcement, since the Boston Marathon bombings happened on the same day.)
It’s fair to say that the “Distinguished Warfare Medal” was universally condemned and mocked in the popular media. Here’s one cartoon about it by Matt Bors, for the Daily Kos.
What made the so-called “Nintendo Medal” so contemptible?
1. As Bors’ cartoon suggests, some find drone strikes to be morally evil, since they have been used outside of battlefields to target specific individuals, and often in violation of what appears to be state sovereignty, the rights of innocent bystanders, and at times our own Constitution.
2. Huffington Post writer (and military veteran) John Bruhns argues that it improperly awards personnel who aren’t physically at risk.
3. Shannon French has argued that drones are at least problematic because they dehumanize the enemy. In combination with the first objection, drones may be thought to (ironically enough) target an individual while at the same time dehumanizing him.
4. Michael Ignatieff argued a while ago that “virtual war” is too sterile, and distances us from the true costs of war.
5. Paul Kahn has argued for a sui generis rule of reciprocal self-defense, which applies only in war, on which “combatants are allowed to injure each other just as long as they stand in a relationship of mutual risk.” He also points out that riskless warfare tempts the more powerful party to adopt authoritarian and hegemonic policies.
These are all good reasons to criticize the Distinguished Warfare Medal. But it’s worth pointing out that at some future point, such a medal might well be an honorable one. After all, it’s just a matter of time until unmanned fighters and drones meet in combat. If two countries have drones of roughly equivalent sophistication, there is no reason I can see against awarding drone “aces” medals for their kills. I can even imagine ace pilots whimsically painting their drones with identifying markers (perhaps a red scarf, or the electronic equivalent?) in order to goad and win fame with their enemy, in keeping with the most ancient practices of honor. (Mutatis mutandis for the computer programmers, who will write the algorithms for fully automated drones.)
So I think the honorableness of drones and the exploits of their operators as we have them now needs to be separated from their honorableness in principle. That said, we needn’t commit ourselves to saying that the honor properly bestowed upon a computer programmer is of the same quality as that we should bestow upon an Audie Murphy.
19 Friday Apr 2013
Posted in anthropology of honor, honor in the news
Here’s a video of the entire Ruslan Tsarni interview. It’s fascinating from many angles, but the importance of group honor is on full display here. Not only does Tsarni feel that his nephews brought shame on his innocent family, but on Chechnyans as a whole. Note at the end, at about 8:00 minutes in, he expresses the wish to kneel before the harmed families and beg forgiveness.
21 Monday Jan 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
The new MLK memorial on the National Mall will be modified in the upcoming months. It currently has an inscription reading, “I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTICE PEACE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.” The passage has been criticized by some of King’s descendants and custodians of his memory as sounding vain. They point to the actual sermon this quote came from, in which King outlines how he’d like to be remembered at his funeral:
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say.
In talking about a “drum major,” King is referencing a 1952 sermon by a white, liberal Methodist preacher named J. Wallace Hamilton called “Drum Major Instincts.” King liked the tag for what he apparently thought was an innate drive for recognition and glory.
You can find King’s sermon (in text and audio form) here. It is quite good, and raises some interesting points for honor research.
12 Wednesday Dec 2012
Next month it will be a year ago that the cruise ship Costa Concordia sank (resulting in the death of 30 passengers), and that Captain Francesco Schettino was arrested for abandoning his passengers. “It’s a matter of honor that the master is the last to leave. Nothing less will do in this profession,” said Jorgen Loren, chairman of the Swedish Maritime Officer’s Association, in a reaction. I am certainly not the first to see a similarity between the unhappy captain and the story of Jim and his lost honor in Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1900). Continue reading »
11 Tuesday Dec 2012
As reported in a recent New York Post article and at length in a new book A Higher Call by Adam Markos and Larry Alexander:
On Dec 20, 1943, with most of his crew killed or incapacitated, American bomber pilot Charlie Brown was desperately trying to fly his battered B17 back to England. Rather than parachuting to safety, he and the rest of his able-bodied crew decided to try to save their injured comrades rather than parachuting to safety.
But to his horror, Brown looks to side and sees a German fighter plane flying just off his right wing. The German then repositions to the left of the bomber and gesticulates wildly to Brown, who could make no sense of what the German pilot was saying. After a few moments, the German salutes Brown, and peels away without firing a shot.
The German pilot’s side of this story wasn’t discovered until the early 1990s, when Brown tracked him down. The German pilot, Franz Stigler, related how he came upon the B17:
14 Wednesday Nov 2012
Posted in announcements
On behalf of honorethics.org, I am pleased to welcome Peter Olsthoorn as a contributor.
Peter Olsthoorn teaches ethics at the Netherlands Defense Academy. He has written several articles on honor in political theory and military ethics, as well as the monograph Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2010). His book on honor in moral philosophy and political theory will appear with Brill in 2013.
A description of his Military Ethics and Virtues:
Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, and military organizations, yet there is little that regulates the behavior of soldiers towards civilian populations. As a result, troops trained for combat in today’s missions sometimes experience difficulty in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations after major combat is over. It can be argued that today’s missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional ones, which are mainly about enhancing military effectiveness, but a convincing case can be made that a lot can already be won by interpreting these traditional virtues in different ways.
This volume offers an integrated approach to the main traditional virtues, exploring their possible relevance and proposing new ways of interpretation that are more in line with the military tasks of the 21st century. The book will be of much interest to students of military ethics, philosophy, and war and conflict in general.
Some of Peter’s articles of special interest to honorethics.org readers would be his:
“Honour, face and reputation in political theory,” European Journal of Political Theory
“Honor and the Military,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy
“Honor as a Motive for Making Sacrifices,” Journal of Military Ethics
Here is a short outline of his forthcoming book, Honor in Moral and Political Philosophy (Brill, 2013):
Until not too long ago it was not uncommon for moral and political philosophers to hold the view that people cannot be expected to do what is right without at least some reward in the form of reputational gain. Authors from Cicero to John Stuart Mill did not dispute that we can be brought to accept the principles of justice on an abstract level, but thought that in concrete instances our strong passions, our partiality to ourselves, and our inability to be a good judge of our conduct, prevent us from both seeing and acting on what is just and virtuous. In their view, our sense of honor and concern for our reputation can help us in finding out what is the proper thing to do and, just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to actually do what is right. Especially in this latter, motivational, aspect conscience appeared somewhat impotent to them.
Today, most of us tend to take a stricter view, and think that people are to be just from a love for justice, not from a fear of losing face. Considerations of honor and reputation are generally considered to be on the wrong side of the line. That diminished position of honor is at least partly a result of the fact that, as a motive, honor is somewhat inconsistent with the ideals of autonomy and authenticity, valued by most people in our day. Modern moral and political philosophy mirrors (and, to some extent, feeds) these ideals, and many authors are not too upset that the honor ethic gave way to more demanding forms of ethics that give central place to that notion of autonomy.
The aim of this book is to make the case that the old arguments for a role for honor are still compelling, and that also today, without deep roots in our present-day vocabulary, honor can yet be of use because it is less demanding, and that the articulated opinions of others remain important for making us see, and then actually do, what is right. The underlying assumption is that honor, although it has lost much of its appeal, is still a common motivator. If there is some truth in this, it is all the more regrettable that most modern theorists have turned a blind eye on the topic.
To make that case the first part of the book describes the early, aristocratic argument for honor made by, among others, Cicero and Sallust, and the conversion of honor into a more modern, democratic form by later thinkers, from John Locke and Bernard Mandeville to Michael Walzer. Even in that more democratic form honor still comes with some serious drawbacks, mainly lying in it being something external (which potentially reduces morality to not being caught), and in its exclusiveness (limiting the number of people that matter to someone). To address the first shortcoming, honor should be internalized, at least to some extent; otherwise honor is, indeed, reduced to not being found out. As to that second weakness: to avoid that too much priority is given to the interests of those who are near and dear to us, it seems that we should define our honor group as broad as possible. Finding out if these two goals can be accomplished is the aim of the second part of the book, which focuses on three virtues related to honor: loyalty, integrity, and respect.
Welcome aboard, Peter! We look forward to your contributions.
11 Sunday Nov 2012
I missed this insightful talk by David Brooks this summer at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The talk is entitled “The Character Code.” Here’s the abstract:
We’re in a world full of good people, but who don’t have a clear vocabulary for character. We don’t have a moral system. Here, David Brooks puts forth Western civilization’s ancient recipe for being a better person—and how we forgot it.
Essentially, Brooks argues that the Western character code is a hybrid of the Greek honor model (excellence, competitiveness, pride) and the Judeo-Christian model (obedience, self-abnegation, humility).
I think he ignores the cultural ubiquity of the honor code. He suggests for instance that chivalry was an attempt to combine classical “Greek” honor values with Christian ones, when in fact a devotion to the honor code was quite indigenous among the Pagan Europeans the medieval Christians were trying to covert, as writers from Tacitus to William Ian Miller and George Fenwick Jones point out. Nonetheless, this is a very interesting talk. You can find the transcript here.
22 Monday Oct 2012
In my previous post, I mentioned the account of “cultures of honor” forwarded by Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen: on it, honor is an adaptive social construct constituted by tendencies to respond violently to threats or insults, thereby communicating to would-be attackers that the honorable person is dangerous prey and not to be trifled with. Nisbett and Cohen argue that these tendencies are rational in lawless circumstances where goods are easily stolen. For instance, cattle are easily rustled while crops are not, and this fact is used to explain why pastoralists are more often governed by honor norms than are agriculturalists. The pastoralist-honor connection is in turn used to explain the elevated honor-mindedness and violence one finds in the U.S. South, since that region was colonized by pastoralists from the British periphery.
I’d like to note in this post one difficulty with the Nisbett-Cohen account as I understand it. (I discuss my concerns more fully in an unpublished manuscript called “Fundamental Moral Disagreement, Antirealism, and Honor.”) The problem is simply this: if honor is a deterrence-based social construct, and this is used to explain why pastoralist societies tend to be cultures of honor, then it’s difficult to see why pastoralists would encourage raiding and praise it as honorable. But they tend to do just this.
Here are some interesting quotes about the connection between pastoralists and raiding:
23 Sunday Sep 2012
Some honorethics.org contributors and readers will be familiar with the work by Richard Nisbett, Dov Cohen, and their collaborators on “cultures of honor,” as set forth in their important 1996 Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South.
Culture of Honor
In this book and the many subsequent articles based upon it, honor is an adaptive social construct constituted by tendencies to respond violently to threats or insults, thereby communicating to would-be attackers that the honorable person is dangerous prey and not to be trifled with. Nisbett and Cohen argue that these tendencies are rational in lawless circumstances where goods are easily stolen. For instance, cattle are easily rustled while crops are not, and this fact is used to explain why pastoralists are more often governed by honor norms than are agriculturalists. The pastoralist-honor connection is in turn used to explain the elevated honor-mindedness and violence one finds in the U.S. South, since that region was colonized by pastoralists from the British periphery.
Empirically-informed philosophers have seized upon the Nisbett-Cohen account of cultures of honor, usually taking it to suggest some sort of antirealist conclusion. For instance, John Doris, Stephen Stich, and Alexandra Plakias have argued that cultures of honor provide us with evidence of fundamental moral disagreement between liberal and honor cultures, i.e., disagreement that would persist even in ideal conditions, where all the non-moral facts were known, where each side was rational, and so forth.
My colleague (and honorethics.org contributor) Mark Collier has a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Scottish Philosophy criticizing this inference (now posted under honor scholarship). Using Hume’s notion of an “indulgent” stance towards cultural differences, Collier argues that even the findings of the culture of honor literature can be accommodated by convergentists, or people who deny the intractability of moral disagreement. For Collier, a core set of human values are plausibly universal, and the diversity we see can be explained by (and this is not necessarily an exhaustive list):
On the last point, Collier considers some studies showing that Chinese are more willing than Americans to say that a magistrate may morally frame an innocent person for a murder he didn’t commit in order to prevent a mob from murdering more innocent people. Does this serve as evidence of fundamental moral disagreement? Collier doesn’t think so:
But this experimental result need not be interpreted in terms of a basic difference in attitude. The participants in the studies presumably share the same values: the welfare of individuals and society matter to everyone. The groups merely disagree about how to prioritize these values when they come into conflict; the “mob and the magistrate” vignette, after all, is a classic moral dilemma. This study does not support the claim, then, that core values are fixed by enculturation. This type of disagreement between East Asians and Westerners merely indicates, rather, that there is a range of adequate natural moralities . . ..
Here’s Collier’s abstract.
In “A Dialogue”, Hume offers an important reply to the moral skeptic. Skeptics traditionally point to instances of moral diversity in support of the claim that our basic values are fixed by enculturation. Hume argues that the skeptic exaggerates the amount of variation in moral codes, however, and fails to adopt an indulgent stance toward those whose attitudes differ from ours. He proposes a more charitable interpretation of moral disagreement, moreover, which traces it back to fundamental principles of human nature. Contemporary philosophers attempt to locate examples of moral variability that cannot be accommodated in this way. But they are no more successful than their predecessors. Moral skeptics have yet to find a single case of moral diversity that is resistant to the Humean strategy.
I think Collier’s paper really advances the debate about the metaethical significance of honor-based norms. He welcomes comments; you can find the paper here.
