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Honor Ethics

~ Devoted to the study of honor as an ethical value

Honor Ethics

Monthly Archives: July 2012

David Brooks connects the boy crisis to the decline of honor

24 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by dan demetriou in honor in the news

≈ 2 Comments

I just discovered a recent op-ed by David Brooks entitled “Honor Code.” He imagines Henry V in today’s schools, which Brooks portrays as coddling and feminizing. Overall, Brooks claims that today’s educational system, from kindergarten to college, promotes more feminine ways of learning, and either forces out vigorous boys like Hal, or drugs them into being little Hamlets. Here’s a key paragraph:

Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.

This piece reminds me of Harvey Mansfield’s  Manliness, which argues “that manliness seeks and welcomes drama, prefers times of war, conflict, and risk, and brings change or restores order at crucial moments. Manly men in their assertiveness raise issues, bring them to the fore, and make them public and political—as for example, the manliness of the women’s movement.” At various points, it’s fairly clear that Mansfield too sees honor as the masculine ethic—even though he’s clear that women (such as Thatcher) can embrace and master it as well. In 2009, I presented a paper entitled, “Honor: The Ethic for Real Men?,” which I plan on including in my book. So lots of people are converging on these ideas.

Any opinions out there about Brooks’ piece? Is the default masculine “code” the “honor” code? Is his description of it fair? Is a decline of honor-mindedness (emphasizing cooperation and therapeutic values instead of competition and agonistic values) denaturing males?

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The Penn State scandal: the difficulty of dishonoring one of your own

23 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by dan demetriou in honor in the news, philosophy of honor

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Honor (in the sense of mere prestige/status/reputation) suffuses the Penn State scandal.

  • It was largely for the honor of Penn State, the football program, and his tenure there that Joe Paterno turned a blind eye to the accusations against Sandusky.
  • Honor probably played at least some role in why administrators sat on their hands as well, since Paterno’s status (not his actual contractually-stated powers) made it a non-trivial matter to reprimand him or diminish the program.
  • The most painful repercussions for Penn State are symbolic assaults on the prestige of the school, the football program, and Paterno. For instance, firing Paterno (rather than letting him retire), removing his statue, erasing over a decade of wins—all these are straightforward cases of various honor groups shaming one of their members. (Imagine how feeble the consequences for Penn State would have been if they were restricted merely to the fines!)

So in this post I want to touch on something being ignored in popular discussions of this scandal. Consider this bit of commentary:

“I think every major college and university needs to do a gut check” on the balance between athletics and academics, Oregon State president Ed Ray said.

This quote represents a popular take on the scandal, that the scandal exemplifies the dangers of allowing a football program to run its institution. But I would like to suggest that the football vs. academics angle is fundamentally irrelevant here.

Universities like Penn State operate in an honor culture, on both their athletic and academic sides. After all, professors are constantly struggling to raise or maintain their professional prestige as individuals. Academic departments compete against like departments at peer institutions, and even other departments on their own campus. University administrators are hired and fired on how well they maintain or increase these rankings, and are constantly rolling out new initiatives aimed at being among the top such-and-such number of universities by such-and-such date.

That is why anyone who has been in academics long enough has heard of similar things to the Penn State scandal, but on a smaller scale. Usually these involve superstar professors getting away with bad behavior (such as sexual harassment, inadequate teaching, etc.), not because of tenure but because of the status they bring their departments.

So as I see it, the problem at Penn State wasn’t one of athletics vs. academics. The problem is that it is very hard for a community necessarily built around a status competition to dishonor a member who brings it lots of glory. As a group, academics are being a little self-righteous in denouncing big college football when the same patterns are manifest enough in prominent academic programs as well.

I don’t know what can be done structurally to counteract this effect of shielding superstars—it really is an empirical question, probably best investigated by behavioral economists savvy to honor. But I don’t see efforts to eradicate the competition for prestige we see in college athletics (and academics) as being a promising way to go.

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Honor at the Tour de France

17 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by dan demetriou in honor code, honor in contempory media, philosophy of honor, stories of honor

≈ 1 Comment

You may have heard about the case of sabotage at the Tour de France this weekend, when the race was disrupted by someone who hurled hundreds of carpet tacks across the road. How the cyclists responded to the sabotage is instructive for the student of honor.

Essentially, what happened was this: the tacks caused havoc as the lead riders had to stop to switch out wheels or whole bikes. The most notable victim was defending champion Cadel Evans, who lost about two minutes. The lead British cyclist and one of Evans’ main rivals this year, Bradley Wiggins (on Team Sky), ordered his team to slow for Evans. He even managed, with considerable success, to direct the lead group (or peloton) of cyclists, composed of various teams, to wait for Evans as well. Evans eventually did catch up, and the standings after that stage were left mostly unchanged.

Here’s a quote from the Guardian on the event. It demonstrates that honor was very much at the forefront of Wiggins’ reasoning:

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Stolen Valor II: The Decision

08 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by dan demetriou in honor and the law, political science of honor

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In case you missed it, the Supreme Court struck down the so-called “Stolen Valor” act in UNITED STATES v. ALVAREZ. We discussed this case briefly earlier on this blog.

The text of the ruling can be found here. Obviously the issues concern the threat to free speech, the value of lying in relation to what it is that makes free speech valuable in the first place, and the nature of the harm of this particular type of lie. In this post, I’d like to briefly summarize the rationale for the ruling and the dissent. Then I’d like to raise for discussion the way the “harm” of stolen valor is treated by the Court.

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Welcome Ryan Rhodes

07 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by dan demetriou in announcements

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On behalf of honorethics.org, I am pleased to welcome Ryan Rhodes as a contributor.

Ryan just completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, where he wrote a dissertation on honor entitled Heroes Great and Small. Ryan was a speaker at 36th Annual Midwest Philosophy Colloquium’s “Honor and Ethics Mini-Conference,” where he presented a very well received paper entitled “Honor and the Moral Value of Reputation.” Apart from honor, Ryan writes about the use of fiction in philosophical illumination and situationist challenges to virtue ethics.

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Recent events:

Kansas State mini-conference: "Perspectives on Modern Honor"

Book series: Honor and Obligation in Liberal Society

Honor and Ethics Mini-Conference

Contributors

  • Andrea Mansker
  • Craig Bruce Smith
  • Dan Demetriou (administrator)
  • Graham Oddie
  • Jim Peterman
  • Joe Thomas
  • Lad Sessions
  • Laurie M. Johnson
  • Mark Collier
  • Mark Griffith
  • Paul Robinson
  • Peter Olsthoorn
  • Robert Oprisko
  • Ryan Rhodes
  • Shannon French
  • Sharon Krause
  • Steven Skultety
  • Tamler Sommers
  • Tony Cunningham
  • Valerie Soon

Recent posts

  • Two new books on honor by contributors Tamler Sommers and Craig Bruce Smith
  • Jordan Peterson on the play/honor (agonism) ethic
  • Honor and the Military Photo Scandal
  • HonorShame.com write-up of Honor in the Modern World
  • “Ethics for Adversaries” blog

Contributors’ Books

Johnson and Demetriou's Honor in the Modern World

Peter Olsthoorn's Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy

Joe Thomas' Leadership, Ethics and Law of War Discussion Guide for Marines

Anthony Cunningham's Modern Honor

Laurie Johnson's Locke and Rousseau: Two Enlightenment Responses to Honor

Peter Olsthoorn's Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century

Tamler Sommers' A Very Bad Wizard

Lad Sessions' Honor For Us

Andrea Mansker's Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France

Laurie Johnson's Thomas Hobbes: Turning Point for Honor

Shannon French's The Code of the Warrior

Sharon Krause's Liberalism With Honor

Robert Oprisko's Honor: A Phenomenology

Graham Oddie's Value, Reality, Desire

Paul Robinson's Military Honour and the Conduct of War

Jim Peterman's Philosophy as Therapy

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