Honor and the Military Photo Scandal

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by Ryan Rhodes in honor and war, military ethics, philosophy of honor

Tags

duty, military ethics, obligation, particularism, scandal, virtue

Recently it has come to light that female members of the Marines and other branches of the military have been victims of a photo-sharing network, in which nude pictures of female service members were distributed in a wide-scale fashion without their consent. In some cases, this practice even involved targeting specific individuals for exploitation or harassment, encouraging others to track them down at their posts or residences, or suggesting that they should be sexually assaulted.

This is appalling behavior on any level, and treating anyone in such a way is shameful and immoral. It seems to me, however, that it is especially egregious that these actions have been perpetrated by service members against other service members. That is, the victims and instigators of this attack are supposed to be comrades in arms, bound together not only by common cause, but by brotherhood or sisterhood. More than anyone else, they have a duty to protect and uphold each other’s well-being, to fight for and with each other. The failure to uphold that standard makes this not only a violation of basic decency and regard for fellow humans, but a sin against martial virtue itself.

In a broader sense, one thing that Honor gets right about ethics is that we have attachments and duties toward certain people, beyond and above general considerations toward others. Whereas this sort of particularism is often seen as contrary to morality (which is supposed to depend upon impartiality), I would argue instead that upholding such personal bonds, obligations, and values is in fact a component of exercising virtue. We have special duties toward our families, friends, allies, and even certain causes, which form part of the conceptual and ontological grounding for traits such as loyalty, integrity, and even courage. I see this feature of honor-based ethics as one of its strengths, which is one reason why this scandal infecting the military is particularly disturbing.

Two Ways of Failing to be Honorable

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Ryan Rhodes in honor in the news, philosophy of honor

≈ 2 Comments

One aspect of honor that cuts across many issues is the question of what it takes to fail at being honorable. We can fail to be honorable by not living up to the standards of honorable conduct—this is probably the most natural and familiar way of thinking about it. But there is another way of courting dishonor, which I think is important for how we view negative instances of “honor”. By way of parallel, consider Aristotle’s definition of courage. We can fail to be courageous by being cowardly, or we can fail by being reckless. Those might be described as emotive or will-based failures. But significantly, one can also fail to be courageous in another way, which doesn’t depend on our willingness to act or our passion for doing so. One criterion of bravery (and other virtues) which Aristotle stresses is that it must be done for the sake of what is fine. Additionally, what really is fine is something about which people may be correct or mistaken, such that one might fail to be courageous not by failing to act nor by acting too unthinkingly, but by valuing the wrong things and acting in service of them.

A historical example of this sort of question concerned the 9/11 attackers. Bill Maher was subject to a lot of criticism when he famously rejected the idea that the terrorists were cowards—they stayed on the planes and died for their cause, he argued, so how is it accurate to depict them as cowardly? Even if one accepts that view, however, it is important to remember that ‘not-cowardly’ is not equivalent to ‘courageous’. The actions of the terrorists were vicious for many reasons, and they specifically failed to be courageous because they were done for the sake of wicked ends.

Similarly, it is important for us to remember that it is possible to be dishonorable not only through inaction or lack of care, but by having a perverted sense of what honor requires in the first place. It seems to me that in cases such as so-called “honor killings”, or the kind of entitlement and perceived disrespect that seems to have motivated Elliot Rodger’s recent rampage in California, this is the operative issue—a twisted sense of what is valuable, what is owed, what is worth living, dying, or killing for. For those of us who, like myself, conceive of honor in general as a positive framework which can provide grounds and motivation for genuine virtue, this is an important distinction.