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Honor Ethics

Category Archives: honor and political philosophy

Honor in the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

29 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by dan demetriou in announcements, history of honor, honor and international relations, honor and international studies, honor and political philosophy, honor and war, honor code, military ethics, philosophy of honor, political science of honor, social psychology of honor

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Dan Demetriou, Laurie Johnson

I’m happy to report—somewhat belatedly—that Honor in the Modern World is now for sale!

Edited by Laurie Johnson and me, the book is probably the most interdisciplinary study of honor yet. We are very grateful to our contributors—many of whom contribute to this blog—for their excellent and highly original essays.

After a century-long hiatus, honor is back. Academics, pundits, and everyday citizens alike are rediscovering the importance of this ancient and powerful human motive. This volume brings together some of the foremost researchers of honor to debate honor’s meaning and its compatibility with liberalism, democracy, and modernity. Contributors—representing philosophy, sociology, political science, history, psychology, leadership studies, and military science—examine honor past to present, from masculine and feminine perspectives, and in North American, European, and African contexts. Topics include the role of honor in the modern military, the effects of honor on our notions of the dignity and “purity” of women, honor as a quality of good statesmen and citizens, honor’s role in international relations and community norms, and how honor’s egalitarian and elitist aspects intersect with democratic and liberal regimes.

The table of contents can be see on Amazon, along with lots of sample viewing. Consider ordering a copy for your school’s library, as the book includes essays useful for philosophers, political scientists, historians, international relations scholars, psychologists, and military academicians.

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Craig Bruce Smith: “Rightly to Be Great: Ideas of Honor and Virtue among the American Founders”

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by dan demetriou in history of honor, honor and political philosophy

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Craig Bruce Smith, Rightly to Be Great: Ideas of Honor and Virtue among the American Founders

I just discovered this great lecture by honorethics.org contributor Craig Bruce Smith (he was too humble to point it out to us!), and he agreed to let me post it on this blog.

 

One of Craig’s book projects is Rightly to Be Great: Honor, Virtue, Ethics and the American Revolution. Here’s a short description of it.  
 
“Rightly to Be Great” tells the history of the Revolution through an ethical lens. It shows that a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating a continuing moral ideology. This manuscript centers on several generations of Americans who came of age before the Revolution and climbed to prominence during it. These founders are remembered for their contributions to American independence and the creation of a nation, but while they were forming this new republic, they reflected on the ethics of their deeds. They wanted the country to succeed, but not at the cost of honor or virtue. These two concepts were at the forefront of the American founders’ minds as they traveled the precarious road to independence. “Rightly to Be Great” traces the development of honor and virtue in the lives of people such as Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and other individuals from the elite, middling and lower classes. It also incorporates groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor, such as women and African Americans. Using a narrative writing style and a deep core investigation into members of these Revolutionary generations, this project traces extensive changes over time and analyzes how thought influenced action.

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Joerg Friedrichs on honor, face, and dignity in international relations

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by dan demetriou in honor and international relations, honor and international studies, honor and political philosophy, political science of honor

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dignity culture, face culture, honor culture, Joerg Friedrichs

Followers of this blog might be interested in a forthcoming article by Professor of International Relations (Oxford) Joerg Friedrichs, “An Intercultural Theory of International Relations: How self-worth underlies politics among nations,” forthcoming in International Theory (a pre-publication version is available here, the FirstView version is here for those who can get past the paywall).

Here’s the abstract:

“This article introduces an intercultural theory of international relations based on three distinctive ways of establishing self-worth: honor, face, and dignity. In each culture of self-worth, concerns with status and humiliation intervene differently in producing political outcomes. The theory explains important variation in the way states and nations relate to members of their own culture of self-worth, as well as members of other such cultures.”

I’d like to summarize Friedrichs’ scholarly, insightful, and thought-provoking essay here, but I will also embellish a bit with questions and commentary. Discussion in the comments section below is welcome as always. (By the way, Joerg may be posting on the blog soon, so keep an eye out for that.)

The dignity-honor-face model

Friedrichs begins his analysis with the increasingly plausible premise that “self-worth is the ultimate human motivator.” Continue reading →

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Peter Singer on honoring racist historical figures

13 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by dan demetriou in honor and political philosophy, honor in contempory media, honor in the news

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Ajume Wingo, Honoring racists, Peter Singer, Thomas Jefferson statue

The ethics of honoring seems to be increasingly relevant in mainstream discussion, no more so than the controversies over the monuments, statues, and institutions honoring great—but racist—historical figures.

In a recent essay, Peter Singer takes up the issue. Especially noteworthy is that he mentions honorethics.org contributor Ajume Wingo‘s Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States, which discusses (inter alia) the importance of image-making and civic mythology to liberal democracies.

Should We Honor Racists  by Peter Singer   Project Syndicate

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23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by dan demetriou in honor and political philosophy, philosophy of honor, political science of honor

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The most popular professional philosophy blog, Daily Nous, has just started a discussion on the ethics of honoring historical figures in light of recent campus protests.

The Ethics of Honoring   Daily Nous

The recent wave of student protests in the United States have focused on a range of issues related to the status and treatment of racial minorities and other vulnerable parties on campus. One issue that has come up on several occasions are the ways in which universities have decided to honor various historical figures—for example, by naming buildings after them, or having statues of them.

Last week, students at Princeton University were protesting the university’s prominent recognition of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was president of Princeton prior to becoming president of the United States, and Princeton has a college and a school named after him. Though he was a progressive on many matters, as Inside Higher Ed reported, “historians have also noted that he was an unapologetic racist who took many actions as president of the United States that held back even minimal rights for black people.” Recent protests at Georgetown focused on the fact that one of its buildings was named for a former university president who sold off some of his slaves to a plantation to pay the university’s debt. And now, IHE reports that at the College of William & Mary and the University of Missouri, “critics have been placing yellow sticky notes on Jefferson statues, labeling him—among other things —‘rapist’ and ‘racist.’”

These developments may have some people wondering what the appropriate stance is towards honoring historical figures who have held what are today understood to be highly objectionable views, or acted in highly objectionable ways. To shrug off the concerns and say “no one’s perfect,” seems insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which such honors might contribute to an unwelcoming environment for some students. Yet to require historical figures to be morally unobjectionable by today’s standards in order to be honored seems unduly strict and inflexible. We might recall that even moral heroes are not morally perfect (see, for example, Lawrence Blum’s “Moral Exemplars” essay).

I am not aware of work on the ethics of honoring historical figures. Perhaps this is an area in which philosophical expertise can help clarify an issue of current pressing concern. Thoughts welcome.

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Defense with Dignity—is violent resistance more dignified and if so, what follows for gun rights?

30 Thursday Apr 2015

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

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dignity and ethics, dignity and honor, gun control, gun rights, self-defense

In 2013, the Department of Public Safety at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS) caused a stir when it suggested female students vomit or urinate on themselves if attacked.

UCCS rape advice

Unfortunately for UCCS, on-campus conceal-and-carry bills were being debated in Colorado at the time, so its post catalyzed a great deal of interest, including that of conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, who criticized these tactics as ineffective, infantilizing, and condescending.

Michelle Malkin   » The Anti Choice Left s Disarming of the American Woman

Given that feminist and left-leaning sources were also unenthusiastic about these unsavory pointers, UCCS promptly cut its losses removed the page.

In its defense, UCCS’s recommendations were not idiosyncratic. For instance, See Sally Kick Ass: A Woman’s Guide to Personal Safety suggests that attacked women, among other things, rub their vomit or feces all over their bodies, as does Fight Back!: Safety and Self-Defense Tips, which adds “barking like a dog.”

See Sally Kick Ass  A Woman s Guide to Personal Safety   Fred Vogt   Google Books Fight Back  Safety   Self Defense Tips   Gina Marie Rivera   Google Books

And this got me thinking: What if these books were titled Bark Like a Dog! or worse, See Sally Rub Vomit on Herself? What would such titles communicate? Why did the authors emphasize violent resistance in their titles, but not so much in their actual advice?

This post isn’t about campus rape. It is, rather, a criticism of an assumption we tend to make in our discussions of resistance generally, namely, that advocates of violent resistance must show that it’s more effective than non-violent forms of resistance. For reasons of dignity, I don’t think that’s true.

Application: gun control

I will use gun control to approach this widespread assumption, although we might have used state-on-state aggression just as easily. There are four main reasons given to permit citizens to have guns: Continue reading →

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Assuming Virtue in a Society that Assumes Vice: the case of honor system markets

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by dan demetriou in economics of honor, honor and political philosophy, honor system, philosophy of honor

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Every autumn, a neighbor up the street sets out a couple hundred pumpkins, along with a metal cash box and placard reading, “Honor System: $5 for small pumpkins, $6 for large ones.” Inspired to learn more about whether selling things on the “honor system” really works, I came across an interesting little book called Honor System Marketing: Discovering Honesty, Trust, and Profit Amongst the Goodness of People, by Jeff McPherson. McPherson is an agriculture consultant and farmer who has been “honor system marketing”—that is, selling produce at unsupervised stands on the “honor system”—for decades. After travelling and meeting other honor marketers from across the US, he wrote this book about the advantages, pitfalls, and philosophy of honor marketing.

honor system marketing

Apparently, honor system marketing (HSM) can have some financial benefits. Eliminating cashiers means eliminating a significant cost of running a market. And since markets operating on the honor system don’t need to be staffed, they can be left open around the clock, even on holidays. But there are other non-remunerative advantages, too, McPherson tells us.

One is that HSM forces us to be more trusting of others. According to McPherson, one of the biggest challenges of being an honor system marketer is resting easy at night, knowing that your market is exposed to theft. McPherson is certainly a practical man: he has no patience with thieves, and he takes proactive measures if he detects (or is tipped off about) shoplifting. He also urges would-be honor system marketers to keep in mind that theft occurs at staffed markets also, and that the savings on employee salary often is greater than the losses from any increased theft. But setting all that aside, McPherson estimates that only about 2% of his customers have ever stolen anything. Since in most HSM scenarios theft is surprisingly low, HSM tends to make us more trusting of our neighbors and complete strangers alike.

Much the same occurs on the other side of the transaction. Surprised customers tell McPherson that they enjoy feeling trusted enough to shop without supervision. However, McPherson does lose a certain percentage of customers to “paranoia”:

Even though they are totally honest, they are still a bit insecure about shopping where there is no attendant. They will avoid contact with situations that associate them with dishonesty.

And here we arrive at an important lesson about honor system marketing: that it assumes virtue in a society that assumes vice. Apparently, our society assumes vice to such a degree that some of us feel uncomfortable being trusted even when we are trustworthy. Why would that happen? Continue reading →

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Welcome Steven Skultety

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by dan demetriou in announcements, honor and political philosophy, honor and sport

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It’s my pleasure to welcome Steven Skultety as an honorethics.org contributor.

Steven Skultety is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mississippi, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. He specializes in ancient philosophy, and his interest in honor primarily stems from his desire to understand the role that honor plays in the works of Plato and Aristotle.  However, he is also interested in how honor continues to inform contemporary ethical and political thought.

Steven’s ongoing work in politics, competition, and sport add a great deal to the emerging picture on honor. Welcome, Steven!

 

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Notice of Peter Olsthoorn’s Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy

15 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by dan demetriou in announcements, history of honor, honor and political philosophy, honor in literature, philosophy of honor, political science of honor

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I’m very pleased to announce that honorethics.org contributor Peter Olsthoorn’s (Netherlands Defense Academy) Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy (SUNY) will be coming out soon.Olsthoorn, Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy

You can pre-order it here. You can peruse the Google Books preview here. Here’s the (U.S.) Amazon link. You can find more of Peter’s work here.

I read and commented on a draft of this book a couple years ago before I visited Peter in Rotterdam and Breda, and I can assure readers it’s a major contribution to the field that anyone interested in honor needs to add to his or her library. Peter’s careful and scholarly discussion of the intellectual history of honor is especially valuable for us, since books on honor (if they discuss history at all) tend either to focus on one epoch (say, the antebellum South), region (say, the Mediterranean), or author (say, Hobbes). Sometimes honor books provide us with useful snapshots of honor-psychology through the ages by discussing samurai for one chapter, medieval chivalry in another, etc. As an analytic philosopher who isn’t very strong on history, I have relied upon and cited all such books a great deal in my own work. But more rarely attempted has been a sustained story of how leading intellectuals have analysed honor in the West. The scholarly aspects of Peter’s book will be the go-to resource on that question for some time.

Peter’s book is also a polemic for reviving honor as a moral and political motivator. I have lots of good things to say about his argument there, too, but that aspect of the book is better handled in this summary Peter provided me:

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 political and moral 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.

Congratulations on the book, Peter!

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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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