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Honor Ethics

~ Devoted to the study of honor as an ethical value

Honor Ethics

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Jordan Peterson on the play/honor (agonism) ethic

19 Friday May 2017

Posted by dan demetriou in evolution of honor, Uncategorized

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Tags

Jordan Peterson, male intersexual competition, male-male competition, Play

Jordan Peterson on the honor-as-based-in-play hypothesis: he talks about self-handicapping as the basis of fair play and honor. The honorable person makes you want to play with him—he’s the “meta player.”

In other talks, Peterson is careful to distinguish between hierarchies based on power and those based on prestige, which get too often conflated as “dominance hierarchies” in biology. To some extent he does this in his answer here as well (just before the point I start the video he references proto-authority in chimps).

 

 

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“The Honor of Human Rights”

30 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by dan demetriou in Uncategorized

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Recently published in Human Rights Review: “The Honor of Human Rights: Environmental Rights and the Duty of Intergenerational Promise,” by Richard Hiskes (Political Science, Grand Valley State).

 

The Honor of Human Rights  Environmental Rights and the Duty of Intergenerational Promise   SpringerLink.png

 

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Fighting for nothing

31 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by PaulR in Uncategorized

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IRRUSSIANALITY

Since February, some of the most intense and continuous fighting in Ukraine has been around the village of Shirokino, just east of Mariupol. Now, the Chief of the Ukrainian General Staff, General Viktor Muzhenko, has declared that the village has ‘no military value whatsoever’.

Muzhenko’s statement drew howls of protests from Ukrainian soldiers and political activists, angry at the suggestion that blood had been shed for no purpose, but he is probably right. And Shirokino is hardly an isolated example. It is a sad fact that war often descends into bloody struggles for territory which has no tactical or strategic value, only symbolic importance. War is not a very rational endeavour, if one measures rationality in terms of material costs and benefits. Rather, as I examined in my book Military Honour and the Conduct of War, it is about honour as much as anything else. Why else keep attacking…

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Honor & Loss

12 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by tonycuinneagain in honor and war, honor in literature, stories of honor, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the tale of Australian prisoners of war building the Burma railway under such brutal conditions in WWII. At one point in the story, one of the most resilient and charismatic prisoners suffers a horrendous beating from the Japanese guards, and his fellow prisoners are forced to stand at attention and witness it the relentless cruelty. That night, the badly injured Darky Gardiner slips into the primitive camp latrine and drowns. After the war, some of his comrades are out for a night of drinking in Hobart, Tasmania, and they come upon Nikitaris’ fish shop. They remember how Darky used to carry on about how much he loved to take his girlfriend to Nikitaris’ for a night out, and how someday he wished to return and free the fish from the tank in the window. Remembering their friend, they break the window, scoop out the fish into slop buckets, and free them in the harbor. The next evening, remorseful for the damages they caused, they visit the fish shop to pay for the repairs, and then something unexpected happens. When they go to explain their actions to Mr. Nikitaris, the old man senses something and brings them up short.

“He was your cobber?”

Not only does Mr. Nikitaris refuse their money, but he feeds them and gives them wine, and soon enough, they realize that the old man lost a son in the war in New Guinea in 1943. And then they are a just a group of men sharing their losses without speaking directly about them, sharing their company long into the night.

“It was hard to explain how good that fried fish and chips and cheap red wine felt inside them. It tasted right. The old Greek made his own coffee for them—little cups, thick, black, and sweet—and he gave them walnut pastries his daughter had made. Everything was strange and welcoming at the same time. The simple chairs felt easy, and the place, too, felt right, and the people felt good, and, for as long as that night lasted, thought Jimmy Bigelow, there was nowhere else in the world he wished to be.”

The scene is an exquisite example of a profound sense of honor—brothers-in-arms honoring the memory of a fallen comrade, an old man honoring their loss, a group of wounded men honoring his loss in kind, and all of them finding some solace together in the deep meaning of what they have suffered and lost.

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Honorable Gestures

10 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by tonycuinneagain in honor and war, stories of honor, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Civil War, honor, John Gordon, Joshua Chamberlain, surrender at Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant

This month marks the 150 anniversary of the end of the American Civil War. After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9th, 1865, Ulysses S. Grant charged Joshua Chamberlain, the former Bowdoin College professor and hero of Gettysburg, with the duty of conducting the formal arrangements of the surrender ceremony. Chamberlain thought long and hard about the formalities. He knew that three brigades would line the sides of a long road and that the Army of Northern Virginia would pass until they came to an open field to stack their arms and relinquish their battle flags. Chamberlain guessed that more than 25,000 men would pass and that the ceremony would take the better part of the entire day. Once it was over, the rebels would have their parole papers guaranteeing them safe passage home in exchange for their pledge to bind themselves in peace to the Union. Chamberlain badly wanted to do justice to the solemn occasion.

At six o’clock on the morning of April 12th, 1865, the line of gray started in silence past the Federal troops with General John Gordon leading the march astride a white horse. He had taken a disfiguring wound below the left eye at Sharpsburg and he must have cut a forlorn figure at the head of the procession. His men marched behind him, defiant even in their famished weariness and defeat. Keeping their eyes to the front, they refused to return the stares of Federal soldiers who craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the men that had tried so hard for so long to kill them.

As Gordon came even with him, Chamberlain gave the order for a call to carry arms, the marching salute. Catching the sound of shifting arms in the ranks of blue, Gordon recognized the gesture as a show of respect from one army to another. In reply, Gordon put a spur to his horse, wheeling him about toward Chamberlain, rearing slightly as he did so. In one graceful motion, Gordon drew his sword and brought it to the tip of his boot as man and horse bowed their heads to acknowledge the tribute. As Gordon moved off to the side, he sent word along the line of gray to answer honor with honor.

Think for a moment about the terms of this poignant scene. These were men who had lost a great deal, both the “winners” and the “losers.” They had suffered horribly at each others hands in a war where the technology of killing vastly outstripped the antiquated military tactics. War had a new face, and these men had seen it. In that moment, Joshua Chamberlain rose to Lincoln’s call to find the “better angels of our nature” by honoring the shared losses and sufferings of that terrible struggle. Gestures can be little things, but I suspect that on that day and at that moment, Joshua Chamberlain’s gesture meant a great deal to a great many.

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Welcome Mark Griffith

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by LJ in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I’d like to extend a welcome to Mark Griffith, Prof. of Political Science at the University of West Alabama-Livingston. Mark attended our very recent conference for authors contributing to the Perspectives on Modern Honor volume Dan Demetriou and I are co-editing. He is currently working on the historical and fictional writings of Winston Churchill, and he presented “Winston Churchill and Honor: The Complexity of Honor and Statesmanship” at the conference. Welcome, Mark!

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John McCain and Honor

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by mgriffith2015 in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

This is one of the best stories I have ever read about honor.  It appeared in the Wall Street Journal a while ago but it will always be worth reading.

Notable & Quotable:

John McCain remembers how Henry Kissinger helped preserve his honor as a prisoner of war.

June 8, 2014 7:23 p.m. ET

Sen. John McCain‘s toast at a 91st birthday celebration for Henry Kissinger in New York, June 2:

To do justice to the life and accomplishments of Henry Kissinger would take—as Henry would be the first to agree—a vehicle longer than my few brief remarks. A mere single-volume biography couldn’t really manage the task competently, could it, Henry?

So I’ll limit my remarks to recalling one anecdote that I think illuminates the character of my friend.

For several years, a long time ago, I struggled to preserve my honor in a situation where it was severely tested. The longer you struggle with something, the more you come to cherish it. And after a while, my honor, which in that situation was entirely invested in my relations and the reputation I had with my fellow POWs, became not just my most cherished possession, it was my only possession. I had nothing else left.

When Henry came to Hanoi to conclude the agreement that would end America’s war in Vietnam, the Vietnamese told him they would send me home with him. He refused the offer. “Commander McCain will return in the same order as the others,” he told them. He knew my early release would be seen as favoritism to my father and a violation of our code of conduct. By rejecting this last attempt to suborn a dereliction of duty, Henry saved my reputation, my honor, my life, really. And I’ve owed him a debt ever since.

So, I salute my friend and benefactor, Henry Kissinger, the classical realist who did so much to make the world safer for his country’s interests, and by so doing safer for the ideals that are its pride and purpose. And who, out of his sense of duty and honor, once saved a man he never met.

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Waller Newell on manliness and honor

10 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by LJ in Uncategorized

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Here’s an interesting podcast featuring Waller Newell on manliness and honor. Newell has published several books whose theme is the question of modern man, and frequently discusses ancient and modern honor in that context.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-art-of-manliness/id332516054?mt=2&i=337024304

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Piketty on honour

10 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by PaulR in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

French economist Thomas Piketty has turned down the Legion d’honneur on the grounds that ‘I don’t believe it’s the role of the government to decide who is honourable.’

I’m not sure what to make of this, but I thought it was an interesting remark. Any thoughts?

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The moral equality of combatants

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by PaulR in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

IRRUSSIANALITY

We do not accord a policeman and a criminal equal status: the criminal is committing an injustice, and so forfeits his right not to be handled forcibly by the policeman; the policeman on the other hand has done nothing to forfeit his right not to be attacked. Their rights are not equal.

In contrast, one of the bedrocks of the laws of war is the principle of the moral equality of combatants. Assuming that one can objectively decide that a given war has a ‘just’ and an ‘unjust’ side, those fighting on the ‘just’ side are still bound by the same rules as those on the ‘unjust’ side. Unjust soldiers are entitled to shoot at the just ones, and they have the same protection under the laws of war. Just and unjust warriors are morally equal, and should treat each other as such.

Not everybody thinks that this is how…

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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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