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Honor Ethics

~ Devoted to the study of honor as an ethical value

Honor Ethics

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Here we are again

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by PaulR in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

This is written from a Canadian perspective. I cannot say to what extent the logic applies to other countries, but would be interested in opinions. Paul

IRRUSSIANALITY

Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again!
We’re fit and well and feeling as right as rain.
Never mind the weather, now we’re all together.
Hullo! Hullo! Here we are again.

(Song by Frederick Wheeler, 1915)

Here we are again. The Canadian Parliament has voted in favour of sending the air force to Iraq to wage war against the Islamic State. This will be the fifth war fought by Canada since the end of the Cold War: the Gulf War (1991); Kosovo (1999); Afghanistan (2001-2014); Libya (2011); and now Iraq (2014). Since a few Canadian servicemen and women were also involved in Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia (1995) and the invasion of Iraq (2003), one could even make that seven wars. This is an extraordinary total for a country which enjoys almost complete safety from external attack.

Not even the Canadian government pretends that it’s going to…

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A Definition of Honor?

25 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by LJ in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

One of the first things my students ask me when I bring up the subject of honor is to give them a short definition. What do I mean by honor? A member of the military recently asked what is academia’s definition of honor, as opposed to the military’s definition? I found myself immediately jumping to a historical explanation. I talked about how the idea of honor had changed over time. I am supervising a class right now that takes students from the Homeric warrior ideal all the way to Existentialism, in which I suppose the whole idea of honor (or of an ideal) is “absurd.” But of course, it is not this type of historical explanation that students are looking for when they ask that question.

The question itself says a lot. We are not quite sure what we mean by honor now. There is less shared understanding of many things in modern liberal society, and certainly honor is one of those ideas for which there is no common understanding. Not only that, but for many it is not an important concept at all, having been replaced with the more democratic “morality.” For others, it holds mainly negative connotations–chivalric honor, which reminds us of sexism, warrior honor which sounds dangerous and destructive, and of course the honor of women as understood in modern political Islam, generating violence against women.

But before we can get to the question of whether or not honor can be a useful concept in Western society, we have to have a discussion about exactly what that term means. When I backed up and tried to give my students a more concrete definition, I had the feeling that it was my own personal definition. I told him that honor has an internal and an external dimension. The internal dimension is that sense of integrity and self esteem that says to us “this is what I won’t do, not because of any reward or punishment but because this is who I am.” The external component strangely contradicts the internal manifestation of honor–it is the social recognition of people of a certain character or with certain behaviors, and of course what is valued in a given society varies. The reason why it seems strangely contradictory is because if we were truly motivated by an internal sense of honor, would we need external recognition of honorable behavior? But of course, the reason for the external signs of honor is to educate, train and shape people to become internally motivated. Without that societal reinforcement, where do people get a strong sense of honor?

I suppose that is why there seems to be a disconnect between the military sense of honor and how the general population thinks about honor. In the military, honor is constantly being “drilled” into people. It may not always take, but overall,  it instills a common understanding of what is honorable and helps to guide our military personnel’s behavior. Perhaps our over-attention to individual autonomy and privacy has made it hard for any collective sense of honor to be passed down to new generations via recognition.

I would like to hear what other people have to say just about the definition of honor, and I’m excited about collaborating with others on the upcoming volume Perspective on Modern Honor and in the series that Dan Demetriou and I co-edit, Honor and Obligation in Liberal Society: Problems and Prospects. I’m also very excited to have Dan come to visit K-State October 21st as part of the Primary Texts Certificate lecture series. He will face that mixed crowd of military and civilians, both eager to come to a more complete understanding of what honor means to society and what it means to them. Thanks for keeping the conversation going!

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Martin Luther King, Jr. and Honor: What’s wrong with being a “drum major” for justice, peace, and righteousness?

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by dan demetriou in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

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.

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Honor and Ethics Mini-Conference Schedule

14 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by dan demetriou in Uncategorized

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I’m pleased to share some more details about the upcoming “Honor and Ethics” mini-conference. It will be hosted by my institution, the University of Minnesota, Morris, under the auspices of the Midwest Philosophy Colloquium.

Date: April 6, 2012
Humanities and Fine Arts Building

Schedule of Talks:
9:15 Chancellor’s Welcome
9:30 Ryan Rhodes (University of Oklahoma) “Honor and the Moral Value of Reputation”
10:30 Stephen Mathis (Wheaton) “Justifying Academic Honor Codes”
11:30 Shannon French (Case Western) “Honor Through the Ages: Differing Conceptions of a Key Concept at the Heart of the Warrior’s Code”
12:30 Break
2:00 Laurie Johnson (Kansas State) Keynote: “Honor in Today’s America”
3:15 Frank Stewart (Hebrew University) “An Anthropologist Looks at Honor”
4:30 Lad Sessions (Washington and Lee) Keynote: “Honor, Morality, Brotherhood”

You can see the poster here: MPC 2012 poster

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What’s the Problem of Honor?

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by Jim Peterman in history of honor, honor system, philosophy of honor, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to Honor Ethics. By way of brief introduction, I have published only one article on honor, in the local Sewanee alumni magazine, but I have taught a course, “Ethics of Honor” for years. That class has become for me a philosophical “laboratory” for thinking about this under-discussed notion. I welcome the chance to explore the ethics of honor with those who have had more to write about this than I have.

One section of my class on honor has students read editorials and articles on the 1906 founding of Sewanee’s Honor System.  From then until now, Sewanee has had a student-run honor code.  It has changed over time. What one at first an informal code, based on agreement of the small student body of around 200 students about what it means to be a gentleman, has become increasingly formal, with no more reference to the grounding ideal of being a gentleman, but with an increasing focus on the intricacies of due process governing honor trials. Since 1906 faculty have the sole responsibility of reporting possible infractions to the Honor Council. Even today, only the student Honor Council can determine that an honor violation has taken place.

When I examine in the school newspaper, The Sewanee Purple, early articles and editorials  on the newly formed Honor System, I see a world that no longer exists at Sewanee, despite our perpetuation of the Honor system.

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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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