Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy

Peter Olsthoorn

Description

In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military and some other pockets of resistance, the notion of honor has become seriously out of date, while the term itself has almost disappeared from our moral language. Most of us think that people ought to do what is right based on a love for jus-tice rather than from a concern with how we are perceived by others. Wide-ranging and accessible, the book explores the role of honor in not only philosophy but also literature and war to make the case that honor can still play an important role in contemporary life.
Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Honor as a Social motive

2. Democratic Honor and the Quiet Virtues

3. Defining the Honor Group: Loyalty and Distance

4. Internalizing Honor: Integrity

5. Denying Honor: Respect and Humiliation

Conclusion

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Éthique et morale
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438455488
• Langue: English

Extrait

H ONOR IN P OLITICAL AND M ORAL P HILOSOPHY
H ONOR IN P OLITICAL AND M ORAL P HILOSOPHY
Peter Olsthoorn
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olsthoorn, Peter.
Honor in political and moral philosophy / Peter Olsthoorn.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5547-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
eISBN 978-1-4384-5548-8 (ebook)
1. Honor. 2. Honor—Political aspects. I. Title. BJ1533.H8O57 2015 179'.9—dc23 2014014918
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Honor as a Social Motive
2. Democratic Honor and the Quiet Virtues
3. Defining the Honor Group: Loyalty and Distance
4. Internalizing Honor: Integrity
5. Denying Honor: Respect and Humiliation
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
The role of honor in political and moral philosophy was already the topic of my dissertation (written in Dutch), and since then I have returned to the subject in several articles, book chapters, and papers, yet, the idea for writing this book on honor did not occur to me until working on Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century , which was published by Routledge in 2010. The purpose of that work was to bring scholarly discussions about some specific virtues to the current debate in military ethics on military virtues. As a result, it discussed a number of virtues, such as honor, courage, and loyalty, which do not always get a lot of attention nowadays, but are still relevant, also outside the military. Yet, looking back, honor was the underlying theme of most of the chapters, and working on that book made me realize once more that some of the old arguments for honor, brought forward by thinkers from Cicero and Sallust to Bentham and Mill, are still compelling. The aim of this book is to convince the reader of the same.
Some parts of this book draw on the just mentioned Military Ethics and Virtues , and I am grateful that Routledge permitted me to reuse some material. All the older material has been rewritten, updated, and expanded. I am also very much indebted to Twan Hendricks, Daniel Demetriou, and the two anonymous reviewers of SUNY Press for their useful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Many thanks also to Michael Rinella at SUNY Press and Diane Ganeles, Anne M. Valentine, and Lori Cavanaugh for their support during the publication process. Finally, I would like to thank the Netherlands Defence Academy for the collegial support while writing this book.
Introduction
Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim , published on the brink of the twentieth century, tells the story of Jim, his lost honor, and a failed attempt to win it back. The story takes off when Jim, a sailor with an honest appearance who chose for a life on the sea after a course of “light holiday literature,” starts working as chief mate of the rusty steamer Patna . Although Jim and the rest of the crew realize that their ship is far from seaworthy, they nonetheless expect it to carry them, along with eight hundred or so pilgrims, from East Asia to Mecca. When the Patna starts taking in water and appears to be sinking rapidly, the crew decides to abandon ship—and the sleeping pilgrims with it. Although Jim had always aspired to be a hero and lives “in his mind the sea-life of light literature” (Chapter 1), he too jumps ship in a moment of weakness, joining the other three crew members who had already left some moments earlier in a lifeboat. The four reach land—and find out that the pilgrims had done so too. The vessel had miraculously stayed afloat and when the pilgrims, who had been rescued by a French gunboat, tell their side of the story this differs considerably from the account that the crew had provided, namely that they had not had the time and means to do more for their human cargo. 1 The captain and the two engineers find ways to steer clear of prosecution, but Jim does not. In fact, he does not want to flee, “from no man—from not a single man on earth” (Chapter 6). But according to one of the assessors, the immaculate Captain Brierly, not evading trial is not a sign of courage; in a case like this it is a sign of having no sense of dignity.
The hearing attracts a lot of attention, and even in the remotest seaports Jim comes to be known as a man who broke the code of honor, as someone not to be trusted, as a man “with a soft spot.” It is because of this unhappy episode, and because his tainted reputation keeps coming up, that he follows the well-meant advice to make a new start. After an intermezzo as a water-clerk, work without “a spark of glamour,” he sets himself up as a trader in far-away Patusan, where he earns a position of trust—he becomes Tuan (Lord) Jim—among the local population. But his successes bring him no fame, as Patusan is shut off from an indifferent world by thirty miles of forest, and “the noise of the white surf along the coast overpowered the voice of fame” (Chapter 22). That does not preclude his past from haunting him again when a pirating rogue named Brown ( Gentleman Brown, as he calls himself)—a man who is everything Jim does not want to be—suggests that there is common ground between them: Brown asks Jim whether he himself does not understand that when “it came to saving one’s life in the dark, one didn’t care who else went—three, thirty, three hundred people” (Chapter 42). Jim’s judgment errs again when he misapprehends Brown’s intentions, a mistake that costs the lives of several members of the local population, including Jim’s best friend Dain Waris. In an attempt to redeem himself, Jim this time chooses death, and in doing so for a second time betrays those who have put their trust in him; above all, he has failed to see how the wife he found among the inlanders needs him. In the words of the narrator of the story, the sailor Charles Marlow, Jim went “away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct” (Chapter 45).
A Quaint Survival?
Conrad’s Lord Jim centers on a number of virtues, such as loyalty, courage, integrity, and, especially, honor, which all have in common that they, with the possible exception of integrity, have a somewhat old-fashioned ring to them. In the case of honor that marginal position today is easily explained by the fact that honor (but loyalty to some extent too) is a very inauthentic virtue, somewhat at odds with the ideals of autonomy and authenticity, valued by most people in our day (and no doubt in Conrad’s day as well, although perhaps to a lesser degree). It is probably not only because of Conrad’s own background—he was a sailor until his late thirties—that the story is located in a maritime setting, and thus somewhat peripheral to society at large, where different virtues hold sway. The theme of Conrad’s novel, lost honor, even seems to stand in need of defense: seventeen years after its publication Conrad wrote a foreword, defending the book against a complaint by one reader who thought the story was “all so morbid.” The response Conrad came up with, after an hour of anxious thought, was that
such a consciousness [of lost honor] may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking ( Author’s note to 1917 edition ).
But if we grant Conrad that Jim is not a result of “coldly perverted thinking,” is it then also true that, as Conrad put it, Jim is perhaps “not a type of wide commonness?”
On first sight, someone so concerned about his honor might seem a singular character, at least in our time. According to intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, only some “quaint survivals” of honor are left today, such as the academic cum laude and summa cum laude (1978, 101). According to another author, sociologist Peter Berger, the notion of honor has become obsolete altogether (1984), while the term itself, writes anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers, “has acquired some archaic overtones” (1974, 39). Nowadays we like to think that we are not too concerned, and also that we should not be too concerned, about how our conduct might appear to others; we are, as we think we should be, primarily motivated by how it looks in our own eyes, and face and reputation are no longer considered to be of overriding importance. Many of us, at least in Western countries, accordingly hold that we, different from our distant ancestors, live in a guilt culture rather than in a shame culture, and it is generally seen as a leap forward in our moral development that our actions are only considered morally good to the extent that they are undertaken for the right reasons; good conduct should not be a result of, for instance, peer pressure, the fear of punishment, or the concern for reputation, nor of the wish for praise, esteem, and approbation. At the same time it is evident that many people are still concerned about (and influenced by) how others think of them, but this is in general seen as regrettably falling short of the ideals of autonomy and authenticity. Most modern political and moral philosophy mirrors (and to some extent feeds) these ideals. But even though honor has evidently lost much of its