Laurie M. Johnson - Locke and Rousseau: Two Enlightenment Responses to Honor

Preface

I want to especially thank the Earhart Foundation for its support for my research in the form of a fellowship grant in the summer of 2010. Their generous support and confidence in my work both now and in the past has been invaluable. Karre Schaefer, my assistant during most of this work, did an outstanding job helping to format this book to the publishers standards and deserves my gratitude for her patience. I also want to thank Professor Marsha Frey for her help in reviewing this and other manuscripts, as well as the anonymous reviewers selected by the publisher.

A warm thanks to my parents, Ken and Nina Johnson, and my good friends, including Mellissa, Laine and Henry Rundus, Colleen Scroggin, Kent Hampton, Mark Griffith, Jeremy Plotnick, Jenny Bagby, and a few others just as important, for helping me come out of the most challenging year of my life able to work on this book and be happy while doing so. Friends like these reminded me that there are many people in the world who deserve my love and respect. Ann Hill, one of my best friends, died during that same year. My conversations with her over the months leading up to her death provided much inspiration for the central topic of this book, honor. She will be greatly missed. Finally, I am particularly grateful to my son, Hunter, who dealt with his own challenges admirably and, while I tried to handle mine, sat by me every night for several months watching TV, when his inclination would normally lead him into the guitar room. He is a gentle and decent human being, and a good son, whose future is brighter than ever. I am confident that he will grow up to be a good man because he has ingrained within him a sense of right and wrong, and a solid understanding of honor.

Introduction

Honor is a concept that is notoriously difficult to define. It is a verb as well as a noun. It can connote an internal state or an external condition. Philosophy Professor William Lad Sessions has identified six concepts of honor: conferred honor, recognition honor, positional honor, commitment honor, trust honor and personal honor. Conferred honor, as the name implies, is that honor given to someone because the person doing the honoring values something about the honoree. Recognition honor is different from conferred honor because the honor is not bestowed as a gift but constitutes recognition of objective excellence. Positional honor is based upon some rank or achievement that is a quality of the honoree. Commitment honor is the honor that comes from honoring ones promises and keeping ones word. Trust honor is a quality of someone who is consistent and reliable in his or her behavior and so deserves our trust. While some of these definitions overlap, Sessions treatment of the first five peripheral types of honor shows how many different ways we use the term, highlighting its complexity.

Sessions reserves the majority of his analysis for the sixth type of honor, personal honor, because in his view this is the most important type. His instincts are correct, because when we think of the social good that honor can do, we think of that kind of honor that is close in our minds to good character or integrity, the type of honor that is recognizable in outward actions that conform scrupulously to a respected honor code. But while we certainly recognize the internal condition of honor as something like integrity, Sessions view of its external component highlights the problem of the compatibility of any conception of honor with liberalism. Personal integrity is honorable in his view because it is tied to an external honor group and its particular code. Such personal honor is more than mere integrity, self-consistency, commitment or responsibility; rather, it means adhering firmly to the honor groups honor code and trust-honor of the members of that group.

Sessions insistence that honor must be derived from a particular groups code reflects the reality of most of human history, but is problematic now because of the times in which we live. It seems to me that the reason a growing number of scholars, not to mention a growing number of people in the general population, are concerned about honor, is because it seems to be in fragile condition at the moment. In a modern, liberal, pluralistic society, one finds a plethora of groups that could be said to have honor codesreligious denominations, civic groups, interest groups, occupational groups, etc., but the codes they hold can and do differ quite dramatically from each other. More troubling still, there is a growing lack of consensus about what honor means even within the groups contexts and a growing lack of concern about adhering to any set code, or at least the idea that the code is interpretable by each individual and adherence is optional. I suspect that this is because in modern Western society, more and more, there is an agreement that only the individual can decide what is good, moral, honorable, for him- or herself, that groups are there entirely for the individual members and not the other way around. The result has been a loss of agreement on what constitutes honorable thoughts and behavior within groups, with the result of a breakdown in socially beneficial behavior. As Kwame Appiah noted, for instance, we have recently experienced a noticeable loss of professional honor, which might have restrained those in the banking and investment industries from irresponsibly seeking massive profits while taking unacceptable risks with other peoples money in the latest economic crisis. One might say the same thing about familial honor, if current statistics on divorce and childhood poverty are any witness to a breakdown in family loyalty and responsibility.

Sharon Krause understands the problematic nature of honor making the transition from the old aristocratic regimes to modern liberal regimes. Along with other authors, she knows that many consider honor an obsolete concept in todays liberal societies precisely because they are no longer comfortable with honor based on either the gender or class distinctions that used to hold sway in the past (i.e., aristocratic honor). But Krause tries to rescue honor for liberalism in the same way Sessions does, highlighting in her book Tocquevilles regard for the role of voluntary intermediary civic associations and their honor codes to create a context in which the individual even in liberal society is motivated via pride and ambition to overcome his or her immediate self-interest for something higher and better. Because most of us inhabit a variety of roles in a variety of settings today, each of us may be subject to multiple codes of honor. In this sense, honor is not only compatible with the moral complexity of modern pluralistic societies, but friendly to it. But again, the problem with this point of view about honor is that we see an ongoing breakdown, a lack of consensus in various groups on what constitutes acceptable thought and behavior, and subsequently an erosion of any effective honor code. Indeed, as Robert Putnam so memorably pointed out, there has been a significant decline in civic engagement via churches, civic, fraternal, charitable organizations, and youth groups such as the Boy Scouts. While there has been an upswing in membership in mass political and issue organizations such as the Sierra Club or the AARP, these organizations do not carry the same obligations and expectations and could hardly be said to transmit any particular honor codes.