Virtue: Honor and Integrity

I had an interesting movement of revelation on two levels as I contemplated the terms “honor” and “integrity”. How are they similar and how are they different? Can you have one without the other?

My mind wandered by to a day in early July 1977, Reception Day at West Point for the class of 1981. That night, we had a first class on West Point’s Honor Code. We had plenty of instruction and I even sat on an Honor Board that turned a cadet out of the academy. But I never consciously connected the Honor Code to the “Honor” in the West Point motto, “Duty, Honor, Country”. Such an obvious connection, yet I never consciously made it. Sometimes the truth is right in front of you and because it is so simple, you do not see it and appreciate it.

This is like the legend of the philosopher’s stone. Britannica states, “The philosopher’s stone, variously described, was sometimes said to be a common substance, found everywhere but unrecognized and unappreciated.” Things are simple and obvious are often overlooked.

As I contemplated overlooking the obvious and what the relationship of honor in the motto and the honor code means, I looked through sites and definitions of honor and integrity. Again, I found connections between concepts that I was aware of, but had not made the conceptual leap. A knight’s lands and properties were his honor. They were what allowed him to be a knight. Without his honor, he could not afford to be a knight. Therefore, when he said, “On my honor”, it was not just an empty promise. He swore upon everything that let him be him.

Other sites discussed integrity as living by a code of conduct and keeping the whole of a thing/concept together and stable.

The difference between honor and integrity is that honor is an intrinsic component of a person and integrity is how a person grows and sustains their intrinsic honor. High honor generates trust and goodwill. The problem creeps in with the subjectivity of what a society/culture values. This is the relationship between the West Point motto and honor code. The motto says cadets and graduates have honor and the honor code tells them how to maintain and sustain it. The honor code is not meant to be left behind at West Point. It is a guide for life. It is, in a way, the philosopher’s stone as living it transmutes the person and guides him or her in a life of honor.

Consider a US Medal of Honor recipient in WWII and a German SS recipient of the Knight’s Cross with Diamonds. Both were awarded for gallantry in combat. Yet the conditions of the award, what was acceptable conduct to win it and what the culture valued were very different. Both had high honor in their society and lived by a code of conduct centered on what the society held dear.

That is the key point. What the society holds dear creates the value for honor and shapes the code of conduct that allows a person to increase honor if they follow it and decrease it if they do not.

This is a critical point, especially today. There are those that think their ends are so pure and good that the end justifies the means. Lies and attacks are not only condoned but celebrated within their cultures. These groups also deny free speech to others and fire them for speaking out against sanctioned programs. There is honor of a sort in the community and even a code of conduct. But is it virtuous? We could perhaps twist some of the cardinal virtues to show the group’s conduct is virtuous as well. Virtue, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.

So how do we get through the problems of relative cultural values and norms? Are there some absolutes we can tie to honor and integrity without getting into morass of rule utilitarianism and other forms of ethics? I think there are two absolutes that provide a compass for virtual behavior and integrity: Truth and Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

As much as I link West Point’s honor code, it does have a large gray area. It says a cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal nor tolerate those who do. The gray area is “not lie”. There is a large gray area between not lying and telling the truth. One can mislead and obfuscate without lying. The North Star in a honor code should be truth rather than simply not lying.

Kant stated the Categorical Imperative in three forms:

1. …act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.
2. So act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.
3. …every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a lawmaking member in the universal kingdom of ends.

These three forms of the Categorical Imperative provide a framework for integrity and its code of conduct. Combined with telling and living by the truth, the framework provides a degree of flexibility to for cultural differences, but a strict set of boundaries.