Discussion questions

Magnanimity and Integrity as Military Virtues

PAUL ROBINSON

Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of honor as a spur to virtue. Noting the traditional division of honor into external and internal elements, the article associates the former with Aristotle’s concept of ‘magnanimity’ and the latter with the modern preference for ‘integrity’. It then argues that magnanimity should indeed be considered a virtue, and that integrity should not be considered an absolute. Both magnanimity and integrity encourage other virtues, but they can also encourage vice. An ethic of honor tends to produce an excess of those virtues considered most important within a given honor group. Honor systems are not conducive to prudence. To help overcome this problem, the article suggests two solutions: first, reconsidering the virtues which are considered most important in the military, to give greater weight to respect for human life and dignity; and second, broadening the honor group whose opinion soldiers value, in order to move beyond their immediate circle of comrades to encompass more fully the civilian society which they serve.

KEY WORDS: Honor, integrity, magnanimity, prudence, virtue

Introduction

In recent years, a number of authors have called for a return to an ethic of honor as a means of imparting virtue to military personnel. Mark Osiel, for instance, argues that ‘martial honor can be more effective in motivating compliance with ethical norms than the threat of formal legal sanctions’ (2002: 32). Peter Olsthoorn similarly states that ‘the military still leaves room for honor... as both an incentive to overcome the inherent weaknesses of man and a check of the ‘‘softening’’ influence of a society that is sometimes seen as lacking in order, hedonistic, and materialistic’ (2005: 194). And, in a slightly different context, James Bowman concludes at the end of a study of the history of honor that, to combat threats such as those of gang culture and terrorism, modern societies require ‘a hard residuum of masculine honor of our own’ (2006: 323). Each of these authors has something very different in mind. This is not the place for a long and detailed examination of the meaning of honor. Simply put, though, most definitions regard honor as having two aspects internal and external. This is reflected in probably the most commonly cited definition, that of J. G. Peristiany, that ‘honor is the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society. It is his estimation of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is also the acknowledgement of that claim, his excellence recognized by society, his right to pride’ (1968: 21). Osiel, in his invocation of honor, appears to be thinking of something close to what the military tends to refer to as ‘integrity’, and which in the literature on honor is more generally considered to be ‘internal honor’: that is, doing what one thinks is right because doing otherwise would undermine one’s sense of one’s own self-worth. Olsthoorn, by contrast, is referring to ‘external honor’, that is to say the praise one receives from others as a result of one’s virtuous behavior. And Bowman appears to be thinking of honor more in terms of the right to pride. Calls for an ethic of honor can thus mean many things. This article examines more closely the role of honor as a spur to virtue in the military context. It concludes that the desire to pursue a proper amount of external honor (which Aristotle referred to as ‘magnanimity’) may rightly be considered a virtue, and also that integrity is not the absolute which military personnel often believe it to be. Furthermore, although a sense of honor is indeed a very powerful spur to the display of other virtues, such as courage and loyalty, it brings with it various negative consequences. In particular, honor does not rest easily with the Aristotelian concept of the mean; rather, it tends to push people towards an excess of those characteristics which are considered most important in the honor group with which they most strongly associate themselves. Finally, the article will also draw conclusions about the virtues with which military institutions most commonly associate honor, and about the possible need to broaden the concept of what constitutes the military honor group.

The Virtue of Magnanimity

Honor is sometimes referred to as a virtue (for instance Westhusing 2003), and it often appears in the lists of values and virtues produced by military institutions. Strictly speaking, though, honor is not a virtue. It is not a disposition of character, nor is it a personal quality, else it could not be lost due to insult (see Stewart 1994: 15), nor is it even an emotion (one can feel ‘honored’ or ‘honorable’, but one cannot feel ‘honor’). Honor is better described, in Aristotle’s words, as the ‘reward for virtue’ (1976: 284). It is more correct to refer to the ‘sense of honor’ or the ‘love of honor’ (philotimia), rather than to honor itself, as being virtues. Even these, however, are not necessarily virtues. A sense of honor may be a virtue in some circumstances, but not in others. To be entirely accurate, the virtue that we are seeking is what Aristotle referred to as ‘magnanimity’, the mean between ‘vanity’ and ‘pusillanimity’ (ibid.: 104). As Aristotle says, ‘the magnanimous man has the right attitude towards honors and dishonors. ... magnanimous people are concerned with honor, because it is honor that they claim as their due, and deservedly’ (ibid.: 154). The pusillanimous man is not virtuous, because he fails to exert himself to the degree that his character deserves; consequently he underachieves. The vain, or overambitious, man seeks rewards which he does not merit, and as a result accepts more risk than he should. The magnanimous man achieves great things because he is willing to accept risk, but also knows the limits of his abilities.

Magnanimity appears at first sight to be entirely concerned with external honor. It describes a disposition of character which makes the magnanimous man seek the praise of others, without carrying this trait to excess. However, the magnanimous man seeks the acclaim of others not for its own sake but because of the self-respect this external validation gives him. External honor makes him feel, internally, that he is a man of worth. It is the self-regarding, one might say egoistical, motive behind the pursuit of honor which makes many in the modern world feel uncomfortable with the notion. As Stan van Hooft says, ‘Much of duty ethics focuses on our obligations towards others’ (2006: 9). This leaves little, if any, room for such a self-regarding virtue as magnanimity within the scheme of one of the dominant ethical theories of our time. By contrast, as van Hooft notes, ‘the flourishing of the self is among the goals of virtue ethics’ (ibid.: 10). John Rawls argues that ‘perhaps the most important primary good is that of self-respect... Without it nothing may seem worth doing’ (1999: 386). Yet as Rawls also says, ‘unless our endeavors are appreciated by our associates it is impossible for us to maintain the conviction that they are worthwhile’ (ibid.: 387). Similarly, Axel Honneth remarks that, ‘individuals can only identify completely with themselves to the degree to which their peculiarities and traits meet with the approval and support of their partners to interaction’ (1995: 22). The concern for external validation may even be hardwired into human biology, according to recent medical research: those who feel that they occupy a respected place in society are healthier and live longer than those who do not, regardless of absolute wealth (Marmot 2004: passim). If this is all true, then the pursuit of external honor is part of what it is to be a human being, and thus magnanimity may after all be considered a virtue.

The Virtue of Integrity

This conclusion rather clashes with the contemporary emphasis on integrity, a virtue to which English-speaking militaries often give pride of place. Philosophers disagree as to the definition of integrity, but what military people generally seem to imply by it is the idea of a person who is true to himself or herself. The principle here is what Lynne McFall calls ‘coherence’: ‘integrity’, she writes, ‘is the state of being ‘‘undivided’’; an integral whole... One kind of coherence is simple consistency: consistency within one’s set of principles or commitments... Another kind of coherence is coherence between principle and action. Integrity requires ‘‘sticking to one’s principles’’, moral or otherwise, in the face of temptation’ (1987: 7). It is the second kind of coherence which, I would suggest, is the more relevant for this discussion.

Whereas the magnanimous man does what he thinks others will approve of, the man of integrity does what he thinks is right, even in the face of disapproval by others. He will risk the loss of external honor in order to preserve his internal honor. One can see this preference for internal honor in the foreword to the Cadet Honor Committee Procedures of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Quoting an article first published in 1929 by Robert Wood, the foreword describes the ideal of the ‘honorable man’: ‘honor... is an individual concept, an inner feeling which can arise only in the heart and soul of the individual. A man must judge for himself what is right, what is wrong... The man of honor... is true to himself... he clings to what he knows is right with all his strength’ (United States Corps of Cadets 2002: i). In this view, honor and integrity are in essence synonymous, which means that internal honor is the only ‘true’ honor, while external honor is ‘false’. As well, integrity is portrayed as an absolute. One cannot, according to this vision, have too much of it. The reasons for the stress on integrity are clear. The military needs soldiers who will resist peer pressure to misbehave and who will do what is right not only when the gaze of others is upon them, but also when it is not. However, there are problems with integrity as an absolute. A person may sincerely hold principles which the rest of us find repugnant. In such circumstances, would we really wish him to display integrity, defined purely in terms of internal coherence? Surely not. Unfortunately, ‘people of integrity can do horrific things and maintain their integrity so long as they are acting in accordance with their core commitments’ (Cox et al. 2005: 4). As William Ian Miller says, ‘even though we can envisage self-esteem without independent confirmation, it is hard to achieve and not always a virtue if achieved, for it can be as easily the defining trait of the sociopath as of the saint, of the self-centered boor as of the self-confident person of inner strength’ (1993: ix). Because of this, some philosophers seek to redefine the term, saying, for instance, that ‘a person’s moral judgment must be sound for that person to possess integrity’ (Cox et al. 1999: 520), or that ‘When we grant integrity to a person, we need not approve of his or her principles or commitments, but we must at least recognize them as ones a reasonable person might take to be of great importance... Integrity is a personal virtue with social strings attached’ (McFall 1987: 11). The problem with this is that it rather reverses what integrity was previously understood to be. Previously, it was considered to consist in standing by what you yourself believe in, regardless of others’ opinions; now it seems to depend rather heavily on others’ opinions.

It is not obvious, either, that military institutions genuinely believe in the absolute form of integrity which they preach. There is a tendency, as McFall says, ‘to objectify our own values in the name of personal integrity’ (ibid.: 10).

Officers such as the UK’s Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith and the US’s Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who refused to obey orders to serve in a war they considered illegal and immoral (the Iraq conflict), have apparently shown the virtue of integrity which the military claims to value so highly. They thought about the issues, reached an autonomous decision on what was right, refused to compromise their values, and took a step which they knew would result in personal hardship but the military’s response in both cases was to punish them. Furthermore, the judge in the case of Kendall-Smith denounced him for thinking that he had the right to decide for himself what was correct ‘you have shown’, he said, ‘a degree of arrogance that is amazing’ (Mitchell & Richardson 2006). Autonomous thinking, it seems, is only a virtue until it leads to conclusions which the military doesn’t like.

This does not mean that we should discard integrity entirely as a virtue. What this discussion does suggest is that we should abandon the idea of integrity as an absolute. Instead, like magnanimity, it should be viewed as an Aristotelian mean flanked by excesses such as arrogance and deficiencies such as weakness of will (Cox et al. 2005: 8). This creates room to allow once again for magnanimity as an acceptable parallel virtue, and thus to say that within limits it is indeed virtuous to seek the approval of others. Indeed, I would suggest that the idea that honor can ever be entirely internal is mistaken. The internal and external elements of honor are always reacting against one another. As Charles Taylor writes, ‘The crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character... We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us’ (1994: 3233). And, as J. Glenn Gray points out, ‘it is crystal clear that man as a social being cannot live without both, however lasting the tension may be between inner and outer... A dynamic social structure... is one that holds both inner and outer conceptions of honor in fruitful interplay’ (1980: 154155).

Magnanimity and Integrity as Spurs to Virtue

Both magnanimity and integrity may be seen as occupying a special place among the virtues. Not only are they virtues in their own right, but they are also spurs to virtue; they encourage people to display other virtues. Those who regard human nature as inherently selfish may even regard the pursuit of honor (whether internal or external) as the primary mechanism by which virtuous behavior may be encouraged. As Robert Ashley wrote in 1596, ‘how can virtue stand if you take away honor? Who would embrace it with so great labor and pains as it bringeth with it if there were no prickles of honor to awake and stir up our minds to the study thereof’ (1947: 28). As a spur to virtue, honor may be said to be offensive or defensive. The former is relative. One can go up or down in degrees of honor, and one measures one’s honor by comparing oneself with others. The latter is absolute. One either has it or one does not. One cannot gain it, only lose it.

The former is associated with the pursuit of honor, the latter with the avoidance of dishonor. In a military context, the soldier who charges a machine-gun post in order to win a Victoria Cross is pursuing offensive honor; the soldier who holds his place in the line when under attack is concerned for defensive honor. There can be absolutely no doubt that both forms of honor do act as an incentive to acquire and display virtue. The link between honor and combat motivation, for instance, is well attested, and there are myriad examples of soldiers carrying out heroic acts both for the pursuit of glory and in order to avoid dishonor in the eyes of their honor group (be it their family back home, their fellow soldiers, or others) (see Holmes 1985: passim, and Robinson 2006: passim). In this way, external honor clearly promotes the virtue of courage. Similarly, various authors have linked both external and internal honor to restraint in warfare. For instance, Mark Osiel assigns General Colin Powell’s decision to halt attacks on Iraqi forces in 1991 to his sense of honor (2002: 25). In this case, honor is associated with virtues such as self-control and mercifulness.

The power of honor as a force for virtue is in large part due to the very fact that it is self-regarding. If one is dishonored, either internally or externally, one’s sense of self is extinguished, and the desire to avoid this is necessarily very strong. But at the same time, self-regard is honor’s weakness. In the case of defensive honor, we have seen how it encourages the virtue of courage. But the same desire not to stand out which makes one stand and fight also encourages one not to prevent one’s colleagues from acting inappropriately and even to join them when they do. Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men provides a good example of this. Men of the German Police Battalion 101 who massacred Jews in Poland did not have to participate in the massacres. Those who refused were not punished. But most were afraid of looking weak in front of their colleagues and of letting the team down by adding to their burden: ‘to break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men... it was in effect an asocial act vis-a`-vis one’s comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism’ (Browning 2001: 184185).

Michael Ignatieff, promoting the concept of the ‘warrior’s honor’, cites John Keegan, saying that ‘there is no substitute for honor as a means of enforcing decency on the battlefield, never has been, never will be’ (Ignatieff 1997: 118). By contrast, J. G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers claim that ‘honor has caused more deaths than the plague’ (1992: i). Putting aside the obvious exaggerations in each case, who is right? The answer is both. Honor promotes virtue, and it promotes vice. It encourages restraint in warfare; it also encourages abuse, and furthermore encourages the very waging of war which makes abuse possible. Indeed, in so far as honor is a relative good, the easiest way to go up is to push others down. Honor can thus encourage people to humiliate those over whom they acquire power.

Prudence and Excess

One might at this point intervene to claim that the problem in cases of misapplied honor is not so much honor itself as an incorrect understanding of it, a lack of what Aristotle called prudence (phronesis). The individual possessing the virtue of prudence would understand the reasons why one should display courage and loyalty, when to do so and not to do so, and what an appropriate pursuit of honor should require. He would realize that displaying loyalty to one’s comrades in battle is a worthy goal, and thus virtuous, but that doing so in order to kill the innocent is not, and so not virtuous. In this section, I will show that the difficulty with honor is that it is not conducive to prudence. In a military context, honor creates a tendency towards excess in those virtues which are considered most important. Honor must be displayed in action. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, ‘we have described honor as lying in the acknowledgement of a person’s excellence and therefore it can be paid only when this is evident. Inner choices can be recognized only throughout outward conduct... Nobility is rooted in our interior freedom, and is signified by our exterior conversation’ (1972: 2a2ae.145.2). You cannot win a medal for bravery, for instance, without undertaking brave actions. Those seeking to win honor, and to a lesser extent those seeking to avoid shame, must act. Moreover, they must act again and again. A reputation for virtue, and an inner sense of one’s own virtue, can be lost by a single unvirtuous act. As Leo Braudy says, ‘There can be no honor that is ever untested. And no test is definitive, for honor must be proved again and again’ (2003: 52). In its more competitive aspects, where matters of precedence are concerned, this is especially true. The officer seeking promotion, for instance, must be aware that others are doing likewise, and continually push himself to exceed them. What is more, any gains he makes may be lost at any time if others do better.

Inevitably, this means that those desiring honor, or wishing to avoid dishonor, cannot afford to take chances with their honor. If there is any doubt whether displaying a virtue, be it courage, loyalty, truthfulness, or any other, is appropriate in a given situation, it is better to show it than not, and if there is any doubt how much to show, better more than less. Many a man was killed by recklessness, but few were ever shamed by it. Now clearly, nobody is going to tend towards an excess of all virtues. Rather, we may expect that they will focus on those which are considered most important by the honor group to which they belong, and that when confronted by conflicts between virtues, they will prefer those which are valued more highly by the group. In the military context, this has historically meant above all else strength, courage, and loyalty. A recent survey of the lists of values and virtues produced by Western armed forces shows that courage and loyalty appear more often on those lists than any other virtues (Robinson et al., forthcoming). Second World War British Field Marshal William Slim once said, ‘I don’t believe there is any man who, in his heart of hearts, wouldn’t rather be called brave than have any other virtue attributed to him’ (Holmes 1985: 306). Reporter Evan Wright, embedded with the Marine Corps during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, noted that courage and strength were the primary values of the Marines with whom he travelled: ‘Among them, few virtues are celebrated more than being hard having stronger muscles, being a better fighter, being more able to withstand pain and privation’ (Wright 2004: 21). The result is that, as William Ian Miller rightly says, honor systems have ‘a built-in bias towards rashness to avoid insinuations of fearfulness or cowardice’ (2002: 163).

There are far too many examples of this bias to list them here, but it is not just a historical phenomenon. It persists in the modern era, as seen in cases such as the French paratroopers in Indochina who refused to turn their red berets inside out to render themselves less conspicuous, because that was ‘cowardly’ (Holmes 1985: 145), and the US Marines in Iraq described by Evan Wright as denouncing equipment designed to make their lives more comfortable as ‘snivel gear’ and ridiculing those who used it (Wright 2004: 21).

Two Suggestions

The problems associated with an ethic of honor are related not merely to the contradictions inherent within honor systems but also to the selection of virtues which institutions choose to prioritize. It is noticeable that the lists of values and virtues produced by most armed forces in the Western world remain inwardly orientated and somewhat old fashioned (see Robinson et al., forthcoming). Only the Israel Defense Forces and the Canadian Department of National Defense include either ‘respect for human dignity’ or ‘respect for human life’ in their lists of ‘core principles’ or official values. If armed forces explicitly promote courage and loyalty to comrades, but not respect for human dignity and human life, one should not be surprised that, if in a difficult moment there is a conflict between the former and the latter, many will choose the former. That might have been appropriate in past eras when the primary task of soldiers was the waging of conventional war. In a time of supposed humanitarian operations, for which public opinion demands the highest standards in the treatment of civilians (and of captives), more emphasis on virtues such as respect for human dignity would seem to be required.

In addition, what anthropologists call the ‘honor group’ is extremely important. The more closely one associates one’s identity with a certain group, the more one will also associate one’s honor with that of the group, be it family, a military unit, one’s country, or anything else. Most people’s identities exist on many levels, and so there may be more than one honor group, but one will probably dominate. Loyalty to that group, and to the virtues demanded by that group, will take precedence over loyalty to others and their virtues. In addition, people may come to define their honor in terms of the honor of the group to which they belong; honor is collective as well as personal. If the group loses honor, so too do its members. Yet protecting the group’s honor may demand actions that are contrary to one’s personal sense of honor, such as covering up criminal activity lest it make the group look bad. This may lead to honor demanding that the individual act in a way that others consider unvirtuous, even dishonorable.

Since the Second World War, great efforts have been put into strengthening small-group cohesion as a means of enhancing combat motivation, on the grounds that soldiers do not readily fight for abstract principles or for larger groups such as the nation but will sacrifice themselves for their comrades in arms. Much of this thinking derives from the work of S. L. A. Marshall. That Marshall may have fabricated his results casts his conclusions into serious doubt and should give reason for not relying too much on them (some historians go so far as to call Marshall a ‘fraud’, and say that his evidence was ‘sloppy, fabricated, or simply guesswork’; see, for instance, Chambers 2003).

Nevertheless, despite the dubious nature of Marshall’s work, his views have proved very influential, and efforts to prioritize small-group cohesion appear to have been very successful in many professional armed forces. For many military people, today’s honor group is very much that of their immediate colleagues. We need to recognize that, while this has its advantages, it comes at a price.

As I have commented, people will elevate the virtues demanded by the honor group over those demanded by others, and will also interpret the virtues within the context of the group loyalty, for instance, will be interpreted as loyalty to the group and not to others, or at least to the group first, and to others second. In an era in which societies are increasingly insistent that soldiers must exercise restraint, minimize collateral damage, and so on, the ‘force protection’ logic which derives from this form of group loyalty is arguably out of place. Greater efforts need to be made to encourage military personnel to consider that they are members of a broader honor group which encompasses civilian society. Only then can we be certain that they will wish to display the virtues that civilian society desires. The German concept of Innere Fu¨ hrung stresses that a soldier must be a ‘citizen under arms’. Perhaps, in the context of the dynamics of honor, this is a more suitable conception of the soldier than the somewhat exceptionalist ‘warrior’ ethics preferred by some other armed forces.

Conclusion

In a 2005 article in this journal, Peter Olsthoorn, drawing on Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, concluded that the ideology of moral autonomy... asks too much... inside the military, most people are probably stuck on the first, preconventional level or on the second, conventional level. The honor ethic is clearly at this conventional level. Although this level falls short of the highest, principled level, it might be the best that can be hoped for. Traditionally, the military is more a shame culture than a guilt culture and too much trust on conscience as an inner voice is not always in place in a military setting. (Olsthoorn 2005:190)

This article has, to some extent, reached a similar conclusion, but for slightly different reasons. For Olsthoorn, the reliance on external honor as a spur to virtue is a concession to reality, a recognition that it is ‘the best that can be hoped for’. By contrast, this article has demonstrated that there are some grounds for considering a proper disposition towards the pursuit of honor (magnanimity) to be virtuous and also for considering integrity to be a less absolute virtue than often portrayed in military circles. The heavy stress that most militaries place on ‘integrity’ and ‘moral courage’ is in fact somewhat odd given that so much of military culture depends on peer pressure and other facets of external honor. It is also inconsistent with the observation made above that honor is necessarily both internal and external. Pure integrity of the sort often preached is neither desirable nor possible.

The solution to the problems caused by honor systems does not lie, as is so often supposed, in substituting an emphasis on internal honor for an emphasis on external honor, i.e., in replacing magnanimity with integrity. Rather, it lies in finding a suitable balance of the two, in reconsidering the virtues which are considered most honorable in a military context, and in broadening the scope of the military honor group. By placing virtues such as ‘respect for human life’ and ‘respect for human dignity’ on an equal footing with courage and loyalty, and by educating soldiers to value more deeply the opinions of those outside their immediate circle, we may find a place for both internal and external honor within a more satisfactory military ethic. It is not that we want soldiers who do not care about what others think of them; it is that we want soldiers who are willing, when it is suitable, to risk the disapproval of their comrades to win the approval of those whom they serve.

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Biography

Paul Robinson is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is the author and editor of numerous works on military history and military ethics, including Military Honor and the Conduct of War: From Ancient Greece to Iraq (Routledge, 2006). He has served as an officer in both the British and Canadian armies.