Questions of Honour

According to a famous anecdote, Robert E. Lee, as the president of Washington College, responded to a young man asking for a copy of the rules: "We have but one rule, and it is that every student must be a gentleman." From this grew the concept of an honour system, based on the expectation of gentlemanly behaviour, by which the students are governed at my college.

Honour, by this understanding, is socially defined and constructed by the group; the honour system is entered into contractually when one signs a card saying “as a member of this community I will be expected to abide by its honour system.”

I’ve heard the argument (and was momentarily persuaded) that the reason our sexual assault statistics are way over the national average is because rape is not prosecuted as an honour violation. Were rape considered an HV, they reason, it would almost disappear on our campus as have cheating and stealing.

The problem here is not so much with honour as it is with its supremacy; we have lost the idea of a transcendent morality underlying and supporting this system and believe that only a socially constructed system of honour defines right and wrong.

Yes, it’s admirable that we are maintaining virtues that might otherwise die away, but are we sacrificing adherence to a much deeper code of morality? Is something wrong only because it is unbecoming of our conception of a gentleman? Have we forgotten that natural laws still govern our behaviour, and that there is a reason that murder and rape are not matters of honour?

In our attempt to be gentlemen, are we forgetting that we first must be men?