Ask a Rice Philosopher: Why is it so easy for me to dislike members of the Honor Council?
The question of the week asks, “Why is it so easy for me to dislike members of the Honor Council simply for being on the Honor Council, when realistically, I know that cheating is bad and there should be consequences for it?”
First, I suppose I should apologize to the Honor Council. Sorry folks, don’t take it personally! This week’s questioner acknowledges your value, and so do I.
To today’s questioner: I’m going to assume that your felt dislike does not just come from the fact that students on the Honor Council are putting hours into a highly structured extracurricular that will look good on a future resume. Otherwise, your question would be, “Why do I dislike 93% of Rice students?” It’s imagining a group of your peers sitting in judgment that really irks you, I’m guessing.
Maybe what’s annoying is a matter of status. Do you find yourself wondering, “Who do they think they are?” That question expresses annoyance that someone who is, by rights, your peer, is acting better than you. People can feel the same way about officials at every level of government. When random members of Congress make a big show of needing security, motorcades and private rooms at restaurants, we think they’re acting like royalty, and we don’t like it. Of course, members of the Honor Council don’t act as though they deserve a motorcade, but they do sit in judgment, and that alone grants them a superior status: they judge, and the student before them gets judged.
Maybe what’s annoying is not the matter of status, but the idea that any student on campus has a right to morally judge a peer. Technically, it is the job of the Honor Council to assess apparent violations of the Honor Code, not to make specifically moral judgments, but I’m sure no one has ever been brought in front of the Honor Council and not felt like there was a moral assessment being made. “What gives you the right to judge?” is the sort of question that naturally comes up to express this thought.
I hear “What gives you the right?” two ways. Maybe you think we’re all sinners, and so any judgment against another is just hypocrisy. But maybe you would find the idea of the Honor Council even more galling if it were made up of morally upstanding, unimpeachably pure students. To many of us, the only thing worse than morally flawed people claiming the right to punish others is a council of moral saints, who threaten to make us embarrassed or ashamed just by the contrast between them and us.
Last hypothesis for today: maybe it’s a matter of power. Members of the Honor Council are representatives of a power that Rice wields over its students, threatening punishment for academic misconduct. You can agree, in principle, that such a power is necessary but still not like living under it. In general, the sort of power that makes us most uncomfortable is power that can be used against us without our being able to fight back. The Honor Council, city police, immigration officials and occupying armies are all supposed to use their power in a restrained way that stays within their justified realm. But all of them might, on some occasion, deploy that power less fairly. What then? That prospect makes us look differently at those with power, however well they have used it so far.
In short, lovers of equality, haters of hypocrisy, guilt-ridden sinners and the potentially oppressed all have a reason to instinctively dislike official judgment. We want it, we need it and we can see the good it does — when it does good. But when I hear a police car’s siren start up, my first thought isn’t how essential it is to have law enforcement in any functional society. My first thought is, “Don’t judge me!” And maybe that’s you and the Honor Council.
Assigned reading: Wolf, S. 1982. “Moral Saints.” Journal of Philosophy 79, 419-39.
Extra credit: Pettit, P. 1999. Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dr. Tim Schroeder is a professor in the Department of Philosophy. If you have a question about reality, knowledge, ethics, consciousness, truth, beauty or other abstract theoretical realms (or about how they apply to what your roommate just did), why not ask him about it? Email your questions to askaricephilosopher@rice.edu.
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