Of Honor Codes and Social Contracts

Maybe that’s not the point of the honor code. By having the students think about how cheating is wrong before taking the test, they’re probably less likely to cheat. In addition, the school could be trying to signal something (integrity, etc) to employers, donors, or whoever else might care.

“To exile millions of innocents to the Third World”

Is Third World some kind of Gulag?

Hume attacked contract as a foundation for justice in THN Bk III, the second enquiry, and such essays as “Of the Original Contract.” Here Smith generally followed Hume.

I take it Bryan’s point here is that honor codes, contracts and the like would fail to constrain sociopaths, snarky 11 year olds, and similar types to whom ‘I never promised not to promise’ actually might seem like a clever valid argument? If so, good point, I guess.

Yes, it’s true enough that without some prior morality – or at least, sense of honor – such things probably wouldn’t work. Fortunately few people I’m aware of try to base their morality entirely on social contract theory, but if/when I ever encounter one, I promise Bryan will be the first person i think of.

When political leaders violate their official obligations, these lessons immediately apply. Yes, “you broke your solemn pledge” sounds bad. But what if you solemnly pledged to murder thousands of babies?

Breaking a pledge to murder babies is an admirable thing. Breaking such a pledge while continuing to exercise the privileges that were conditioned on that pledge? Not so much. If an official honestly feels that he cannot exercise the duties of office in good conscience, then let him resign in protest.

In addition to preserving the rule of law (a phrase which, Bryan’s last post notwithstanding, actually means something and thus doesn’t belong in scare quotes), requiring officials to either do their duty or resign discourages them from elevating every policy disagreement to a crisis of conscience.

Honestly, Bryan, this argument that public officials can and should follow their conscience over the law is a losing one. Can you really not see how such a norm would be abused if we adopted it generally?

everything is a moral obligation to someone and an injustice to someone else. So, basically, to get out of any obligation you just have to choose the relevant baseline.

No President is obliged to enforce an unconstitutional law. And the entire institution of federal immigration law is an affront to the Constitution, as argued here by Thomas Knapp.

Those that are honorable would be bound by such a promise. Those that are not will not.

We are fortunate that we live in a society where honor codes have historically been effective (see Cowen and trust just recently; or the economics of Quakers).

Alas this does not hold true for many people in the world.

I should elaborate on my earlier comment. Bryan’s argument here is structured something like this.

Premise (1) there are pre-contractual moral obligations, and breaking a contract to enforce one of them is not wrong, if the obligation is sufficiently serious.

Premise (2) an executive enactment of the DREAM Act falls within the ambit of premise 1.

Conclusion: Obama was not wrong to enact the DREAM Act by executive fiat.

All of the contentions have been about Premise 2, either due to rule of law concerns, or moral objections to classifying immigration restrictions on the same plane as mass baby-genocide. But Bryan still seems to just take Premise (2) as a given – he considers it an enthymeme. Hence, I consider this post to be begging the question.

I believe, Steve Z, that Bryan has elucidated his strong moral opposition to immigration restrictions before. However, I would concur that he’s done so in a way not necessarily likely to convince people who do not share his moral precepts. And yet, I find that that is true of essentially all arguments. We all start from somewhere.

Don’t you believe in framing effects, Bryan? Students face the temptation to cheat on their exams. At the margin, students who are reminded of their commitment to the Honor Code, who are reminded that every other student has made the same commitment, etc. cheat less, possibly a lot less at a place like Princeton.

Locks are for honest people.

You’re evading the issue: what shall we do when good (or at least many) people disagree over some allegedly “moral” question? In that case, doesn’t higher morality demand adherence to the previously-agreed peaceful process–to rule of law–in order to avert internecine violence?

You admit that you hold a distinctly minority view on the morality of US immigration law– earlier you kvetched that waiting for the “median voter” to come around to your side was unsatisfying, so it pleased you to see Obama speed things up by abusing his office. I thought you were a pacifist? As a pacifist, why do you want to deprive people of the hope of settling differences peacefully, by asking the peace-supervisors to defect? When you applaud Presidential malfeasance, you encourage the “losers” to resort to violence– “after all,” they will reason, “parliamentary remedies have failed, and the magistrates are traitors.”

Rather than defend your incendiary opposition to the rule of law, you insert a tendentious statement of your highly-disputed “moral” claim into a list of widely-accepted moral claims. Your rhetorical question, whether rule of law should supersede absolute morality, “But what if you solemnly pledged to murder thousands of babies? To uphold slavery? To exile millions of innocents to the Third World?” is deprived of force by your cheap debater’s trick.

Look, everyone* agrees murder is immoral. Not everyone agrees whether, just for example, abortion constitutes murder. I doubt you would cheer a President taking lawless “prerogative” action on abortion the way you cheer a President taking lawless prerogative action on immigration!

When many people disagree over your pet question, your appeal to universal moral absolutes falls flat.

I think you know this, and that is why you keep misusing the word “exile” as a substitute for “expel” or “deport.” You are encoding a moral argument into your choice of terms, just as anti-abortion activists use the word “murder” instead of “abort” (and pro-choice activists write “terminate”).

Everyone* agrees it is immoral to “exile” people from their native countries. That is why exile rates two mentions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Article 9. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile“ and “Article 13(2). Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country“ (emphasis added).

Not everyone agrees that immigration law is immoral. The UDHR is suffused with the notion that each person has a “country” and enjoys a right to reside and participate in politics in “his country,” but not in other countries: Article 13(1). Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

I am not claiming the UDHR as authority for whether a particular view of migration is a moral absolute. Rather, I claim the UDHR shows that while significantly many people think exile is wrong, significantly many people think immigration controls are not wrong. You must carry the burden of persuading everyone else that your moral view of immigration is right– simply confusing terms doesn’t make a compelling argument.

So the challenge for you is: explain why, in a moral question which admits of considerable dispute, a magistrate elected to govern a fractious population by a rule of law to ensure that disputes are peacefully resolved by a generally-accepted process (a process which, yes, may allow an injustice to persist for some time before any consensus to remedy it is reached)– why such a magistrate should be lauded rather than impeached and removed for violating the very rules he is supposed to enforce?

*Okay, nearly everyone– you can always find some Charles-Mansonesque special case.

It is a mistake to think that Hobbes tried to “ground morality itself in contract”. He did not.

The foundation of morality has its origins in the first law of nature: ” it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: to seek peace and follow it.”

The second law of nature is equally important:
“From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commanded to endeavour peace, is derived this second law: that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself. For as long as every man holdeth this right, of doing anything he liketh; so long are all men in the condition of war. But if other men will not lay down their right, as well as he, then there is no reason for anyone to divest himself of his: for that were to expose himself to prey, which no man is bound to, rather than to dispose himself to peace. This is that law of the gospel: Whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them. And that law of all men, quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris.”

The obligation to keep contracts has its source in these two laws. The nature of these laws and where they come from continues to be debated. (Do they come from God? Are they merrily laws of prudence?)

Hobbes agrees with Bryan that it would be absurd to think that oaths themselves are binding. He says at the end of ch. 14 of Leviathan:

“It appears also that the oath adds nothing to the obligation. For a covenant, if lawful, binds in the sight of God, without the oath, as much as with it; if unlawful, bindeth not at all, though it be confirmed with an oath.”

There is more to Hobbes still. Whatever one might think of Hobbes, however, he is not simple-minded.

Bryan,
I think most Princeton students would characterize your representation of how the Honor Code works as inaccurate: the reason for compliance is not that one feels the obligation to do so due to the promise but rather that the absence of a Professor from the examination room together with the reminder of one’s Honor Code duties(which include reporting of violations) lead students to fear the enforcement of the Code by the other students in the exam room with all the excessively harsh punishments that entails. Grading students on a curve at Princeton makes that mechanism individually rational as other students’ cheating worsens your own relative performance.

Class of ’11

The reason why Bryan mischaracterizes moral contractarianism is because he mistakenly believes that the contractarian posits some foundational voluntary commitment as the answer to the question “why should we be moral?” Bryan envisages the contractarian answering this question with the response “because we voluntarily agreed to the social contract”. This is not, however, the motivational basis for morality that contractarians posit. They typically provide some account of practical rationality and human nature (for Hobbes, instrumental rationality and egoistic man) as the basis for social morality. They seek to answer the question “what justifies paying attention to morality, rather than dismissing it as an appendage of outworn beliefs?” (David Gauthier, Why Contractarianism?). They believe that morality has a point—providing a rational basis for peaceful social life among numerous goal pursuers—and that this point must play a key role in our understanding of morality.