“To claim that whistleblowers speak the language of honor might sound odd. The very concept of honor strikes some people as anachronistic and others as ridiculous. ‘The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted the spoons,’ Emerson wrote. It is hard to think about honor without also thinking of pointless duels, vigilante justice, and Don Quixote, tilting at windmills in his rusty armor. Until recently, honor was not even a topic for serious moral philosophy. It was an archaic term whose lost position in moral thought was mourned only by romantics and reactionaries. ‘Honor occupies about the same place in modern usage as chastity,’ wrote Peter Berger in a famous essay on its obsolescence. ‘An individual who claims to have lost it is an object of amusement rather than sympathy.’
“It is true that the concept of honor no longer has the meaning it once had. Honor was built on a foundation of inequality and rooted in a pre-Enlightenment world of social hierarchies. In the traditional ethic of honor, your duties depended on your social station. The collapse of social hierarchies in the eighteenth century dealt a death blow to the concept of honor, which was already on the decline. In its place, Berger argues, arose the concept of dignity. Whereas in the ethic of honor your worth came from your social station, with dignity your worth came from your status as a human being. Dignity, unlike honor, is universal. It extends to everyone. As the United Nations states in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’
“Yet concepts rarely just vanish, even when the words that describe them start to seem quaint and old-fashioned. We may not live in a world of French aristocrats or Japanese samurai, but we know what honor means. The concept still makes sense to us. ‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city,’ Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote — a complex maze of twisting streets and archaic constructions spreading out into suburbs, where the houses are uniform and the streets are straight and regular. In Wittgenstein’s city, honor is like a crumbling old church that has been renamed and renovated, but where Sunday services are still held.
“Many of us still feel the moral force of honor, even if we don’t use the word. Take, for example, the story of Franz Gayl, an officer in the US Marines and the whistleblower behind a 2007 investigation by Wired magazine. Gayl was suspended after he spoke out about the refusal of the military to provide soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with armored vehicles. In Tom Mueller’s book Crisis of Conscience, Gayl explains that his decision to speak out was simple. ‘Das macht man nicht. What was happening was just wrong, and I couldn’t let it happen,’ he said. ‘I’ve fallen short in many things in my life. But on this very important thing, I felt, “No! I’ve gotta look myself in the mirror.”’
“At the heart of the honor ethic lies the sense of potential self-betrayal articulated by Gayl. Unlike the liberal virtues, which usually emphasize obligations to other people, honor is about the duty to oneself. ‘I’ve gotta look myself in the mirror,’ Gayl says, by which he means, ‘I have to live up to my own moral ideals.’ Failure under the scrutiny of one’s own moral judgment is what the honorable person fears most. The philosopher Anthony Cunningham describes it this way: ‘In the face of such failure, he is not the man he wished to be — indeed, the man he took himself to be — and he should loathe this fact, provided he really cared in the first place.’ . . .
“The conventional view of whistleblowing is that it is a simple moral choice. Yet the more carefully you listen to whistleblowers, the more complicated their actions come to seem. Whistleblowers feel morally obligated to speak out, yet they often feel bad about doing it. Many of them understand they are embarking on a professional suicide mission, yet they feel as if they have no choice but to do it anyway. Some of them feel complicit in the crimes or sins of their organizations and feel ashamed, yet they acknowledge they have played no part in the wrongdoing. Perhaps most troubling of all, many whistleblowers come away from their experience deeply scarred — even if they are vindicated, even if the wrongdoers are punished, even if there is justice for the victims. To understand these puzzles, we must understand the nature of honor.”
— from Carl Elliott, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No (W. W. Norton and Company, 2024)