As a philosopher, I like to begin at the beginning with definitions but the first thing that one runs across in thinking about honor broadly and Military Honor more specifically is the question of what role morality plays in the concept and definition of honor. To be clear, I am an ethicist and a philosopher so I am less interested in what might be called the anthropology of honor – that is descriptions of how specific historical and contemporary cultures and groups have practiced honor (although that can be interesting and give some conceptual clues) – and more interested in an analytic definition of honor. What is it that all the discussions and instances of what we term honor have in common, what is the conceptual overlap without which we do not have honor (and have something else)?
Starting with a few more general definitions of honor, we do see that an honor group (a small Community of Practice, to borrow Alastair MacIntyre’s term which I have used extensively in my work) – a small group with shared norms, moral commitments, identity and practices – seems central to the definitions. Kwame Appiah defines honor in terms of the giving and receiving of respect (Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010, Norton NYC), xix), while William
Military honor accounts prior to Shannon French’s Code of the Warrior which I think is a seminal account of warrior codes and military, tended to focus on Military Honor either from a virtue perspective (a collection of traits and dispositions that one thought marked out Military Honor as distinctive) or more commonly, from a Kantian, universal rule based orientation. Sidney Axinn’s A Moral Military starts from this Kantian standpoint and Anthony Hartle’s book Moral Issues in Military Decision Making focuses a bit on the virtues, but more on the undergirding rules and principles that he thinks make up something like Military Honor. Axinn specifically uses the honor language, Hartle seems to be implying something like it as the conceptual basis for military ethics.
Practicing Philosophy in Real Time 