How Did Honor Evolve?

The biology of integrity

By DAVID P. BARASH

To paraphrase Shakespeare's Falstaff, "honor pricks us on." And although Sir John famously concludes "I'll none of it," the reality is that for most people, honor is more than a "mere scutcheon." Many colleges have honor codes, sometimes elaborated into complex systems: The list includes small colleges (e.g., Gustavus Adolphus, Haverford), large universities (e.g., the University of Virginia, Texas A&M), Ivies like Dartmouth and Princeton, sectarian institutions like Brigham Young, science-tech (Caltech) as well as liberal-arts (Reed) colleges, and, with particular solemnity, the three military academies. The code at West Point is especially terse and predictably directive: "A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do." The first "three commandments" — thou shalt not lie, cheat, or steal — speak for themselves. Of particular interest for our purposes, however, is that fourth admonition: "nor tolerate those who do." (Sure enough, Prince Hal shows himself true to this martial virtue when he eventually — and for many of us, hurtfully — turns away from Falstaff, showing that as king he disowns Fat Jack's dishonorable behavior.)

Doesn't it stand to reason that everyone would be intolerant of violators? After all, when someone lies, cheats, or steals, it hurts the rest of us while making a mockery of society itself (cue Immanuel Kant, and his categorical imperative). The "fourth commandment" should, therefore, be altogether logical and hardly need specifying. The problem for theorists — if not for the "naturally intolerant" — is that blowing the whistle on liars, cheaters, or thieves is likely to impose a cost on the whistle-blower, while everyone else benefits from her act of conscience. Why not mind your own business and let someone else do the dirty work? Isn't that why we have police: to, as the word suggests, police the behavior of others, at least in part so we don't have to do so ourselves?

A conceivable explanation is that if no one else perceives the transgression or, similarly, if no one else is willing to do anything about it, then perhaps the miscreant will get away with it, whereupon everyone — including you — will be worse off. In short, turning in a violator could be a simple act of self-aggrandizement, if the cost of doing so is less than the shared penalty of keeping silent. Another possibility, of course, is that people are indeed predisposed to ignore code violations, which is precisely why the "fourth commandment" exists — because otherwise malefactors would be tolerated. Yet another, and of particular interest to evolutionists, is that people are, at least on occasion, inclined to do things that are detrimental to their personal benefit so long as their actions are sufficiently beneficial to the larger social unit.

That process, known as "group selection," has a long and checkered history in biological theory. Since natural selection should consistently reward selfish acts, how to explain the existence of morality that induces people to behave, as Bertolt Brecht puts it in The Threepenny Opera, "more kindly than we are"? These days, evolutionary explanations lean heavily on kin selection (also known as inclusive fitness theory, whereby apparent altruism at the level of bodies can actually be selfishness playing itself out at the level of genes), and on reciprocity, essentially "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." But there is also the possibility that beneficent acts are biologically generated by a payoff enjoyed by the group, of which the altruist is a member. At one point in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin gave impetus to the group selectionists:

"Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, … an increase in the number of well-endowed men and advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another."

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