By Jonathan Andreas

What is honor?  Honor is the pleasure that comes from the approval of virtue and integrity.  We can bestow honor upon ourselves or upon others.  Bestowing honor on ourselves is a less common way of thinking about honor, but is is the most important because without one’s own intrinsic sense of honor, the honor from others would be of scant motivation.  The second form is also known as public esteem, reputation, recognition, privilege, distinction, and respect.  This short essay offers a variety of ways to think about honor.

Don’t define honor too narrowly and blind yourself to its potential fullness.

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer discouraged the drive to seek esteem from others because he said, “The desire for one’s own honor hinders faith. One who seeks his own honor is no longer seeking God and his neighbor.” (Bonhoeffer, 1954, p. 95)  For Bonhoeffer, being honored by God was the only kind of honor that ultimately matters while seeking honor from society can lead one astray.  Society often has a very different definition of what is honorable than God has.  When Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” he wasn’t meaning that both spheres are of equal importance.  Bonhoeffer wrote these disparaging words about honor during the rise of Nazism in Germany.  Although Adolf Hitler seemed like a buffoon to his critics during his early years in power, his leadership team proved to be masterful at reshaping the institutions of society to redefine honor along Nazi priorities.  This propagandistic control was their greatest tool for motivating a relatively small population to accomplish the conquest of most of Europe (whose colonial empires in turn dominated most of the world at the time), a remarkable achievement albeit a dishonorable one.  In this context, it is easy to understand why Bonhoeffer rejected honor as it was defined by his community, Nazi Germany.  

Bonhoeffer realized the crucial importance of community for helping people develop (or resist) the better angels of their nature.  He saw how crucial community is for helping people live truly honorable lives because he saw how his church community was changed by Nazi leadership who successfully altered the church’s definition of honor as part of their campaign to change the values of German society.  

Bonhoeffer was skeptical of honor because he defined the word too narrowly.  Like many writers, he thought that there is only one specific, fixed set of behaviors that are universally associated with honor, but this is a blinder which prevents writers like Bonhoeffer from appreciating the full importance of honor across all societies and the wide variety of different behaviors that are considered honorable by different people.  Every person has a different idea about what is honorable.  

Some scholars have claimed that their society has lost all value of honor.  For example, James Bowman wrote a 382-page history of honor which claims right on the cover that in western civilization “honor has been disregarded or actively despised for three-quarters of a century.” (Bowman, 2007)  Bowman simply regards 19th-century Western norms as the only true conception of the honorable and ignores modern conceptions of honor.  When scholars like Bowman define honor as a specific set of actions that should be honored rather than the general concept that all humans honor some people and dishonor others, it blinds them to the wide diversity of honor codes that exist and how they shape societies.  

Similarly, Bill Johnson claims that “Many people live in atmospheres void of honor and desperately seek our help in creating such a culture.” (Silk & Johnson, 2009, p. 20)  This makes no sense.  If someone had no sense of honor, she would not seek it.  In reality, all people have a unique (and changing) conception of honor and are inherently motivated to create a more honorable culture by their own definition of honor.  All people should always feel that our culture falls short of what is honorable, because we are all sinners and sinners cannot create a perfectly honorable culture.  Even if we could create a perfectly sinless culture, some people would still feel that it is not honorable because there is always some amount of disagreement between people about what exactly is sinful versus what is honorable.  

Honor is vitally important in all societies, but conceptions of what is honorable vary greatly

Alexander Welsh disagrees with the popular notion expressed above by Bowman and Johnson that America is a post-honor culture.  Welsh says that whereas Americans no longer use the word “honor” as frequently as in the past, he argues that Americans continue to care about honor, but we just talk about it using other words today such as identity, respect, dignity, shame, and morality (Welsh, 2008).  Perhaps Americans have ceased to use the word honor because they mistakenly believe like Johnson that honor is defined narrowly as the code of behaviors that were considered honorable a century ago.  Most modern Americans reject some aspects of what used to be accepted and/or honorable in America such as white supremacists who terrorized and murdered minorities, sexism that banned women from voting, and factory owners who enriched themselves by dumping toxic waste with impunity that poisoned neighbors.  Similarly, our forebears would be aghast at the language in modern music, the decrease in importance of family, and changes in sexual mores. For example, gay marriage was considered unthinkably dishonorable by most Americans for over two centuries, but then over the course of only about two decades a majority of Americans changed their minds and decided that it is so honorable it should be enshrined in law and celebrated with gifts and parties like any other wedding.  That is a remarkably rapid shift in America’s honor code.  

Despite inevitable fluctuations in perceptions of what is honorable, for better or for worse it remains a force of attraction that binds people together into communities, churches, tribes, associations and nations as well as a force of repulsion that propels peoples into conflict and discrimination against one another.  People with the same conceptions of honor are attracted to each other, but opposing conceptions of honor cause people to repel one another, and this same force helps motivate vigilantes, honor killings, excommunication, and war.  For example, although honor is always a crucial motivator for all sides during wartime, the opposing sides always have some diametrically opposite versions of what is honorable.  During the US Civil War, confederate soldiers tended to agree that slavery and rebellion were honorable and northern soldiers didn’t.  However, both sides agreed that honor was important and used it to rally the troops and justify the atrocities that they committed against the other–dishonorable–side of the war.

Although honor is a universal concept across all social groups, there is remarkably little agreement about what behaviors are honorable.  Honor is the act of acknowledging virtue however that is defined.  It is so fundamental to humanity it is encoded into our languages which have honorific structures such as “Your Eminence,” “Sir,” “Doctor,” and “Mrs.”  Many languages like Spanish and Japanese even have complex verb conjugations to convey (or withhold) honor.  Additionally, there are many words whose purpose is to convey dishonor and some are so potent that it would be too dishonorable to write one here even though it would only require four letters of the alphabet.  Honor is the underlying principle that motivates terms like “politically correct” on the left and “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) on the right.  These terms are meant to enforce particular codes of behavior in the in-group and distance or chastise people who do not conform.  

Writers like Bowman and Johnson who argue that American culture has lost its value of honor will never convert people who don’t already agree with their particular sensibility about what is honorable because it is impossible to quantify whether one society has more honor than another and it is well documented by scholars like Kwame Appiah that different societies simply disagree about what is honorable.  Appiah’s book, The Honor Code (2011), documents examples of how societies and individuals change their definitions of honor over time.  Appia recounts engrossing histories of how dueling in America, footbinding in China, and slavery in Western Civilization were considered honorable for centuries and then suddenly became dishonorable in a relatively short period of time.  Appiah theorizes that honor codes tend to evolve to become more emancipatory over time, but his own examples fail to support his thesis because chattel slavery, footbinding, and dueling all got markedly less emancipatory before they got better.  If Appiah’s theory were valid, should be able to at least explain his own hand-picked histories.  Nobody has a perfect theory to explain how these kinds of norms change, but the seemingly arbitrary choices of leaders to change social institutions is one important factor.

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) helps explain disagreements about honor

Another attempt to understand how different societies (and peoples) develop such different moral norms is Moral Foundations Theory which is like a personality test for moral judgements.  By understanding these fairly universal moral foundations, it gives us one more tool to think through our own moral convictions to try to understand ourselves better and avoid accidental moral beliefs that do not accord with our fundamental values.  These categories can also help us understand how other people value moral foundations differently, so we can better comprehend why others sometimes come to opposite moral judgements and, with this understanding, it may become more feasible (although still difficult) to convince other people to adopt a better ethical system.  

The main moral foundations are briefly summarized on the Moral Foundations website (Dobolyi et al., 2016):

1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy…
3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions)…  
6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.

Every social group has institutions to encourage group members to live up to the group’s moral norms that are inspired by the above moral foundations, but this is just a beginning and there are many more differences in honor codes that cannot be explained by them.  For example, group norms of personal appearance like the blue suits traditionally worn at IBM Corporation versus the facial tattoos worn by workers in the Mara Salvatrucha gang may both be motivated by the same moral foundations of loyalty & identity (#3) and authority (#4) in both organizations, so these moral foundations cannot explain why the specific dress codes are so radically different.  Both organizations are large, hierarchical multinationals that manage a large amount of cash flow, but they have very different honor codes that use various forms of peer pressure to regulate how workers behave within each organization right down to the minute details of what clothes are honorable to wear to work.  If a Mara Salvatrucha worker showed up to work wearing a blue 3-piece suit, he would get dissed just as much as an IBM worker who showed up to work with facial tattoos and pants hanging low on his hips revealing his colorful hiked-up underwear. Both IBM Corporation and the drug dealers of the Mara Salvatrucha gang use peer pressure to regulate  personal appearance and many other norms for their workers.  Although the term “peer pressure” is usually associated with rebellious teen culture, it is just a form of honor culture.   

Honor (and dishonor) is a tool social groups use to influence and control individuals by appealing to altruistic contributions

Churches also use peer pressure to get members to conform to group norms.  Bonhoeffer stressed that Christians need to be part of a church community because a church is an institution that helps its members be better Christians.  Churches use norms of honor to motivate members to strengthen their faith, be more generous, and follow Christ in ways that would be much more difficult without group support.  Leadership also matters, and unfortunately when the Nazis took over the leadership of Bonhoeffer’s Church, they worked to change the norms of the church to help make Christians be better Nazis.  

Cultures reinforce desirable behaviors by bestowing honor and rebuke unwanted behaviors by punishing with dishonor.  Both are motivated in large part by altruism.  The more effort that is expended to award honor, the more altruistic and powerful it is.  People are largely motivated to expend the effort to honor others by the emotion that is sometimes called the warm glow of altruism.  Almost all people have altruistic impulses that make them feel good when they honor good behavior and thereby help their community by encouraging better behavior.   

Similarly, punishing dishonorable behavior also requires effort that is rarely justified by material gain.  Punishment is often motivated by different emotions that we don’t always identify as altruistic, but much punishing dishonorable behavior is altruistic nonetheless because it, too, primarily helps the community rather than yielding selfish gain.  For example, when an Amish church goes through the difficulty of shunning a member of its community, it is painful for the family and friends who must do the shunning, but they do it for the benefit of the group as a whole and to enforce its honor code and limit the influence of someone who has been willing to violate it.  

Each person’s honor code is behind many of our altruistic emotional reactions. A soldier who jumps on top of a hand grenade to save his comrades standing nearby is motivated by a knee-jerk emotional reaction to the situation that heroic characters just have, and although she might briefly get an emotional warm-glow from the act, most of the material gains go to the comrades and that is what makes it altruistic.

Altruistic punishments can also be motivated by knee-jerk emotional reactions founded on our honor codes.  For example, a woman driving in a city who gets cut off by a reckless driver may ‘dis’ the dishonorable stranger by flipping him off, without any potential for material personal gain.  Sending this signal of dishonor out of a desire to retaliate for an injustice doesn’t undo his act nor will it have a chance of preventing it from happening to her again because she is unlikely to ever see him again.  It is altruistic because it is motivated by a hardwired desire to punish injustice which helps reduce the risk that he will recklessly cut off others in the future.  Rather than giving her a material benefit, it comes at a material cost because it increases her risk of road-rage retaliation.  The emotional impulses that motivate dishonoring don’t feel as altruistic as the ‘warm glow’ emotions that motivate honoring, but both often have altruistic results.  In general, when a dissing is culturally accepted (aka honorable), it probably has altruistic results for the culture that accepts it.  This is another example of altruistic punishment because there are material costs to the woman and the benefits mostly accrue to the rest of society.  

Of course, this example of altruistic punishment is only altruistic if you share the woman’s honor code which deems it a just and proportional punishment.  Other societies might have very different values.  In Saudi Arabia it wasn’t considered honorable for a woman to drive a car until recently nor interact with men, much less disrespect men, so the woman’s actions would have been dishonorable in that culture.  Every culture has a different honor code.  Although the terrorists who killed themselves to dis America on 9-11 were despicable villains under the honor code of almost the entire world, they viewed their actions as the ultimate sacrifice of altruistic punishment as did the small minority of extremists who shared their subculture’s honor code and supported them.  Although we all probably agree that suicide bombers have a bad honor code, It is hard to deny that it is a powerful motivator.  

When suicide bombers are viewed from their own honor code, they are doing altruistic punishment to powerfully dis their targets.  Although books about honor focus more on honoring than on dissing, dishonor is perhaps even more important than expressing positive honor for shaping societies because many people expend greater effort punishing the dishonorable than honoring the good.  You can see this priority embedded in American government.  The United States punishes millions of dishonorable Americans every year whereas we pick very few heroes to honor.  Although we spend vast amounts of tax dollars to punish dishonor, we spend almost nothing to honor virtuous Americans.  If you include spending to honor our dead heroes, that is a bigger priority than honoring the living, but the money we spend on monuments honoring the dead is still just a trifle compared with our vast spending on large structures in every county in the nation whose massive stone walls are monuments to our resolve to punish dishonor: our jails, courts, and prisons.  Similarly, most parents spend more effort doling out dishonor for bad behavior than honoring achievements, and grade school teachers prioritize similar tools to manage their classrooms.  

Schools exist because they can motivate students to learn better than individual students could do on their own by making learning more fun, easier–and by using honor.  For example effective teachers achieve a position of honor in their classrooms and motivate their students to perform by honoring good work.  The GPA is nothing more than a formulaic honor code whose primary purpose is to motivate students. We all know how  dishonorable it feels to look stupid in school by making a mistake in front of peers.  Many students work harder in a class with a group of students than in an independent study with a tutor because the honor of a teacher is less powerful than when it is added to the desire for honor from a group of peers and fear of their dishonor too.  

The support of a teacher’s leadership and honor from peers makes learning much easier in a group than alone.  Otherwise schools would have been replaced long ago by the original information technology revolution: the printing press.  Cheap books contain all the information that students can get from most classes and more, but without the social institutions of the classroom, it is too difficult for most students to extract the power of knowledge from books without the social support of a class.  There are a few exceptions like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey who were successful despite dropping out of school, but they are life-long bibliophiles with unusually strong self-motivation to read and learn.  Promoters of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) believe that they will replace the traditional classroom, but more likely they will replace the traditional textbook because unless a MOOC can reproduce the community of a traditional class, they won’t be able to motivate students much better than the book.  Even though MOOCs offer content that is more engaging than many textbooks, because they cannot provide honor and other social support from personal relationships, most students fail to finish them.  

Like all schools, Bluffton University uses the levers of our academic community to motivate students to learn, grow, and develop various virtues two of which are extolled by our motto, “The Truth Makes Free.”  It is hard to teach truth and freedom, but one unusual set of levers that Bluffton uses to inculcate these two particular values is our academic honor code.  It is the primary way that cheating and plagiarism are discouraged on all assignments including examinations.  According to our honor code, Bluffton faculty should not monitor student examinations.  Instead students have the freedom to monitor themselves and with freedom comes responsibility.  They must sign a pledge that they witnessed no cheating.  

The first reaction that many newcomers have when they hear about the honor code is that if nobody is making students behave well during exams, there will be no incentive to prevent cheating.  In reality, the honor code puts the responsibility of encouraging good behavior onto each individual student because all students pledge on their honor that they have not witnessed any dishonorable behavior.  When the students create a community of honor, that is much more powerful than anything a single professor can do.

Bluffton’s honor system works, and Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) helps explain why.

As you might imagine, not all Bluffton students are always truthful for the two reasons mentioned before: first of all, everyone is a sinner and secondly, not all students necessarily agree that our honor code is the right definition of honor despite the pledges that they sign.  Naturally, Bluffton’s honor system is imperfect, but according to research by Dr. Mark Bourassa, it is better than the alternatives.  Dr. Bourassa has researched numerous academic honor codes to understand how they work and he found that Bluffton’s does indeed work.  Bluffton has less cheating than at schools without honor codes (Bourassa, 2011).  One reason the honor code works may be that it can appeal to all six of the moral foundations of MFT.  

Some people are much more motivated by some moral foundations than other.  For example, there is fascinating literature on disgust ethics (#5) that focuses just on disgust as a way of explaining moral behavior without even considering the other foundations. The critics of this literature are probably people who do not prioritize disgust and sanctity in their own moral intuitions.  Deontology is an even larger school of ethics scholarship that should appeal to people who prioritize authority (#4) because it is an attempt to base ethics on the authority of a system of rules.  The biggest rival school is the consequentialists who attempt to base ethics on the outcomes, and many of these scholars seem to judge the various possible outcomes according to the amount of harm (#1) and/or fairness (#2) that result.

In the books mentioned earlier by Bowman (2007) and Silk (2009), these authors use a narrow definition of honor that relies heavily on two moral foundations: loyalty (#3) and hierarchy (#4), but they have had little success at converting critics to agree with their conceptions of honor perhaps because these foundations aren’t very persuasive for much of the American population.  Differences in how people value moral foundations also helps explain why conservatives and liberals come to different moral judgements.   Liberals tend to value the foundations of loyalty (#3), authority (#4), and disgust (#5) less than care (#1), fairness (#2) and liberty (#6) whereas conservatives tend to value all of the foundations relatively equally (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009).  Bluffton’s academic honor system works well in part because it leverages each of the moral foundations to achieve academic honesty and thereby appeals to different kinds of personalities across the ideological spectrum.  The six moral foundations of MFT can be related to the honor code as follows:

1) Care/harm: When I taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I was expected to proctor exams, and I regularly caught students cheating.  During every exam I felt like a predator stalking prey, and this approach put me into an adversarial relationship with my students–not the kind of leadership that inculcates virtue and learning.  Under the honor code at Bluffton I feel the same kind of mutual care and respect for students during exams that we normally feel for each other.  During exams I feel more of an atmosphere of reciprocity and kindness with my students rather than a milieu of spying and suspicion. I think students are more aware that cheating would harm their relationships with me and their fellow students.

2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation for the honor code is the most self-evident, but the honor code helps each student internalize the value of honesty, which makes it more powerful because internalizing it can have lifelong impact.  The Bluffton president has occasionally gotten a letter from an alumnus asking to be forgiven for cheating and offering to return his or her diploma as penance.  That wouldn’t happen without the honor code.  

3) Loyalty/betrayal: Even students who do not feel loyal to their professors are more loathe to cheat under the honor system because it is a betrayal of their peers, too.  Under the honor system, students sign a pledge that they know of no cheating. Fellow students take it personally when they think someone is cheating because then students feel obligated to report it to the authorities, an incredibly difficult step.  Some students try to avoid looking at other students during exams to avoid putting themselves in the awkward position of wondering whether a fellow student is cheating, and although this is not the most honorable way to live out the honor code, it still demonstrates a culture where cheating is considered shameful and students do not want to feel betrayed by their peers and then feel the duty to report it.  Attitudes were very different in Chicago without the honor code.   

4) Authority/subversion:  In the literature about honor, authority is sometimes called “vertical honor” because it is honor given between people with higher status or power and those with lower status or power.  Some people have great respect for social hierarchy and authority, which makes them want to respect the rules imposed by powerful people without questioning the legitimacy of the power.  Others tend to be skeptical of authority, but it is harder for anyone to argue that the authority of the honor code is illegitimate when the authority of the honor code is widely respected by their peers who pledge to help keep each other honest, and when authority isn’t held by the most powerful person but is shared more equally by all students.  

5) Sanctity/degradation:  In Chicago during an examination, my classroom felt like a police station where suspects are awaiting bond while being closely guarded (by me). During an examination at Bluffton my classroom feels more like a quiet chapel.  Students expect that professors will respect the sanctity of the exam room, and they get upset if a new professor misunderstands Bluffton’s culture and seems to be trying to monitor an exam.  The honor code makes students feel more disgusted by cheaters who violate the sanctity of our community.  You do not hear nearly as much disgust about cheating at universities without the honor code even though they have more cheating.  Ironically, because Bluffton students internalize the responsibility to reduce cheating, there seems to be a heightened awareness of the smaller amount of cheating that remains, and Bluffton students probably complain more about cheating than at other schools even though the empirical evidence shows that Bluffton has less academic dishonesty.  

6) Liberty/oppression:  This foundation is not always included on the list with the other five moral foundations because it is sometimes seen as a part of the same continuum as the authority foundation (#4), but at the opposite extreme.  As mentioned above, some people tend to be rebellious against domination by authority, but because students are judged by their peers as equals under the honor system, it gives less motivation for rebellion against domination.  Some of the literature about honor calls this kind of honor among peers of equal status “horizontal honor.”

The institutions you join will influence whether you live an honorable life and even your very conception of honor.  Pick them carefully and try to shape them intentionally.

MFT helps explain why the Bluffton honor system is an institution that works to increase academic honesty, but MFT cannot justify any specific moral judgements such as when it is good to tell a white lie or when coercion is justified.  MFT is just a descriptive theory of ethics which tries to correlate patterns among the markedly different moralities that we see in different cultures and even vast differences between neighbors on the same street.  Unfortunately, MFT isn’t a normative theory which can tell what moral judgement is the best.  MFT postulates that all people share the same set of moral foundations, and that some individuals and cultures develop different morals because they value some foundations differently than others.  

Because normative ethics is the very meaning of life and the bedrock of civilization, it would be wonderful if we could figure out what is best. Unfortunately there is no perfect ethical code that everyone can agree upon. The Bible is a good place to start, but even Biblical scholars cannot come to agreement amongst themselves about how it says we should live our lives.  Although secular institutions often shy away from explicitly examining their moral values, this approach is even more dangerous because every choice that you make down to each breath you take is based on an ethical judgement. It would be horribly immoral for you to choose to cease breathing, so I’m glad you continue to make the easy choice to keep taking another breath, but many of our ethical choices are much harder and if you do not consciously think about ethics, you will end up with an accidental ethics which will lead to less deliberate and more random ethical choices at best and lead to selfish temptations at worst.  At the end of your life, if you have not deliberately thought about ethics, you are less likely to feel that you lived a meaningful life.  

This is one of the advantages of spending time in institutions that deliberately focus on questions of what is honorable.  I’m not claiming that a church school like Bluffton has all the right answers, (we are all sinners, remember?), but at least we spend more time deliberately working on the questions than most secular institutions do.  And difficult ethical questions are impossible to avoid.  What profession should I pick?  Where should I go to make friends?  Who should I marry?  How should I spend the money I control?  When is it healthy to encourage some indulgence?  

You are forced to make these choices and more during life, and they have moral consequences that can be almost as profound as your decision to keep breathing because they put you into institutions with honor codes that will shape your life.  A corporate lawyer will be pushed into very different ethical challenges than a 4th-grade teacher due to the very different institutions of corporations versus schools.  If you seek friends at one institution like a church, you will find yourself under very different social pressures than if you seek friends in another institution like a bar.  Through the institution of marriage, your spouse will have tremendous influence over your spending priorities and what indulgences become your habits.  

Every choice people make is a moral act, and whereas some are as easy as breathing, others are hard, and so it is important to try to think ahead and choose to put yourself into institutions that will make it easier for you to make good choices.  As smart college-bound students, you will have more ability to make choices than most Americans.  You will have more freedom to pick the kind of institutions that you want to contribute to and more power to influence them.  Most of you will become leaders in your work, church, and/or communities.  One of the most difficult arts of leadership is shaping institutions to help their members make better choices.  Honor is one of the important levers for leaders, and one of the most difficult to master.  More importantly, honor is a virtue that each person should strive to achieve, not by seeking glory from others, but by trying to do the right thing for the sake of doing good.

References:

Appiah, K. A. (2011). The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Reprint edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Bonhoeffer, D. (1954). Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community. New York: Harper One.

Bourassa, M. J. (2011). Academic dishonesty: Behaviors and attitudes of students at church-related colleges and universities (Doctoral Dissertation). Ann Arbor: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I. (Accession Order No. AAT: 874341013).

Bowman, J. (2007). Honor: A History (60476th edition). New York: Encounter Books.

Dobolyi, D., Ditto, P., Graham, J., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Motyl, M. (2016, January 30). Home | moralfoundations.org. Retrieved January 4, 2018, from http://www.moralfoundations.org/

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029.

Haidt, J. (2013). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Reprint edition). New York: Vintage.

Silk, D., & Johnson, B. (2009). Culture of Honor: Sustaining a Supernatural Environment (1st edition). Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image.

Welsh, A. (2008). What is honor?: A question of moral imperatives. Yale University Press.