[Note: "WIERD" = Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic]
At the University of Virginia, for example, we have a student-run honor
system, created in 1842 by a few hundred sons of Virginia planters whose
families vigilantly tracked one another’s reputations and arranged marital and
commercial alliances accordingly. In that world, a gentleman could not tolerate
a stain upon his honor, and neither could a community of gentlemen. We therefore
have a “single sanction” based on a psychology of purity: any dishonorable
behavior contaminates the whole community, so any violation of the honor code is
punishable by expulsion.
Today, however, the university’s 21,000 students come from all over the
world, and concerns about purity are mostly confined to the cafeteria. The moral
domain has shrunk — as it must to accommodate the individualism, mobility and
diversity of a WEIRD society — to its bare minimum: don’t hurt people, treat
them fairly but otherwise leave them alone. Students at Virginia work hard and
care about their grades, but when they learn about fellow students’ cheating,
they usually do nothing. They understand that cheating harms others (in courses
graded on a curve), but because WEIRD moral calculus involves only individuals
(not the honor of the group), they feel that expulsion is too harsh a
punishment. And because they do not feel personally dishonored by a cheater,
it’s not clear to them why they should step forward and press charges. The
result is that our purity-based single sanction, still in force long after the
death of its natal honor world, increases students’ willingness to tolerate
dishonorable behavior.
