ABSTRACT
In Bernard Shaw’s play, How He Lied to Her Husband, the lady says to her lover: ‘As a gentleman and a man of honour you couldn’t tell the truth.’
This illustrates the very peculiar position that honour occupies among moral principles. Many things are wicked but not dishonourable; some things are virtuous but not honourable. Wherever a code of honour exists, it is considered more imperative than the ordinary moral code. Prussian officers in old days used to be exonerated for military disobedience if they had been commanded to do something contrary to their honour. It was compatible with honour to ruin Europe in warfare against Napoleon, but it would have been dishonourable to employ private assassins to remove him without damage to anyone else; in fact, the British Government repeatedly refused with indignation the offers of would-be murderers. A gentleman’s honour used to suffer if he endured an insult without allowing the offender a chance to run him through the body with a rapier or shoot him through the head with a pistol. When the Emperor of Russia promised the King of Prussia to make his dominions as large as they had been before Napoleon cut them in two, honour demanded that he should carry out his undertaking even if he had to force unwilling populations to submit to Prussian dominion and to risk a European war in process. The honour of the merchant demands that he shall pay his debts but not that he shall avoid sharp dealing. The honour of a card player demands that he shall make money by only one sort of skill and not by another. The honour of a woman demands only one thing and ignores the whole of the rest of the moral code.
