Honoring Integrity?

This chapter examines how the integrity framework bears on political honors, understood as any form of special symbolic recognition accorded by political entities to individuals, to particular social groups, or to particular social causes. Rather than focusing on honorees’ personal integrity, the chapter argues that honors decisions ought to focus on marking and reinforcing appropriate moral commitments of the collective in whose name the honor is being (or has been) awarded. Suggesting that political honors can often fulfill their collectivist functions even when they involve no individual politicians, the chapter also shows how the collectivist approach can account for cases where there is a particularly firm intuition that political leaders should be at the center of political honors. Rejecting an individual desert alternative to the collectivist approach, the chapter ends by showing how the collectivist approach can guide decisions regarding the withdrawal of political honors, without falling back either on individual integrity or on individual desert.