The Contradictions Of Honor

Last night I found myself in a situation where my code of honor seems to demand that I act in two totally contradictory ways. Without going into too much detail, one side of honor dictates that I pass some information on, while another dictates that I stay silent unless asked directly. I am currently wrestling with which of the courses of action I should take.

Honor is a funny thing, examining the code of chivalry, it seems to be straightforward. Yet the more I try to follow it in my life, the more situations I run into where one tenant of the code is at odds with another, or where obligations to different people demand different, often contradictory, actions. When I was a teenager, computer games were just beginning to come into their own. The graphics were primitive or nonexistent, and the action was often reparative and monotonous. Yet often the stories behind the games were much more involved than almost anything out there today.

I particularly remember one series, The Ultima series by Lord British. In the game of that name (or maybe it was the fourth), you had to run around the landscape and perform actions that increased your scores in each of the seven virtues. Unlike many games of that time (or since, for that matter), there was no character setup, per say. Rather than choosing abilities and classes from a preset list, in the opening screen, you were presented with a series of questions that pitted one virtue against another. (For example, one of the situations you were given was that, as a knight, you were asked to speak to a group of orphans about your exploits. Do you follow A) Charity and brighten the children’s day by telling them stories of what you have been through; or B) Humility, and refuse to speak on the grounds that you should not promote yourself?) While simplistic, the questions required though, and in the end your answers provided you with the statistics for your character.

While the questions Ultima asked were simple, I am finding that in real life, the apparent contradiction between the action required by each of the virtues comes up more often than I would have dreamed possible. While no one ever said behaving honorably was easy, I had no idea it would be this involved.