I think this distinction is largely illusory. There’s a continuum from less real standards (PR, brand) to more real ones (contract law, keeping promises), but it’s all fragile, sometimes extremely so, and rests on the assumption that the societal conception of what those standards means won’t change underneath you, and/or, in many cases, on the assumption that no one will call your bluff.
What is honor? Ask five people and you’ll get at least three answers. What is ethical behavior? Ask five people and you’ll get at least five answers, half of which will be incoherent and impossible to act on. Ask people what the brand of <Company X> is, and you’ll get even more answers than that, and you’ll be lucky if any of them are coherently actionable.
And if you (generic you, not ‘specifically Anna Salamon’) get together a panel today—maybe your organization’s board—and give them a day to hash out a definition of what ‘being honorable’ means for your group, you’ll get an answer. But if you bring them back next year, even if you give them today’s consensus then, they won’t get the same answer. Even if there are no major changes in the societal zeitgeist, which is a very unsafe assumption given that the last few years have given those to us on an annual basis, you’re not going to have a stable picture of your target. (Examples: #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter redux, all had significant effects on what we culturally perceive as proper conduct. It’s not enough for them all to be improvements on net, though I think they are, or even enough for them all to be purely-good uncaveated improvements, which is uncertain but plausible.) Even if all the changes are improvements, society getting a better picture of the moral good, they’re still substantial changes which are neither predictable in advance nor backwards-compatible.
The obvious response to this is to stick to your current best working theory of what you ought to do to behave honorably. This has several complications. Firstly, assuming you are not a sole proprietorship or a startup small enough that the founders can make decisions by consensus and directly, personally relay them to everyone else in the org, you are not all going to make the same updates. You will not have one idea of honorable conduct; even if you start with one (already difficult!), when the underlying social reality changes, you will have many different ideas of what that means. You can attempt to reach consensus, but you will not succeed in a feasible timeframe, even if you take the time to hash it out until you’re satisfied you’ve reached consensus; Hofstadter’s Law is in full force, doubly so because you don’t just have to resolve your disagreements with other people but also your internal disagreements between the elephants in your brains and their riders. Secondly, you have to decide how much to apply it retroactively, and you, y’all, and y’all’s backers/customers/funders/supporters/audience, will each have a different idea of how much that should apply. This is where the ‘call your bluff’ bit gets into it. If standards change and you change along with them, you essentially must bluff your way past the obstacle of past behavior. For things which are in retrospect egregious, you can apologize and/or make restitution and move on, but for all the judgment calls, you’re not going to have the time, energy, or bandwidth to check, so you have to 80⁄20 it and tacitly declare that good enough. This works most of the time, but you’re bluffing, and if someone watching you (either externally, e.g. customers contemplating a protest, or internally, e.g. middle manager contemplating a leak) has a large enough difference of opinion, they might call your bluff and force you to have an opinion. This downside risk here is not small, and it is rarely practical to get compact. Your audience and employees are usually not out to get you, but that could, on a limited front, change at any time. You can try to route around this—but that’s just back to ‘PR’, examining all the ways in which your environment might start being out to get you and hedging against all of them.
If you really want to get out of the game: get tenure. Literal tenure probably works, but I primarily mean metaphorical tenure. Have a full alternative stack such that you’re not beholden to anyone outside your subculture (which is smaller, more uniform, and therefore much easier to get compact against than broader society). Be independently wealthy. (Hey, it worked pretty well for the psychedelics pioneers!) Establish an extremely robust UBI that can’t be interrupted by retroactive declarations of criminality or wrongthink. Secede. Take over the world. Become god. In short: make yourself immune to other people’s low opinion, directed along any of the thousands of levers by which they can express it tangibly in ways that may ruin your life.
It would be better, for everyone, if it was a feasible strategy to listen to Aral Vorkosigan. But, besides being fictional and therefore poor evidence, he was the Imperial Regent of three planets. “Let your reputation fall where it will and outlive the bastards” is much more feasible advice when you have an army, a navy, an immense family fortune, and the personal loyalty of everyone of consequence in the entire planetary government. Which I do not, and I’m fairly certain no one else does either. And even if someone does, it doesn’t scale.
I think this distinction is largely illusory. There’s a continuum from less real standards (PR, brand) to more real ones (contract law, keeping promises), but it’s all fragile, sometimes extremely so, and rests on the assumption that the societal conception of what those standards means won’t change underneath you, and/or, in many cases, on the assumption that no one will call your bluff.
What is honor? Ask five people and you’ll get at least three answers. What is ethical behavior? Ask five people and you’ll get at least five answers, half of which will be incoherent and impossible to act on. Ask people what the brand of <Company X> is, and you’ll get even more answers than that, and you’ll be lucky if any of them are coherently actionable.
And if you (generic you, not ‘specifically Anna Salamon’) get together a panel today—maybe your organization’s board—and give them a day to hash out a definition of what ‘being honorable’ means for your group, you’ll get an answer. But if you bring them back next year, even if you give them today’s consensus then, they won’t get the same answer. Even if there are no major changes in the societal zeitgeist, which is a very unsafe assumption given that the last few years have given those to us on an annual basis, you’re not going to have a stable picture of your target. (Examples: #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter redux, all had significant effects on what we culturally perceive as proper conduct. It’s not enough for them all to be improvements on net, though I think they are, or even enough for them all to be purely-good uncaveated improvements, which is uncertain but plausible.) Even if all the changes are improvements, society getting a better picture of the moral good, they’re still substantial changes which are neither predictable in advance nor backwards-compatible.
The obvious response to this is to stick to your current best working theory of what you ought to do to behave honorably. This has several complications. Firstly, assuming you are not a sole proprietorship or a startup small enough that the founders can make decisions by consensus and directly, personally relay them to everyone else in the org, you are not all going to make the same updates. You will not have one idea of honorable conduct; even if you start with one (already difficult!), when the underlying social reality changes, you will have many different ideas of what that means. You can attempt to reach consensus, but you will not succeed in a feasible timeframe, even if you take the time to hash it out until you’re satisfied you’ve reached consensus; Hofstadter’s Law is in full force, doubly so because you don’t just have to resolve your disagreements with other people but also your internal disagreements between the elephants in your brains and their riders. Secondly, you have to decide how much to apply it retroactively, and you, y’all, and y’all’s backers/customers/funders/supporters/audience, will each have a different idea of how much that should apply. This is where the ‘call your bluff’ bit gets into it. If standards change and you change along with them, you essentially must bluff your way past the obstacle of past behavior. For things which are in retrospect egregious, you can apologize and/or make restitution and move on, but for all the judgment calls, you’re not going to have the time, energy, or bandwidth to check, so you have to 80⁄20 it and tacitly declare that good enough. This works most of the time, but you’re bluffing, and if someone watching you (either externally, e.g. customers contemplating a protest, or internally, e.g. middle manager contemplating a leak) has a large enough difference of opinion, they might call your bluff and force you to have an opinion. This downside risk here is not small, and it is rarely practical to get compact. Your audience and employees are usually not out to get you, but that could, on a limited front, change at any time. You can try to route around this—but that’s just back to ‘PR’, examining all the ways in which your environment might start being out to get you and hedging against all of them.
If you really want to get out of the game: get tenure. Literal tenure probably works, but I primarily mean metaphorical tenure. Have a full alternative stack such that you’re not beholden to anyone outside your subculture (which is smaller, more uniform, and therefore much easier to get compact against than broader society). Be independently wealthy. (Hey, it worked pretty well for the psychedelics pioneers!) Establish an extremely robust UBI that can’t be interrupted by retroactive declarations of criminality or wrongthink. Secede. Take over the world. Become god. In short: make yourself immune to other people’s low opinion, directed along any of the thousands of levers by which they can express it tangibly in ways that may ruin your life.
It would be better, for everyone, if it was a feasible strategy to listen to Aral Vorkosigan. But, besides being fictional and therefore poor evidence, he was the Imperial Regent of three planets. “Let your reputation fall where it will and outlive the bastards” is much more feasible advice when you have an army, a navy, an immense family fortune, and the personal loyalty of everyone of consequence in the entire planetary government. Which I do not, and I’m fairly certain no one else does either. And even if someone does, it doesn’t scale.