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Several posters hang on the wall outside the Naval Academy’s Fourth Battalion office, one of which reads, “Honesty . . . The Best Policy,” and shows a picture of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio.
I laughed the first time I saw it, because it looks like it belongs in an elementary school. Something else about the poster struck me: The words don’t sound right.
“The Best Policy.” Is that all? What if it does not always appear to be the best policy? Who decided that honesty is the best policy, anyway? The poster indicates a more pervasive trend: to consider a quality or principle (such as honesty) not for its intrinsic value or goodness but for its likely effect in a situa
tion. If the outcome is good, the means of producing the outcome must also be good.
Situations arise in which the unscrupulous course of action appears to be the most attractive. We may even convince ourselves that what we are doing is right, simply because something good comes as a result. Must we always be honest—even when it seems unnecessary or counterproductive?
Yes, when we are faced with ethical dilemmas, we must cling to what we know is inherently right. We must throw off all other temptations. We must be honest, fearless of the consequences.
The next question is obvious and sometimes troublesome: How can we know what is necessarily right and necessarily wrong? Who decides what is good and bad? Can we ever agree? No, we can’t. We won’t agree on everything, but there are some things on which we will all agree:
Honesty implies a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any Way.
Honor implies an active or anxious regard for the standards of one’s profession, calling, or position.
Integrity implies trustworthiness and incorruptibility to a degree that one is incapable of being false to a trust, responsibil- 'ty, or pledge.'
These three qualities—although they are differentiated in Webster’s Dictionary—are thoroughly intertwined. It is difficult to maintain one without the other two. These are the traits that an officer must have to uphold the special trust and confidence that are placed in him or her.
How can we develop into persons of integrity and honor? In some situations it will be obvious, but sometimes we may make dishonorable decisions in subtle, half-conscious ways.
Suppose a junior officer is deployed with his squadron on hoard an aircraft carrier. The commanding officer of the squadron wants to get three more ready room chairs, and he tasks the junior officer with finding them. One of the junior officer’s men tells him he can “acquire” three more chairs from another squadron. The junior officer need only say the word, and the next morning he’ll have the chairs. He might reason that the chairs don’t really belong to the other squadron, or “Didn’t that squadron take some of our float coats and head gear?”
Anything can be rationalized. As Benjamin Franklin writes in his autobiography, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”2
Clearly, the junior officer should find a valid way to procure the ready room chairs. He should be able to Please his commanding officer and act with integrity—this is where he earns his pay. If he can’t satisfy the commanding officer without doing something wrong, which should he choose?
There is another point to consider: When the junior officer’s sailor comes to him and suggests how to get the chairs, what is the junior officer’s immediate reaction? Whatever it is, the reaction will not escape the sailor’s notice. Does he sense the illegitimacy of the idea and make it clear that he Won’t consider it? Does he hesitatingly think about it and then agree (indicating that he knows it is wrong but will do it anyway)? Does he grudgingly and apologetically decline the idea, because he doesn’t want to get anyone in trouble? While this exact situation may never occur, the principles can be applied to many similar problems.
For instance, when some aviators record their flight time, they add five minutes to the time they actually flew. This was the standard procedure in one squadron that I know of, and one of my Naval Leadership professors acknowledges that his former squadron did the same thing. I have not heard a valid reason for the extra five minutes, but one explanation is, “We’re all trying to make it into the airlines.” The rationale, I suppose, is that an extra five minutes tacked onto each flight will add up to a few extra hours every year, eventually giving one a slight advantage (unless his peers are doing the same thing).
As far as the squadron is concerned, honesty doesn’t seem to be “the best policy.” After all, if every other squadron is using the same procedure, the pilots in an honest squadron would not record as many flight hours as their equally experienced counterparts. Why such a big deal about five minutes? Whenever we accustom ourselves to accepting what isn’t true, it is a big deal. The Naval Academy’s Professor Montor quotes Emerson in his book Ethics for the Junior Officer, “Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”5 There are no small, harmless lies. Even those that appear harmless inevitably urge us to more obvious and detrimental ones when the opportunity arises.
So what is the squadron to do? In this case, it must base its policy on something more than what is best for the squadron. It must demand absolute truth in all circumstances. If this puts the pilots and crew behind their peers in flight hours, then they must understand that there is sometimes a price to be paid for doing what is right.
When confronted with the temptation to lie, honesty is not merely the best policy; it’s the only policy.
Jim Wilson, a Naval Academy graduate of 1950, offers an excellent analogy to personal integrity. He describes what happened when his ship, the USS Brush (DD-745), hit an underwater mine off Tanchon, Korea, on 26 September 1950: “The exterior integrity of the ship was severely compromised. There was a big hole in the port side below the waterline. Because of the interior integrity of the ship, we did not lose her.”4 He then relates the concept of “interior integrity” to human beings: “If we maintain an excellent personal integrity, we can survive the most severe storm; opening a door to a seemingly minor breach of integrity, however, is like opening a hatch to the sea. It is difficult to close the hatch again, and the vessel is compromised.
We should aspire to close the hatches whenever falsehood and deceit press upon us. The swirls of moral relativism must not lead us off course. We should live with the zeal of Job, who, despite his persecutions, declared, “Till I die, I will not deny my integrity. I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.”3
'Frederick C. Mish, ed., Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: Merriam Webster, 1990), p. 579.
’Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1908), p. 43.
'Karel Montor, Ethics for the Junior Officer (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994), p. 12.
Mim Wilson, “Are We Seaworthy?” The Hammer, 1993, p. 6.
’Job 27:5-6, Holy Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), p. 458.
Ensign Rouland, a 1994 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, will report to flight school at NAS Pensacola, Florida, in January 1995.