The Honor

A trade gives its members a living; a profession also gives them a way of judging whether that living has been properly earned. The distinction becomes consequential wherever the person buying a service must entrust another with decisions he cannot fully assess. A fee names the payment, and a contract can name much of the work, but the quality of judgment exercised along the way remains partly in the practitioner’s hands. The guild, the bar and the bench differ in their powers and obligations, yet each makes membership a claim about how a person will use an entrusted capacity. Honor binds that claim to the esteem of informed colleagues and, when it has been taken inward, to the member’s own self-respect. Its economic work begins in the space between having the power to do something and regarding it as a proper use of one’s calling.¹

The need for such a commitment is especially clear when expertise is part of the thing being purchased. Kenneth Arrow’s account of medical care starts with uncertainty: the patient cannot reliably know the course of illness, the effect of treatment, or how to evaluate the knowledge for which he is paying. A good outcome can follow poor judgment, and a bad outcome can follow care well given, so the result alone provides an imperfect report on the service. The physician also helps determine what the patient ought to buy. Arrow therefore treats the obligation to use knowledge on the patient’s behalf as part of the service itself, although the purchaser cannot thoroughly inspect it. The professional promise gives the delegation a basis: the person who knows more undertakes to use that advantage with regard for the person who knows less. The promise matters precisely because the fee alone does not tell the buyer how that discretion will be used.²

Fellow practitioners can give the promise a more discerning audience than the customer alone can supply. Someone who knows a craft can recognize the shortcut concealed by a polished surface, the inference that outruns the evidence, or the competent decision whose outcome happened to disappoint. In such a community, esteem attaches to how the work was done as well as to how it was received. Apprenticeship can transmit the distinction through examples: the error acknowledged before it becomes convenient to conceal, the unnecessary work declined, the difficult judgment explained to someone capable of questioning it. These are ways a professional standard can become an expectation shared among people who must rely on one another. The inference has conditions. Colleagues need access to the relevant conduct and a willingness to judge it; expertise kept entirely private, or used chiefly to defend the member’s standing, gives the outsider little additional assurance. A knowledgeable audience supplies a possibility of scrutiny, whose exercise still has to be sustained.

The standard reaches further when the practitioner comes to want the esteem that the work deserves. Adam Smith distinguished satisfaction in being approved from satisfaction in having acted so as to merit approval. Praise founded on ignorance can fail to comfort someone who knows what he has actually done; conduct that goes unseen can still satisfy the person who judges it worthy of an informed spectator’s regard. This is the inward movement described by the earlier conscience: the rule enforced from without becomes a rule felt within. Applied to a profession, it explains how a person can complete the care no colleague will inspect, decline the easy gain no client would detect, or admit a fault that would otherwise remain hidden. The professional standard has become part of the person’s account of himself. Its presence is a possible source of fidelity when observation fails, and its content remains something that the practice must teach and the practitioner must judge.³

The authority to guard a standard also gives a profession an interest in deciding who may enter and whose work may count. A demanding qualification can help an outsider distinguish trained judgment from a persuasive claim to possess it. The same boundary can restrict supply, narrow the range of services offered, or protect established members from a capable newcomer. Arrow treated this tension as part of the institution’s economic character: the uncertainty that makes assurance valuable can bring forth restrictions whose effects deserve examination in their own right. He considered alternatives ranging from exclusion through licensing to certification without exclusion, and noted that training alone cannot guarantee continued good performance. The question follows the purpose of the boundary. Does it make the entrusted service more reliable for those who need it, and at what cost? The profession’s sincere belief in its own standards leaves that question open to evidence.⁴

Honor can therefore ask a member to place the shared task ahead of the group’s immediate comfort. If colleagues reward the concealment of a failure, the desire for their approval can pull against the quality of work their code professes to defend. If they regard candid correction as part of doing the work well, the same social attachment can support an unwelcome truth. The difference concerns the object of the loyalty: the members’ protected standing, the reliability of their work, and the interests of those who depend upon it can diverge. Elster’s warning about social norms applies here with particular force. A rule that solves a collective problem for insiders can create a problem for people outside the group. A profession’s ability to discipline its members must accordingly be judged alongside what it disciplines them for. The strongest evidence of a living standard is its capacity to put even a respected member’s conduct in question when the purpose of the work requires it.⁵

What binds the members of a trade beyond its governing law is the judgment they learn to share about the work, the regard they can confer or withhold, and the obligation a member can carry into the room where no colleague is present. Law and contract can support these relations, and a written code can give them explicit form; their force also depends on how people interpret the code and what they actually admire. Honor supplies something economically valuable when competence and fidelity become objects of informed esteem, so that entrusted discretion carries a responsibility felt by the person exercising it. The standing of the profession then rests on conduct that warrants reliance. A title announces the claim, the community teaches its meaning, and each piece of work either earns it again or spends the trust accumulated by others. The member’s good name belongs to him; the confidence it helps sustain belongs to everyone who has cause to rely on the trade.