To the Editor:

More and more people are complaining about Princeton University moving the Dinky station, but few do anything about it. That’s a pity because the University’s new arts classrooms can be built without the move. Then we’d keep a right-of-way on which, within three or four years, energy-saving light rail could glide all the way to Nassau Street. Moreover, there’s still time, while court cases are pending, to help stop the move.

Here’s why you should help. Over the summer, the University’s new president, Christopher Eisgruber, assigned Kwame Appiah’s The Honor Code to all incoming freshmen so it could be discussed throughout the year. Appiah, a Princeton professor, argues that changing ideas of honor more than morality (or both honor and morality) ended dueling and slavery in Britain and foot-binding in China. In fact, he writes, these social revolutions were fueled by a growing sense of shame, honor’s opposite.

Is Appiah’s historical account persuasive? If A happened before B, did A cause B? If some public-spirited Englishman wrote about the immorality and the national dishonor of African slavery in British territories, did changes in a widely-held honor code lead to abolition? I find Appiah much more persuasive in his general arguments about the nature of honor. And he does suggest to me why simply complaining might help save the Dinky and its right-of-way. Let me call especially on Princeton University’s tenured faculty to complain, those professors most committed to living here and least dependent on their employer’s favor.

Appiah suggests that people who share an honor code belong to an “honor community.” They enforce their code themselves by ostracizing those who deviate from it. Honor helps drive human behavior because few of us can endure shame, because our happiness depends on our peers’ esteem. Princeton’s tenured faculty are in both our honor community and in Nassau Hall’s.

As our peers, tenured professors honor what we honor: they also value a walkable, energy-saving, civic-minded community, not one in which their employer acts unilaterally to serve its own interests. And, as Nassau Hall’s peers, they can hold the University to a higher moral standard. We can all accord the University what Appiah calls “recognition respect,” recognizing its intrinsic qualities of scholarship and power. But we can withhold our esteem until it meets our moral standards, until its scholars help bend its power toward responsible development.

What does honor do that morality alone cannot, according to Appiah? We can act morally all by ourselves. But it takes a sense of honor to drive us beyond doing what is right. “It takes a sense of honor to feel implicated by the acts of others,” Appiah writes. Honor makes us insist that something be done when others do wrong.

Please ask any tenured faculty members you know to take time to complain about moving the Dinky. Then complain to them if they don’t.

ANNE WALDRON NEUMANN

Alexander Street