I LEAVE my bag, my Walkman and my wallet unattended. I accept rides from strangers. I walk through Charlottesville at 3 a.m. I do not lock my door.
These actions may seem incredibly naive or even dangerous. While I was walking in Charlottesville late one night, a police officer told me that I should return to the campus area because he did not want to see me raped. According to the police officer, by walking through Charlottesville in the middle of the night, I am increasing my chances of being raped.
I do not doubt this belief. Nor do I doubt the fact that leaving my bag unattended will increase the chances that my bag will be stolen.
The question is not whether these probabilities are true, but whether we should let these social probabilities govern our behavior. Relying on probabilities such as these carry heavy opportunity costs, the most detrimental of which is a loss of a belief in other people's honor.
The University community has been fumbling recently with the issue of honor. Part of the discussion has focused on the fact that we no longer trust one another. This seems to be a fair, but correctable, assessment. We can restore a community of trust by relying less on social statistics to guide our thoughts and behavior and more on our personal experiences and judgments.
I have no reason to believe any particular person will steal my bag if I leave it unattended. I have not seen anyone's diagram detailing his grand mission to snatch my bag. Nor have I heard anyone telling her friends of her intention to take my bag. I simply have no reason to think any actual person will steal my bag.
I only have a reason to believe that someone might take my bag. I base this on the fact that I know people have stolen bags before and my belief that more bags have been stolen unattended than bags have been stolen when carried by a person.
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So when I act on these probabilities I don't protect my bag from an actual person, but rather from an unseen evil person who may or may not be lurking in the stacks of the library. Since this person is nobody in particular, it could be anybody. Everyone becomes a suspect. Or even worse, people who "look suspicious" become suspects. Everyone I do not know personally becomes a possible thief. This leads to the destruction of a community of trust in favor of a community of skepticism.
This community of skepticism is not only a value vacuum, but it is created out of poor reasoning. It transfers certain individuals' past actions to other individuals' future actions. It assumes that because I know a guy stole a bag in Clemons library two months ago, I have a reason to believe a different person will steal my bag in Clemons later today.
This reasoning assumes each individual is nothing more than a statistical unit. If taken to the extreme, as in the case of racial profiling, it is easy to see the injustice and fallacy of such reasoning. Individuals cannot be judged by the social demographic they fit into.
Individuals in the University community have committed honor offenses. But if one student cheated on her test last month, that is no reason to think another will cheat on his test tomorrow.
We should not judge individuals except by their own announcements and actions. Regarding honor in the University community, we do have a way to judge each student. Each student signed the honor pledge upon entering the University, declaring his or her intent to abide by the rules of honor as laid out in the pledge.
We have a reason to believe an individual will be honorable, and we have no reason to believe that individual won't be honorable. This applies to each and every student.
We should reserve our belief in others' dishonor for those who have given us a reason to believe they're dishonest. If a student says he plans to steal the answers to his chemistry exam, then we have an actual reason to think he's dishonorable.
Otherwise, we should believe each student is honorable because we have a reason to believe this: each student's actual promissory declaration to abide by the principles of honor.
For those non-students in the University community who haven't signed the pledge and we don't know personally, we haven't reason to believe they're devoted to honor. However, we don't have a reason to believe they're intent on dishonor. Therefore, we should refrain from prejudging them and remain open-minded.
If we adjust our beliefs and behavior to social probabilities, we irrationally stop believing in honor because there have been a few cases of dishonor. We should resist this trend and believe what individuals actually give us reason to believe.
(Kelly Sarabyn's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at ksarabyn@cavalierdaily.com.)
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