In his new book, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, Christian B. Miller provides an account of honesty that addresses some conceptual difficulties facing the virtue, including the wide range of behaviours that seem to challenge honesty and its relationship to practical wisdom. In addition to holding the A. C. Reid Professorship of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, Miller is currently the Director of the Honesty Project. His work bridges philosophical inquiry with empirical data from psychology, presenting insights about character and virtue to a wide audience. In this interview, Miller discusses gaps in past philosophical and psychological treatments of honesty, what his new book provides to the discussion, and his next project.
What is your work about?
The title gives it away! It is about the virtue of honesty, which I approach from the perspectives of philosophy and psychology.
The first half of the book is more conceptual. I begin by suggesting that honesty works against a wide range of behaviors, including lying, cheating, stealing, promise-breaking, misleading, hypocrisy, self-deception, and bullshitting. This raises a unification challenge, since it is initially hard to see what these various behaviors have in common. I offer a solution to this challenge by arguing that the core of honesty, when it comes to honest behavior at least, is a matter of not intentionally distorting the facts as the person takes them to be. This gets revised as we go along and consider important cases like the Nazi-at-the-Door and Huck Finn. One interesting development I consider is whether “the facts” can include the moral facts, and if so, whether many cases where we do something we take to be morally wrong are also cases of dishonest behavior.
But honesty is not just a matter of behavior. It is a moral virtue, and so it pertains to thinking and feeling as well. One chapter explores the relationship between practical wisdom and the cognitive side of honesty, and there I flirt with a skeptical position about practical wisdom. In particular I raise concerns about the standard model of practical wisdom, whereby it is a character trait which is distinct psychologically from the moral virtues, but which is necessary for them to count as virtues. Another chapter looks at honest motivation, and while it excludes self-interested motives from counting, it adopts a pluralist approach in general which encompasses friendship, caring, justice, dutiful, and other kinds of motives.
The second half of the book turns to more empirical matters. It notes that there isn’t much research in psychology or behavioral economics on many facets of honesty and dishonesty, such as stealing or promise-breaking. But there are a number of studies on cheating and lying, and in one chapter I review many of their results. From there we can construct an explanatory psychological model to fit with the data, and then compare this model with the psychology of an honest and a dishonest person. The upshot, I suggest, is that both the model and the empirical studies in general do not fit with the claim that either the virtue or vice are widely possessed. Instead, there is good preliminary reason to think that most people have a mixed character in this area of their lives which is intermediate between honesty and dishonesty.
The book concludes with some preliminary reflections on how we might grow in honesty, given the significant character gap between our actual character and the honest character we should strive to develop.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
I wrote my dissertation on issues in meta-ethics and moral psychology, but got a bit burned out on them by the time I was about five years out of graduate school. At that point I shifted my focus to virtue and character, specifically interdisciplinary work on whether moral character traits exist and if so, what they look like. This led to about 10 years of work and several books and articles, in particular Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (OUP, 2013) and Character and Moral Psychology (OUP, 2014).
Eventually, I got a bit burned out on this topic as well, but not before I tried my hand for the first time at doing more public philosophy. My trade book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? attempted to take some of this academic research and make it more accessible and engaging for a non-academic audience.
Once The Character Gap came out, though, I was searching for something new to work on. That’s when I got interested in the topic of neglected virtues. More on this next.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Well, honesty is a virtue, and clearly an important virtue as well. It is both intrinsically good and has a number of important instrumental benefits as well. But, and this really surprised me, it is also stunningly neglected. ‘Neglected’ in the sense that there has been very little work done on honesty by academic philosophers in recent decades. So little, in fact, that I could only find two articles in professional philosophy journals on this virtue in the past fifty years! So the need was pretty apparent to me.
Why do you think honesty has been neglected by philosophy in recent years?
I don’t have a good answer to this question, but I can speculate. Part of the answer might be that individual virtues in general were neglected for many years. With the renewed interest in virtue in the 1970s and 80s, much of the focus was on virtue ethics as an approach in normative ethical theorizing. Only more recently have a number of particular virtues been getting attention, and even so, some still remain neglected such as generosity and graciousness. Another piece of the puzzle could be that perhaps there was an assumption that there wasn’t much of interest to say about honesty. I hope this book will help to undermine that assumption, if it was in fact one in the first place. Finally, for a long time, no one has said anything really controversial or provocative about honesty. Contrast this with modesty. Julia Driver wrote a famous article in 1989 developing what became a very controversial account of modesty. This led to a whole pile of papers being published in the ensuing years. Nothing like this happened in the case of honesty. Who would have thought that there would be 10 times as many papers written by philosophers on modesty rather than honesty?
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
Probably the overall account of honesty. One reason this book was both challenging and rewarding to write, was that I didn’t have an existing literature in philosophy against which I could carve out my own approach. I basically had to start from scratch for much of the conceptual work in the book. I’m really excited about the proposal I came up with. While I realize that it has flaws and that many philosophers who read the book will try to show where I went wrong and how their proposals are better, I still found it rewarding to develop the first worked-out account and thereby move the discussion of honesty forward. Hopefully the account can serve as a springboard for others to use to do better than I did and to help make further progress in this area.
What’s next for you?
After I finished my two academic books on character, I wrote a trade book trying to disseminate the ideas to a wider audience. I hope to do the same by taking the ideas in Honesty and presenting them more accessibly for non-academic readers, with plenty of examples, personal anecdotes, connections to current events, and illustrations from literature and sports. The plan is to make a lot of progress on this project when I have more free time in the summer of 2022.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
Having explored the virtue of honesty, I’d like to consider other virtues that have been neglected in the philosophy literature. One example is generosity, which also has almost nothing written about it in the past fifty years. I’ve worked out some of the preliminary details of my thinking about generosity in a recent paper. Another example is patience. There is a book and a few articles on patience, but again overall not much has been said. Finally, practical wisdom is starting to finally get some attention, with a new collection that just came out from Routledge. In my paper for that volume, I argue for a highly controversial skeptical position. There is a lot more to say there as well.
Christian B. Miller
Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is currently the Director of the Honesty Project, funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In recent years he was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project, funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and the Director of the Character Project, funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 100 academic papers as well as Moral Psychology with Cambridge University Press (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press).
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
Dear Authors: To refer to honesty as a virtue is itself leap in logic beyond what can be demonstrated. On a personal level it is doubtful if honesty is a virtue and at a societal level it is actually a conduit to anarchy. In a complex society, systematic dishonesty is a functional necessity. You cannot have a society where every individual reveals their true intentions, motives or desires. A complex society requires systematic role playing which means saying, acting or evoking society’s expectations for a role rather than a true revelation of one’s inner beliefs. This is the real reason why honesty has been ignored as a virtue for so long, Society today is too complex for honesty to be regarded as a virtue. Dishonesty is the glue which bonds modern society.
On a limited personal level, honesty might be regarded as a virtue, yet only in connection with more recognized virtues such as courage or wisdom. As a philosopher, one should honesty speak of truth as one sees it and a priest should honestly speak of God. Yet, it is uncertain that this view would hold beyond these limited situations. As Socrates noted, if a benighted person intended to do harm to another and i knew where that person was, would it be a virtue to honesty tell him? Of course, there are many other situations such as this.
On a simple level, honesty seems to be a virtue, yet in this imperfect world it is doubtful one. Untruth seems to be a condition of life at least as we know it.