The Honesty Crisis

Honesty is under a lot of pressure today in areas of society ranging from politics to religion to celebrity culture to education. But honesty is also incredibly valuable and important. So it is worth doing what we can to try to protect against further erosion of this virtue. Or so I argue in my new book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Cherished Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. Here I summarize some of the main claims I defend in the book, and invite readers to consider taking a deeper dive. More specifically, we will touch on why honesty matters, what honesty even is, and some areas where there is an ongoing honesty crisis. 

The Value of Honesty

Honesty is indeed valuable. It helps to show respect for others, to treat them as persons with dignity, and to demonstrate that we value their autonomy. Honesty promotes trust and credibility, and prevents harm. It also fosters healthy relationships, and strengthens organizations and societies. Empirically, increased honesty is related to decreased aggression, higher GPA, and increased performance, among other benefits (Park and Peterson 2008 and Sosik et al. 2012). Without honesty, communication would break down, relationships would fail, and businesses would crumble. Competitive athletics, financial investing, and academic assessments would all cease to exist.

Fortunately, people tend to recognize just how important honesty is. Indeed, there is actual data which suggests that we care about honesty more than any other quality a person might possess. For instance, our team at Wake Forest University ran a study in which participants were given 60 different names of traits, like being forgiving, intelligent, mature, kind, lazy, needy, and humble (Hartley et al. 2016). Honesty was on the list too. Then participants in the study were asked to consider three questions:

“Your task is to group these words into those that are most characteristic of a person you would like…”

“Your task is to group these words into those that are most characteristic of a person you would respect…”

‘‘Your task is to group these words into those that are most informative toward feeling like you understand who someone really is…”

Which trait emerged in first place out of the 60 on the list? Surely it would be something like being compassionate or kind or maybe fair, right? No, it was honesty in all three cases. More than all the other traits, people rated honesty as central to what they liked, respected, and wanted to know about other people.

This resonates with our own experience too. It is often deeply upsetting to find out that a friend has been lying to us, a spouse has cheated on us, or a sibling has been stealing from us. We care about others treating us in an honest way, and when they don’t, it usually hurts. A lot.

So honesty matters, and people care a great deal about it. But what even is honesty in the first place?

A Sketch of An Account

Let’s begin by distinguishing the virtue of honesty from some related notions. Suppose you hear someone say:

“Smith did the honest thing in telling the truth on the stand in the courtroom.”

The speaker is offering an assessment of Smith’s behavior in the courtroom. But even if that assessment is correct, it is not the same thing as saying that Smith is an honest person. For one thing, it is possible to perform an honest action yet not be an honest person. Smith, for instance, might not be honest at all, and only told the truth on the stand for fear of being punished for lying. So honesty and honest actions are pretty clearly distinct concepts.

On the flip side, someone can be an honest person without her exhibiting any honest behavior for an extended period of time. Rather, because of facts internal to who she is psychologically, her psychological makeup and character, it is true of her that she is honest, even if that psychology does not manifest in outward behavior. 

So being an honest person is distinct from performing a single honest action. More closely connected to honesty, though, is the concept of acting from honesty. If Smith does the honest thing, and he is acting from honesty, then that does entail that he is an honest person (you cannot act from honesty without having honesty in your character!). But here too, the honest action is distinct from, and dependent upon, the virtue of honesty. The latter is what explains the performance of the former.

So what would be some examples involving the virtue of honesty, strictly speaking? I have in mind statements like these:

• “Roberts is an honest person.”
• “I have spent enough time with him to know that he is really dishonest and you don’t want to be his friend.”
• “Her honest character really stands out in her application; we should definitely hire her.”

Now the focus is on the traits of character of these individuals. Thus for Roberts to have the virtue of honesty, he has to have some stable tendency or disposition of the honest sort. 

This is a familiar picture of how character traits work from the philosophy literature. Roberts’s honesty can give rise to honest thoughts about, say, the fact that exaggerating a charity donation on his taxes is cheating, and consequently how cheating on his taxes would be wrong. These thoughts in turn can lead him to act in honest ways, in this case by reporting the correct figures on his taxes. The honest disposition itself is distinct, though, from these thoughts and actions. It plays a causal role in giving rise to them, and in turn is part of the causal explanation for them. 

Furthermore, thoughts stemming from an honest disposition would not be activated all the time in every situation—exceptions might include sleeping, watching TV, or looking at one’s phone out of boredom. Rather, only certain situations Roberts is in which are relevant to this trait—such as parties or classrooms—might activate his honest disposition. Trying to accurately predict when this will happen depends on a number of specific features of his psychology, such as what he notices, how he interprets events in his surroundings, what else is going on in his mind at the time, and so forth. Once activated, though, his honest disposition can play an active role in his psychology. Using the philosophical jargon, Roberts’s honest thoughts can go from being merely dispositional thoughts, to being occurrent thoughts.

Tying these observations together, here is a helpful starting point for thinking about the virtue of honesty:

The virtue of honesty is a psychological disposition that, when triggered in conditions relevant to honesty, can reliably cause the formation of thoughts and feelings of an honest kind, which in many cases can subsequently give rise to honest actions.

Naturally the honest thoughts and feelings won’t always translate into honest actions. Sometimes the environment will not cooperate, say if one is prevented from speaking or acting. Sometimes other, more important considerations come into play, say in cases where lying or cheating could prevent a terrorist attack. But other things being equal, the triggering of an honest disposition gives rise to occurrent thoughts which in turn give rise to intentional honest action.

From here it would be natural to go on and spell out what form honest thoughts take, what virtuous motivation for honesty looks like, how the virtue of honesty relates to practical wisdom, and other topics which are essential to developing a fuller conceptual account of a moral virtue. Surprisingly, philosophers in the past 50 years have said almost nothing about these issues, and space does not allow for us to do so either (for much more, see Miller 2021). 

But let’s at least say a bit more about honest and dishonest behavior. Examples of honest behavior include telling the truth, making a genuine promise, and not stealing even when you know you would not get caught. But philosophers have neglected the question of what an honest behavior—as such—is. Another way to put the question is, what do acts of truth-telling, genuine promising, and not stealing, among others, have in common such that they all count as forms of honest behavior?

So far as I can tell, I am the only one thus far to have developed a detailed account of honest actions. The central notion at work in my account is reliably not intentionally distorting the facts as the person sees them. An honest person, in other words, has a character trait whose functioning importantly gives rise to behaviors which do not intentionally distort the facts both to herself and to other people.

I do not try to define “distorting,” but a close synonym is captured by “misrepresenting.” An honest person does not intentionally misrepresent the facts by her lights. For “intentionally,” the contrast is with “accidentally.” If by accident a banana happens to fall into someone’s pocketbook at the grocery store and she walks out without paying for it, she is not intentionally distorting the facts in my sense. 

Finally, the facts are to be understood subjectively, not objectively. In other words, honest behavior reflects how the person sees the world, and not necessarily how the world really is. Indeed, since it relies on mere subjective representations of facts, my account will have to allow for cases of a person acting honestly even in the face of massive error about the world. 

With this framework in place, let’s turn to what is happening to honesty today.

Our Honesty Crises

Even though honesty is important to cultivate, we are facing an unprecedented erosion of honesty today—what I call an honesty crisis. Indeed, we are facing not just one crisis, but a variety of honesty crises in different parts of our society. An honesty crisis occurs when there is a significant surge in dishonest behavior due to two factors: (i) dishonesty becoming easier to get away with than it was before, and (ii) dishonesty becoming more enticing or appealing to engage in. When we are in such a crisis, everything dishonest accelerates.

There are many areas of society facing honesty crises. I focus on six in particular:

• In online spaces, the frequency of deepfakes has skyrocketed, now that they are simple to make and basically untraceable. Distributing these recordings is often dishonest, and undermines our ability to trust what we see and hear online.
• With the easy availability of pornography, anonymous chatrooms, and infidelity websites like Ashley Madison, cheating in a relationship has never been easier.
• In education, many students are using AI to complete their graded assignments for them—papers, problem sets, and coding projects—with little chance of being detected by their professors.
• In politics, social media helps with the dissemination of fake news, and polarization reduces our tendency to condemn political dishonesty if it aligns with our own views.
• In public spaces, it is easier to become a celebrity than it has ever been in human history, and the allure of celebrity might be stronger than ever before too. Yet celebrity encourages greater dishonesty, since celebrity tends to be insatiable, to be closely guarded, to erode moral safeguards, and to create greater opportunities to be dishonest.
• Religious leaders are increasingly confronted by pressures to be dishonest that arise in different areas of their lives, including pressures to engage in sermon plagiarism, have inappropriate emotional and sexual relationships, and fall into the trappings of celebrity. 

In each of these cases I claim that many people’s character is being shaped in a direction further and further away from the virtue of honesty. If this is right, it would be a tremendous loss not just for us as individuals, but for society at large.

A thread running through all of these honesty crises is the role of new technologies. Students are using AI, as are pastors and deepfake creators. Social media platforms are elevating celebrity status, and the Internet is making infidelity easier than ever. To be sure, the technology itself is not inherently dishonest. Rather it is enabling new capabilities for humans to use for good or ill. Nobody says that AI capacities for video creation have to be used to make non-consensual deepfake pornography, for instance. But this is now being done at an alarming rate.

So honesty is extremely important, and people care a great deal about it. Yet we are facing the frightening reality of a number of honesty crises in our society. There needs to be a collective effort to confront these crises head-on.

The main purpose of the book is to highlight this sobering reality. But in addition, it turns out that in many cases we are not powerless in the face of these crises. There are both individual and institutional strategies available to help us push back. Individually, for instance, role models of honesty can inspire us to be better, and perspective-taking has been found to reduce temptation to cheat in certain circumstances. Institutionally, cultures where cheating or stealing are prevalent make it very hard to resist joining in such behavior. Cultures committed to honor, integrity, and truthfulness can curb temptation to cheat. 

However, to be very clear, I do not have any quick fixes, easy remedies, or simple solutions. At times, I enthusiastically support more nuanced strategies for resisting an honesty crisis. But to be honest (which seems appropriate), there are times where I just admit that I do not see a way to move forward constructively. AI student cheating with respect to graded home work is one of them.

Hopefully my work will serve as a wakeup call to pay attention to the many ways in which it is becoming easier to act deceptively, and to do what we can to protect our most treasured virtue.

(Disclosure: this post draws extensively from Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, and The Honesty Crisis, both with permission from Oxford University Press.)