Cultivating Honesty
The virtue of honesty has been seriously neglected in contemporary philosophy. Hardly any papers on the nature of the virtue have appeared in a leading philosophy journal in decades. Similarly, almost nothing has been said about how to cultivate the virtue of honesty. In recent work, Miller has offered a preliminary account of the nature of the virtue of honesty. In this chapter he aims to do the same with honesty cultivation. Specifically, he first looks to the psychological literature on cheating to see what dispositions most people actually possess in this moral domain. Central among them will be beliefs about the wrongness of cheating, as well as desires to cheat while also appearing honest both to others and to ourselves. With this baseline in place, Miller considers what strategies can be recommended to enhance the importance and salience of the wrongness of cheating, while weakening our desires to cheat.