Honesty as Ethical Communicative Practice

Honesty is a central concept in interpersonal communication ethics, typically studied through the lens of self-disclosure in close relationships. Expanding the self-disclosure construct to encompass multiple types of messages occurring in public and private relationships offers additional insights. Across relational contexts, at least two aspects of human communication are relevant to honesty: the content dimension, which references factual information carried by a message; and the relationship dimension, which provides the implied stance or attitude toward the other and/or the relationship. This dimension provides interpretive nuance for the content dimension, its implications for honesty shaped by culture and context. This chapter considers five themes relevant to communication research—self-disclosure and restraint, Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, message design logic, communication competence, and civility, authority, and love—and explore the implications of each content area for honesty in human relationships.

Enacting Integrity

A person of integrity is someone who stands virtuously for her commitments. We receive some direct moral instruction, but the process of developing integrity gets underway in earnest when we glimpse, however dimly, the special goodness of this particular virtue and desire to instantiate it. Exemplars are studied and emulated. One’s own successes and failures in emulation are scrutinized. The role of trusting relationships and supportive communities is essential, even as insulation from critique short-circuits the development of integrity. The account developed here clarifies how it can be the case that admiration and emulation play such a key role in the acquisition of a virtue like integrity, despite the fact that integrity has to do with a willingness to stand for one’s own commitments and therefore for one’s own best judgments.

The Legal Enforcement of Integrity

Talk of “integrity” is ubiquitous in law and legal discourse: Protecting the integrity of our political system has been cited as a basis for anti-corruption laws; preserving the integrity of the legal profession as a principle underlying the rules of lawyer ethics; ensuring integrity in policing and in the wider criminal justice system as a justification for excluding evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution; and protecting bodily integrity as a potential goal for the law of rape and sexual assault. This chapter examines what integrity means in each of these contexts, what these uses have in common, and whether thinking about these various rules and doctrines in terms of integrity rather than other moral concepts leads to any practical difference in outcome. It also asks what the examination of integrity in the law can tell us about the concept of integrity in other contexts.

Developing Truth Seekers

This chapter argues that because truth is both innately valuable and directly connected to human flourishing, the development of truth seekers within the context of formal K–12 education should be a principal aim of a healthy society. It is further argued that while the fruits of truth are profoundly satisfying, truth seeking is neither easy, nor natural, nor widespread. To develop the sort of truth seeking needed to support both individual growth and human progress, we need a truth-centered vision for education—a vision that aims to develop in students the deeply rooted and virtuous traits of intellectual character that flow from a love for truth and produce the kind of intellectual and moral goods that result in human flourishing.

Historical Truth and the Truthfulness of Historians

Although philosophers and theologians have speculated on the ability of timeless, ontological truth to manifest itself in the flux of history, most working historians have focused on epistemological questions concerning the relationship between history as what actually happened and history as its present representation. Two extreme positions—naïve positivism and radical constructivism—have proven equally untenable. This chapter examines three alternatives: falsificationism, the new experientialism, and institutional justificationism. It defends the last of these, which posits a self-reflective community of competence, morally obliged to be truthful and engaged in an endless quest for plausible narratives and compelling explanations of past occurrences, as the most persuasive answer to skepticism about historical truth.

The Virtue of Honesty

Honesty is two-handed: it encompasses both truthfulness and parts of justice, not as a haphazard assemblage, but more like two hands mutually coordinated—different, but essential to each other’s function. Honesty as truthfulness is more than a disposition to tell the truth; it is also a disposition to face and seek the truth, and essentially involves a circumspect concern for and sensitivity to the values of truth in the context of human life. Honesty as justice, too, is a propensity to both actions and emotions, consisting in an intelligent concern that justice be done (i.e., that people get what’s coming to them) in the areas of justice having to do with keeping agreements, complying with rules, and respecting others’ property. Given the many available motives for dishonesty, honesty is reliable only when it partners with other virtues like compassion, humility, self-control, and conscientiousness.

To Thine Own Self Be True? Integrity and Concern for Truth

Most accounts of integrity in the philosophical literature see the virtue as having little to do with truth. At most, typically, one sort of integrity—intellectual integrity—is supposed to exhibit a close connection with truth seeking; a concern for truth is (nearly) absent from other sorts of integrity (e.g., personal integrity, professional integrity, artistic integrity, etc.). This is puzzling, not least because of long-standing connections between integrity, honesty, and sincerity. Against these accounts, I argue that integrity is best understood as a complex character trait that concerns a person’s relation to her own judgment. Understood this way, the proper concern for one’s judgment that is characteristic of the person of integrity essentially involves responsiveness to facts and evidence and a concern for truth. I close by considering advantages of this account.

Intellectual Temperance

From antiquity, temperance has been viewed as the virtue that moderates our appetites for food, drink, and sex. Recent work on the virtues has revived the medieval view that our intellectual appetites also stand in need of moderation. Augustine’s and Aquinas’s work on studiositas and curiositas reveals how our pursuit of knowledge can be virtuous or vicious insofar as it conforms to or deviates from right reason and wise concerns. Their distinctively Christian accounts of temperance also differ from Aristotle’s in denying that one can ever be perfected in temperance. Temptation, and our susceptibility thereto, remains an inescapable feature of this life. In analyzing intellectual temperance both Augustine and Aquinas illustrate how vicious desires for knowledge and experiential acquaintance harm others and ourselves. Further harm arises depending on how the knowledge we acquire is applied.

Justifications as a Threat to Honesty

People often face tempting situations in which they can secure profit in dishonest ways. Here we survey a variety of justification processes that free people to engage in dishonesty. We distinguish two main categories: (1) self-serving justifications, in which one justifies one’s actions by processing information in a self-benefiting way; and (2) socially motivated justifications, in which one justifies unethical acts by reference to an additional, socially beneficial factor. We close with a discussion of the ethical hazard of corrupt collaboration (i.e., joint unethical acts). Corrupt collaboration is a major challenge to institutions and societies as it places individuals in a dilemma: collaborate with peers or follow ethical rules of conduct. Recent work suggests that in such situations, people prefer collaboration over honesty. We discuss the dynamics of corrupt collaboration, the ways in which these toxic relationships emerge and spread, and how we can curb such behavior and encourage honest, ethical conduct.

Becoming Honest

While there is more to being honest than not lying, becoming the sort of person who does not lie unjustifiably is essential to becoming an honest person. This paper will provide an account of the underlying psychology of a certain kind of lie: namely, morally unjustified lies we tell due to a perceived benefit to ourselves. The proposal is that such lies naturally spring from a personal orientation to the world that centers on self-protection, self-preservation, and self-enhancement. This analysis suggests that a way to refrain from lying is to engage in a relationally connected way of life that brings about an alternative orientation to the world in which one’s protection, preservation, and reputation are secure apart from lying. An aspect of this new orientation will be the emerging willingness to relinquish control over the perceived disadvantages of honesty. So, on this view, lying (and other forms of dishonesty) is largely unnecessary when the perceived disadvantages are no longer viewed as a threat to one’s secure standing in the world.