Honesty: Respect for the right not to be deceived

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore the characteristic reason that motivates a virtuously honest person to perform honest actions. I critically examine previous accounts of honesty’s characteristic motivating reason, including Christian Miller’s pluralistic account, which allows various virtuous motivating reasons to count as honesty’s motivation. I then introduce the respect for the right not to be deceived as the moral ground that characteristically motivates a virtuously honest person’s honest action. After addressing possible objections, I conclude by discussing its educational implications on cultivating the virtue of honesty.

KEYWORDS:

• Honesty
• virtue
• respect
• right
• deception
• moral education

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Christian Miller, Dong-ik Jang, and Nicholas Colgrove for the helpful comments. I would also like to thank the audience at 2022 Jubilee Centre Annual Conference, 2022 Honesty Project Conference, 2022 APA Central Division, 2022 Seoul National University (SNU) graduate seminar on honesty, 2022 SNU Political Theory Workshop, 2021 Korean Society of Ethics, as well as anonymous reviewers of this journal and of the Honesty Project’s funding competition for their helpful comments and discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Few exceptions include Baier (1990), Smith (2003), Carr (2014), Wilson (2018), Miller (2020), and Miller (2021).

2. Henceforth, I will use ‘a virtuously honest person’ and ‘an honest person’ interchangeably to refer to a person who fully possesses the virtue of honesty.

3. By a ‘distinctive virtue,’ I do not mean a virtue that is independent of the considerations of all other virtues. After all, if we accept some form of unity (or reciprocity) of virtue thesis—the thesis that one who fully possesses one virtue must possess all other virtues—each virtue does not stand alone in a strict sense. All that I mean is that honesty is a virtue that deserves a separate name and treatment as do, say, benevolence and courage.

4. Miller mentions the possibility that honesty is a species of justice (Miller, 2021, pp. 22–23). I am open to the possibility that honesty is a subvirtue of justice. But even if this is the case, we should be able to distinguish honesty from other subvirtues of justice (such as fair-mindedness or compliance to rules), as well as other virtues such as benevolence or prudence.

5. This seems to be the account that Rosalind Hursthouse would have in her mind considering what she says about lying: ‘[W]hat is wrong with lying, when it is wrong, is not that it is unjust (because it violates someone’s “right to the truth” or their “right to be treated with respect”) but that it is dishonest, and dishonesty is a vice.’ (Hursthouse, 1999, p. 8, emphasis added).

6. Although I use ‘honesty’ to refer to honesty as a moral virtue, there can be a controversy about whether intellectual honesty should count as a species of honesty. For the reason of space, I will remain open about this issue. For the purpose of this paper, it would suffice to clarify that what I call ‘intellectual honesty’ is meaningfully different from honesty as a moral virtue and that the latter is what I focus on here.

7. I understand ‘deceiving’ broadly to include various dishonest acts such as lying, cheating, and misleading. For the purpose of this paper, ‘deceiving’ can be roughly understood as involving ‘intentionally causing someone to have a false belief that the deceiver believes to be false’ (Carson, 2010, p. 46).

8. For the debates on the possibility of acting for the right reasons without being consciously motivated by them, see, for example, Pollard (2003), Snow (2006), and Asma (2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the New Faculty Startup Fund from Seoul National University and a grant from the Honesty Project, based at Wake Forest University and funded by the John Templeton Foundation. I am deeply grateful for this support. The views expressed are my own and not those of these funders.

Notes on contributors

Sungwoo Um

Sungwoo Um is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethics Education at Seoul National University (SNU). His research focuses on such issues as virtues, autonomy, and personal relationships.