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

1. Introduction

Hardly anyone would doubt that honesty is an important virtue. However, there have been insufficient philosophical studies on what constitutes the nature and value of honesty as a distinctive virtue.¹ There are many important philosophical challenges to be addressed: What is the scope of honesty? What is the relationship between honesty and lying? Is there a vice of excess for honesty? Among the philosophical issues related to honesty, I find one issue particularly interesting and important: What is the characteristic reason that motivates a virtuously honest person to perform honest actions? As Wilson (2018, p. 108) and Miller (2020) have recently pointed out, developing a coherent account of the virtuously honest person’s motivating reason is critical for understanding the virtue of honesty. But few, if any, philosophical studies have been conducted on this topic.

This paper explores what a virtuously honest person characteristically takes to be the reason to perform honest actions.² After justifying the need for a new account of the characteristic motivating reason of honesty, I argue that to respect what I call the right not to be deceived is the moral ground that provides the characteristic reason that motivates a virtuously honest person’s honest action. Next, I define the right not to be deceived and examine its sources. I show how it is distinguished from other rights such as the right to know or the right to autonomy. After addressing possible objections, I conclude by discussing its educational implications on cultivating the virtue of honesty.

2. Honesty’s characteristic motivating reason

People say, ‘honesty is the best policy.’ Indeed, in real-life situations, there can be many reasons to perform ‘honest’ actions. It makes you (or at least makes you appear) more trustworthy, strengthens your relationships, and provides consistency to your life. Honest actions can also manifest different sorts of virtuous traits. It manifests benevolence when you tell the truth to protect someone’s well-being; it manifests fair-mindedness when you avoid deception because you think it would be unfair. However, if honesty is a virtue that is distinguished from other virtues such as benevolence or fair-mindedness, what would be the characteristic moral ground that serves to motivate a person who possesses this virtue to perform honest actions? To pursue self-interests? To promote others’ well-being? Or simply to be or become an honest person? To understand honesty as a virtue meaningfully distinct from other virtues, it would be important to examine the reason that characteristically motivates the honest person to perform honest actions. Despite its importance, there have been few attempts to explore this topic.

An adequate account of an honest person’s characteristic motivating reason should be able to explain, first, why an honest person’s honest actions merit moral praise. As Robert C. Roberts and Ryan West point out, ‘motivation is crucial to the virtue of honesty, and that not just any motivation to tell the truth will do’ (Roberts & West, 2020, p. 108). If an account of honesty sets no limit on the kind of reasons that motivates an honest person, then it would be hard for such an account to explain the moral praiseworthiness of acting from honesty, since one may perform seemingly honest actions based on an egoistic desire or other non-praiseworthy motives. For example, a merchant may refrain from deceiving her customers just because she believes that being honest is the best way to maximize her profits. A boy may keep telling the truth because of a mere obsession with not lying, which has been inculcated through his mother’s strict education. In the case of honest actions motivated by such considerations as self-interest or obsession, it is hard to find them morally praiseworthy. Thus, without specifying the moral ground that is supposed to motivate to act from the virtue of honesty, it would be hard to tell when and why it is morally praiseworthy to perform such actions.

Miller’s pluralistic account addresses the problem of being too egoistic or self-regarding by arguing that an honest person’s motivating reasons include dutiful and altruistic kinds but not egoistic ones (Miller, 2020, 2021 Ch. 4.):

The virtue of honesty is the virtue of being disposed, centrally and reliably, to not intentionally distort the facts as the agent sees them, and primarily for good or virtuous motivating reasons of one or more kinds K₁ through K_N of sufficient motivating strength and modal robustness and scope to encompass all human beings, along with the absence of significant nonvirtuous motivation to distort the facts as the agent sees them. (Miller, 2021, p. 108)

Miller’s pluralistic account allows for different kinds of virtuous motives (e.g., a caring attitude or a sense of fairness) to provide the impetus for being honest, thereby showing why someone who performs honest actions from such motives is virtuous and thus morally praiseworthy. Consider the following replies to the question, ‘Why did you tell the truth about your past business failures, when it would have been so much easier to lie?’:

‘He deserved to hear the truth.’

‘I don’t lie to my friends.’

‘It is important for us to be able to trust each other.’

‘A good person wouldn’t do that.’

‘It would not have been honest.’ (Miller, 2021, p. 94)

According to the pluralistic account, each of these virtuous considerations may qualify as an honest person’s motivating reasons. However, Miller’s pluralistic approach cannot adequately explain what marks honesty off from other virtues. That is, the pluralistic approach fails to specify the ultimate moral ground of honesty as a virtue that establishes honesty’s status as a distinctive virtue. If various virtuous motivating reasons do the work of making honest actions morally praiseworthy each time, then it may undermine the status of honesty as a distinctive virtue that deserves a separate name since performing honest actions may be understood merely as one specific way in which other virtues (e.g., benevolence or fair-mindedness) are manifested.^3,4

Thus, an adequate account of honesty needs to specify the moral ground that provides the characteristic reason that motivates an honest person to perform honest actions. Wilson suggests that this characteristic motivating reason of honesty is to avoid deception (Wilson, 2018). However, as he acknowledges, this is not a sufficiently ‘deep’ account of the motivation of honesty as a virtue since one may still be disposed to avoid deception motivated by non-praiseworthy reasons such as egoistic desires or fear of a bad reputation. It still does not offer a convincing account of what makes honesty’s characteristic motivating reason morally praiseworthy.

Nor does being honest for honesty’s own sake adequately explain the honest person’s characteristic motivating reason.⁵ For it presupposes the value or goal of honesty, which is to be explained first here. An answer like, ‘I did it because it is the honest thing to do.’, would not explain, let alone justify, much about why she performs the honest action where she could easily tell a lie. This is so even if such an answer can be a consideration that motivates people to perform honest actions. Still, there should be some deeper motivating reason that characterizes honesty as a distinctive virtue. Of course, to the question, ‘Why are you doing it?’, ‘Because it is the virtuous (benevolent, fair, honest, courageous) thing to do’, can normally serve as a reasonable answer in our everyday life. But this type of answer is not adequate because it does not shed sufficient light on why it is important to do what is demanded by the particular virtue in question unless the questioner already understands and accepts the importance of that virtue. Moreover, while referring to honesty as the reason for not deceiving is commonly found in our ordinary conversations, ‘being honest’ itself cannot be part of what explains honesty’s characteristic motivating reason. For ‘being honest’ cannot be part of its own honest-making feature.

It may be suggested that an honest person perform honest acts for truth’s sake. For example, David Carr says that the ‘“target” of honesty would seem to be truth’ (Carr, 2014, p. 4) and takes ‘the disposition to seek and honor truth’ as ‘the soul of honesty as a moral virtue’ (Carr, 2014, p. 9). I admit that such a disposition may constitute honesty as an epistemic virtue, which I think is better called ‘intellectual honesty’, since it helps the agent herself to get closer to the truth. It is true that both intellectual honesty and moral honesty shares the concern for the truth in some sense. Even honesty as a moral virtue is at least indirectly related to truth in the sense that not deceiving—that is, preventing someone from acquiring the truth in question—owes its importance to the value of truth. If it were not important to acquire truth and avoid falsehood, deception would not have been an ethical issue from the beginning. However, I do not think seeking and honoring truth is the characteristic motivating reason of honesty as a moral virtue, on which I intend to focus here. Honesty as a moral virtue should involve some virtuous way of treating a certain morally significant aspect of the person to whom we are trying to be honest, rather than truth per se.⁶

The care for being an honest person would also not be in the motivational profile of a fully honest person. While the motivation to be honest is neither vicious nor egoistic, it is too self-regarding to be the characteristic motivating reason for an honest person to perform honest actions. The honest person’s focus would not be on one’s own character, but on what the virtue of honesty demands. A person who is not yet but wants to be virtuous may perform virtuous actions to become or to be a virtuous person, but a fully virtuous person would be motivated by what the given virtue tells to care about, not (at least not primarily) by such a self-regarding consideration. For example, a fully benevolent person would help a person in need motivated by a concern for that person’s well-being rather than by the desire to be or become a benevolent person. One of the reasons why deceiving is bad would plausibly be that it renders the deceiver a dishonest person. But to preserve or promote one’s own honesty seems to be too self-regarding to be an honest person’s characteristic motivating reason.

3. Respect for the right not to be deceived

3.1. Respect for the right not to be deceived as honesty’s characteristic motivating reason

Honesty, as I understand it, is a matter of respecting something valuable in the person in question in the context of communication. In the sphere of communication, the concern should be focused on the person with whom one tries to communicate. I propose that respect for the right not to be deceived is the moral ground that provides the characteristic motivating reason for an honest person to perform honest actions.⁷ By saying that the right not to be deceived (henceforth, RND) grounds the characteristic motivating reason of an honest person, I am not claiming that an honest person would be consciously motivated by the reason of respecting RND whenever she performs honest actions. What I claim is that to respect RND should at least be an honest person’s underlying reason to perform the given honest action, even if does not serve as a salient motivating reason on the surface level of her consciousness.⁸

Whether the respect for RND is serving as a reason gets clearer in a situation where an honest action serves no ulterior purpose or where it seems to even conflict with other considerations such as those of prudence or benevolence. Consider the context in which Mola asks his friend Anya about which city is the capital of Chile. She tells him the correct answer as she knows it—Santiago. Suppose that telling this truth would neither promote her or his well-being nor serve any other purposes. So she could easily have chosen to deceive Mola about Chile’s capital were she not an honest person. But given that she is an honest person, of course, she chooses to avoid deceiving Mola. The question here is what she, qua an honest person, would take to be the reason not to deceive him in such a situation.

The reason would not be the desire to show off her knowledgeability, since such a self-centered consideration does not seem to be an honest person’s reason to perform honest actions. The action performed may still qualify as an honest action, but that would be different from an action motivated by a virtuous reason. Also, it would not be a concern for Mola’s well-being, since it is assumed in this case that knowing the capital of Chile would not promote his well-being in any sense. If Anya is an honest person, I suggest, she would have told the truth to Mola out of respect for his RND. Of course, non-virtuous motivating reasons do not disqualify her as an honest person insofar as they are compatible with respect for RND. But if such a reason is what characteristically motivates someone to perform honest actions, it would be hard to ascribe the virtue of honesty to her.

Note that avoiding deception from some other virtuous reasons does not render the agent an honest person in a strict sense unless respecting RND is at least an underlying reason to act so. Of course, a case of an honest action may still be virtuous and morally praiseworthy even if it is motivated by the reasons characteristic of virtues other than honesty. For example, suppose that when Julie asked, Jim told her, out of concern for her well-being, what he heard about Wayne’s plan to assault her. This action would be virtuous, however, qua a benevolent action. That is, while it may typically count as an honest act, strictly speaking, this is a case of acting from benevolence, not from honesty.

In this example, avoiding deception is just used as a means to protect Julie’s well-being. Jim has a deep care and concern for her, and, if he lacks the virtue of honesty, he would have easily deceived her if he thought doing so would have been better for her well-being. Suppose that he avoided deceiving her just because he believes that it is the best way to promote her well-being while lacking respect for her RND. Then he may well lie to her on another occasion insofar as the situation is such that deceiving her is the best way to promote her well-being. In this sense, telling the truth in this case is not more than a means to protect her well-being that is contingently chosen because of the given circumstances. However, if he were honest, he would at least take respecting her RND as a reason that competes with her reason of benevolence in deciding what to do in the case where these two considerations appear to be in conflict. In our case, Jim’s care for Julie’s well-being should be able to compete with the respect for her (or someone else’s) RND if, for example, deceiving her seems to be the best way to promote her well-being.

I do not deny that some honest actions can be performed motivated by other virtuous considerations such as concern for the given person’s well-being. Such an action would be not only honest but also virtuously motivated. What I am denying is that this is an action performed from honesty in a strict sense. I do not mean to explain away any unexpected motivation that is not respect for RND as belonging to a different virtue. First, a virtue has a behavioral, as well as a motivational, aspect. Thus, other things being equal, regardless of the motivation, one who performs honest actions more stably would be more honest at least in the behavioral aspect than one who does so less stably. Second, actual human psychology is complicated. Other virtues’ characteristic motivating reasons may affect, directly or indirectly, that of honesty. For example, someone who tends to be motivated by the consideration of giving others a fair share may also be more likely to be motivated by respect for their RND. Thus, my account allows for someone to be called honest at least to some degree even if her honest actions are motivated by reasons other than respect for RND. What I deny about such a person is that she fully possesses the virtue of honesty.

Let me summarize my point. There can be three possible motivating reasons to perform an honest action: 1) for a non-virtuous reason (e.g., an egoistic reason); 2) for a virtuous but non-honest reason (e.g., the reasons of benevolence, i.e., to promote or protect the given person’s well-being); and 3) for the reason of honesty (i.e., to respect RND). In the case of (1), the action is an honest action but is not virtuous because its motivating reason is not virtuous. Unlike (1), (2) is a case of an honest action motivated by a virtuous reason. However, the virtuous reason in question is a reason of benevolence, i.e., to promote or protect the given person’s well-being, rather than that of honesty. Although an honest action can be motivated by both a reason of benevolence and a reason of honesty, they can also diverge from each other.

A fully virtuous person would consider various reasons of different virtues that are relevant to the situation and hit the right balance among them in deciding what to do. However, it would be important to distinguish the reason of honesty from the reason of benevolence in order to know what should be considerations that should compete with each other in the given situation. I believe that the pluralistic account of honest motivation does not distinguish the reason of honesty that is supposed to compete at least sometimes with the reasons of other virtues. What benevolence demands is to promote the given person’s well-being; what honesty demands, I suggest, is to respect his friend’s RND.

3.2. What is the right not to be deceived?

Now let me explain in more detail what respect for RND is. The first question to ask is who holds RND and why. Generally speaking, RND is grounded in the idea that each person has a claim that no one intrudes into their epistemic life. We all have the basic desire to ‘be in touch with reality’, sometimes because that is the precondition for living an autonomous life and sometimes simply because of curiosity. Although we may not have the right to be told or informed about whatever we want to know, it would be reasonable to say that we have a minimal claim that no one positively intrudes into our pursuit of truth by deceiving us, at least if there is no good reason to do so. In this sense, the general RND is grounded in our basic claim that no one inappropriately interrupts in our pursuit of epistemic life. Persons in normal condition have this general RND by default, so to speak.

However, there also is a special sense of RND, which depends on the relationship between the right-holder and the possible deceiver. In this special sense, RND is relative to the matter in question in the context of deception. RND in this sense is to be understood as a local concept, whose content is fixed in the given context. It usually takes the following form:

X has a right not to be deceived by Y on the matter M.

For example, Alicia has a right not to be deceived by her husband Bruno on whether he cheated on her, but a stranger may not have a comparable right to Bruno regarding his love affairs. Thus, through appropriate specifications about the possible deceiver and the topic in question, we would become better able to analyze the normative basis of honesty in particular situations.

We can better understand RND by comparing it with some similar but different rights that are more familiar to us. First, honesty on my account is grounded in RND, but not necessarily the right to know. While the fact that one has a basic interest in knowing some fact does not give the subject the right to know it, it can ground her right not to be positively deceived by some agent. The right to know M generally requires more than RND about M. For example, a research participant in a medical experiment has a right to know about the relevant conditions such as risks and benefits involved in the participation. This right implies the researcher’s corresponding duty to inform the participant if any significant change occurs in the risks and benefits. In contrast, RND does not necessarily imply a comparable obligation from the researcher’s side unless, say, she has promised in advance to inform her when relevant changes occur. The researcher may, for instance, omit to inform the participant some relevant information without disrespecting anyone’s RND.

Moreover, while RND has a negative claim that one is not deceived, the right to know has a positive claim that one is provided with the knowledge in question. RND is usually easier to satisfy than the latter. For example, while one may satisfy RND simply by not saying anything misleading or deceptive, the right to know can be satisfied only when the knowledge in question is provided by the one who has the correlative duty to let the right-holder know. Also, the right to know cannot ground honesty because it is unclear who is supposed to give the knowledge to the person who holds this right. If one has the right to know, it is not always possible to specify who is supposed to let this person have the knowledge in question. More generally, the right to know casts the net too wide to ground honesty.

It might be argued that one can be rightly charged with being dishonest even when one does not do anything positive to deceive someone. Consider P. Quinn White’s case of Claudia, who has cancer:

Imagine cancer-afflicted Claudia has an intimate marriage with her spouse, Sally; they are (typically) quite open with one another and are committed to living their lives together. Where Claudia may deceive her coworker about her cancer, she may not similarly deceive her wife; that would constitute a grave betrayal. Indeed, even if no deception were involved, simply not telling Sally seems objectionable. Where lying is permissible with a coworker, deception or even mere withholding of information is impermissible with a spouse; and that seems connected to the fact that a cancer diagnosis is (in some sense) Claudia’s wife’s business but not her coworker’s (White, 2022, p. 10, emphasis added).

It seems that Sally may justifiably feel deceived and see her as dishonest if she later realizes that Claudia has been hiding for months that she has been diagnosed with cancer. Thus, one might argue, since Claudia’s withholding of the information does not violate her negative right not to be deceived, my account cannot explain why it is appropriate to see her as dishonest.

However, my account can make sense of this apparent dishonesty in terms of a lack of respect for RND. The fact that RND is a negative right does not mean that one can never disrespect this right without some positive act of deception. Deception does not take place only when someone positively does something. It comes in many different forms. There are many different means of deception, such as lying, facial expressions, patterns of behavior, and sometimes omission, that is, misleading by not doing something reasonably expected can be a way of deceiving someone. Thus, even if RND often requires that some positive information be delivered to the right-holder, it does not mean this right is to be understood as the right to know.

To apply this point to the case above, suppose that Sally, unlike a stranger, would have a right not to be deceived by Claudia about whether she has such a serious disease as cancer. Then Sally can have the reasonable expectation that Claudia would tell her if she has cancer. Thus, in this context, the fact that she does not say so is likely to be interpreted as evidence that she does not have cancer. In this case, we can say that Claudia disrespected her RND about this information by not informing her about it. In such a way, my account can make sense of Claudia’s dishonesty without appealing to the positive right to know something.

RND is also to be distinguished from the right to autonomy. The right to live autonomously amounts to the claim that one should be allowed to govern oneself or to determine the course of one’s own life. One’s right to autonomy is infringed when someone inappropriately influences one’s life so that it is partly governed by that person’s choice without one’s consent. Deception is one common way in which a right to autonomy is infringed. Suppose that Olivia lies to her son Ed by saying that the application deadline for the actor audition has passed because she wanted him to be a lawyer rather than an actor. Then her deception is infringing his right to autonomy by depriving him of the opportunity to choose a possible life course by intentionally causing him to believe what she believes to be false.

However, although RND and the right to autonomy can both be infringed by deception, it does not mean that they are the same. While not being deceived is important to living an autonomous life, one may still have RND about a certain matter even if that is not particularly relevant to living one’s life as one decides. Japa Pallikkathayil appeals to some sort of right to autonomy when she grounds the normativity of not deceiving—though not in the language of ‘honesty’—in respecting the given person’s agential interest in the truth:

I suggest that respecting others as agents requires taking this agential interest in the truth as reason giving in much the same way that we take others’ ends as reason giving. That is, we have a duty to have others’ agential interest in the truth as an end. Let us call the duty that reflects this requirement the duty of doxastic concern … . Additionally, the agential interest others have in the truth gives us reason to give them information that may not be a means to any particular end that they have chosen but instead gives them reason to adopt new ends or reconsider the ones they have chosen. If, for example, you are planning a trip to Italy, I have reason to tell you about the excellent gelato. This information may not contribute to any particular end you had already adopted but contributes to your understanding of the space of possible ends. (Pallikkathayil, 2019, p. 154)

I generally agree with Pallikkathayil’s view on the importance of respecting others’ agential interest in the truth. However, my view differs from hers in that RND is not necessarily based on the agential interest in the truth. I believe that someone’s basic interest in the truth should be respected irrespective of whether that interest is relevant to her (possible) use of agency. For example, one may want to know some facts purely out of curiosity, with no intention of using the information to do anything. For example, one may have a right not to be deceived about how much money she has in her bank account even if she does not intend to do anything with that money. In this sense, disrespect for someone’s RND does not necessarily imply disrespect for her right to autonomy. But the fact that someone is not going to use some piece of information for any action is not necessarily a reason to think that the interest in knowing it is less important. This is why I believe the right to autonomy is not sufficient to ground honesty.

Christine Korsgaard, as a Kantian, also relies on a version of the right to autonomy in making sense of what is wrong with deception. However, the way she explains the condition in which deception is justified is notably different from my account. She takes the familiar example of a murderer who asks you about where his (innocent) intended victim is. She grounds the permissibility of deceiving the murderer at the door on the fact that he has the intention to deceive you:

It is permissible to lie to deceivers in order to counteract the intended results of their deceptions, for the maxim of lying to a deceiver is universalizable. The deceiver has, so to speak, placed himself in a morally unprotected position by his own deception. He has created a situation which universalization cannot reach. (Korsgaard, 1986, p. 330)

I agree with Korsgaard that, contra Kant, it is permissible (and not even dishonest) to deceive the murderer in such a situation. However, my account does not rely on the deceptive intention of the murderer in question. On my account, whether the deception in question manifests dishonesty (or is morally permissible) counts on whether it involves disrespect for the given person’s RND.

Here is one way my account can make sense of the permissibility of lying to the murderer. The murderer at the door has forfeited his RND about the whereabouts of the intended victim due to his intention to use the knowledge to do something evil—i.e., killing the innocent victim. Thus, regardless of whether the murderer tries to deceive you, on my account, his evil intention is a sufficient reason for the RND to be forfeited. That is, it is not dishonest to lie to him even if the murderer explicitly reveals his intention to kill the intended victim using the information about their whereabouts, since he no longer has the RND to respect. This is, I believe, a merit of my account since it can capture the intuition that it is at least permissible to lie to the murderer even if he does not intend to deceive you.

3.3. What is the respect for the right not to be deceived?

We have examined what RND is and now let me examine what respect for RND is. It would be helpful to start by saying what respect for RND is not. First, it is not the care for the right-holder’s well-being. As I have argued, such care is characteristic of benevolence, not honesty. For example, one may refrain from deceiving someone out of the respect for her RND, even if one believes that deceiving her would better promote her well-being. Second, it is not the respect for truth itself. The basis for RND is not the value of truth itself, considered independently, but the right-holder’s minimal claim against inappropriate intrusion into her basic interest to be in touch with reality.

To use Stephen Darwall’s distinction, the respect due to RND is a kind of recognition respect, which consists in ‘the disposition to weigh appropriately in one’s deliberation some features of the thing in question and to act accordingly’ (Darwall, 1977). It leads the honest person who appropriately recognizes RND of the person in question to avoid deceiving her about the relevant matter. Recognition respect is distinct from appraisal respect, which involves a positive appraisal of a person or her merits. As a kind of recognition respect, the respect for RND is not characterized in terms of particular phenomenological feelings such as fear or awe. But respect for RND may often be experienced as having to recognize the given person’s RND appropriately and, as a response to such right, avoiding deceiving her about the relevant matter.

One remarkable feature of respect is that it is experienced as some motivational force that leads the agent to do what the object of respect is due independently of one’s own desires or inclinations (Dillon, 2021). This feature ensures that the respect for RND is not egoistic. Being motivated ‘to respect RND’ may seem similar to being motivated ‘to avoid deception’ (Wilson, 2018). However, unlike a person who avoids deception just for an egoistic reason, a person who avoids deception out of respect for the other’s RND would still avoid deception even if it does not promote one’s own benefits.

4. Possible objections

I have argued that respect for RND grounds the characteristic motivating reason of the virtue of honesty. Now that I have characterized a virtue and its characteristic motivating reason in terms of a right, some questions may naturally arise. One might think that respecting RND would amount to not deceiving out of a sense of duty since there should be a duty not to deceive the given person, which corresponds to respect for RND. If so, one might argue, acting from duty is a dutiful person’s motivating reason, rather than a virtuous one's. But a virtuous person is different from a merely dutiful person because the former does what virtue demands with the appropriate inner state. Honesty is no exception. As Rosalind Hursthouse points out, 'we think of honest people as people who tend to avoid the dishonest deeds and do the honest ones in a certain manner—readily, eagerly, unhesitatingly, scrupulously, as appropriate' (Hursthouse, 1999, p. 11, emphasis added).

Unlike a virtuously honest person, a dutifully honest person may perform the same acts unwillingly, reluctantly, or even painfully. For example, one may be strongly tempted to make a false promise to pay the money back to borrow money but manage not to do so out of a sense of duty, a duty not to deceive others. This person cannot be said to fully possess the virtue of honesty. In this sense, the virtue of honesty is more than a disposition not to deceive other people. We can perform an apparent act of honesty either virtuously or non-virtuously (or even viciously). This is one reason it is important to think about what would characteristically motivate the virtuously honest person to perform honest actions.

To meet the Aristotelian condition that Robert Audi calls the intrinsic motivation required, acting from virtue requires that such action be ‘in a special way motivated by the relevant virtue’ (Audi, 1995, p. 451). Acting from justice, for example, requires that ‘I decide on the action on the basis of a conception of it as, say, just, or as rendering each a deserved share, or as something else that connects my deed with justice as an element in my character’ (Audi, 1995, p. 451, emphasis added). One aim of this paper is to find the consideration which connects my deed with honesty as an element in my character when I act from honesty. This is another reason why the concept of a duty not to deceive cannot fully capture an honest person’s characteristic motivating reason.

Moreover, it might be argued that rights sit awkwardly with virtues and thus cannot be a part of what explains a virtue’s characteristic motivating reason. However, while virtues may not automatically spring from rights, it is a matter of being virtuous to deal with rights appropriately, insofar as rights are something important in our lives. For example, Hursthouse says that it is one thing to say women have rights to their own bodies and another to exercise that right in a virtuous way. Similarly, it is one thing whether one has a certain right and it is another whether people treat that right in a virtuous way. I am suggesting here that having the virtue of honesty is a matter of treating RND in a virtuous way. In a similar vein, Michael Meyer says the following about the relationship between a right and a virtue:

[A] theory of what rights one has should not be taken as a complete account of one’s moral relations. Equally clearly—but less often recognized by proponents of individual rights—an account of individual rights should be supplemented by a theory of virtue. This is necessary because the idea of oneself as possessed of certain rights falls short of thoughtful guidance on their use in specific circumstances. (Meyer, 1992, p. 479, emphasis added).

As he suggests, virtue should inform us not only about how to use one’s rights appropriately but also how to treat others’ rights appropriately. Honesty, according to my account, is a virtue that informs how a virtuous person would treat someone’s RND.

5. Educational implications

I believe my analysis of honesty’s characteristic motivating reason can shed light on some important issues concerning the education of honesty. My account gives answers to various questions: What is the moral ground of honesty? Why is it morally praiseworthy to be honest? How is honesty different from other virtues? Unless these questions are answered, it would be hard to educate learners consistently and convincingly about why and how they should cultivate and exercise the virtue of honesty. My account helps guide learners’ cultivation of honesty by answering such important questions.

First, I believe my account of honesty’s characteristic motivating reason can also offer good guidance on how to cultivate the virtue of honesty. To begin, an honest person performs honest actions reliably, that is, both stably over time and consistently across situations. A self-interested motive cannot explain an honest person’s reliability because it will allow her to perform dishonest actions when doing so brings her more benefits than performing honest acts in the given context. The efforts to strengthen the reliability in performing honest actions by offering extrinsic rewards are not helpful for cultivating the virtue of honesty since this virtue is more than a mere disposition to perform honest actions reliably. Acting honestly, as opposed to merely performing honest actions, also involves having appropriate ‘inner states’ such as emotions and motives in performing honest acts and there is a great deal of empirical evidence suggesting that offering extrinsic rewards such as money tends to have a negative impact on the development of intrinsic motivation (e.g., Deci et al., 2001).

It is true that Miller’s pluralistic account of honesty’s characteristic motivating reason also does not support reinforcing the inclination to perform honest acts through extrinsic reward. But it faces difficulties in offering guidance on how to cultivate the virtue of honesty because it does not offer an honesty-specific motivating reason. To cultivate a certain virtue, we need to be informed about the considerations that would characteristically motivate a person who possesses the virtue in question. If various kinds of virtuous considerations such as care for others or a sense of fairness can serve as a motivating reason for performing honest actions, then it would be hard to know how to cultivate honesty as a virtue as opposed to other virtues.

Although I agree that the learners eventually need to learn situation-sensitivity by considering the reasons of other virtues, not just honesty, I believe that this well-balanced sensitivity can be better cultivated when they first become familiar with the characteristic reasons of each virtue and then learn how to weigh them together later. There are different morally important features that each virtue characteristically captures. To cultivate different virtues to grow into a well-balanced person, it would be important to emphasize the different features that each virtue captures. If these features of different virtues are conflated, those who try to cultivate virtues, especially younger learners, are likely to be confused. The learners may ask questions like, ‘Why should I be benevolent?’ or ‘Why should I be fair?’. We should be able to show the characteristic moral grounds for each of such questions. Then the learners will be better able to distinguish what each virtue characteristically demands in the given situation and learn how to hit the balance between them to make an overall virtuous decision.

Thus, it should be clarified what the main reason to be honest is. Saying ‘Be virtuous!’ would be too broad and abstract to help younger learners focus their mental habituation to grow into honest people. Saying something like ‘Don’t hurt others’ feelings!’ or ‘Avoid unfair treatment!’ may make them confused about the point of being honest and how it is different from the point of being benevolent or fair-minded. My account can offer better guidance on how to cultivate the virtue of honesty and why this virtue is important. It offers guidance on where to focus when cultivating honesty by suggesting that respect for RND is the characteristic motivating reason for an honest person. On my account, the virtue of honesty demands more than refraining from lying for an egoistic reason and is distinct from other virtues such as benevolence or fair-mindedness.

My account also clarifies the relationship between lying and honesty. This account can set up a ground for a concept of honesty that does not put excessive moral significance on making true statements taken by itself. In teaching younger people, many teachers and parents use ‘Be honest!’ almost interchangeably with ‘Don’t lie!’ However, on my view, an act of lying does not necessarily manifest the agent’s dishonesty and an honest person may sometimes justifiably or permissibly lie. On my account, whether a given act counts as lying or not would be less important in honesty studies than whether it disrespects anyone’s RND. While the education of honesty has focused on teaching learners not to lie and tell the truth, being honest also involves knowing when not to tell the truth. My analysis offers better guidance and a clearer picture of what it takes to be honest and how it is related to truth-telling or not-lying.

Relatedly, my account can explain the vices corresponding to honesty that learners are to avoid. First, dishonesty can be understood as lacking sufficient respect for the potential victim. That is, a dishonest person is disposed not to respect even when the victim’s RND requires it in the given situation. Unlike honesty, dishonesty does not have any characteristic motivating reason. For example, suppose that one lies to one’s father because of a fear of punishment or a desire to revenge on him. Either way, insofar as one is lying due to a lack of sufficient respect for his RND, one can be said to be acting from dishonesty.

On the other hand, my account also makes sense of the vice of being ‘too honest’, which might also be called the vice of communicatory indiscretion. At least in the Aristotelian tradition, a virtue is understood as a mean between two extremes: deficiency and excess. There has been difficulty in making sense of honesty as an Aristotelian virtue because it seems hard to explain what the vice of excess in relation to honesty would look like. Learners may be puzzled if they hear that telling the truth and not lying can go excessive. Philosophers like Miller, for example, deny that there is such a thing as a vice of excess corresponding to honesty (Miller, 2021, Ch. 6). My account, however, can understand this vice as a disposition to avoid deception even when it is strongly required by other virtues in the given circumstances and no one’s RND about the given matter is being disrespected in that context. For example, it would be a case of being ‘too honest’ to risk many passengers’ lives by telling a terrorist the password to get into the pilot’s office, when one could easily prevent it by deceiving him. No matter how we name this vice of excess in the sphere of honesty, I believe it can be a good candidate for the vice of being ‘too honest’.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that respect for RND is the moral ground that provides the characteristic reason that motivates an honest person’s honest actions. My goal has been to set up a platform for the lively discussion of the characteristic motivating reason of honesty and contribute to the development of new research projects on honesty that explore its scope, behavioral aspects, and relation to other virtues and vices. Above all, this paper offers a new perspective that can help us to make sense of apparent cases of honesty in a more unified way.

I believe that this paper can possibly inform and inspire not only conceptual works in philosophy but also empirical works in social sciences including moral psychology and education. It may also have the potential to have some practical impact on fields such as character education, child-rearing, and medical practice and research. A virtuous person acts virtuously motivated by a virtuous reason. If honesty is a virtue, as it is widely endorsed as such, the characteristic reason that motivates the honest person should be explicated. I hope this paper can serve as a step toward filling this gap in the literature on the virtue of honesty.

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).

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.

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).