The Virtue of Honesty
Ask the next person you meet to name three virtues and the chances are high that honesty will be among them. It’s a virtue we care about: we teach our children to be honest, we expect public figures to be honest, we know it is important to tell the truth. It is perhaps surprising, then, that honesty isn’t much studied in contemporary Anglophone philosophy.
If honesty has been neglected in philosophy, it also seems to have been neglected in late modern life. Schools and universities are concerned that students are passing off the work of others as their own. Political campaigns manipulate the ‘facts’ to make their case. Accountants and lawyers and politicians seem perpetually to fall short. Sports stars have dropped the ball. Across the board, there seems to be a shortage of the honesty we expect and need to preserve the trust that holds society together.
Robert C. Roberts is among a small group of philosophers (Christian Miller of Wake Forest is another) who have taken up the challenge and started to engage in the task of understanding just what honesty is—important work if we are going to learn how to cultivate and encourage it. Professor Roberts was in Oxford recently, speaking at Blackwell’s Bookshop as part of a philosophy series hosted by the Philosophy Faculty of Oxford Brookes.
Christian Miller recognizes five aspects of honesty: truthfulness, respect for property, fair play, fidelity to promises, forthrightness. In his paper, Roberts reduces these to two categories that are often intertwined: truthfulness and justice (giving people what they deserve). He focuses further on honesty as truthfulness, which he takes to be the dominant of the two, and defines as ‘circumspect concern for truth in communication, and thus an emotional sensitivity to the values of truth’. If this is straightforward enough then Roberts’ next move is more interesting. He identifies three kinds of virtues that relate to this understanding of honesty as truthfulness, opening up possibilities for the cultivation of the virtue of honesty itself: (1) Virtues of caring: honesty is distinct from indiscriminate truth-telling on account of the circumspection that comes with care, both for other people, for justice, and for the truth itself; (2) The virtue of humility: this liberates from the motivational vices that lead to dishonesty; (3) Virtues of passion control: in order to overcome temptations to dishonesty that come with the offer of short-term gain, it will take courage, perseverance, patience, and self-control.
Roberts didn’t go further in his talk, but his taxonomy opens up possibilities for virtue cultivation. If we want to grow in honesty, and our society to grow in honesty, we will need to learn to care and develop a culture of care; we will need to grow in humility; and we will need to adopt practices that allow our passions to be properly ordered, towards good ends. For Christians, this is not a calling we face on our own: in Christ we have an example of honesty in all of its aspects; by the Spirit truth lives in us and flows through us; in the church we have a community that is called to learn honesty before God and speak the truth in love to one another—a community of honesty for the life of the world.