Thank you, Agar Mayor Gai-Makoon, for this crucial question.
The word “honesty” designates a virtue, or a settled and stable disposition to think, feel, and choose appropriately in some sphere of human experience. The particular sphere of experience in which honesty can be located seems to be that of truth-telling. There are three principal types of choices we make in this sphere: telling the truth, withholding the truth, and lying. So, the question is, what choices with respect to telling the truth, withholding the truth, and lying are appropriate? that is to say, which of them display the virtue of honesty?
It is difficult to give concrete guidance on this question, since each situation in which truth-telling is at issue is different. Generally, a person will not count as “honest” if she tends to either lie or withhold the truth about important matters. That is why some philosophers call honesty a “high-fidelity” virtue: it requires a fairly high degree of consistent truth-telling. Another important but often overlooked point is that since honesty is a high-fidelity virtue, and since we can deceive ourselves, it follows that we probably don’t count as honest if we aren’t honest with ourselves.
The next point I want to make is that in order to know when it is appropriate to either tell the truth, withhold the truth, or lie, one must be capable of recognizing all of the morally salient features of a given situation and of weighing the significance of those features to arrive at an “all-in” conclusion about what choice to make. To take a well-worn example, if the Nazis are at the door and you are hiding a Jew in your basement, you should realize that your moral reason to save a human life trumps your reason not to lie. This suggests that to be able to see and choose the appropriate course of action with respect to truth-telling, we must also be able to see and choose the appropriate course of action with respect to all spheres of relevant human experience. This idea is called the “unity of the virtues” thesis. It follows that if you want to know what honesty requires in a given situation, you must also know what the other virtues require. It makes no sense to aim to be an honest person without simultaneously aiming to be a just person, a prudent person, a benevolent person, and so on.
A final point. Aristotle believed that virtues were located between two extremes – the doctrine of the so-called “golden mean.” On this view, honesty is located between the extremes of too little and too much truth-telling. Aristotle also believed that such virtues were relative to each individual’s disposition. For example, it seems that most people are not disposed to tell the truth as often as we should. So, we may have to compensate by telling the truth more than an honest person, so that we can train our disposition appropriately.
What do you think? What makes someone honest? Let us know in the comments.
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I received my BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and my PhD from the University of Notre Dame. I specialize in ethics, with a particular focus on the nature of normative reasons and the ethics of hypocrisy in its myriad forms. My favorite philosopher is Henry Sidgwick, since I believe—to borrow a line from Alfred North Whitehead, speaking about Plato—that much of analytic ethics in the 20th century is a series of footnotes to Sidgwick.