The Philosophy of Honesty

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0:00:07.6 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.6 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.0 Aaron Powell: Our guest today is Christian Miller, he’s the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Honesty Project. Today we’re discussing his book, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. Welcome back to the show.

0:00:24.6 Christian Miller: It’s great to be back with you guys. Thank you so much for having me on again.

0:00:28.7 Aaron Powell: What does it mean to say that honesty is a neglected virtue?

0:00:33.8 Christian Miller: Well, I really have in mind two senses of that. One is that it’s neglected, in that in society it’s not present very much, so it’s just absent, it’s not as present as I think we would like it to be, we would hope it to be. But I also have another sense in mind, and that’s really what I was thinking of when I wrote the book. It’s neglected in the minds of scholars, or at least in the publications of scholars, put it that way. So over the last 50 years in my field of philosophy, for instance, there has not been a book written on the topic of honesty. There have only been two articles in all the philosophy journals written on the virtue of honesty, and there has not been one edited volume on it either. So I really have in mind that sense of, look, it’s such an interesting, important, and when it’s absent, significant virtue, but why aren’t people paying attention to it? Let’s get some people paying more attention to it, let’s get it from being neglected to being front and center in our discussion.

0:01:38.4 Trevor Burrus: Honestly seems pretty clear though, that if you tell lies, you’re dishonest, and if you tell the truth, you’re honest, and that’s what most people seem to think when they think of honesty. So maybe there hasn’t been a book in 50 years because there isn’t that much to write about. Having read your book, I see there is a lot, but I see there is a lot to write about, but I think a lot of people think that there’s not that much to write about.

0:02:00.1 Christian Miller: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think it’s very possible, at least a partial explanation for why it’s been neglected, on the surface, it looks like, what’s there to say? If you’re a liar, you’re not honest, if you’re telling the truth repeatedly over time and in a variety of situations, you are, kinda case closed. So what I wanna do in my contribution here with this book is say, that’s only part of the story, it’s only a very small part of the story about honesty. Actually, honesty is quite a multi-​faceted virtue, and it only pertains in part to truth telling and lying, there’s interesting puzzles and questions and paradoxes that arise, and you could actually spend an entire career trying to plumb the depths of this virtue, so I’m gonna get people to pay more attention to it and see how sophisticated and interesting and important it is, and also ultimately with the goal of not just as an intellectual exercise, but hopefully to facilitate cultivating this virtue, of which there is, it’s sort of lacking in our society today.

0:03:01.8 Aaron Powell: I wanna get to some of those complexities, but first, just to clarify, what do you mean by virtue, when you call honesty a virtue?

0:03:09.0 Christian Miller: Yeah, so there’re different theories out there, so I should put my cards on the table. I’m following probably the dominant tradition in western philosophy, which goes back to Aristotle. So a kinda Aristotelian approach to thinking about virtues. So first of all virtues are in our character traits, they’re part of our character. They are counterbalanced by vices, which are the opposite of virtues. Virtues are intrinsically good. They’re good in and off themselves. They are dispositions in our minds to think, feel, and act a certain way. So let me expand on that a little bit more. A virtue leads you to think certain thoughts. I can use another example because we’ll talk about honesty in a moment, but a compassionate person is gonna be thinking about how important it is to help others, to feel certain things, so a compassionate person is gonna be motivated altruistically to help others, and outwardly to express those thoughts and feelings in behavior. So a compassionate person is gonna reliably help people over time and across situations. So to sum it up, I’m thinking about virtue, it’s something that’s intrinsically good, that has a cognitive component to it, a more motivational component to it, which together give rise to outward expressions of behavior, which is admirable behavior.

0:04:30.7 Trevor Burrus: Well, that implies that a person who possesses or demonstrates the virtue of honesty could at least sometimes be dishonest, right? It doesn’t have to… You said it’s a disposition, it’s not a constant adhering to a sort of deontological rule of honesty.

0:04:48.9 Christian Miller: Right. And so I think that’s right. I’m thinking of all virtues as coming in degrees, and the same thing is gonna be true of vices. It’s not an on and off thing, it’s not the view that either you’re perfectly virtuous or you’re not virtuous at all. The Stoics, at least some stoics held that view. I don’t think that makes good sense to me. I have a hard time thinking about it in that way. I also think that’s pretty discouraging, that the only virtue there is is perfect virtue, that’s gonna be discouraging to me, is try to become virtuous. So instead, what I wanna say is, virtue comes in degrees and then there’s a kind of cutoff and then at which point you’re not virtuous anymore. And so it’s quite compatible for Abraham Lincoln say, he was kind of one of our paradigms of virtue, a virtue of honesty in our society, to have on occasion told some lies or cheated or stolen. Now, if he did that a lot, we might question whether he even meets the threshold. But yes, some dishonesty is compatible with having the virtue of honesty.

0:05:50.7 Aaron Powell: If honesty or any other virtue is like an internal… It’s a trait, and it’s a, as you said, like a disposition and motivations and these other things that are inside of us, then does that mean that the external is just a sign of that, or is the external act related to that? And I guess what I mean is like, can you be a dishonest person without ever actually lying to people? Or like an honest person, maybe that one’s harder, but you actually have to… Can you be internally dishonest without being externally dishonest?

0:06:22.4 Christian Miller: Yes, yes, yes you can. So I do think the behavior is primarily just an expression of what’s going on inside, and what’s crucial to virtue is what’s inside. That’s an objective matter. So, internal to our psychology, either we have these virtues or we don’t. It’s hard to know that about other people. What you have to go on is usually just the behaviour. So it’s hard to peer into someone’s mind to see what’s going on in there, but what is going on in there is the crucial thing about virtue. Now, in your case, you were thinking, is it possible for someone to be dishonest internally in their mind, but not display that very often? And I think, absolutely. Clever, dishonest people would actually be like that, in at least, interpersonally. What do I mean?

0:07:10.7 Christian Miller: Well, it’s not usually in your self-​interest to display dishonest behaviour around others. It depends on who they are, of course. But at their work place, it’s probably not a good idea to be walking out the door carrying a bunch of office supplies in front of everyone else. In a marriage, it’s probably not a good idea to blatantly lie about things to your significant other. So yeah, it’s rather the kind of thing where you might wanna portray a positive, honest image interpersonally, if that’s to your benefits, and only display that dishonest behaviour when you think you can get away with it and not get caught. So you be strategic about when you display it or not.

0:07:53.3 Trevor Burrus: In your book, you break down honesty and the into components. I’d like to ask you what those components are, but I’d I also like to… When you’re doing that, are you doing a sort of sociological analysis of what the way people use the term, or are you doing a more metaphysical analysis about what the virtue actually means? And then, what are those components?

0:08:17.0 Christian Miller: Yeah, yep. So let me give you the components and I’ll answer the other part too. So, when we’re thinking about components here, I’m thinking about what does honesty pertain to? What is it range of it? What kinds of moral behaviour does it govern? And I say it’s very broad in scope, it covers a lot of moral grounds, maybe more so than many other virtues do. And this is under-​appreciated. So I think, of course, honesty has to do with lying… No, preventing lying, not… Let’s assume that is what I’m saying when I say that. And that’s where we go to for, that’s our starting point. But it doesn’t end there, it also has to do with misleading. When you mislead others verbally, you actually say something true, but in order to try and get them to arrive at a false conclusion, you mislead people about what you were doing last night at the bar, or other things going on in your life.

0:09:12.4 Christian Miller: So it has to do with misleading, lying, cheating, stealing, maybe promise-​breaking, that’s maybe a little bit more controversial, BS-​ing, hypocrisy, self-​deception, fraud. The list is long and that’s not exhaustive. Now, where did I come up with that list? I’m just trying to go off of ordinary intuitions. So when you ask people, “If someone cheats a lot on tests, are they an honest student?” People say no, that signals to me that cheating has something to do with honesty. So it’s more probing people’s intuitions, including my own intuitions and saying, “Would you count this person as a honest person, if they did this?” They say, “No.” Okay, well, that must mean that honesty pertains to that. So yeah, it’s more sociological, you could put it that way, or intuitive, or kind of common sense, ordinary folk thinking about things.

0:10:17.5 Aaron Powell: How much of this, I guess the determining factors of those things, are socially determined? So you’d said earlier that dishonesty is this internal trait and its status is objective within you. But a lot of the things that you’ve mentioned, like take stealing, so stealing is taking someone else’s property, but there’s a lot of disagreement about what counts as property, who owns what, anyone who’s taken a property class in law school knows that we’ve spent forever trying to come up with all these rules and we have some consensus, but other places we haven’t. It differs between cultures and so on. And so, something that might look like stealing to one person doesn’t look like stealing to another, but it’s being motivated by the same thing inside.

0:11:06.2 Christian Miller: Yeah, no, that’s good. And that’s a very tricky question. I’m thinking of this subjectively. Now, this might seem like it’s confusing, and haven’t I just talked about objectively, now I’m going to subjectively. So I’m gonna be thinking of this more based upon what an individual happens to think is stealing or not, rather than what objectively the law might say is stealing or not. Let me give a couple of examples. Let me start with not stealing, I think maybe to be clear, if we shift over to lying for a moment. If I think… If I’ve been raised a certain way to think that the Earth is flat, and that’s all I’ve ever encountered in my life, the people have told taught me the Earth is flat, it’s all the evidence I’ve ever seen. And one day somebody comes up to me and says, I don’t know why they would say this but randomly, they say, “What’s the shape of the Earth?” If I say the Earth is flat, I’m being honest. That’s how I see the world from my perspective.

0:12:12.8 Christian Miller: Even though it’s false, objectively, my claim is mistaken. If on the other hand, I get the sense that that’s probably not the appropriate thing to say in this context, like people might make fun of me or something, I say, “Oh, you know what, the Earth is round. Everyone believes that.” That, I’m actually being dishonest. I’m failing to be honest, even though I’m saying something true. So honesty, on my view, is indexed to how we subjectively view the world. And that’s gonna carry over to the case of stealing too. So, if we have someone who believes that this notebook belongs to someone else, but needs a notebook and no one’s looking and grabs a notebook, they understand that that’s stealing. From their perspective, they think it’s stealing. By their lies, they’re doing something dishonest. If it’s a different kind of case where someone for some reason just thinks, “This stuff belongs to me, it’s mine.”

0:13:19.5 Christian Miller: No one else is entitled to it. Stealing… Does the rules against stealing, don’t apply to them? Then that’s a different matter. They still could be doing something morally wrong, but I’m not sure they’re doing something dishonest in that case. Hopefully that got to the question.

0:13:35.5 Trevor Burrus: So does that answer… Is that one way you would answer the… Maybe the classic lying conundrum in history of western philosophy, which is Kant’s perfect duty not to lie, in which case his argument was that lying always is wrong, because willing lying to be a universal truth negates the existence of Universal rule, negates the existence of universal rule. And then the Nazis come to your door and you’re hiding Jews in your basement, and the question is… And I think it’s pretty clear from Kant that you have to tell the Nazis that there’re Jews in your basement. But on your account of virtue in the internal subjective side, can someone get away, not get away, can someone be honest due to their own commitments to protecting life? So they definitely… Usually know that they’re telling a lie, but they have other moral virtues that they care about too, so it doesn’t really undercut their honesty to lie to the Nazis.

0:14:34.5 Christian Miller: Yeah, great, great example, I’d love to probe that in some detail, so maybe we can have some follow-​up too. There’s so much to say about, it’s such a rich example. So first with Kant, Kant held the view and he was explicit about this in an essay that lying is always wrong. That also seems to follow from his different formulations of his moral theory, what’s called the formulations of the Categorical Imperative; the universal law formulation and the formula of humanity, those are his two most famous theories and they also seem on initial certain inspection to prohibit lying. Now, Kant of course didn’t know about the Nazis, he was earlier than that, but in that very essay, when he talked about lying, he had a parallel example about an axe murderer who was looking for, would-​be victim to try and kill that victim, and you had the opportunity to lie to protect the would-​be victim. The… Subsequently you’re right, this has been adapted into an example, involving a Jewish family who you’re hiding in a basement during World War II, here comes a Nazi patrol… There’s just a routine, it’s crucial, it’s a routine patrol of the neighborhood, they don’t suspect you in particular, they’re just going door to door asking… “Do you know where any Jews are? Do you know where Jews are?”

0:15:45.9 Christian Miller: If you say, “yes,” of course they’ll ask follow-​up questions, probably leading to the death of you and the family, or at least the family. If you say “no, I don’t know where any Jews are,” they’ll close the door and go to the next house. So Kant seemed to say, you gotta tell the truth. Overwhelmingly, people think that that’s impossible. Students, when I present this in class, no one likes that answer from Kant, they think yeah you gotta lie in a situation. How does this work with respect to honesty? I wanna say something a little different from the way, direction you’re going. I wanna say dishonest, but all things considered, justified to lie. And then you hit at that at the end, when you talked about other virtues.

0:16:35.6 Christian Miller: So honesty is just one virtue among many. And when we’re thinking about what is all things considered the best thing to do, we have to take into account all relevant virtues that pertain to the situation. So just with respect to lying and honesty, I think if you said to that Nazi, “I don’t know where any Jews are,” you’re both lying, ’cause you do, and on my definition of honesty, which has to do with not intentionally distorting the facts, you’re failing to be honest. However, there are other virtues that come into play like compassion, and so compassion would dictate protecting the lives of the Jewish family, that would in this case, be more significant of a virtue, more important and more Weighty worthy of a virtue than its honesty, and so when you balance those two up against each other, compassion wins. All things considered, tell the lie to the Nazi.

0:17:30.9 Aaron Powell: There does seem to be, though something, maybe… Kant takes it further than most of us would in saying, you have to tell the truth at all times, but there is this general sense that his argument that like, look, it would be… If we had a general rule that you could lie like whenever, that would make the world a lot worse off, it would make more suffering, it would make us all unhappy… It wouldn’t be a great place. And so we want a world where people are honest, even if we have some carve-​outs for Nazis, but it seems like if you have that carve-​out for Nazis, and the reason that you do is because there are other virtues that matter, compassion and so on. Doesn’t that open it up to basically everyone thinking it is okay to lie or shade the truth or whatever, whenever they think it will be good for the other person? Or in some like… Doesn’t that end up… Kant took it too far in one direction, but don’t we risk kind of devouring honesty? If they go the other way…

0:18:32.1 Christian Miller: The other way… Yeah I think we certainly do. Yeah, you’re opening up a door and it’s not clear where you stop… The slippery slope. Now, let me make the first preliminary comment about Kant, and I think this is interesting. The argument you’re citing from Kant actually can be used to justify on Kantian grounds lying to the Nazi. So you’re referring… Both of you have referred to this idea of universal law, that’s Kant’s first formulation, you’re contemplating an action, you imagine what if everyone did this action, then you think… Is that even coherent? Is that possible? And would you wanna live in that world? And then you go from there, well, and I don’t know. This next point I’m gonna make is not original to me, it’s an original to a philosopher named Christine Korsgaard. She pointed out that if you’re thinking about, not the action of lying in general, but if you’re just thinking about the action of lying to a… Someone intending to murder innocent people, like the Nazi.

0:19:33.4 Christian Miller: If that’s the action you’re thinking about, and you universalize that, imagine a world in which everyone lied just to “Would be murderers” about to kill innocent people. Can you conceive of that world? Yeah, I can conceive that world. Could you will that world? Would you wanna live in that world? Yes, I wouldn’t mind living in that world, it actually passes. So interestingly enough, she argues that that Kant’s universal law formulation, when carried out properly, does justify lying in these restricted cases. Which it of course, it makes an interesting scholarship question; how then could Kant have written an essay saying, lying is always wrong. Okay, but that’s enough about Kant, it may be more than you wanted about Kant. On the general question…

0:20:18.2 Christian Miller: There would be other cases that now come into play. So some of which you might be okay with lying to. So the natural one, I’m thinking of are white lie cases. So of course, the stakes are not nearly the same as the Nazi case, but we’re talking about things like, how does the dress look, or how does the tie look? Or how is the dessert or this kinda thing? And now you’re bouncing again, Do I tell the truth? ‘Cause, you don’t really like any of that stuff, or do I lie? Well, on what basis? Maybe it’s again, compassion, the well-​being of the other person, you wanna protect their feelings, or maybe wanna protect the relationship and so forth. Many people there too, are okay with the idea that some lies can be justified. So it wouldn’t just have to be the kind of extreme Nazi kind of cases. But then, of course, now, we’re just kind of more grist for your mill, because where do we stop?

0:21:17.7 Christian Miller: And at that point, and I don’t have a good answer there. You could look to different ethical theories, different ethical theories will try to give you some kinda guidance, utilitarianism will give you some guidance. Maybe go back to Kant again, other theories, I’m not a big fan of thinking that there’s just one theory of morality that’s gonna sort out these little issues or settle these issues. I’m much more of a fan of thinking, we need to go case by case. And see what the objective truth is though. In each case, not relativism, not saying this opens the door to… Well, just because I think this other value is more important, that must mean it is. I wanna say there are still objective truths. But we have to sort through the details of each case to see whether honesty is outweighed or not.

0:22:11.5 Trevor Burrus: Interesting, your point about Kant, even before I read Korsgaard, I wrote a paper on that idea in my current class saying, “You could formulate the categorical imperative, as narrowly or generally as you want to. You could say does everyone… Can I… Will, it is a universal law that everyone lied to Nazis, which actually, if you do that, then you’re just gaming the system”. And Kant gives very little guidance on how to do that properly, except for doing it with goodwill. But maybe that’s one reason why we’re virtue ethicists. So on the virtue ethicist part, I agree that we probably can’t come up with a general rule. But it seems that the rule would be something about weighing things that are actually virtuous. So I’m thinking about parents lying to children, in many instances, and how they lie to children. Also thinking about lying to the soldier dying on the battlefield and telling him that he took out the battalion or something in the last moments to just give him something to… But whatever we’re gonna do if we’re virtue ethicists, we should weigh different virtues against each other, in order to come up with a case-​by-​case analysis.

0:23:17.5 Christian Miller: Yeah, that’s certainly one way to go. So first, in Kant, what you point to is the most famous problem for Kant’s formulation, that’s called the Problem of Relevant Maxims, how do you specify the Maxim right? It’s a notorious problem, probably no one’s ever solved it adequately. We switch over to a virtue ethics perspective, where for virtue ethics, the starting point of ethical theorizing is what kinda person should I become? What would a virtuous person do? Weighing different virtues against each other. And what you’ve given is one approach to thinking about that. So you’re suggesting, take these two virtues, objectively, let’s assess their importance or relative importance and see which one is weightier and more significant in the moments. I think that’s a very reasonable way to go from a virtue ethical perspective, and makes a lot of sense that fits very well with the kinda particularist approach I was suggesting of case by case, the weighing can come out very differently. It’s not the only way that virtue ethicists tend to think about this. So another prominent approach is to think about what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances.

0:24:27.7 Christian Miller: The most probably canonical presentation of virtue ethics in the last 50 years is by a philosopher named Rosalind Hursthouse, in her book called On Virtue Ethics. And that is her account of what right action is. Right action is one that is in line with what a virtuous person would do in a circumstance. So would a virtuous person lie to the Nazi, would a virtuous person… Parents lie to a child and so forth, just suggesting that there are other ways to go too.

0:24:57.5 Aaron Powell: Is dishonesty just the absence of the virtue of honesty? You mentioned vices, and so is it a distinct thing and then I think relatedly one of the things that our listeners may remember from Aristotle is that the mean between extremes, that virtue is the mean between extremes. And so what is honesty the mean between?

0:25:21.5 Christian Miller: Mmm-​hmm, mmm-​hmm yep. Great question. Great question. So Aristotle held this famous doctrine of the mean, that for every virtue, there’s a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. And that makes sense, I think in some cases, like, take courage. That was his I think best example. On the one hand, there’s excessive courage, which was not even courage anymore. Maybe it’s rashness. On the other hand, there’s deficiency, that’s cowardice. So we could kinda make sense there, these two are polar opposite vices. In my view, controversially, and feel free to push back against it, I think, actually, honesty is a counterexample to Aristotle’s approach. Because I think in the case of honesty, there is the vice of deficiency, dishonesty. And I’ll come back to… That was the first part of the question, but there’s no vice of excess. What I mean by that, so you might think… Well, of course, there is being too honest.

0:26:27.2 Christian Miller: And then maybe if this just becomes terminological and we don’t need to fight about terms here. But how I think about it is something like this. Take an example, you’re riding in an elevator to work in your office floor up in the skyscraper. Here’s, in the elevator, someone you barely know, but you like to know them enough to say “Hello,” and “How’s your day going?” And he says, “Hey, it’s going fine. How’s your day going?” And you answer by rattling off all this detail, like, “Well, I got up at 6:00, and then I had to go to the bathroom, and then I ate this for breakfast, and then I did that,” dah, dah, dah, “And I’m not feeling so well, the indigestion. I gotta go to the bathroom again.” It’s like all this stuff. There’s a sense to which you’re being too honest.

0:27:12.3 Trevor Burrus: This is the TMI theory of oversharing, correctly.

[laughter]

0:27:16.9 Christian Miller: Oversharing, yep, yep, yep. But let’s now see for that everything you say is true, by your lights. So I wanna say that there’s no failure of honesty there. You’re conforming to the norms of… Honestly, what the failure is, is the failure of tact or discretion. You’re not recognizing what is appropriate to share in the social situation, given how well you know this other person. So that’s just the way I think about it. Again, you can push back against… Or people are gonna argue about that. Let me speak to the other side though. The other question was about dishonesty. I don’t wanna say that dishonesty is just the absence of honesty. That would be like saying a newborn infant is dishonest, you know. A newborn infant doesn’t have the virtue of honesty, doesn’t have any virtue, so it is not old enough to be moral agents at all in the first place. So they’d have the absence of honesty, but I wouldn’t wanna say they’re dishonest.

0:28:16.1 Christian Miller: No, I think dishonesty is an actual full-​fledged character trait, just like honesty is. It’s a disposition that involves thinking, feeling, expressions of outward action, cross-​situationally and stably over time, but with a different orientation of course, not oriented in a good way like a virtue is, but oriented in a bad way. In this case, it involves a disposition to intentionally distort the facts, at least when you think you can get away with it and it would be towards… To your benefit. So, it’s a positive psychological disposition.

0:28:52.5 Aaron Powell: Now, half your book is the turning to the psychology and the empirical side of this. And I wanna get into that ’cause it’s fascinating stuff, but maybe the way to start that conversation is to ask if we are… It’s one thing to explore honesty from a philosophical perspective, like from our arm chair, right? But if we’re gonna start doing empirical work, we have to have ways to measure it. And so how do you go about measuring honesty?

0:29:20.6 Christian Miller: Yeah, great, great. And I’m a philosopher, I should caveat everything I say by, I don’t have a PhD in Psychology, so I’m certainly open to correction and learning more here. There are different ways to measure any virtue, but let’s focus on honesty as we have been. You can… So let me give you a spectrum of different approaches. You can just do pure self-​reports. You can give people out questionnaires and you can say, “How honest are you? Rate yourself from one to seven,” right? Or if you wanna do a little bit more nuanced than that, “Do you tell lies frequently?” Or, “How often do you cheat on your taxes?” Or something like that.

0:30:02.6 Aaron Powell: Isn’t that like the two doors in Alice in Wonderland though? Like, the person is dishonest…

0:30:07.6 Trevor Burrus: Aaron We’ve been doing this too long. We’ve been doing this too long ’cause I literally had the exact same thought. It’s just like the two doors of… “He’s telling the truth or… ” yeah.

0:30:12.8 Aaron Powell: Asking the dishonest person to answer truthfully on a survey seems…

0:30:16.6 Christian Miller: Yep, yep, yep. So I am just… You asked me what the range is, what is the measure? I’m not saying whether they’re good or bad. I’m not editorializing yet. But I’m hesitant there. I’m reticent to go… At least certainly as the only measure gonna use. Now, it could be strengthened by combining that with observer reports. So you can have friends, significant others, family members, fill out a similar survey, but about the target. Not about themselves but about the target, and then you can see how much do those observer reports agree with each other, between the observers, and how much do the observer reports agree with what the target says, in the self-​reports. And that gives you a little bit more objectivity. But that’s not the only thing you could do. I’ll just mention a couple other things: One is you can have people give… This is what… It’s called experience sampling. Five times during the day, their cell phone can be pinged and they can be asked very targeted questions: In the last hour, how many lies have you told?

0:31:22.5 Christian Miller: Get a self-​report, but it’s not these global self-​reports like “How honest of a person are you in general?” It’s, “Talk about your behavior in a very short period of time, recently, that’s fresh in your mind. Do that five times a day, over the span of a week.” Another approach is bring someone into the lab and do laboratory studies of behavior. Give them a test and give them an opportunity to cheat if they want to, but they don’t have to, and make the… They can cheat, and they can get away with it for monetary gain, let’s see what they do or not. And then the final one would be natural environment, where people don’t even know they’re part of a lab, and you covertly observe their behavior and see what they’re up to. So there’s whole different ways of doing it. Notice, none of this will be infallible, especially when it comes to trying to discern underlying motivation, and what we’re talking about, internal structure. You’re gonna have to try and do the best you can to infer, or get as much effort as you can to try and probe into the minds of people.

0:32:30.1 Trevor Burrus: So what do we know, or what do we seem to suspect? You’re right there, I’m glad you mentioned the replicability crisis. So the best we can say with a lot of these psych studies is we seem to suspect something about whether people are honest.

0:32:46.3 Christian Miller: Yeah, very nice to flag that right from the start. There are caveats to all this. So first, there’s the fact that we tend to have these studies be based in Western countries, we tend to have a over-​abundance of students in these studies. We also have in the last 10 years been confronted with this replicability crisis, where many famous studies not having to do with honesty per se, had been attempted to be replicated and had failed, so we have to note all these caveats. I also want to note another one specific to honesty, which is that there’s some components of honesty we don’t even have enough studies to really make any confident conclusions, so, and not surprising something like stealing.

0:33:30.6 Christian Miller: Stealing’s gonna be a harder to study other than with self reports than maybe some other kinds of behavior are going to be. Having said that, what I did find was that there are lots of studies pertaining to lying and cheating. So that’s where I really focused my attention, and then to cut to the chase, we said, “Well what do we know?” In this ballpark I wanna say, I don’t wanna… There’s not one golden study that proves everything, or anything, or everything, but when we start aggregating the studies, we start getting dozens and dozens of cheating studies aggregated together, a picture emerges and paints a picture of our behavior. And I’ll give you the broad brushstrokes of the picture, and then if you want an actual example of a study, let me know.

0:34:21.5 Christian Miller: The broad brush strokes are, people tend to behave well in some situations and deplorably in other situations. They tend to cheat in some situations where they can’t cheat, but in other situations where they can cheat, they tend not to. And so we tend to see a mixed bag of behavior that doesn’t conform to my expectations of an honest person, but also doesn’t conform to my expectations of a dishonest person. Maybe what… If it’s okay with you maybe helpful to give an actual example, because that’s pretty abstract. So here’s a study I like to use by way of illustration. It has to do with students coming into the lab, taking a test with 20 problems, being told that they would be paid 50 cents per correct answer, and then sent to get to work on the test. This is a setup that’s been used, been probably 15 plus 20 plus studies now, so it’s quite popular. But what does it have to do with cheating? Well, here’s how it goes. In the normal setup, they’ll take the test, they’ll turn in the test to the person in charge, the person in charge will grade it, they’ll be paid based upon their objective performance.

0:35:34.7 Christian Miller: In one of these studies, they got seven out of 20 correct on average. Again, what does that have to do with cheating? Nothing yet. But then another group of these participants would come into the lab, they will be given the same test 50 cents per correct answer, but they’re gonna be told afterwards, “You grade it yourself”, and then once you grade the test, destroy all your materials, and just tell us how you did. And it was very clear that they could answer whatever they want, even they could say 20 out of 20 and there’ll be no questions asked, they would be be paid $10 in that case. Well, now you have the opportunity to cheat. You don’t have to, there’s no requirement that you cheat, you could just say how you actually did or you could inflate it all the way up to 20, if you didn’t get 20 correct. And since we have a baseline of seven, we know what the average performance is. In this particular study, I’m thinking it was 14. So seven verses 14. That suggests significant cheating, but it doesn’t interestingly suggest maximal cheating. If you’re gonna cheat it’s an interesting question, why not cheat all the way, why not just say 20? If you’re willing to say 14, why not say 20, get paid more? Now, one more wrinkle to it. So that’s got the disappointing news, that doesn’t reflect honesty.

0:36:57.1 Christian Miller: But to tell the other side of the story, to craft this picture of mixed character, there’s a third group. And in the third group, they come into the lab, 50 cents per correct answer, they have the shredder opportunity, the shredder being destroy your materials, and just verbally report how well you did, but the one wrinkle now is before they take the test, they sign their university’s honor code. So the honor code is, sure familiar to all listeners, but that’s a pledge that a university will have to not lie, cheat or steal or in any way violate the integrity of the academic exercise you’re about to engage in. So they sign that, then they take the test and they destroy the materials, then they verbally report. And in the study I’m familiar with, cheating disappeared. The average performance was back down to the baseline. And they found that with 50 cents per correct answer, they also found out with $2 per correct answer in another variant. Now, that’s not what I would expect of a dishonest person. I would expect a dishonest person to sign the honor code as a formality, again, like we talked about earlier, making a good impression on others, looking like you’re a virtuous person, and then just go ahead and cheat. You get the best of both worlds, right? But that’s not what happened. So that’s a microcosm of the larger picture of mixed character that I think emerges from this lecture.

0:38:22.0 Aaron Powell: Does this then play into the sense that we have that say certain professions are more or less honest than others, that if like our environment and priming effects, and all these things have an impact and different professions have different peers and different internal practices, and so on? So we tend to think that all politicians are crooks, and it does seem like the… The evidence does seem that we have lots of instances of them lying. But the question is like, Is there a reason to think that there’s something internal to that, that’s making people that or that professions or whatever might attract certain kinds… If virtue is more stable character trait, then certain professions might attract honest people or certain professions might not, or that this is just the same as when you buy a red car, suddenly, you see red cars everywhere, like we’re just noticing it in certain professions?

0:39:17.1 Christian Miller: Yeah, now this is gonna be going back to the armchair speculation for me. So I don’t have data or kind of evidence to cite here, so let me just engage in some speculation.

0:39:27.1 Christian Miller: So there’s, one question is this intrinsic versus this is just more common in some professions than other. I would doubt that it’s… That say politics is intrinsically dishonest or is such that one, in order to succeed in politics has to be a dishonest person or one can… It’s impossible to be an honest person because we know counterexamples. So Abraham Lincoln being a note-​worthy counterexample to that. So I would probably generalize that across the board and say, I don’t know of any profession where it’s kind of intrinsic to it, even something like being a poker player, which you might think of, in order to be a successful poker player, you’ve gotta bluff and you’ve gotta lie and deceive, and so forth, but I don’t… And we could talk about this at another time, but I don’t think that that you’re actually being dishonest, because that’s a case where the norms of honesty are suspended.

0:40:20.8 Christian Miller: Now, having said that, are there some that are more conducive to honesty or the reverse more conducive to dishonesty than others, yes, that seems to be a clear, clearly the case with politics being on one end of the spectrum. What seems to matter… One thing that seems to matter here a lot, and this is a lesson from what we’ve been talking about in the last 10 minutes, is the environmental and situational factors around us, and what kind of incentives are in place and what kind of reward structures are in place, what kind of role models are in place? If you see this, and this is generalizes any profession, if you see lots of other people in your profession being dishonest, it’s very hard for you to resist the temptation to join them because you’re gonna see, you’re gonna think I’m gonna be falling behind, and if I don’t join doing what they do, I’m gonna be at a disadvantage.

0:41:14.1 Christian Miller: I think about this a lot in the case of education with my students, if they see lots of other students in the class cheating and getting ahead with it, it’s gonna be very hard for them to stick to their moral guns and their conscience, and resist as well, so because of environmental and situational pressures, there’s going to be in some jobs more incentive to be dishonest and cut corners than there will be in others. That’s how I would will think about it.

0:41:39.9 Trevor Burrus: And even aside from jobs, it could be reasonable to say just almost at a societal-​wide level, you could have different levels of honesty, and that could be a little different than other virtues, because… Let’s take a society that is lower in compassion and people are generally not as compassionate but an individual person can still be compassionate and gain from being compassionate by helping someone out, but honesty is a more of a two-​way game where you say, “Well, everyone is now lying, I think about maybe an Eastern Bloc country in the Soviet era or so the Soviet Union saying, or North Korea saying to get ahead, you can, you… To eat, you have to lie or be corrupt in some way or violate some other part of honesty, and so there, you could definitely see a culture kinda break down and get to the point where no… Honesty or dishonesty is rampant.

0:42:42.1 Christian Miller: Yep, I think that’s right, and there are some… I’m not a specialist in this, but there are some actual societal measures of corruption and societal measures of dishonesty, tracking country by country on how our different countries are doing, and, yeah, I think you’re quite right to see lower honesty is going to be tied to all kinds of other things to the point where at some, where that society will start to break down and not function, Why? Well, honesty is a intrinsically valuable thing, it’s a really good thing to have, and it’s also instrumentally linked to many other good things like trust. So if you… If honesty breaks down, trust is gonna break down, and cooperation and other, respect for others and value in people’s dignity, and all these things are linked to honesty as well, and they’re gonna break down. What’s gonna happen to a society where those things break down, that’s gonna be a tough place to live in, yep. So I think you’re right as a general point, I agree with you.

0:43:45.5 Trevor Burrus: What role, if any, does I guess, domain knowledge and rationalization play in the story? And what I mean is, so I was having a conversation with a professor I know on Twitter who had remarked recently that so many of her colleagues, so many professors are trained in spotting issues of privilege in society, but then when it comes to professors at top tier tenured professors at top tier universities who have a tremendous amount of privilege compared to at lower-​tier universities or non-​tenured, but they tend to not recognize that as… And I’ve also heard, maybe this is apocryphal, but there’s studies of you put books or food out on an honour system at an academic conference and conferences of moral philosophers, they tend to take a lot of stuff more than other groups, and how much that might just be like, because they’ve got so much training in this, they’re really good at telling themselves, well, what I’m doing isn’t actually privilege or it isn’t actually dishonesty, they have the tools to talk their way out of it.

0:44:49.6 Christian Miller: Yep, yep, it’s a great question. So let me make a quick comment on that last point you made, and then let me tell a little bit of a longer story about how rationalization and self-​deception, might play a role here. So what you reported is pretty accurate, Eric Schwitzgebel, one of my favourite philosophers in the world today, teaches at University of California Riverside, has done all these interesting studies of academics and philosophers in particular, and then moral philosophers in… More specifically, to measure how good or bad they are, and he finds, in broad strokes here, moral philosophers are no better than people who don’t study ethics, which is disappointing as a moral philosopher myself. You teach this stuff all the time, and it turns out you’re not actually acting any better than anyone else. Now that’s an aside. The role of self-​deception I think and rationalization emerges from this empirical literature in a way that piggybacks nicely on what we were just talking about.

0:45:51.8 Christian Miller: So why is it that in that study we had people who are willing to cheat didn’t go all the way up to the 20, they stopped around 14. Why is it that the honour code was effective in preventing cheating, when those people could have cheated anyway and gotten the same monetary rewards that they were willing to get without the honour code. Well, there’s a emerging… And this could be the direct answer, a psychological model that will generalize far beyond tests to our minds and across the board, which is goes like this. “We do tend to know what’s right and wrong about morality, and specifically with honesty, we do think that in general, cheating is wrong, lying is wrong, stealing is wrong, and so forth, but those norms aren’t always salient in our consciousness, so we can often get seduced by something that looks tempting, give us some momentary advantage, short-​term advantage, like a financial benefit of getting that money from cheating on the test. But there’s a third element that comes into play, a desire to think of ourselves as honest people, our self-​image matters too.”

0:47:06.8 Christian Miller: And that self-​image we want to preserve that self-​image at significant cost, so we will often rationalize and tell ourselves stories so that what we’re doing is not really cheating, so that we can still think of ourselves as honest people.” And that’s part of the explanation for why those participants were willing to cheat up to 14 on average, but not go all the way to 20, because if they went all the way to 20, it’s hard to also think of yourself as an honest person that way, but if you just fudge it a little bit, you just bend, I got a couple more rights, then that’s not as big a deal, I could still think of myself as an honest person. So I’m manipulating destroying the facts, just a little bit, but then the honour code comes along, and what does that do? That makes our moral values very salient to consciousness, very fresh and immediate… I know, now I’m reminded, I already knew it, I’m reminded that cheating is wrong. Immediately after I take this test, I just had this opportunity to cheat, well now it’s hard to be engaged in self-​deception and rationalization because I’ve just been thinking about how cheating is wrong, and now I’ve given this opportunity to cheat, well, I’m much more likely to not cheat, so it actually is all bound up with this research that’s going on today.

0:48:22.6 Trevor Burrus: That point to the question of cultivation, or give us some tips on… I agree, that it would be good to be more honest, not to a fault, but more honest society. I also remember that when I was a kid, up to about seven, I used to lie all the time, and then I decided that it was silly to lie all the time, and I think I’ve been a pretty honest… I mean kids lie a lot. So just stupid lies.

[chuckle]

0:48:45.6 Trevor Burrus: Just stupid lies that made no sense, yeah.

0:48:47.1 Trevor Burrus: But I so I had some moral moment of clarity in my seven-​year-​old brain saying that this was a silly… So how do we cultivate this virtue, or what kind of things should we think about for ourselves to cultivate the virtue?

0:49:00.0 Christian Miller: Yeah, that’s great. I’ve got three kids myself, so I know what you’re talking about, [chuckle] Yeah, I’m dealing with it too. So there are several different strategies that could emerge at this point, we could focus on individual cultivation, what steps can I take as an individual? We could also talk about institutional practices and cultural practices and societal practices. Let me start with the individual at least, and depending on how much time we have, we can go further. So one thing that piggyback is exactly on what we were just talking about, is the idea of moral reminders. So what is the honour code doing? It’s functioning as a moral reminder. It’s calling to mind something we already believe and making a salient to consciousness, and then having it play a motivational role in guiding our behaviour. So the thought would be, let’s have lots of moral reminders in our lives to keep us… To keep our perspective and our focus where it needs to be. Those could be anything from starting the day by reading a certain positive reading, diary-​ing at the end of the day, text messages and emails and so forth that come through during the day, things on the wall, whatever you find is helpful there.

0:50:14.6 Christian Miller: Another strategy, now, I’ll stop after this one is looking to people who have done better than us, of which there’s always someone, often many people, right? So these are moral exemplaries, these are moral role models, these are moral heroes. In the case of honesty, there’s kind of stock examples, Abraham Lincoln, but it needn’t be Lincoln. In fact, there’s good research to say that the most effective role models are those who are near and dear to us. People who we know kind of on a personal basis, who are regular parts of our lives and who are really crucially relatable to us, not up on a like a distant pedestal, who almost seem unattainable to us, but we can relate to.

0:51:05.2 Christian Miller: And also relating to them, see that they are further along that path of virtue, where we started talked at the very beginning about virtue coming in degrees, they’re further along than we are, so we can admire them, which fosters… Can foster in us a desire to emulate them, to be inspired by them, so to bring my character closer to their character as opposed to bringing their character down to my level. So those are two quick thoughts, reminders and role models.

[music]

0:51:45.9 Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favourite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.