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Motivation and the Virtue of Honesty: Some Conceptual Requirements and Empirical Results

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Abstract

The virtue of honesty has been stunningly neglected in contemporary philosophy, with only two papers appearing in the last 40 years. The first half of this paper is a conceptual exploration of one aspect of the virtue, namely the honest person’s motivational profile. I argue that egoistic motives for telling the truth or not cheating are incompatible with honest motivation. At the same time, there is no one specific motive that is required for a person to be motivated in a virtuously honest way. Instead I advance a pluralistic theory of honest motivation, which allows for motives of caring, fairness, and virtue, among others. The second half of the paper then turns briefly to the empirical literature in psychology and behavioral economics on cheating, to see to what extent honest motives appear to be operative. The upshot is that we have good preliminary evidence for the claim that most people are not virtuously honest.

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Notes

  1. Smith 2003 and Wilson 2018.

  2. Miller 2019.

  3. My project in this paper is narrower in another sense, as I do not engage with historical discussions of honesty here. The discussion which follows will assume a broadly Aristotelian approach to thinking about the virtues, but Aristotle himself said little about honesty, instead focusing on the virtue that pertains to truthfully talking about oneself (1127a114-1127b33). Augustine and Kant held famously strict views about truth-telling and honesty, but those issues won’t arise in the context of this paper. Thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to emphasize the contemporary focus of the paper.

  4. For extensive discussion, see Miller 2013: chapter one.

  5. When it comes to the empirical discussion I focus mainly on studies which pertain to cheating, so for the purposes of this paper at least cheating had better fall under the scope of (dis)honesty.

    An anonymous reviewer noted that I assume, among other things, that the way we know reality responds to a specific order, and that it is good to observe and help to preserve that order by, e.g., respecting other people’s property and expressing things as we see them. I do indeed assume claims at least broadly in this neighborhood.

  6. See Miller 2017, 2019. (H) ends up getting revised several times, but the basic proposal is good enough for my purposes here.

    In my book project, I elaborate in detail on what ‘intentionally disporting the facts’ amounts to, and on why it is important to understand the ‘facts’ in this context subjectively (as what the agent takes the facts to be), rather than objectively (as what the facts actually are). I also clarify that ‘reliably’ is important to the account as capturing both stability over time and consistency across situations (so-called ‘local’ character traits can be stable without being cross-situationally consistent). Finally, I explore how the account is supposed to work for lying, theft, promise-breaking, cheating, and misleading. Admittedly, the account may look implausible with respect to, say, theft that does not involve deception. One idea I consider in such cases is whether the ‘facts’ should include normative facts as well as descriptive facts. Thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to flag these issues here.

  7. Even many non-Aristotelians would agree. See, for instance, Adams 2006: 121, 127, 130. For the need for a motivational requirement on honesty, see Carr 2014: 10 and Wilson 2018: 271–274.

  8. For relevant discussion, see Kant 4: 390 and Markovits 2010: 206, 210, 224–225.

  9. For an extensive discussion of both kinds of reasons and how they relate to each other, see Miller 2008.

  10. It might be unsatisfying in general with respect to all the virtues, but I don’t need to get into that discussion here. See Stocker 1976 for relevant discussion.

  11. Below we’ll see what happens when the motive of duty is the ultimate motivation.

  12. For a more rigorous treatment of the difference between egoistic and altruistic motives, see Miller 2013: chapter two.

  13. Another response could have been, “It would been a lie, and lying is wrong.” Or “I would have stolen, and stealing is wrong.” The discussion in the next two paragraphs for the case of “It would not have been honest” parallels very closely these other responses too.

  14. See also Hursthouse 1999: 129. I also don’t think that appealing to what is or is not the honest thing to do, needs to give rise to an egoistic focus on one’s own character, nor to the kinds of worries about moral schizophrenia that Michael Stocker famously raised in his 1976 paper. This is not to say that these concerns couldn’t arise if an appeal is made to other virtues instead of honesty, such as compassion, as Stohr 2018: 457–458 has noted.

    Finally, an even more general appeal to ‘that was the virtuous thing to do’ or ‘that is what a virtuous person would do’ can also fall in the range of virtuous motives for honesty, even if the person doesn’t have any further story to tell about why that is the case (Hursthouse 1999: 129).

  15. This fits well with Hursthouse’s discussion of acting from virtue as acting from one or more “X reasons,” where these reasons can be diverse in nature and do not need to explicitly appeal to the virtue in question. In the case of honesty, she notes that “we get such things as ‘It was the truth’, ‘He asked me’, ‘It’s best to get such things out into the open straight away’” (1999: 128).

    As Karen Stohr writes in a related context, “We might think of X reasons as pointing to the features of the circumstances that make it choiceworthy, features that the virtue person is attending to when she chooses her action” (2018: 461).

  16. See Wilson 2018: 271–272.

  17. Wilson 2018: 275.

  18. Wilson 2018: 276, citing Wilson 2017.

  19. See Garcia 1998, emphasis removed.

  20. See also Williams (2000: 246-247), who reads Garcia as offering a motivational story for honesty in general, and then (rightly in my view) notes that if so, the story is far too narrow.

  21. For a pluralist view about reasons against lying, see Murphy 1996: 99–100.

  22. For related discussion, see Markovits 2010: 206.

  23. See, e.g., Stocker 1976 and Markovits 2010.

  24. Markovits 2010: 205, emphasis removed.

  25. Ibid., 230, emphasis removed.

  26. Ibid., 228.

  27. Hursthouse 1999: 11, see also 97, 125. As she writes, “If it is ‘hard for me’ to restore the full purse I saw someone drop because I am strongly tempted to keep it and have to conquer the temptation, I am less than thoroughly honest and morally inferior to the person who hastens to restore it with no thought of keeping what is not hers” (97).

  28. For an extensive review, see Miller 2019.

  29. Mazar et al. 2008: 643.

  30. See Gino et al. 2010: 714, Gino et al. 2009: 397, and Zhong et al. 2010: 312 respectively.

  31. See, e.g., Gino and Mogilner 2014: 418.

  32. Bryan et al. 2013: 1003.

  33. Mazar et al. 2008: 637.

  34. See Eisenberg 2004: 167 and Shalvi et al. 2012.

  35. I am using “beliefs and desires” as a convenient shorthand for all the folk psychological mental states, including hopes, wishes, intentions, emotions, and the like. This is purely for convenience and not a claim about the reducibility of these other states to beliefs and desires.

  36. See Diener and Wallbom 1976: 110 and Shu et al. 2011: 330, 332.

  37. Here I draw on Mazar et al. 2008: 635.

  38. Being mindful, though, need not require reflection or conscious awareness.

  39. See Bazerman and Gino 2012, Shu et al. 2012: 15197, Shalvi et al. 2012, Gino and Mogilner 2014: 420, and Shalvi et al. 2015.

  40. See Mazar et al. 2008, Shu et al. 2011, Shalvi et al. 2012, Bazerman and Gino 2012, Bryan et al. 2013, Gino and Mogilner 2014, and Shalvi et al. 2015.

  41. As Mazar writes, there is a “magnitude range of dishonesty within which people can cheat, but their behaviors, which they would usually consider dishonest, do not bear negatively on their self-concept” (Mazar et al. 2008: 634). Similarly Christopher Bryan notes that, “an individual can engage in dishonest behavior while avoiding the correspondent inference that he or she is the kind of person who behaves dishonestly, allowing that individual to have his or her cake (reap the benefits of unethical behavior) and eat it too (preserve a positive self-image)” (Bryan et al. 2013: 1001, emphasis his).

  42. Note that if the motivator were to actually be or become an honest person, then that could in fact be a morally admirable motivator. But this was not part of the explanatory story offered in this section, which focused on the desire to think of oneself as honest, and that is an importantly different desire both psychologically and morally.

  43. See, e.g., Doris 2002 and Miller 2013.

  44. I am very grateful to Claudia Navarini and Angelo Campodonico for inviting me to be a part of this special issue, and to two anonymous reviewers for their comments. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Wake Forest University, Box 7332, Winston-Salem, NC, 27109, USA

    Christian B. Miller

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Miller, C.B. Motivation and the Virtue of Honesty: Some Conceptual Requirements and Empirical Results. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 355–371 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10055-1

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