NSE+ Books You Should Know: The Honesty Crisis by Christian B. Miller

**Lee C. Camp** (0:04)
Hello, friends, Lee C. Camp here.
Anytime I'm not scrupulously honest about something, my wife likes to remind me that she'd expect a little better from a man with a Ph.D. in Ethics. And I hate to admit this, but there's research showing that she's on to something. That ethics professors may be no more honest than anybody else. It concerns me that I may be no exception. Each quarter over on NSE Plus, our subscriber community, I pick a book I think you should know about. This quarter, I'll make you an honest recommendation, a book about honesty. It's called The Honesty Crisis by the philosopher Christian B. Miller. What I love about it is that it is not a book about lying politicians or con artists. It's a book about you and me and about how we might find ways to stay honest in a world where deceiving one another keeps getting easier and easier and easier. Here's a bit of that conversation.
Christian Miller, welcome back to No Small Endeavor.

**Christian B. Miller** (1:04)
It's great to be back. I look forward to our conversation.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:06)
Yeah, me too. I've been looking forward to getting to connect again. Great. Continue to be grateful for your work and delighted to get to be with you today. I would love to hear you do this in the book, but give us a definition of honesty.

**Christian B. Miller** (1:19)
Sure.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:19)
Because it seems that could cut a lot of different ways.

**Christian B. Miller** (1:22)
As a philosopher, that's where I like to start, I want to make sure we're on the same page and we're clear what we're using terms to mean.
There's a lot to say in unpacking honesty, although it might not seem like there is. Because if you ask most people, what is honesty? Well, that's just telling the truth.
So it's behavior and what behavior is true telling and we're done. Why do we even need to comment on this? I have an entire chapter though, fleshing it out to show that it's actually multifaceted and more nuanced. I won't go into all of it, but a couple of highlights. One, yet behaviorally, true telling is important, of course, for an honest person. If I said otherwise, you should just stop the interview right now, that'd be crazy. But it's not the only thing that's important. So honesty prevents lying, but also prevents stealing, it prevents cheating, it prevents BSing, fraud, self-deception, hypocrisy, misleading behavior, promise-breaking. So lots of moral territory is covered by this virtue in preventing these kinds of dishonest actions. So that's the outward facing side of honesty. And if you boil it down, honesty involves not intentionally distorting the facts or misrepresenting reality as you see it. But then there's also the inward side, there's the character side, because I think it's a character trait, it's a virtue. There's always more to character than just how you see people acting externally.
If their heart isn't in the right place, they don't get to count as virtuous. This isn't unique to me, it goes all the way back to the Greek philosophers. So in a case of honesty, if you tell the truths of the boss, that's an example I like to use, the boss asks you a question, you tell the truth to the boss, okay, you get a check mark for the behavior, but why did you do it?
If it was you're angling for the boss's job, or you're trying to get a raise, or you're trying to not get fired, or you're looking for rewards in the afterlife, or you don't want to feel guilty for lying, all these kinds of reasons have one thing in common. They're self-interested, they're about me benefiting myself, they're egoistic, they don't count as far as a virtue is concerned, the virtue of honesty. Instead, and I'll end with this, virtuous honesty has to be outwardly honest, coming from a heart that is concerned with things larger than itself. Maybe it's go back to the boss, maybe it's because you think it's the right thing to do, to tell the truth, or because God commanded it, or you're trying to become an honest person, because it's important to become an honest person, or maybe it's because you care about this person, or love, I don't know, love, but the boss, but your friends, or something larger than just what would benefit yourself. We put that together with the behavior, the package overall is closer to what I would expect of a virtuously honest person.

**Lee C. Camp** (4:20)
So some good, there's an internal disposition towards seeking some good outside the self that's bound up with the practice of honesty.