New Delhi: It is a well-known proverb that “Honesty is the best policy.” But is it getting harder to be honest?
Christian B Miller, professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, told Newswise that failures of honesty are currently encouraged and incentivised in new and powerful ways.
Miller in his new book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, explains why it is getting harder to be honest and why it matters more than ever to be so.
For him, honesty is more than just telling the truth; it is a “nuanced and complex virtue.”
“I think of honesty primarily as a virtue of character—something that influences how we think, how we feel and how we act,” Miller said.
He argues that in addition to eroding religious, societal and moral standards, technology is also facilitating dishonesty.
“Technology itself is neutral, but it gives us power and ability these days to do things we couldn’t do before, or to do them a heck of a lot easier than we could have done in the past. It gives us new capacities that facilitate greater dishonesty,” he adds.
In his latest book, Miller says that there is almost a sort of honesty crisis.
“There are situations where we’re both tempted to be more dishonest than we have been in the past—it’s incentivised and more appealing than it was before—and at the same time, we’re also able to get away with the dishonesty more easily than we could have in the past. It is simply harder to catch people being dishonest today. When you put those two things together, you’ve got a bad combination: greater temptation to be dishonest and easier means of being dishonest,” he explains.
Miller was previously the head of The Honesty Project, one of the world’s largest research initiatives on the topic by Wake Forest University and Carnegie Mellon University. He argues that humans are naturally hard-wired to default into a truthful mindset, saying that he finds it very “encouraging.”
“We naturally tell the truth, and it actually takes effort and cognitive resources to get us to lie. It is so much more natural and easier psychologically for us to tell the truth,” he added.