I think honesty is either misconstrued or overrated. I like playing “Ethical Dilemmas” with thoughtful people. You pose a hypothetical situation where one must choose between, say, hurting someone emotionally by telling them a truth, or lying and sparing their feelings. I would lie on the side of charity without blinking. But the large preponderance of people I’ve posed this to choose to be honest irrespective of how much emotional damage the truth might inflict. I believe honesty per se is misunderstood. The virtue it’s confounded with, which I rank highly, is reliability, dependability, not truth-telling for it’s own sake.
Anyway, my paramount virtues are charity, reliability, courage and tenancity. Limiting the choice to one, charity.
Of course–lying is preferrable sometimes to truth. A common example: police storm the house with weapons drawn, looking for a friend of yours. Assume, further, you know for certain your friend is innocent. Do you tell the truth (about where he is)?
Kant would tell us, surprisingly, yes–you shouldn’t lie, it’s categorically morally wrong. What if everyone in the whole world lied? We’d have chaos; it’s inconsistent with a “rational” society; therefore, it’s morally wrong, and if we’re going to do our duty, we cannot lie. Of course, Kant perhaps would allow for leniency in extreme cases where a harmless lie can prevent serious harm (any Kant scholars?)
But the real twist of this issue is the fact that, actually, we are pretty much lying to everyone all the time. The existence of the individual is imaginary; this means that the words we say are not even true or false in themselves–it takes a world, more precisely, it takes the social fantasy of a world, to allow for the supplement of symbolic weight which makes the words true or false in reference to a particular political situation. In fact, politics is the only place we practically encounter the truth, much as war (or force, more generally) is where we practically encounter Being; more accurately, politics and war are where Being and truth rupture, where the reality-producing social fantasy breaks down. (In reality, political-machines and war-machines only work when they break down, by breaking down.)
Basically, if all of social life is a fantasy, how can one myth be more “true” than another? Despite how simple it may appear, this question is a critical one for our time…
I could avoid that emotionally charged word and use something like “generosity” or “empathy”. But I love warm things too. Sweet warm things. I don’t care what her name is. Charity is fine. Well, Chastity is out.
Lying and sparing their feelings is just a way of doing and saying to please others and to be liked. Isn’t charity about giving to the other person so that even though you might say something they don’t want to hear it helps them see their own faults or errors of their ways in order that they can grow rather than with a big grin saying oh you’re just fine? You might not be liked for it but you’ll be on the giving side (true charity), not the receiving.
If you are taking a virtue-ethics (Aristotelian) view of virtues then Honesty is not the same as telling the truth for its own sake.
A virtue is the “golden mean” of an attribute of some kind. Both extremes of this are vices - so either not telling the truth at all, or always telling the truth no matter what both would be vices. Honesty would be telling the truth most of the time, and correctly discerning by practical wisdom when it was wise not to tell the truth. The joy of Aristotelian virtue ethics was that it did not provide deontological rules that could not be broken, so was a much better practical guide. Of course it had other problems but thats another story.
As to Kant on truth telling… This is something that is (possibly) a misconception of Kant’s view. In the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (printed as “The Moral Law” in America) Kant states the form that ethical statements must take if they are to be genuine moral (categorial not merely hypothetical) statement or imperatives. In this book he does use the notion of truth telling to illustrate what he means by a categorical imperative (how it can never be broken).
However, the groundwork is a formal work, not interested in the details of actual rules. By this I mean that Kant was only interested in the form that was necessary for any statement to be genuinely moral. He made no attempt to make any statemetns as to which rules should take this form.
In another book, of which the name I am not sure, Kant does attempt to show which laws should be considered moral. However, almost no one, including myself, except Kant scholars have read this book. The example of truth telling is so widely used, and the Groundwork often quoted in support of this, that I think he is possibly being misconstrued when people claim that he states it is always wrong to tell a lie. It is possible he did say this… as I said I have not read this other book… but it definately isn’t as clear that he did say it as some people like to think.
I think it’s ok to lie when the person you lie too is in the wrong and will be a threat if you tell the truth.
i may understand their actions but i don’t emapthise with irrational behaviour or emotions.
If they aren’t going to be a major inconvinience then just say that you won’t tell them where he is because you know for a fact hes innocent, though if you did know he was innocent for a fact why is he hiding/them chasing ?
In our little over-simple example, standing mute wouldn’t be an option; but presumably, if the police officers are rational, we ought to be able to explain the situation to everyone’s satisfaction and neatly clear up any fallacious reasoning on their part. It’s easy to see this is rather hopelessly idealistic, but this is almost what Kant would have us believe— that is, if we could convince the police officers that hunting down an innocent man isn’t a categorically universalizable moral act, and in fact is quite unethical, then their rational aspect ought to fire up and they’d decide on their own volition to give up their search.
But in reality, the state (really any social machines) creates the conditions for judging whether a statement is a lie or the truth. Tim Russert was talking on the Daily Show the other day about the First Amendment, noting it was “interesting” because it doesn’t mean you’re responsible for speaking–for example, it means you can (legally!) refrain from responding to public questions regarding your administration’s security and foreign policies. This sounds a lot like lying, but it’s not technically a falsehood–it’s close to a lie by omission, but it’s not truly a response at all. Once again, standing mute isn’t true or false…
JrnmnX:
Of course not; that’s not the point. The point is about the institutions which create versions of ‘reality’ and punish people accordingly. The point is that if lying is choosing whether or not to support the social fantasy (which may have little to no connection to what an individual imagines is reality,) then it’s not clear in any way that a universalism can point our way out of any of the common (political, not logical) paradoxes involving lying. To take a more poignant example, when a Homeland Security officer asks you if you are or have ever been a member of any subversive or anarchist party (assuming that you have or are) would you rather lie and go free, or tell the truth and get jailed, tortured, and possibly killed depending on the “quality” of the “intelligence” they’ve got on you? This really boils down to: how can we be honest to dishonest people? (It seems like we have to lie to tell the truth, sometimes.)
quite possibly JrnymnX… I am familiar with the form of the nicomachian ethics but skipped over most of the specific virtues as I didn’t consider them really relevant (cultural bias and assumed teleology getting in the way of them being anything i might actually accept).
But if we are considering “Honesty” as a virtue, it is clear that it would have to be the mean of truth telling and not the excess of it. Whatever name it was attributed in the nicomachean ethics is not that important.
edit: On reflection, I think that self expression is a different issue. Whilst the mean would be telling the truth about yourself, it is not the same general truth telling.
What we should consider is why people lie in the first place. No matter if the intentions are noble or not, people lie to avoid a difficult situation. Therefore, by this notion, lying is simply displaying a weakness in the face of difficulty. A lie is nothing more than a personal wish expressed for others. So one would say, “I don’t know where my friend is.” However, they are actually thinking, “I wish I didn’t know were my friend is, then I wouldn’t have to be in this difficult situation.” So we should not talk about honesty for intrinsic value, but as truthfullness as a sign of inner-strength, because when you are really truthful with yourself you will feel no need to mislead others.
there are other cheracteristics I see as virtues but the words used to describe them carry a number of unplesant meanings so it is best left unsaid
As for to tell the truth or to lie for the sake of someones feelings I prefer to leave it unsaid as well, simply tell them what they wish to know and leave it at that, otherwise you erode the trust you have built by lying, and you erode at the friendship by being too blunt.
What if the the person you’re withholding the truth from is emotionally unstable and could become suicidal if you told them, eg, that their deceased father had been a Nazi? The truth would hurt, whereas telling them you know nothing or that he was a fine man would not exactly be pandering. Saying you’ll deliver on a promise and doing so is a form of honesty which RicDemian called “reliability”. That’s different from “boy scout” honesty for its own sake, irrespective of the consequences.