Transcript - Why Telling the Truth Is Harder (and More Important) Than Ever With Christian B. Miller

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Why Telling the Truth Is Harder (and More Important) Than Ever With Christian B. Miller

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 571 of Live Happy Now. It’s no secret that we’re living in a time when we’re being challenged by misinformation and deception, and this week’s guest is doing something about it. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and today, I’m joined by Christian B. Miller, the AC Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His books and articles have focused heavily on morality and virtues, and he directed the Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. His latest book, The Honesty Crisis, looks at six specific areas where dishonesty is rampant, and he connects the dots on how that erodes our trust in institutions and in each other. Today, we talk about what honesty means, how this honesty crisis is affecting us, and what we can do about it. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:54] PF: Christian, thank you so much for joining me today on Live Happy Now.

[0:00:58] CM: Thank you so much for having me on your show.

[0:00:59] PF: This is going to be a fantastic conversation. Your latest book is The Honesty Crisis, and wow, is that a timely topic? I know that you’ve written in the past about morality and character, and I wanted to learn a little bit about how all that led into writing about honesty.

[0:01:14] CM: I’m a philosophy professor at Wake Forest University. I’ve been working on the topic of virtue and character for pretty much 20 years, and I was thinking about it from a very broad perspective, just what is virtue, what is character writ large. I was thinking, how can we foster a better character? What does our character look like these days empirically? What does the psychological research tell us? That sustained me for a while. But then, I said what I want to say, both for the academics and for the popular audience, and I was looking for something different, but related, not completely different, and I seized upon honesty because, strikingly, almost no one in my world of academic philosophy was talking about honesty. I don’t know why that was, but two articles written in the last 50 years, nothing in book form.

At the same time, every day I’m confronted in the news with some usually negative, unfortunately, story about honesty. How can I reconcile this disparity? Well, as a philosopher, at least I want to jump in there and say something constructive, trying to get more clear about why we should care about honesty, why it’s important, and what is it even in the first place? I transitioned about five years ago to exclusively focusing on this, what I would call a neglected virtue in my world, and trying to get it no longer neglected.

[0:02:29] PF: Now, what do you find most interesting about the topic of honesty?

[0:02:34] CM: For me as a philosopher, I’m interested in just what it is in the first place. I don’t know if this is the most interesting thing, but I find it very interesting. It’s so tempting to think of it as just a matter of telling the truth. When I speak in front of an audience and say, “Tell me what honesty is,” it’s not lying and it’s telling the truth. That is one part of it, but it’s only one, I would say, actually, small part of what honesty is. It’s actually much more rich and multifaceted and nuanced virtue than we typically appreciate. Honesty works against lying, of course, but also works against cheating, it works against stealing, it works against breaking your promises, it works against fraud, self-deception, hypocrisy, BS’ing, just all down the line, one after another of these things.

It turns out that honesty covers a tremendous amount of moral territory, maybe more than any other virtue there is, in preventing these bad forms of behavior. Even that isn’t all there is to honesty. There’s the heart behind the behavior, as well as the behavior itself. Why are you telling the truth? Why are you not cheating? That matters, too. You could have someone who reliably tells the truth in lots of different situations and get fails, to be honest, because they’re doing it for what I would call self-interested, or self-seeking motivations. If you’re really trying to be a virtuous person in general and a virtuous, honest person in particular, your heart has to be not focused on yourself. Will honesty help me get a promotion? Will keep me from being fired? Will I get rewards in the afterlife? Will it overcome my guilt?

Rather, you need to be focused on something larger than yourself. You need to be focused on what’s good for other people. You need to be focused on what’s right and wrong, what’s good and bad, what’s virtuous and vicious. That perspective takes us out of our probably natural inward focus, benefiting ourselves, outwardly pushes us to care about others and has to be there as part of what it is to be an honest person. To sum it up, I started by thinking it was just a matter of telling a truth. I came to discover that it’s much more interesting and nuanced and rich than that.

[0:04:46] PF: Yeah. I was surprised to see how complicated honesty really is. It’s a 266-page book, is that correct?

[0:04:54] CM: That sounds right to me.

[0:04:55] PF: Yeah. It’s not the slim volume of, “Oh, here’s what it is. Here’s five things you can do.” The motivation aspect really fascinated me, because I’ve not seen that touched on, and that’s not something we’re taught either. We’re taught, tell the truth. As you said, it’s if you lie, you’re going to hell. If there’s always a consequence, there’s something bad that’s going to happen if you’re dishonest. Can we dive into just a little bit, the idea of those motivations and how do we do that self-examination to know what our motivations are?

[0:05:28] CM: Yeah, good, good. I think as a philosopher thinking about character in general, every virtue is going to work this way. Honestly, it’s not a special case. When we go courage, patience, justice, compassion, all down the line, motivation matters as well as behavior. But let’s dive in a little bit more to honesty specifically. I think you can carve up motivation into three categories. There’s motivation, let’s say, to tell the truth, because it benefits myself. That’s self-interested motivation. We’ve already given a couple examples of that, including the one you just gave to avoid punishments, either in this life or the next life. That’s a self-interested motivation.

Another category is selfless motivation, altruistic motivation, motivation concerned with the good of someone, or other people in general. I tell the truth, because I care about this person, or because they’re my friends, or because I don’t want to hurt them with a lie. Then there’s a third category, which is more impersonal, or abstract motivation. Examples would be, “I tell the truth, because it’s the right thing to do,” or “Because morality requires it,” or “Because God commands me,” or “Because what would happen if everyone were to do this?” Lie, for example. That’s a more impersonal motivation.

I think, to sum this up, self-interested motivation has got to be off the table. If that’s what’s primarily driving you to do these honest actions, you don’t get to count as virtuously honest. The other two, though, I think are fine. If I make a new example, if my student comes to me and says, “Hey, I saw a lot of people cheating on the test, but I didn’t do it.” I asked them, the students, “Well, why didn’t you do it? I’m so happy you didn’t. That’s very impressive. Why didn’t you do it?” They say, “Because I knew that cheating was the wrong thing to do.” That’s fine. Well, they say, “Because I respect you as a professor.” That’s fine. Or, “Because an honest person wouldn’t do that.” That’s fine. Lots of these examples, motivation would be fine, so long as they’re not self-focused.

Then to briefly tackle the other side of your question, well, unfortunately, we are not infallible guides to our own motivation. We can look into our minds and we can think, “Why did I do that? What was my reason?” Hopefully, the majority of the time, we figure it out accurately. We know from empirical research and from our own experience that we often deceive ourselves to, plus there’s unconscious, or under the radar motivation. I don’t think we’re ever going to be perfect about this. But we do a reasonably good job of figuring out what our motivation is. Sometimes it’s after the fact, like I just do the thing, I tell the truth, and then afterwards I say, “Why did I do that?” At that point, confabulate, I can come up with something nice story. “Oh, I did it. Yeah, of course, I did it for a good reason, because it’s the right thing to do.” Hopefully, we can discover afterwards, this was in fact my motive and it was a virtuous motive. Then we’re in good shape. I have no solution now as far as how to get people to be better at figuring out their own motivations. That’s a problem in psychology that’s been around for a hundred years.

[0:08:36] PF: Are you saying that a little white lie? Like, every husband has heard, “Does this make me look fat?” What’s the answer? Is it okay? Is a little white lie okay.

[0:08:45] CM: Yeah. White lies are notorious for, first of all, they’re lies, but they were, comparatively little is at stake. Not a matter of saving innocent lives, or national security, or anything like that. My view here is that I don’t want to give a blanket answer. I think it probably in some cases, they’re going to be okay, especially if the other person’s in a precarious mental situation at the time. Maybe they’re going through some struggles mentally and you know that a honest remark might tip them over the edge, then I’m going to be reticent to advocate for honesty.

I think a lot of the times, we think it’s okay and it’s not. Here are some reasons. It comes with a lot of costs when you tell a white lie to a person. One cost is that, well, the person’s going to go ahead and do the thing you’re lying about. They’re going to wear that thing, or they’re going to continue to make that dessert. You’re going to have to put up with it in the future. You’re also going to have to remember that you told the lie, so that you don’t get caught later –

[0:09:45] PF: Ah, good point.

[0:09:47] CM: – having told a lie earlier. You’re going to have to keep it a secret from third party. You’re going to not reveal what you really think to the kids, or to your best friend and what not, because they might let the truth slip out. These kinds of things are costly. They make what might seem like a quick, momentary decision to tell a lie. They actually make it a much more demanding investment in dishonesty. That is not how we are normally psychologically wired. In chapter two of the book, I talk about truth default theory. Our normal default tendency, and this is on empirical grounds, is to tell the truth. When we lie, that actually takes more psychological resources and energy. That’s not how we’re naturally disposed. Then that energy has to be continually invested in the future to keep the lie from being discovered. If it is, that can break trust with the other person. That’s again another cost that could come along with the white lie. You could erode the relationship if it’s discovered and break trust with that other person. I think lots of reasons to be cautious, although I would not blanket prohibited.

[0:10:51] PF: It’s like individual cases. We got a case-by-case example.

[0:10:54] CM: Yeah. I think that’s right. I think a lot of morality works that way in general. I don’t think there’s one simple moral rule, for example, for all moral behavior. I think we need to look at particular cases and weigh up the considerations in those particular cases to determine what the correct answer is.

[0:11:09] PF: If our instinct is to tell the truth, then why do we have such a problem with honesty in today’s world? I mean, it’s easier than ever to be dishonest. We have more ways to do it. As you’ve discussed, it’s not just about lying. It’s misleading, it’s self-deception, it’s cheating, things like that. Has honesty become more difficult in today’s world, because of the environment we’re in?

[0:11:33] CM: Yup. Yup. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Here’s the glass half full story and then the glass half empty story. Glass half full story is that it’s a good thing that we default to true telling. I’d rather it be that than defaulting into lying, or defaulting into being neutral. The research in the last 10 years has found that overwhelmingly, most people don’t tell lies most of the time. In one particular study, 60% of people reported not telling a lie in the last 24 hours. Not a single lie.

[0:12:05] PF: That’s good.

[0:12:06] CM: Yeah. Then the majority of the lies that we’re told, we’re told by 5% of the participants. There’s a small group that tells a lot of lies, most people otherwise don’t. However, that’s the positive side. Now we come to the other side. There are situational environmental factors that can make dishonesty more tempting. The one that runs as undercurrent throughout my book is technology. No surprise. Technology, I think is neutral in and of itself and the Internet, your cellphone, whatever it might be, is neutral. However, it enables us to do things we might not have been able to do before and it gives us capacities to be honest, or dishonest.

Unfortunately, though, what’s happening is that it’s giving us capacities to be dishonest in ways that are really easy, that makes dishonesty really easy. It also makes it very tempting. Finally, it makes it really hard to detect. So, to make it less abstract, because I know that’s pretty abstract. Real quick, create illustration. Student cheating has been around since there were classrooms.

[0:13:08] PF: Right. Probably before.

[0:13:09] CM: Probably before. Yeah. The Internet comes along. The Internet’s neutral. It’s not good, or bad. It’s neutral. But it provides abilities and capacities for students to go online and get material, put it into the paper. Now, of course, the next wave is AI. You only have to go and search around. You just give this tool the prompts, the length, a stylistic suggestion, and it’ll write your paper for you within a span of 10 seconds, and it’ll probably be a paper better than what you could write yourself and get you a higher grade than you would get otherwise. It’s now, go back to what we’re saying, a piece of technology that makes dishonesty very easy, very tempting, and at least at the current moment, almost impossible to detect. That’s a bad formula when it comes to trying to preserve honesty in our society.

[0:13:58] PF: For students who are trying to be honest, but they’re saying, “Okay, my buddy over here who is a C student, and now he’s going to write this paper and he’s going to get an A, I’m a B student, and that’s about as good as I can do a paper on.” It takes away, it seems, some of the incentive for honesty. Because it’s almost like you’re going to be punished for not doing what the others are doing.

[0:14:22] CM: A 100%. Very good observation. When you look at the research on predictors of student cheating, the number one predictor is perceived cheating by other students. It’s not the difficulty of the test, or your GPA, or needing to get into graduate school or something like that. The number one predictor of whether a student will cheat is whether they perceive, rightly or wrongly, other students in their environment cheating as well. If they perceive that, they think they’re going to be left behind, and it’s very hard at that point for them to overcome the temptation to join the crowd, because we have this crowd mentality off and we follow the crowd and cheat as well. That’s depressing fact, but it’s well validated now.

[0:15:06] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:15:14] PF: Now, let’s hear more from Christian Miller.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:15:18] PF: It’s not just in schools, it also happens in the workplace. People, I think, don’t see it as wrong, because it’s so accessible. It’s just they’re using it. They perceive it as a tool to help them do their job better. What’s that fine line and where do we go from here?

[0:15:35] CM: There are cases where it is clearly wrong. Then we can talk about what to do. If a professor is very clear, I want this paper to be your own work. The student turns in a paper generated by an AI without disclosing that AI use. Then it’s clearly violating the professor’s expectations. And so, now that counts as plagiarism. It’s plagiarizing from another source without giving credit. It’s dishonest and it’s morally wrong. I think in situations like that, and that would apply in the workplace, too. If the boss, or the team leader or something expects original work and doesn’t get it, the same thing happens. What do you do about it?

In the book, I talk about a variety of different honesty crises. This is one we’re focusing on now. For some of them, I do think there are concrete steps and practical initiatives we can explore. I’m optimistic in some areas. Alas, I’m not so optimistic in this area. What can you do to try and inspire people and draw on the good size of their character to motivate them for good reasons to produce their own work? I think there are things you can do, but they’re just not going to be effective enough. You can have things like an honor code, or in the work environment, their ethics codes. You can have every assignment, or work product have an honesty pledge attached to it. This worked quite effectively prior to the Internet, even worked with the Internet in the educational context. These honor codes were quite effectively. There’s good data to back them up. I just don’t think they’re going to be these days effective enough to reign in temptation to use AI on an agreed assignment.

To now finish this, at least in the education context, so I’ll focus there. I think you have to do what most of my colleagues are doing, which is take AI out of the students’ hands, literally, by bringing the graded work entirely into the classroom. You’re grading what? Blue book exams, like the old-fashioned blue book exams. You’re having them do quizzes in class. You’re maybe give an oral exam, individually to each students. You maybe have writing assignments, but they’re in class writing assignments. They get the prompt and then they spend the entire class writing in response to the prompt, maybe over multiple class meetings, scaffolding the assignments. All these things, well, they cannot literally have a technology with them, so it removes that obstacle.

[0:18:03] PF: Those are great solutions that we can use for technology, but some of the other things that you talk about are more difficult, like fake news. The problems we have, you talked about it with a clergy. We talk about it with politicians. We are just swimming in dishonesty. That makes us feel sometimes like everyone’s dishonest. When we see the news, you just start feeling like, well, everybody’s lying. Nobody’s telling the truth. Why does honesty still matter?

[0:18:31] CM: Yeah. I would first encourage people to resist that impression. One side of what you’re saying is an empirical description of how we feel today. I think you’re right. We can feel that there’s dishonesty everywhere. If I’m not part of that, I’m falling behind. It’s like the student case. I would encourage listeners to resist the temptation to think that way. My reading overall of what psychology tells us about people’s character is that not that most people are dishonest. Is that they’re situationally honest and dishonest. They’re sometimes honest, sometimes dishonest, that we’re a mixed bag of good and bad. That’s more encouraging than the other alternative of thinking everyone’s dishonest.

Now, that richer philosophical question is, okay, well, what we don’t have today is widespread honesty. Why should we care about trying to foster widespread honesty? Why should we care? We’re so busy, why is this important? Why does it matter, such that we should invest in this? Whether we happen to be mixed, whether we happen to be dishonest ourselves and same thing with our society. I think we can go a number of different routes. I’ll mention a couple of them, but I’ll dive deeper into just one or two of them. We could go a religious route. For people who are religious, there are going to be resources in every world religion I’m familiar with for thinking that honesty is really important. We could explore that. We could explore it from a societal lens. Why is it important for our society to be a place of honesty? We could explore it from an individual lens. Why it’s important to me and my health and well-being and flourishing for me to be honest? At the societal level, I think this is the most straightforward case.

Imagine what it would look like to live in a society where dishonesty really was rampant. In that case, you couldn’t trust other people. Because, well, they’re probably going to cheat you, or steal from you, or lie to you, so how could you trust them? You couldn’t respect other people, and they’re not going to respect you, because everyone’s going to instrumentalize each other to take advantage of them for their own purposes. You couldn’t have genuine relationships, because the only relationships you would have would be transactional ones where you’re using others for your own benefit, honestly or dishonestly. I think, significantly, you would live in a state of fear. You couldn’t have peace and comfort. It’d be hard to sleep at night. Because everyone else around you is dishonest, they can take advantage of you at any moment. That’s also related to the trust.

Will I want to live in a society where there’s rampant fear, but I want to live myself a life of fear? No. That’s awful. Okay, so I think the societal case is pretty clear. The individual case is trickier. When I think of myself, okay, I’m going to live in a society where there’s honesty. But that doesn’t mean automatically that I have to be honest. Now, there are some things to note right away, advantages of honesty. There’s empirical research in this, too, things like, it’s correlated with improved physical health, improved mobility, for example, lower risk of lung disease, lower risk of depression, increases, or honesty that is, reduces cognitive load, decreases stress, lower stress hormones. I’m just recycling some things on a list. In those ways, you could think, “That is actually beneficial for me.”

[0:21:57] PF: Absolutely.

[0:21:57] CM: It gives me these nice benefits. Now, here comes the caveat, because you’re talking to a philosopher. Go to a psychologist, I would give you these studies and tell you the empirical results and we’ll be good to go. You’re talking to a philosopher though. The philosopher in me knows that, going all the way back to Plato, there has been this worry that maybe the best life of all is a two-faced life, or double life, where you’re publicly honest and good, because you reap the societal benefits of being a good person, you’re praised, commended, respected by society. But in private, when no one’s looking and you’re sure you can get away with it, you do dishonest things for your advantage.

Connected to the topics in the book, maybe you cheat on a test when you know you can get away with it. Maybe you look at the pornography, or whatever in the relationship when you know your significant other is not going to catch you. Maybe you do some financial misdoing. Wouldn’t that be the best life of all? You reap the benefits of public claim, and in a private life, you get to have self-interested pleasures when no one’s looking. That is always been a worry that has to be addressed if you’re making the case for honesty.

The last thing I’ll end with there is that I think you can make the case. Against that kind of life, that double life, the fit life of fakery, which we’ve seen celebrities been caught in, we probably know people who have been caught in that and our personal lives have been caught in that life, one thing stands out to me that’s missing. That is genuine relationships. If you’re a fake person, you cannot have in your life genuine relationships of love and friendship with other people. In order to love another person, I have to care about them authentically as who they are and have to be selfless in my attitude towards them. In order to have real friends, not friends of convenience, or pleasure, but friends of virtue, I have to care about those friends for who they are and invite them into my life and let them see my life as well. That person who is fake and double is not going to be someone who has genuine friendships and loving relationships. So, it’s still an impoverished life. They’re not flourishing, in my opinion.

[0:24:17] PF: That’s incredible. your book gives us so much to think about. There’s so many different entry points where someone can pick it up and get into it, whatever topic, whatever area they’re most interested in. I highly recommend it. As you’ve done all this work, what’s your prognosis on this honesty crisis? Are we going to get through this?

[0:24:38] CM: Well, I am a philosopher, so I can’t see the future. I only see my armchair. I think about deep thoughts. I think the prognosis varies based on what we’re talking about. I mean, the prognosis is grim when it comes to things like the educational context, we already talked about. I also think it’s pretty grim when it comes to sexual honesty and online infidelity. Other areas, though, I’m a little bit more optimistic. I’m a little bit more optimistic when it comes to deep fake. We didn’t touch on this, but deep fake videos and audio, which are becoming more and more prevalent. I think actually legislative remedies can work there to curb these deep fakes and require disclosures. I’m also a little bit more optimistic on the political misinformation from just political misinformation, politics in general. You might be pessimistic about that. But new strategies to dissuade people from sharing political misinformation, like accuracy prompts and so forth. I think there’s some reason for optimism there. Some areas, I’m optimistic. Some areas, I’m pessimistic. I can’t give you a simple answer overall.

[0:25:42] PF: Because there is no simple answer. Christian, I really appreciate you sitting down with me. We’re going to tell our listeners how they can find your book, how they can find you. We’re going to tell them about The Honesty Project, which we didn’t talk about that you’re director of, which investigates honesty a little bit differently than past research. We’re just going to give them a lot of information and let them learn more about how to dive into this honesty crisis and help solve it.

[0:26:06] CM: Super grateful for all those resources being put out there and for your time and interest in my book. Thank you for having me on your show.

[0:26:13] PF: Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:26:18] PF: That was Christian Miller talking about honesty. If you’d like to learn more about Christian, check out his books and other writings, follow him on social media, or get a discount code for his latest book, The Honesty Crisis, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why honesty means more than just telling the truth.
How modern technology makes dishonesty easier, more tempting, and harder to detect — especially in classrooms and workplaces.
How honesty supports trust, reduces stress, and allows for genuine connection.

Visit Christian’s Christian’s website.

Download a free chapter of The Honesty Crisis.

Get a discount on your purchase of The Honesty Crisis.

Follow Christian on social media:

X: @charactergap
Facebook: @CharacterGap
LinkedIn: @charactergap.bsky.social

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