Honesty is an important virtue, yet philosophers have said almost nothing about the virtue of honesty in the past fifty years. This book aims to draw attention to this surprisingly neglected virtue. It first provides a theory of honesty, looking at honest behavior, motivation, and thinking. From there it turns to relevant empirical research, and explores how most people are neither good enough to count as honest nor bad enough to count as dishonest.

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Honesty Project. He is currently the Director of the Honesty Project. He is the author of over 100 academic papers as well as four books, including Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Moral Psychology (2021). He is a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics (Bloomsbury Press).

• Preface


• I. The Philosophy of Honesty


• 1. Preliminaries to Developing an Account of Honesty


• 2. A Preliminary Account of Honesty


• 3. Refining the Account: Considering Challenges and Counterexamples


• 4. Motivation and Honesty


• 5. Practical Wisdom and Honesty


• 6. Dishonesty and the Virtuousness of Honesty


• Interlude


• 7. Classification and Taxonomy


• II. The Empirical Data


• 8. Research on Stealing and Promise-Breaking


• 9. Research on Lying and Cheating


• 10. The Emerging Psychological and Moral Picture


• Afterword: Improving our Less Than Honest Characters


• Works Cited


• Index