Honesty may be the virtue we prize most in other people, and it is eroding fast. Philosopher Christian B. Miller, A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and author of *The Honesty Crisis*, argues that we are living through not one honesty crisis but several at once, each driven by new technologies that make dishonesty more tempting and harder to catch. In this episode with Evan Rosa, Miller unpacks what has actually changed: why AI cheating feels efficient, effective, and evasive to students who assume everyone else is doing it; how sermon plagiarism moved from borrowed manuscripts to the internet to AI; and how celebrity culture, at every scale from pop stars to local pastors, widens the gap between a curated public image and a private self. Together they discuss honesty as far more than truth-telling, a virtue that covers cheating, stealing, misleading, BS-ing, and self-deception, along with Miller’s definition of honest behavior as not intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts as you see them, which frees honesty from any claim to possess capital-T Truth. Together they also consider why we are neither born nor raised honest, why honest motivation has to be other-centered rather than reward-seeking, how hard reality, trusted friends, and the Holy Spirit can break through self-deception, how rampant dishonesty leaves a society transactional and afraid, and why, in a fallen world with a Nazi at the door, honesty can be outweighed by compassion and justice. Episode Highlights - ”So when you put those two together, greater temptation and also easier to get away with it, that’s a bad combination. It’s a bad formula for trying to preserve what I think is our most important virtue of honesty.” - ”We have something that’s efficient, effective, evasive, and everyone else is thought to be using it.” - ”I think it’s now we’ve gone so far, there’s no going back … we cannot assume that graded work in education at the middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels is actually, predominantly the work of the student as opposed to the work of an AI.” - ”According to some survey data I’ve seen, at least 25% of pastors are using AI for sermon writing and preparation without acknowledgement. And so they’re standing up there presenting this material as if it were their own.” - ”What I want to say is honest behavior is a matter of not intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts as you see them.” - ”3,000 years ago, when people were saying the Earth is flat, they were wrong, but they weren’t dishonest.” - ”Most people want to cheat if they think they can get away with it, and it’s suitably beneficial.” - ”This is not just the Taylor Swifts, this is not just the LeBron Jameses of the world, massive celebrities. We are all celebrities to some extent.” - ”You are unable to form genuine friendships and loving, caring relationships with anyone, because those presuppose trust and honesty, and dishonesty breaks down trust, and fractures the relationship… And instead, what ends up happening is you live in fear.” - ”In these tragic, terrible situations, we have to balance honesty, which is important, with other values like compassion, kindness, caring, justice… Honesty is really important, but it’s not the only thing that matters.” About Christian B. Miller Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, where he studies virtue and moral character. He directed The Honesty Project, a $4.4 million initiative funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and earlier led The Character Project. He is the author of more than 130 articles and several books, including *The Character Gap: How Good Are We?*, *Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue*, and, most recently, *The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World* (2026). He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his wife and three children. Helpful Links and Resources - *The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World*, Christian B. Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/the-honesty-crisis/ - *The Character Gap: How Good Are We?*, Christian B. Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/the-character-gap/ - About Christian B. Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/about-me/ - The Honesty Project, Wake Forest University: https://honestyproject.philosophy.wfu.edu - *On Bullshit*, Harry G. Frankfurt: https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691276793/on-bullshit-0 - Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom, Thomas Jefferson: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/honesty-first-chapter-book-wisdom/ - “Lying and Speaking Your Interlocutor’s Language,” Alexander R. Pruss: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/637086/pdf Show Notes - The honesty crisis - Not one crisis but several, each pairing greater temptation with easier escape from detection - Technology as the cause, though not inherently evil - Crib notes, honor codes, and the internet - AI cheating - Four drivers of student AI use: speed, polish, near-undetectability, and assuming everyone else does it - No going back on assuming graded work reflects a student’s own effort - Technological advance as relational decline and eroded accountability - Sermon plagiarism, from borrowed manuscripts to online sermons to AI - Pastors using AI without acknowledgment, and the broken trust when it surfaces - Lying, cheating, stealing, misleading, fraud, self-deception, and BS-ing - Harry Frankfurt’s *On Bullshit* - Deepfakes, AI companions, infidelity websites, and misinformation - Honest behavior defined by the facts as you see them, not capital-T Truth - Flat-earth believers, the Matrix, and trusting experts who let us down - Most people cheat when it pays and detection seems unlikely - Not born honest, not raised honest - Winnicott’s false self and early incentives to hide - Why honest motives must be other-centered, not self-protective - Celebrity culture, curated public images, and feeling above the rules - Everyone with a platform, down to the local pastor, as a minor celebrity - Jefferson on honesty and wisdom - Self-deception - Downplaying unwelcome evidence about a partner, or about ourselves - Hitting bottom, trusted friends, and the Holy Spirit as ways through - Ephesians 4:25 - A dishonest society as transactional, friendless, and afraid - The Nazi at the door, when compassion and justice outweigh honesty - Alexander Pruss on lying - Preserving valuable connections at the cost of corrupted ones #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Honesty #HonestyCrisis #AIEthics #AcademicIntegrity #MoralPsychology #Virtue #Philosophy #ChristianEthics #Podcast Production Notes - This podcast featured Christian B. Miller - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Noah Senthil - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
Honesty may be the virtue we prize most in other people, and it is eroding fast. Philosopher Christian B. Miller, A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and author of The Honesty Crisis, argues that we are living through not one honesty crisis but several at once, each driven by new technologies that make dishonesty more tempting and harder to catch.
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Miller unpacks what has actually changed: why AI cheating feels efficient, effective, and evasive to students who assume everyone else is doing it; how sermon plagiarism moved from borrowed manuscripts to the internet to AI; and how celebrity culture, at every scale from pop stars to local pastors, widens the gap between a curated public image and a private self.
Together they discuss honesty as far more than truth-telling, a virtue that covers cheating, stealing, misleading, BS-ing, and self-deception, along with Miller’s definition of honest behavior as not intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts as you see them, which frees honesty from any claim to possess capital-T Truth. Together they also consider why we are neither born nor raised honest, why honest motivation has to be other-centered rather than reward-seeking, how hard reality, trusted friends, and the Holy Spirit can break through self-deception, how rampant dishonesty leaves a society transactional and afraid, and why, in a fallen world with a Nazi at the door, honesty can be outweighed by compassion and justice.
Episode Highlights
About Christian B. Miller
Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, where he studies virtue and moral character. He directed The Honesty Project, a $4.4 million initiative funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and earlier led The Character Project. He is the author of more than 130 articles and several books, including The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, and, most recently, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World (2026). He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his wife and three children.
Helpful Links and Resources
Show Notes
#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Honesty #HonestyCrisis #AIEthics #AcademicIntegrity #MoralPsychology #Virtue #Philosophy #ChristianEthics #Podcast
Production Notes
From the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, this is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Christian Miller: Imagine you live in a dishonest community or a dishonest society. Think about what the consequences of that are gonna be. They’re gonna be things like, your relationships with others are purely transactional. You’re just seeing them as a means to benefit yourself, so that they are distant and cold kinds of relationships with other people. You are unable to form genuine friendships and loving, caring relationships with anyone, because those presuppose trust and honesty, and dishonesty breaks down trust and fractures the relationship, so in a world in which there’s rampant dishonesty, you cannot actually have true friendships and loving relationships.
And instead, what ends up happening is you live in fear. Your life is going to be a life full of fear. When you go to sleep at night, how can you be confident that people won’t steal from you, cheat from you, lie to you, and so forth? So that’s not the kind of life we wanna live, a healthy life.
And it will manifest in very concrete ways, like maybe we shouldn’t tell as many white lies as we do. Maybe the value of frequent, small lies is not as high as you might have thought it is. But here’s the big caveat. We live in a fallen, tragic world, and there are, I think, going to be—and this is gonna be controversial amongst Christians and religious scholars—I think there are just going to be situations where we have to be dishonest. Not because that’s the way God designed the world or what God ultimately wants us to be like, but in response to very sinful, tragic circumstances like the famous case of the Nazi at the door, where you protect a Jewish family by lying to the Nazis.
I think, look, in Heaven, those kind of things don’t arise. We don’t have to even have these kind of debates. But in these tragic, terrible situations, we have to balance honesty with other values like compassion, kindness, caring, justice. And I think some cases, other values get the upper hand on honesty. [It] becomes morally obligatory of us to lie, steal, or cheat if in so doing we can, for example, protect innocent lives.
Honesty is really important, but it’s not the only thing that matters.
Evan Rosa: I am lying to you. Think about that sentence for just a second. I am lying to you. If you ask, “Is that sentence true?” that means I’m telling you something false, which means I’m not lying to you. And if that sentence is false, because after all I am telling you that I’m lying to you, then it would be false that I’m lying to you, meaning I’m telling you something true.
Okay, that’s called the liar’s paradox. And it’s okay if you’re confused. You’re sort of supposed to be. It’s a paradox, after all. The early twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell formulated it like this, quote: “Epimenides the Cretan said that all Cretans were liars, and all other statements made by Cretans were certainly lies.” And then Russell asks, “Was this too a lie?”
From one perspective, this is of course just a cute philosophical problem. And the confusion or perplexity that sets in after such things is what makes philosophy so charming. But we need to move beyond the mere paradoxical nature of this into something more normative. What I find interesting is the confusion, the distortion, the alienation, the kind of isolation that the practice of dishonesty can create. Because deception, or concealing the truth, misrepresenting it, has a way of building a wall, a relational wall between people, but also a metaphysical wall between us and reality.
My guest today is the philosopher Christian B. Miller, A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. And he thinks of honesty as our most treasured virtue, the thing that we look for the most when assessing someone’s character. His recent book, The Honesty Crisis, explores dishonesty across a range of social phenomena. And he’s trying to make the case that the stakes are truly higher than we realize.
Honesty, as he sees it, is so much more than not lying. Honesty is about representing the truth as you see it, presenting yourself, representing yourself in light of that truth. And the fact is, there’s an increasing flippancy in our attitude about our own orientation to reality and the sharing of that reality.
In this conversation, we discuss the role of artificial intelligence in this culture of dishonesty and what makes AI cheating so very tempting; the peculiar case of plagiarizing a sermon; the distinctions between lying, cheating, stealing, bullshitting, and deceiving ourselves, all as different faces of dishonesty. We talk about celebrity culture and the split between one’s true self and false self, who one really is and who one makes themself out to be in public. He comments on how the rampant misrepresentation of the truth leaves our society more transactional, more suspicious, more afraid, and the role that honesty plays in a whole life of virtue, compassion, and justice. Thanks for listening today.
Evan Rosa: Christian, it is so good to have you on the show. This is such a fascinating topic. We have so much to say and so much to learn on what it means to be honest.
Christian Miller: It’s great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me on your show, and I look forward to talking as much as we can.
Evan Rosa: I think this is something that registers immediately with anyone who sees the title of the book. I think it registers because there is this intuition. It’s either a familiarity with our own temptation to misrepresent, to be disconnected from the truth, to outright lie, to protect or cover ourselves, or try to put our best foot forward, or however you wanna euphemize the concept of lying. But as you see it, and as you’ve sort of lived in this topic, describe the crisis of honesty that we’re facing at the moment.
Christian Miller: Sure, happy to. Although maybe not—happy might not be the right word. Willing to.
So the honesty crisis, as I see it, is actually a variety of more specific honesty crises, which I’m seeing appearing across society. They all have two features, though. One feature is that dishonesty is becoming more incentivized. It’s becoming more appealing, more tempting than it was before. So in these areas of society, there’s always been dishonesty. It’s not like we’re starting from zero, but it’s becoming more appealing. And at the same time, it’s easier to get away with the dishonesty. So it’s harder to catch people being dishonest, and that’s known, it’s recognized. So when you put those two together, greater temptation and also easier to get away with it, that’s a bad combination. It’s a bad formula for trying to preserve what I think is our most important virtue of honesty.
And this is not the first time there have been honesty crises in human history, but right now I think we are experiencing a variety of them because of the impact of technology. So the underlying cause of these crises that I’m focusing on is technological change. It’s not that I think technology’s bad or inherently evil or anything like that. Far from it. But because of new developments, things like AI, social media, the internet more generally, we have available to us certain tools that we didn’t in the past, that can be used for good, of course, but can also be used for ill, and in this case can be used for dishonest means. And alas, people are recognizing that and using them increasingly for dishonest means.
Evan Rosa: I mean, there’s a history of dishonesty that I would like to explore a little bit, in light of the fact that it looks like technology and new contexts, new human contexts for relationship and for communication, is what is adding to, or sort of adding fuel to the fire of, an honesty crisis at the moment.
Do some comparison work. And I’m not looking for chronological snobbery. I’m just looking for an understanding of what has truly changed about the ability to, say, hide or deceive, that might not have been there in the past. Especially in light of the fact that it looks like there has always been concern—in fact, great concern, so much so that the devil’s depicted as the father of all lies. And the search for truth is sort of lasting, universal. Give us a bit of the history about the virtue of honesty and the crisis of dishonesty.
Christian Miller: Sure, sure. So you’re right, I’m never gonna claim that this is brand-new stuff. This is just adding on to existing dishonesty that’s already prevalent. But maybe, rather than talk in vague generalities, I think it might be more helpful to focus in on one particular crisis, and I think that will be illustrative, and generalize from there.
So, take education. That’s the space I occupy. I’m a professor at a university. I daily think about my students and their honesty and what I can do to promote it.
And in the past—let’s go back fifty years, before my time maybe. Let’s go back thirty years. How about that? A little more realistic. Professors, teachers were confronting honesty challenges then, too. They would be things like crib notes, or people working together outside of class on a graded assignment. Okay, that was something, but we also had pretty reliable strategies to try to help combat it. We had things like honor codes. We had professors who were willing to make personal investments in their students and in the classroom, and get to know them, and try and inspire the students to care about the material for its own sake.
So that was one thing. And then the first honesty crisis comes along, and it’s not AI. It’s the internet, and the availability of all these resources online for students to go to and take the material and put it into their graded assignments, typically papers here, without acknowledging the source, and then passing it off as their own work and turning it in for a better grade, or at least that’s what the hope was. Also, that was something that professors were aware of. They could come by afterwards and try and track down the use of the material. So it wasn’t 100 percent foolproof. And also, not to mention, it took some work to go on the internet, try and find the material, and incorporate it, weave it into the paper that you already had.
Fast-forward again: the second honesty crisis that we’re confronting in education. Student AI use on these graded assignments, whether that’s papers, coding assignments, problem sets. Now, what do we see? We have something that’s efficient, effective, evasive, and everyone else is thought to be using it.
So, to go over each of those: we have a tool that’s thought to be very efficient. So rather than taking five hours on a paper, a student can take five minutes and get the paper generated for them by the AI. This looks like it’s very effective. So it’s not just any old paper that’s generated, or any old problem set that’s kind of incompetently done. This work that’s produced is likely gonna be better than what the student would’ve been able to do on their own. So they’re probably gonna get a better grade by using this tool than if they hadn’t.
It’s also evasive. So unlike that internet stuff, which the professor could track down afterwards, now we don’t have 100 percent reliable detectors, and students know that. So they know that it’s very, very unlikely that they’re gonna be caught and proven to have used it, to any kind of sufficient level of proof.
And then the last thing—and I’ll stop—is that in this case, they think that they see their peers using it all the time, and so if they don’t use it, they’re gonna fall behind.
So you’ve got those four features of this technological development with AI, which then significantly incentivize deceptive behavior and also make it very hard to catch that deceptive behavior. So we’ve got the two features of an honesty crisis. And so it’s not surprising at all, just given the ordinary moral psychology and the pressures that students are facing at 18, 19, 20 years old, that they’re gonna be very tempted to go down this path—to the point where I think now we’ve gone so far, there’s no going back. This is now a train that’s kind of gone off the cliff, and we cannot assume that graded work in education at the middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels is actually, predominantly, the work of the student, as opposed to the work of an AI.
Evan Rosa: There’s a lot of things going on here, but what’s jumping out is, one, a seeming social project that we are adopting. And here I’ll admit it, I am kind of taking your concrete example and abstracting a little bit, to see that we’re creating a technological environment where access to the truth just is harder, where the ability to parse out... I mean, you can use Pangram to do AI tests. There are other tools as well, with varying levels of success in identifying human- versus AI-produced writing, in this case.
But what is perceived as technological advance ends up being relational decline and connective decline. And it’s in the context of that that I want to use the word accountability, which you bring up at plenty of points in the book: the difficulty of allowing for systems of accountability to follow and keep step with the technological progress that these new things allow.
Christian Miller: Yep. Very nice. So, building on the first point: yes, this generalizes. The observations about education map onto other areas of society, and the observations you made carry over as well. So there’s eroding relationships, there’s increased difficulty of assigning responsibility and holding people accountable. So that all seems right to me.
I’ll give you and the listeners another example, to see how well it maps onto other areas of society, and this may be near and dear to the work you’re doing at Yale. So take the religious context, and the church context. Remember everything we said about cheating and plagiarism and dishonesty in the education context, and map it straightforwardly over to sermons, and pastors preparing and preaching their sermons.
You might think that this is just disconnected, it’s a wholly different topic. How are they related? Well, in the old days—we have a history here, which you’ve also alluded to—in the old days, there was a history of sermon plagiarism in the church. Pastors would actually take written copies of someone else’s sermon and adapt it for their sermon. We saw an honesty crisis 1.0 with the dawn of the internet, and now you could go online and you could see Tim Keller or someone else you admire, and grab material from them and incorporate it into your sermon without acknowledgment, and then preach it. Now we see the 2.0 version, just like in the education context, where you have less of a worry about being caught, because we’re using AI now. And you have that efficiency, effectiveness, and evasiveness going on as well.
So what do we see in a sermon context? According to some survey data I’ve seen, at least 25 percent of pastors are using AI for sermon writing and preparation without acknowledgment. And so they’re standing up there presenting this material as if it were their own. It’s one thing if there was acknowledgment, like, “Hey, I used AI to help me with this example,” or for this application or whatnot. Then the honesty problems go away. But if you get up there, present the material as if it were your own, taking credit for it, then that is dishonest, that’s also plagiarism, and it’s morally wrong.
Now, back to your comments. We’re just seeing the kind of generality of this. What do we have here? We have technological advance again. We have relationships being broken down, because, alas, this kind of thing will often emerge eventually, which then breaks trust between the pastor and the congregation, also between the pastor and the leadership. And so you’re gonna get those relationships being frayed and broken. And then there’s the accountability. So it might take a while to discover that, and in the meantime, there’s not any kind of accountability for the pastor. The pastor gets away with it. But then eventually it all comes out. There’s accountability, and then there’s also damage to the congregation. So it’s a difficult matter, for sure.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It makes me want to go to the psychology of dishonesty. But I feel like there’s a step in between, where we’ve been working with examples of AI and plagiarism as the concrete examples of dishonesty. Before we go to some of the psychological factors, I wonder if we need a little bit of looking at the categories, the various categories of dishonesty. And so I’m wondering if you can provide that. How do you like to break down a matrix of what kinds of dishonesty there are? And then we can try to add some definition.
Christian Miller: Yeah, absolutely. And then that might also tie into some of the other examples of honesty crises. I won’t elaborate on that, but I think you’ll see connections, and expand the repertoire beyond just AI plagiarism.
The easy thing to say about dishonesty is that it’s just lying. That’s a temptation many people have: honesty is telling the truth, dishonesty is lying. That’s kind of the end of the story. Why do we need to even raise this question? But I think it’s way more complicated and also way more interesting than that.
Of course, for dishonest behavior, lying is first and foremost, as our paradigm instance of that. But there are many other kinds of dishonest behavior as well. For example, cheating—not just in a relationship, but cheating in a game, and cheating on your taxes. Misleading others, stealing, self-deception, so deceiving yourself. BS-ing, if I’m allowed to say that. A very, very influential kind.
Evan Rosa: I appreciated the fact that you did that for your mother’s sake, instead of just coming out and saying—
Christian Miller: I did. My mother did not want me to write out the full version, so I listened to her.
Evan Rosa: And I’ll be honest here that when I was teaching philosophy, and eventually we got to the segment of the course where I was talking about epistemology and the value of truth, I just would outright say the word “bullshit” at this Christian university I was teaching at, because it’s a technical term. It’s a philosophical technical term that we just need to fully represent, in the way that Harry Frankfurt—
Christian Miller: Yeah, very good. Yeah, because it’s on the cover of a bestselling book. I mean, come on. What’s the big deal? So...
Evan Rosa: So it’s a technical term. It’s a technical term.
Christian Miller: Well, well, I’m—
Evan Rosa: It’s not a curse word. It’s not a curse word.
Christian Miller: That’s fine with me. Yeah, so that’s a really important and interesting kind of dishonesty. Fraud is another. There are many kinds. The point is, there’s a long list, and they’re not the same. You can’t just collapse stealing into lying, or cheating into lying, or BS-ing into lying.
Evan Rosa: There’s nuances.
Christian Miller: So when you think about it that way, dishonesty can take many forms. But you reverse it around to honesty, and you’ll get truth-telling as opposed to lying, respecting property as opposed to stealing, being transparent with yourself as opposed to self-deception. And so we get the kind of corresponding forms of honest behavior.
And then, maybe not now, but if we wanna unpack the broader psychology of a virtuously honest person, we’d have to get into things like: What is their motivation like? What are their beliefs like? How do they see the world? What about practical wisdom, and phronesis, and this kind of thing? So it’s a very rich, complex moral psychology to an honest person. But just sticking now with this dishonest behavior.
So when we look around now for these honesty crises, the two we’ve focused on initially are both not cases of lying. They’re cases of cheating. They’re cases where there are standards in place, rules you’re supposed to follow, and people are not following them. They’re plagiarizing, and in doing so, they’re violating rules of academic integrity, or maybe church integrity.
Some other kinds include deepfakes, deepfake audio and video, where there’s AI manipulation of the content of these things, and [people] are passing it off as if it were authentic. There’s the relationship forms of dishonesty that I get into, whether that’s chat rooms, Ashley Madison, pornography, or the more recent thing, which shows my book is already dated: AI romantic companions. There’s celebrity culture and influencer culture in dishonesty. There’s politics and social media, misinformation.
So the point being that it’s appearing in a variety of different ways throughout society, and not just one particular kind of dishonest behavior, either. We’re sometimes seeing lying, we’re sometimes seeing cheating, we’re sometimes seeing BS-ing. So it’s multifaceted and widespread.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Sticking with definitional elements here: talk through truthfulness, forthrightness, respectful of property, compliance with rules, integrity, and authenticity. I’m fascinated by the space of human culture and human experience of this kind of orientation toward the truth, or toward facts, or toward reality. And what’s fascinating about the concept of honesty, especially once you can clarify it’s not just the same as lying, or a pure verbal misrepresentation of the truth—it’s more complex, and it hits on a much wider slice, perhaps even to some respect the whole of the human experience of relating to others, and relating to ourselves, and relating to God. So—
Christian Miller: Yeah, I’d love to. So I’m thinking of honesty as a virtue—
Evan Rosa: Yes.
Christian Miller: —and any virtue is going to have different moving parts. There’s going to be the outward behavior, which I’ll focus on. So how do we interact with others? How do we interact with the divine? How do we interact with ourselves, as a kind of reflecting back on ourself? But in addition to that, for any virtue, there’s also the motivational side to it, and the emotional side to it, as well as the cognitive and the thinking side to it. So there’s a lot to unpack.
But focusing on honest behavior specifically, that itself is quite interesting. We have the truth-telling, like you said; we have the proper respect for property; we have complying with good rules; we have transparency to ourselves. The thing about all that is, it looks pretty like a jumbled mess. There’s lots of different things we’re talking about here. What connects them all to honesty? What is the thread that goes through all these different behaviors that ultimately ties them to this notion of honesty?
And what I want to say is honest behavior is a matter of not intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts as you see them. So let me say it again, and then unpack it a little bit. So for the listeners, I think it’s worth it.
Evan Rosa: It is. It certainly is.
Christian Miller: So it’s, you’re not intentionally, on purpose, misrepresenting or distorting reality, the facts, the world, as you see it, as you take it to be. So, to give an example, I’ll ask you a question. What state were you born in?
Evan Rosa: Massachusetts.
Christian Miller: Massachusetts. So, I don’t know for sure, but assuming that you’re telling me the truth, you’re not intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts as you see them. If you are lying to me, that’s what you’re doing. You’re intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts on that particular subject matter.
Okay. One thing that should jump out to listeners right away is it’s the facts as you see them, reality as you take it to be. It’s our subjective understanding of the world that matters for honesty, not the objective truth. Now, I’m a big fan of objective truth. Don’t hear me coming out as a relativist or anything like that. I’m a big fan of objective truth. I think it’s objectively the case that the Earth is round. Objectively, we’re not the center of the universe, these kinds of things. But when it comes to honesty, it’s a matter of corresponding to how you take things to be.
I can illustrate that more concretely in a couple ways. One is, stick with the planet Earth. Three thousand years ago, when people were saying the Earth is flat, they were wrong, but they weren’t dishonest. They were being honest in their conversation with each other. That’s just how they saw things. Today, if in a normal conversation you came out and tried to get other people to believe that the Earth is flat, knowing that it isn’t, you would be doing something manipulative and dishonest.
So it matters a lot how you see the world and what the context is. So it’s subjective representations, not objective facts, that matter for honesty. That often surprises people. I think they’re attuned to linking honesty with capital-T Truth. But it’s not. And that’s no attack on capital-T Truth. It’s just the way honesty works.
Evan Rosa: I wonder—and I’m just surmising—if that tendency to see dishonesty as simply not getting at the capital-T Truth might just be an overinflation of our own expectations about our relationship to the truth: that we just happen to think that whatever we believe about it is the capital-T Truth. And so if we’re wrong about something, it’s just consistent with lying.
Christian Miller: Yeah, I don’t have a good explanation to offer instead of that, so that seems like a—
Evan Rosa: I just find it interesting.
Christian Miller: And so in talking about that, that can actually foster some humility on our part. We can reflect that maybe we often don’t have the capital-T Truth, and we can still be honest in the process. So—
Evan Rosa: The truth so far as we—
Christian Miller: —[reduce] our confidence in having that truth. And it doesn’t detract from our honesty in the process.
Evan Rosa: Right. It’s sort of to emphasize that all of us have a view from somewhere—
Christian Miller: Yeah.
Evan Rosa: —and we need to be able to appreciate that. But I think that, yes, it is fostering humility in this sense, this particular distinction that we’re working on at the moment, because what it does is it bounds the concept of the virtue of honesty to be within our control in a very significant sense. There’s all sorts of factors that might prevent us from getting to the truth, all sorts of real limitations, and understandable growth, and the need to learn. But to be honest is to simply represent oneself as we are, and to accept that fact. And I think that’s gonna help us move into some of the psychology that I wanted to talk to you about as well.
Christian Miller: I love that point. I think we can see that in a variety of different ways, with some case studies. Since I’m a philosopher, I love these kinds of imaginary case studies. So if you’re in the Matrix, most of your beliefs are false. You think this is the external world, you think you’re actually interacting with other people, you think that you’re walking into a building or whatnot, and you’re not. It’s all, or for the most part, a computer-generated simulation. And yet that doesn’t detract from your honesty. Unbeknownst to you, this is going on. It’s out of your control. That’s why I thought of this. But it doesn’t detract from your honesty.
And then, a little bit more relatable, contemporary example: given our epistemic limitations, given that as creatures we can only do so much during the day, and only process so much information, and only become experts on so many topics, we have to repeatedly rely on the testimony of others. We have to look to experts, because we can’t be experts on everything ourselves. Well, sometimes experts let us down. We were quite reasonable in trusting them, but they let us down. They actually had false information, or fake news, or whatnot, and that kind of transmitted itself to us, and we got infected by that fake news or some false information. But that didn’t detract from our honesty.
So here’s the point about responsibility again. We get those false beliefs, but in so doing, we’re doing something very reasonable and rational, which is trusting the testimony of others. And it doesn’t detract from us being honest in the process. This generalizes to political matters, generalizes to scientific matters. It also generalizes to religious matters, too. We have to trust experts, but sometimes they let us down, and [that] needn’t detract from our honesty.
Evan Rosa: The reason I think I find this particular point encouraging is that it shows that honesty is achievable in this really important sense: that it is bound by our control. It is closely tied to what we are most intimately connected to—our behavior, motivation, thoughts that we have control over insofar as we are able to represent it. And we can just simply let that be the reality that is then publicly represented. And I find that whatever could lower the barrier of entry to a more honest life, I think, is—
Christian Miller: Yeah. Good. I like that point a lot, and I think I completely agree with it. To pivot to the moral psychology—
Evan Rosa: Please.
Christian Miller: —the extent to which we’re likely to exert that control is questionable.
Evan Rosa: Yes. Absolutely.
Christian Miller: So what I mean by that is that yes, it is under our control, but in our psychology we also face certain temptations away from honesty. And so we’re not born honest, and typically we’re not raised honest. So we’re kind of coming into adulthood with—I like to talk about a mixed character—a mixed character that has some good aspects but some troubling aspects, too.
And in this space, one thing that I think emerges pretty clearly from the moral psychology literature is that most people want to cheat if they think they can get away with it, and it’s suitably beneficial. And this is not restricted to one area of their life. They wanna cheat on financial matters, they wanna cheat on academic matters, they wanna cheat on reputational matters, and advancement and career matters, and even sometimes on personal relationship matters. But with those two elements in place: if they think they can get away with it and not get caught, and they think it’s suitably beneficial to them, it’s worth the trouble of cheating.
That is just empirically a kind of matter-of-fact desire that most people have, that can be overcome. And we have the ability to resist it, but alas, most of us will give in to it from time to time in our lives, to some extent or other. Some people, of course, give in to it all the time. Then they become dishonest as opposed to honest. But that’s part of the moral psychology of human beings today, alongside some other—
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yes. And I wanna just briefly comment that when I say lower the barrier of entry to honesty, I mean, the fact is there’s a lot pressing us into that predisposition to cheat, lie, cover, protect, misrepresent, and so forth. Perhaps for some survival reason—we could explore all sorts of reasons, whether it’s survival, or some kind of self-preservation, or just the observation that it’s more acceptable, and if everyone’s doing it, you can bandwagon.
But your comment that we’re not born honest, we’re not raised honest—my initial response was, “But aren’t we?” And then I thought, “No. So soon in our lives, we are given an opportunity to construct a false self that gives us a chance to try to secure what we feel like we’re not getting, or just, again, to try to survive at some relational level.”
And I think this distinction, this true self/false self distinction, shows up in a lot of different disciplines. I’m mostly thinking through the lens of the history of psychology and psychoanalysis, and Donald Winnicott’s true self/false self, which has been picked up by all sorts of other spiritual traditions as well. But I find it interesting, because that disconnective work at a core psychological level means we’re being raised in an environment where dishonesty is incentivized over and over, and you just end up with a false self, [where] we all end up being disconnected from that truer—
Christian Miller: Yeah.
Evan Rosa: —presentation of ourselves.
Christian Miller: Yeah, so let me make two comments. One is, that is a reason why I think most people aren’t raised honest. That’s one reason. Another reason—which we haven’t talked about at all—is that honesty requires a certain kind of motivational profile, and that motivational profile can’t be egoistic, it can’t be self-centered, it can’t be punishment avoidance, it can’t be reward seeking. It has to involve something that’s other-centered: being honest for the sake of the good of another person, or because it’s the right thing to do, or because morality requires it, and so forth. So I don’t think that kind of motivational profile is gonna be in place for most young kids or for most teenagers. So that has to emerge later in life. In other words, we have to care about honesty for the right reasons. And that’s a hard thing to do.
But on your very interesting point about the true and false, and maybe the public and the private, or the outward-facing and the inward: I pick up on that theme quite a bit with respect to another dishonesty crisis, which we haven’t talked about, which is the tremendous growth of celebrity culture these days, connected to social media, and how we present ourselves in public versus in private. And I think this might be a kind of natural expansion on your point.
There have always been, in the past, public/private splits. That’s nothing new. But when we talk about these crises, we’re talking about an acceleration or exacerbation of something that’s already there. And what I focus on is how I think it’s easier these days to be a celebrity than it has ever been before. And it’s also more incentivized to be a celebrity than it ever has been before. There are financial incentives, there are reputational incentives, all this kind of thing—increased visibility.
And so, given that, when you’re more of a celebrity, you’re more inclined to have a public image that is only partially under your control. You try to shape it as much as you can, but the public shapes your public image too, and has some control over it. So it’s not entirely under your control. And then you also have your private self, which you keep in reserve, and which may not be accurately reflected in your public image. Your public image is often curated. It often glosses over some deficiencies or some rough areas, either by others or by yourself. But in private, it’s a different story, when you know that you’re often a mixed bag.
And then in that kind of environment, the pressures for dishonesty, I think, just increase. I’ll just mention a couple, then I’ll stop. So when you have this quite visible public image, and that’s tied up with your celebrity status, you want to make sure you keep that public image, keep it positive, keep it adored by your fans. Well, if there are transgressions from your past that could damage your public image, you wanna cover them up. How could you cover them up? By being dishonest: by being silent about them, or by lying about them, or by being misleading about them.
You also often will enjoy the celebrity and the fame. Once you taste some, you want more. You can’t get enough. It’s sometimes been called the most addictive drug there is. And so how can you get more? By being dishonest, by taking dishonest means to getting more celebrity and notoriety and fame for yourself.
And then lastly, when you’re in that kind of position, as a celebrity with this big public image, you often think the rules don’t apply to you anymore—that the moral safeguards that exist for most people don’t exist for you, that you’re above that. And you have people affirming you, yes-men telling you everything you do is great, people not willing to be courageous and come forward and say, “You should check yourself here,” or, “Are you really doing the right thing?” And that just greases the wheels for more dishonesty.
And this is not just the Taylor Swifts, this is not just the LeBron Jameses of the world, massive celebrities. We are all celebrities to some extent. If you have a kind of social media platform, if you’re on Facebook, if you’re a pastor at a local church with no visibility outside of your local church—in all these contexts, you are a kind of mini-celebrity, with a following and with an audience, who sees a public image of you that you partially curated, but that they’ve also created themselves in their own eyes. And you get that split, public/private, no matter who you are these days, I think, so long as you are visible, often electronically, to a larger group. So that’s the reality of today’s situation, I think.
Evan Rosa: I want to hear you say more about self-deception, because I think the concept of seeking to be truthful to ourselves—
Christian Miller: Mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: —once a person matures... I’m not saying at the beginning of one’s life. I think actually it probably is the other way around early on: learning how to be transparent, and being given a context in which you can be your real self in relationships, is just incredibly healthy, and so much better than the alternative.
But then, once you do work yourself into a life of hiding, covering, misrepresenting, whatever that might be, the work of healing that, and the work of moving toward the true representation of the facts of one’s life and your relation to them, starts with addressing these areas of self-deception, and seeking to come into finding integrity. And I don’t think we’ve really hit that word quite enough. There’s a sort of internal integrity that comes, a stable character that can emerge. I think that’s probably why you can say things like honesty is one of, if not the most, important virtue. It’s why the Book of Wisdom, as Thomas Jefferson—you quote him—starts with a chapter on honesty. It starts there because it’s the gateway to the real. And it’s the gateway to genuine connection, and an experience of oneself that is how it is.
But I wish that there was just more work on self-deception. And this is to sort of stretch the project into more of the practical dimensions of how someone addresses crises of honesty.
Christian Miller: Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. So you’re right, quite right to note that was not a big focus for me.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, certainly. And I’m not holding it against you in any—
Christian Miller: No. It is in the back of my mind, for sure, and I’ve written about it elsewhere. But I don’t know if I could’ve made the case that there’s an honesty crisis with respect to self-deception today due to technological developments, and backed that up with actual concrete evidence. It’s a hard thing to document and a hard thing to prove that’s going on. I suspect it is. I suspect there is. But I don’t know if I could’ve really supported that concretely.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, and I don’t mean to necessarily say that it’s a current crisis. I’m thinking of it more longitudinally.
Christian Miller: Yeah, so it’s always been with us, and maybe it’s just as bad as it’s always been. So, a couple thoughts. One is just to do a bookend on the celebrity point, because I think celebrities are going to be especially prone to self-deception. They’re going to see this public image that’s presented and crafted, and it’s very positive and glowing, and they will often be motivated to internalize that, and come to believe that about themselves, and adopt that as their own private self-image, at the expense of not paying attention to some areas of their life where they need to grow.
But putting celebrities to one side: in the cases of self-deception, the biggest obstacle here is that we don’t want to confront certain things. Maybe we don’t wanna confront certain things about ourselves, or we don’t wanna confront certain things about those people in our environment who we care about.
A standard example is, your significant other’s cheating on you, or at least you’re getting all this evidence that they are—very concrete, very compelling evidence that they’re cheating—but you just don’t wanna confront that, about what’s happening to your relationship and what’s going on with them. So you downplay, downgrade the evidence, because of a desire to want to continue to be in a healthy relationship with that other person. So the desire drives how you treat evidence to the contrary, downplays that evidence to the contrary, and leads you to continue to believe that your significant other is loyal when he or she is not.
That’s about others, but it also applies to yourself. You don’t wanna confront this real problem in your own life. And so, in the process of deceiving yourself, you downplay evidence for that thing, and maybe elevate evidence to the contrary, inflating positive evidence that you’re not actually going through that problem or that struggle, when you really are.
So, thinking more practically now, there are various ways to try and break out of this situation. None of them, of course, are gonna bring about an instantaneous transformation. It’s very hard. It’s a very difficult struggle. But there are a couple things that I think might be helpful to mention.
One is just the sad reality of things getting so bad that you kind of bottom out, or you hit ground zero. Your significant other runs off with the boyfriend. You find yourself in the hospital because you didn’t confront a medical or psychological problem that you were dealing with. So reality itself can awaken you to the facts that you didn’t wanna confront.
But then two other things might do that as well. One is trusted companions and friends, and maybe a loving community, which, with care and concern, can gently bring things to your attention that you don’t wanna see for yourself. So maybe it’s a best friend, maybe it’s a prayer group, maybe it’s a spiritual confessor or whatnot. They can help shed light where you don’t wanna see the light.
And then the last thing to mention is that in this kind of conversation we’re having, I think it’s appropriate to bring in maybe a divine perspective: that the Holy Spirit, if we’re talking from a Christian tradition, can work internally in a person to break through some of those barriers and shed that light, even if other people around that person aren’t willing to do so, or are not available to do so. I mean, God can break through internally, through the working of the Holy Spirit, and shed that light as well.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. What I feel like I have learned through your work on this is a new appreciation for the ways that dishonesty in all of its forms does a kind of disconnecting—whether it’s at the level of self-deception that we’ve been talking about, or the kinds of deception and dishonesty that exist between people, let alone the kind of—silly, if perhaps understandable for some people—dishonesty that might even exist before God.
And it’s this point that you reference in the text near the end, Ephesians 4:25: “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” And it’s this concept of the unity of the person, the unity of the human relationship, or a family, or even a public, a church, and then certainly unity with the divine. If we are moving toward union, then dishonesty is standing in between us and that task: to be a more unified self, to be a more unified people, and certainly to be more unified with God.
And I think that expression of it is where I experience the most pain of it. There’s the most grief with it, with respect to the disconnective work that this does. And for me personally, it’s just the deepest level of motivation to keep on growing in this way.
Christian Miller: That is so useful to me. Yep. I wish you had written the last chapter for me. That went much better than anything I did in that last chapter. But that was—
Evan Rosa: No, it’s your work that is making this rise in me.
Christian Miller: So let me agree with that, but then with one big caveat that I think will interest people, but we have to confront. So I absolutely agree with that. We’ve talked about honesty to the self. Maybe I’ll just expand a little bit more interpersonally, with other human beings.
I mean, imagine you live in a dishonest community or a dishonest society. Think about what the consequences of that are gonna be. They’re gonna be things like, your relationships with others are purely transactional. You’re just seeing them as a means to benefit yourself, so that they are distant and cold kinds of relationships with other people. You are unable to form genuine friendships and loving, caring relationships with anyone, because those presuppose trust and honesty, and dishonesty breaks down trust and fractures the relationship. So you can’t—in a world in which there’s rampant dishonesty, you cannot actually have true friendships and loving relationships.
And instead, what ends up happening is you live in fear. Your life is going to be a life full of fear. When you go to sleep at night, how can you be confident that people won’t steal from you, cheat from you, lie to you, and so forth? So that’s not the kind of life we wanna live.
Evan Rosa: And a fear that you would be found out at some point, even.
Christian Miller: Yep, very good. If you’re the one who’s being dishonest, then you always have to be afraid that you’re gonna be caught and there’ll be bad consequences.
Now, so having said that, I think we should really keep those points in mind in our relationships with ourselves, with other human beings, and with God. And it will manifest in very concrete ways, like maybe we shouldn’t tell as many white lies as we do. Maybe the value of frequent, small lies is not as high as you might have thought it is.
But here’s the big caveat. We live in a fallen, tragic world, and there are, I think, going to be—and this is gonna be controversial amongst Christians and religious scholars—I think there are just going to be situations where we have to be dishonest. Not because that’s the way God designed the world, or what God ultimately wants us to be like, but in response to very sinful, tragic circumstances, like the famous case of the Nazi at the door, where you protect a Jewish family by lying to the Nazis.
I think, look, that wouldn’t... In Heaven, those kinds of things don’t arise. We don’t have to even have these kinds of debates. But in these tragic, terrible situations, we have to balance honesty, which is important, with other values like compassion, kindness, caring, justice. And I think in some cases, other values get the upper hand on honesty. [It] becomes morally obligatory of us to lie, steal, or cheat if in so doing we can, for example, protect innocent lives. Honesty is really important, but it’s not the only thing that matters.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. In fact, it’s because it’s so dependent on—I mean, in this case, the dignity of the person, justice, the fact that things have gone awry, and the fallen and tragic world we’re a part of. It’s necessary, given the circumstances, that you must, in order to do the good. And maybe it’s the doctrine of double effect that helps to come in and divert attention from the lie to the pursuit of justice. Maybe it’s just the concept of good trouble, or civil disobedience, in this case.
I found it also interesting, you referenced Alexander Pruss and his suggestion that “I don’t know of any Jews around here” is just a sort of linguistic turn on the Nazi officer’s definition of “Jew” as something subhuman, animal, and a kind of unspoken disagreement with that. I don’t know about that. It seems like there’s still dishonesty operating at that level. But a justified deception. And I think this has to be right, because it’s for the sake of connection in the end. The nature of the pursuit of justice is to connect and remain united in an important way. And so, yeah, we can sacrifice the behavior of honesty at the feet of connection when it really, really matters.
Christian Miller: Yeah. Yeah, and in this context, some connections are going to matter more than others. So I am sacrificing a kind of connection with a Nazi, but for the sake of a much more important and much more valuable connection with a Jewish family. And so it’s not connection for its own sake. It’s worthwhile and valuable connections that are worth preserving, even at the expense of perhaps disrupting or breaking other connections [with] people who themselves have already gone down a dishonest path.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It’s powerful. This is good work. I’m so glad that you’ve taken up this mantle, and it’s so interesting to talk about. I feel like we can continue to go on and on, but—
Christian Miller: I’ve talked with people for hours and hours, and we still don’t get to the bottom of it. So it’s a great topic. I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts about it, and maybe bring it to more people’s attention, and hopefully we can do something to push back against these crises and help preserve our most cherished virtue.
Evan Rosa: I’m with you, Christian. Thank you so much for joining me.
Christian Miller: Thank you so much for having me.
Evan Rosa: A special thanks today to our guest, Christian Miller. Make sure you pick up his latest book, The Honesty Crisis. And if you’re interested in a much deeper philosophical and psychological guide, I’d encourage you to look at his academic book, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. And make sure to check out his website, christianbmiller.com, for a full list of books, including The Character Gap, Character and Moral Psychology, and much more.
Noah Sentel is our production assistant and edited this episode. And I’m Evan Rosa. I produce the show.
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