Christian B. Miller is the author of the new book The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. His other books include Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. He is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University.
Q: What inspired you to write The Honesty Crisis?
A: I had three things that motivated me at the same time.
One was that I noticed writers didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to honesty. In my own field of philosophy, for instance, I found only a couple of articles written in the span of 50 years!
At the same time, it seemed to me (and still does) that honesty is tremendously important, and that at some level most of us recognize this fact. Indeed the subtitle of the book says that honesty is our most treasured virtue, and there is some data to back that up.
Yet sadly – and this is the third motivation for the book – it became apparent to me that honesty was (and is) under attack, eroding at an alarming rate in multiple areas of society all at once. If we don’t do something to stop this erosion, we are all going to be much worse off.
Q: You’ve written about honesty before--what has compelled you to explore this topic?
A: Prior to my work on honesty, I lead a huge research project on character, and wrote several books and 30+ articles on the topic. After a while, though, I got a bit tired of that topic, as I felt like I had said everything I could say about it.
So I was looking for something fresh but not completely unrelated to character. That’s when I started thinking about what might be called “neglected virtues.” They are neglected in the sense that academics were not writing on them. They are neglected also in the sense that they are rarely possessed in society in general.
Virtues like generosity, practical wisdom, and patience all fit this description. But so too did honesty. And I wanted to do what I could to try to get more people – both my fellow academics and non-academics too – to pay a lot more attention to this especially neglected virtue that, it seemed to me, was and still is gradually eroding in our society.
Q: What are some of the factors that have made society “increasingly dishonest,” as your subtitle says, and do you see any hope for the future?
A: In the book, I focus on six different honesty crises having to do with AI student cheating, sermon plagiarism, celebrity and dishonesty, deepfakes, political misinformation, and Internet infidelity.
If there is one factor that runs throughout these crises, it is the role of technology in facilitating greater opportunities for dishonest behavior that is harder to detect.
For instance, student cheating has been around forever, and we already had one honesty crisis with the Internet and the ability of students to extract material from websites for their use without citation. But now we are all keenly aware of the most recent honesty crisis surrounding AI student cheating.
As far as hope goes, I think it depends. For some of these crises, I honestly do not see much hope.
The student cheating case is one of them. It is so easy to use an AI now to improve a student paper, and to do so in a way that minimizes the risk of detection. When such a resource is so powerful and easy to use, I fear the temptation will be too much.
In other areas, though, I am a bit more hopeful. For instance, there is good momentum at the moment to push back against the creation and distribution of harmful deepfake videos, especially pornographic ones. Here legal interventions can be especially impactful.
So I can’t give a simple answer to the hope question. It’s a mixed bag for me.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I already had a lot of the conceptual framework for thinking about honesty worked out in my head, and actually published that framework in a prior academic book which came out in 2021.
The research I had to do for The Honesty Crisis was mostly empirical. I consulted studies on lying behavior, on pornography, on political misinformation, on student cheating, and on a dozen of other topics as well.
In every case, I learned something that surprised me. For example, in chapter two I talk about research which finds that most people don’t lie most of the time, and it is only a handful of people who are responsible for most of the lying that happens in society today.
And in the chapter on politics, I looked at cutting-edge work on how social media can take people out of an accuracy mindset and make them much more likely to share political misinformation, even when they wouldn’t ordinarily think it is true.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have been working a bit on some other virtues that academics have not been paying much attention to, like generosity, patience, and practical wisdom.
But in the coming years I think I will be shifting my focus more and more to topics concerning religion and morality, including whether morality comes from a higher power and whether religion tends to be good for us.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: If you are interested in a more general discussion of character and of how good or bad most people are today, then I’d encourage you to check out my first book for a general audience, The Character Gap: How Good Are We?. It is where I first got to explore writing for people other than my fellow academics!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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