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Honesty
Honesty
The Philosophy and Psychology of a
Neglected Virtue
C H R I S T IA N B. M I L L E R
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Christian B., author.
Title: Honesty : the philosophy and psychology of a neglected virtue /
Christian B. Miller.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057889 (print) | LCCN 2020057890 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197567494 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197567517 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Honesty.
Classification: LCC BJ1533.H7 M55 2021 (print) | LCC BJ1533.H7 (ebook) |
DDC 179/.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057889
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057890
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197567494.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To Lillian Joyous Miller
For all the joy and laughter you bring to our lives
Contents
Preface: A Neglected Virtue  ix

Acknowledgments  xv
I . T H E P H I L O S O P H Y O F HO N E S T Y
1. Preliminaries to Developing an Account of Honesty  3

2. A Preliminary Account of Honesty  28
3. Refining the Account: Considering Challenges and
Counterexamples  64
4. Motivation and Honesty  89
5. Practical Wisdom and Honesty  113
6. Dishonesty and the Virtuousness of Honesty  134
I N T E R LU D E
7. Classification and Taxonomy  159
I I . T H E E M P I R IC A L DATA
8. Research on Stealing and Promise-Breaking  183

9. Research on Lying and Cheating  198
10. The Emerging Psychological and Moral Picture  238
Afterword: Improving Our Less than Honest Characters  274
Works Cited  289

Index  305
Preface: A Neglected Virtue
If you ask people today to name some of the virtues, honesty will often
show up on their list. It is a perfectly familiar virtue. It is also widely
accepted as a virtue. Unlike some other character traits, such as chas-
tity or humility, there is little controversy about whether honesty is a
moral excellence that is worth cultivating.1 It seems clear enough, too,
that honesty is a tremendously important virtue. Parents want to de-
velop it in their children. Close relationships typically depend upon it.
Employers value it in their employees.
Yet, despite these observations, philosophers have—stunningly, in
my view—almost completely omitted the virtue of honesty from their
professional writing. This is one of the only books to discuss the virtue
of honesty in detail since at least the 1970s.2 Furthermore, at the time
I was writing these words, there had been almost no articles in main-
stream journals in analytic philosophy on the virtue of honesty in at
1 As Linda Zagzebski (1996: 158) writes, “honesty is on all accounts a moral virtue.”
Similarly Tara Smith (2006: 75) claims that honesty “is probably the single most widely
endorsed virtue by people of divergent views on many other aspects of morality’s
substantive instruction.” And Howard Curzer (2012: 195) remarks, “Honesty is on
everyone’s list of virtues.”
2 Sissela Bok’s 1978 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life is the book
most comparable to this one that I am aware of, but it was focused narrowly on lying,
which is only one kind of dishonest behavior. Tom Carson’s 2010 book, Lying and
Deception: Theory and Practice has just one chapter on honesty as a virtue. He also notes
that “philosophers have written very little about the concept of honesty and the idea of
honesty as a virtue” (257). See also Michaelson and Stokke (2018), which is an edited
volume focused more narrowly on lying with little discussion of the virtue of honesty,
as well as chapter 5 of Karen Stohr’s (2012) On Manners. Also noteworthy is Bernard
Williams’s 2002 book, Truth and Truthfulness, and Andreas Stokke’s 2018 book, Lying
and Insincerity.
Interestingly, Bok herself was making the same observation back in 1978 about the
lack of work in this area: “The striking fact is that, though no moral choices are more
common or more troubling than those which have to do with deception in its many
guises, they have received extraordinarily little contemporary analysis. The major works
of moral philosophy of this century, so illuminating in other respects, are silent on this
subject” (xix).
x Preface: A Neglected Virtue
least fifty years.3 Edited volumes and monographs have snippets of dis-
cussion here and there,4 but even the leading collections on the virtues
and vices tend to omit honesty and dishonesty altogether.5 To make
matters worse, major Western philosophers such as Aristotle have had
little to say about honesty.6
What explains this neglect, especially when there has been a huge
resurgence of interest in virtue and virtue ethics dating back at least to
the 1970s? I do not have a good answer to this question.7 In the case of
the virtue of modesty, for instance, Julia Driver wrote an important and
controversial article, which helped to launch a small research industry
on this virtue.8 However, until just recently, no one has taken that first
step with respect to honesty, which might in turn spark responses and
refinements.9
It could be that philosophers have felt that there just is not much
of philosophical interest to say about honesty. Or perhaps they have
tended to assume that, at the end of the day, honesty is not really a dis-
tinct virtue in its own right and can be reduced to other virtues, like
justice and truthfulness. Or what is most likely the case is that since no
one is saying much about honesty, philosophers haven’t formed many
assumptions about it one way or the other. Their attention has been
elsewhere, and it has simply been overlooked.
3 The closest journal article in the neighborhood might be Louis Guenin’s 2005 paper,
“Intellectual Honesty.” Martin (1993) has some discussion of honesty, although much
of its focus is on love. In her 2003 paper, Tara Smith spends two paragraphs on what the
virtue of honesty is and devotes the rest of the paper to why honesty is valuable. Also rel-
evant is Carr (2014), although it did not appear in a philosophy journal.
Slowly our team here at Wake Forest University has been trying to change this trend.
See, for instance, important papers by two of my former postdoctoral fellows (Wilson
2018; Roberts and West 2020), as well as not so important papers by Miller (2015, 2017a,
2019a, 2019b, 2020a, 2020b, forthcoming a, forthcoming b) and the papers in our edited
volume on honesty, integrity, and truth seeking (Miller and West 2020).
4 For an exception, see Baier (1990).
5 See, e.g., Timpe and Boyd (2014).
6 The closest Aristotle gets is the virtue that pertains to truthfully talking about one-
self (1127a114–1127b33), although he does at one point note in passing that there are
other issues pertaining to being truthful, and that on his view they should fall under
the heading of justice (1127a33–1127b1). For related discussion, see Carson (2010: 257–
258) and especially Curzer (2012: chapter 10).
7 For Bok’s speculations, see her 1978: xx, 10–12.
8 See Driver (1989).
9 For my attempt, see Miller (2017a).
Preface: A Neglected Virtue xi
While I do not have a good explanation for the neglected study of

honesty in philosophy, this book intends to do something about it.
Overview of the Book
For the past decade, my interest in the topic of character has combined
more conceptual work in philosophy with the results of empirical
studies in psychology. This book will be no exception. Part I is on the
conceptual side and will offer a new account of the virtue of honesty.
In the process it will take up themes such as the scope of the virtue, the
motivational dimension of honesty, the role of practical wisdom, and
what the corresponding vices are to honesty.
Chapter 7 will serve as a bridge chapter or interlude between the
conceptual and the empirical parts of the book. Its focus is on tax-
onomy, and it will raise several conceptual issues about how to cate-
gorize people’s character in this moral domain. But it will also draw on
empirical work being done in positive psychology with the Values-in-
Action classification.
Part II turns to questions about whether most people as a matter of
fact do have the virtue of honesty and, if not, what their character looks
like instead. Here I dive into the latest research literature on stealing,
promise-breaking, lying, and cheating. The last chapter in this section
tries to put all the pieces together by offering an explanatory account
of the data, followed by a moral assessment of how good most people
would turn out to be if the explanatory account is correct.
The book ends with an afterword on how to close what I have called
the “character gap.”10 In this case it is the gap between how our char-
acter should be (deeply honest) and how it tends to actually be. I sug-
gest, at least in a preliminary way, that the ideas offered in the book
can provide some guidance as we start to think about strategies for be-
coming better.
Let me be up front about two topics I will not be exploring in the
book, especially since some readers might be expecting a discussion
10 Miller (2017d).
xii Preface: A Neglected Virtue
of them. The first topic is the definition of lying. There is a small but
growing literature on how exactly to define lying, given that the tra-
ditional definition, which dates back at least to Augustine, has been
widely rejected.11 This literature has quickly become complex and
technical, and for my purposes I do not need to delve into it. My focus
will be on uncontroversial cases of lying.
Second, I do not consider whether lying is ever morally permissible.
Here too we find a long-standing view which in recent years has faced
steadfast resistance. While there are a few defenders of the strict posi-
tion that lying is always morally wrong,12 most ethicists today allow for
exceptions, say in emergency rescue cases where a family of Jews can
be protected from the Nazis. Although my own sympathies rest with
the majority, I will try as much as possible to remain neutral on this
debate.
Intended Audience
My most recent book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, was a
trade book written for a nonacademic audience and did not presup-
pose any background in philosophy or psychology. In this book, I have
returned to more academic writing, although down the road I hope to
use the ideas here in a book for a wider audience. But for now, this is a
book aimed mainly at academics in philosophy, psychology, and reli-
gion, as well as others who are interested in the virtue of honesty. It will
use some of the machinery of contemporary analytic philosophy, but
hopefully the writing will be accessible to graduate students and un-
dergraduate majors in these fields. Many of the chapters should also be
accessible to a well-informed nonacademic audience.
11For reviews, see Fallis (2010) and Mahon (2016).

12See in particular Griffiths (2004) and Tollefsen (2014). See also Finnis (1980),
Murphy (1996), Garcia (1998), and Pruss (1999).
Preface: A Neglected Virtue xiii
Credits for Previous Work
I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to use ideas or

excerpts from my previous work:
Reproduced courtesy of Oxford University Press through
PLSclear are portions of chapters 4 and 10 from Moral Character:
An Empirical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and
portions of “The Mixed Trait Model of Character Traits and the Moral
Domains of Resource Distribution and Theft,” in Character: New
Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology, ed. Christian
B. Miller, R. Michael Furr, Angela Knobel, and William Fleeson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 164–191.
Reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press are portions of “Honesty,”
in Moral Psychology, Volume 5: Virtue and Character, ed. Walter
Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian B. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2017), 237–273, and “Honesty Revisited: More Conceptual
and Empirical Reflections,” in Moral Psychology, Volume 5: Virtue
and Character, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian B. Miller
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 295–307.
Reprinted courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan and SpringerNature are
portions of “Categorizing Character: Moving beyond the Aristotelian
Framework,” in Varieties of Virtue Ethics, ed. David Carr (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 143–162.
Reprinted courtesy of the Belgrade Philosophical Annual are
portions of “The Virtue of Honesty, Nazis at the Door, and Huck Finn
Cases,” Belgrade Philosophical Annual 32 (2019): 51–66.
Reprinted courtesy of the Portuguese Journal of Philosophy are
portions of “Honesty and Dishonesty: Unpacking Two Character
Traits Neglected by Philosophers,” Portuguese Journal of Philosophy 76
(2020): 343–362.
Reprinted courtesy of Routledge Press are portions of “Flirting with
Skepticism about Practical Wisdom.” Practical Wisdom: Philosophical
and Psychological Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge: forthcoming).
Reprinted courtesy of Copyright Clearance Center and Springer
are portions of, “Motivation and the Virtue of Honesty: Some Con
ceptual Requirements and Empirical Results,” Ethical Theory and
Moral Practice 23 (2020): 355–371.
Acknowledgments
The central ideas in this book were first developed for a conference
on character that we organized at Wake Forest University, whose pa-
pers were subsequently published by MIT Press as Moral Psychology,
volume 5. I am grateful for all the support of my coeditor of that
volume, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, as well as his very helpful feed-
back. The next big step was the opportunity to be on leave for an
academic year to expand the discussion from a paper to a book manu-
script. Thanks so much to the Wake Forest University Reynolds leave
program and the Thomas J. Lynch Fund for so generously supporting
me during this year. Win-Chiat Lee and Ralph Kennedy were my de-
partment chairs during the writing of this book, and I couldn’t have
asked for better. They are extraordinary.
Work on this book has spanned two major grant projects I have been
fortunate to be a part of at Wake Forest: the Beacon Project, funded
by the Templeton Religion Trust, and the Honesty Project, funded by
the John Templeton Foundation. Naturally the opinions expressed
here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views
of either Templeton foundation. Special thanks to Chris Stewart, John
Churchill, Alex Arnold, Sarah Clement, Michael Murray, and Richard
Bollinger.
Peter Ohlin at Oxford University Press has once again been a joy
to work with, and I am very appreciative of his support of my work.
Many thanks as well to Meridith Murray for preparing the index so
carefully. The two reviewers for Oxford, one of whom subsequently
identified himself as Paul Bloomfield, sent along tremendously
helpful comments that substantially improved the book. I am greatly
in their debt. The same is true of the Honesty Project reading group,
which workshopped the conceptual chapters and caught a number
of problems. Thanks so much for helpful comments to Emily Austin,
William Fleeson, R. Michael Furr, Eranda Jayawickreme, Kathleen
Stimely, Gregory Robson, Logan Martin, Cameron Silverglate, and
xvi Acknowledgments
Michael Lamb. For additional written comments I am very grateful

to Alexander Jech, Robert Hartman, Matt King, Charles Starkey, Tim
Pawl, Jing Hu, Andrew Cullison, Matthew Benton, Emily McTernan,
Eva Kort, Daniel Lapsley, Robert Audi, Ryan West, Adam Pelser,
Alan Wilson, Jess Kingsford, Sarah Schnitker, Alex Pruss, Jonathan
Robinson, Jason Baehr, Ronald Green, Chad Bochan, Jada Strabbing,
Bella DePaulo, and the students in my Virtue and Character course.
My mother once again did an amazing job with her editing suggestions
and saved me from many writing mistakes.
Many thanks to the following for the opportunity to share some
of my ideas in these pages: Baylor University, Tulane University,
Wake Forest University Eudaimonia Institute, Macquarie University,
University of Sydney, Jubilee Center for Character and Virtue,
ARETAI conference at the European University of Rome, Society
for Psychology and Philosophy, Wake Forest University Beacon
Project Final Conference, Coastal Carolina University, Fordham
Epistemology and Ethics Workshop, University of Notre Dame,
Vanderbilt University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Wake
Forest University Library Lecture Series, “Is There Anything Like
Moral Character & Virtue?” Conference in Gdańsk, Wake Forest
University Philosophy Department, Honesty Project State of Research
Conference, and the Developing Character Project Final Conference.
I am especially grateful to Wake Forest University and our Department
of Philosophy for the opportunity to discuss honesty as part of the
A. C. Reid Chair Inaugural Lecture.
My greatest source of support and encouragement has always been
my family—my parents, Bill and Joyous Miller; my mother-in-law,
Eileen Smith; my children, Jackson, William, and Lillian; and most of
all my wife, Jessie Lee Miller. Thank you, as always, from the bottom of
my heart.
PART I
THE PHILO SOPH Y
OF HONE ST Y
1
Preliminaries to Developing
an Account of Honesty
Part I of this book is a conceptual exploration of the virtue of honesty.

It does not draw on any empirical data, but instead tries to gain some
clarity about what is involved in being an honest person. The prelimi-
nary account is outlined in c hapter 2. Before we get there, though, it is
important to do some stage setting. That is the job of this chapter.
In section 1.1, I make sure the focus is on the virtue of honesty, as
opposed to honest actions. Section 1.2 then turns to the scope of the
virtue, or the kinds of behaviors to which it applies. Section 1.3 wraps
up the chapter by outlining four desiderata which I think any prom-
ising account of honesty should attempt to satisfy.1
1.1. Framing the Virtue of Honesty
Let us begin by distinguishing the virtue of honesty from some related

notions. Suppose you hear someone say, “Smith did the honest thing in
telling the truth on the stand in the courtroom.” The speaker is offering
an assessment of Smith’s behavior in the courtroom. But even if that
assessment is correct, it is not the same thing as ascribing to Smith the
virtue of honesty, for at least two reasons.
First, honesty can give rise to honest actions. But it can also be true
of someone that she is an honest person, without her exhibiting any
honest behavior for an extended period of time. Nor does she count as
an honest person simply because of her earlier track record of honest
behavior. Rather, because of facts internal to who she is psychologically,
1 For an earlier version of the ideas in this chapter, see Miller (2017a).
Honesty. Christian B. Miller, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197567494.003.0001
4 The Philosophy of Honesty
her psychological makeup and character, it is true of her that she is

honest. I will return to this point in a moment.
Second, it is possible to perform an action which we might call
‘honest,’ yet not be an honest person. Smith, for instance, might not
be honest at all, and only tells the truth on the stand of fear of being
punished for lying. So honesty and honest actions are pretty clearly
distinct concepts.
More closely connected to honesty is the concept of acting from
honesty. If Smith does the honest thing, and he is acting from honesty,
then that does entail that he is an honest person (you cannot act from
honesty without having honesty in your character!). But here too, the
honest action is distinct from, and metaphysically dependent upon,
the virtue of honesty. The latter is what explains the performance of
the former.2
These same points carry over to mental activities as well. Consider
someone saying this: “Jones carried out a thorough and honest as-
sessment of the evidence in the case.” This claim has to do with Jones’s
mental life, and specifically with how she thought about the evidence
and came to form an overall judgment. That judgment itself, though, is
not the virtue of honesty either. If Jones is an honest person, then her
virtue could have shaped this particular judgment. Again, though, the
virtue is prior to the judgment itself. Furthermore, as with Smith, it is
possible that Jones might have formed the judgment on this one occa-
sion without being an honest person in general.
So what would be some examples involving the virtue of honesty,
strictly speaking? I have in mind statements like these:
1. “Roberts is an honest person.”

2. “I have spent enough time with him to know that he is really dis-
honest and you don’t want to be his friend.”
2 For more on virtues, virtuous actions, and acting from virtue, see Hurka (2006),
Crisp (2015: 268–269), and Battaly (2015: 111). It is also true that there can be causal
dependency in the other direction as well, if the performance of honest actions helps to
develop and strengthen one’s possession of the virtue of honesty.
Preliminaries to Developing an Account of Honesty 5
3. “Her honest character really stands out in her application; we

should definitely hire her.”
Now the focus is on the traits of character of these individuals. Thus for
Roberts to have the virtue of honesty, he has to have some stable ten-
dency or disposition of the honest sort.
This should be a familiar picture of how character traits work from
the philosophy literature.3 Roberts’s honesty can give rise to honest
thoughts about, say, the fact that exaggerating a charity donation on his
taxes is cheating, and consequently how cheating on his taxes would
be wrong. These thoughts in turn can lead him to act in honest ways,
in this case by reporting the correct figures on his taxes. The honest
disposition itself is distinct, though, from these thoughts and actions.
It plays a causal role in giving rise to them, and in turn is part of the
causal explanation for them.
Furthermore, thoughts stemming from an honest disposition would
not be activated all the time in every situation—exceptions might in-
clude sleeping, watching TV, or looking at one’s phone out of boredom.
Rather, only certain situations Roberts is in which are relevant to this
trait—such as parties or classrooms—activate his honest disposi-
tion. Trying to accurately predict when this will happen depends on a
number of specific features of his psychology, such as what he notices,
how he interprets events in his surroundings, what else is going on in
his mind at the time, and so forth. Once activated, though, his honest
disposition can play an active role in his psychology. Using the philo-
sophical jargon, Roberts’s honest thoughts can go from being merely
dispositional thoughts, to being occurrent thoughts.
These occurrent thoughts, it should be noted, need not be con-
scious. Roberts may not even recognize them in the moment if they
are functioning subconsciously. Presumably most of the time we have
a variety of subconscious occurrent beliefs and desires which are
3 I have discussed this picture at great length in Miller (2013: chapter 1) and
(2014: chapter 1). There I consider the metaphysical nature of character traits, their role
in causing and explaining behavior, and their irreducibility to mere patterns of behavior.
Since the discussion there applies straightforwardly to the case of honesty, I have not
taken the space here to repeat it.
causally influencing us to act in different ways without our realizing it.

Thoughts arising from the virtue of honesty would not be an exception.
Tying these observations together, here is a helpful starting point for
thinking about the virtue of honesty:
(H) The virtue of honesty is a psychological disposition that, when

triggered in conditions relevant to honesty, can reliably cause
the formation of thoughts and feelings of an honest kind, which
in many cases can subsequently give rise to honest actions.
Naturally the honest thoughts and feelings won’t always translate into
honest actions. Sometimes the environment will not cooperate, say
if one is prevented from speaking or acting. Sometimes other, more
important considerations come into play, say in cases where lying or
cheating could prevent a terrorist attack. But other things being equal,
the triggering of an honest disposition gives rise to occurrent thoughts,
which in turn give rise to intentional action.
So far so good. Yet while (H) might be helpful in shedding some
light on honesty qua character trait, it doesn’t shed much light on hon-
esty. Why not? Because we could say the very same thing about many
other virtues too. Consider compassion, for instance:
(C) The virtue of compassion is a psychological disposition that,

when triggered in conditions relevant to compassion, can reli-
ably cause the formation of thoughts and feelings of a compas-
sionate kind, which in many cases can subsequently give rise to
compassionate actions.
Virtues in general are causal dispositions that typically give rise to their
own relevant thoughts and actions. Same with the vices as well.
So the work of this section has been to provide some helpful back-
ground about character traits, which will frame what follows in the
book. Let us now turn to some of the distinctive features which set
honesty apart from the other virtues, starting with its scope.
1.2. The Scope of Honesty
What comes to mind when thinking about exemplars of honesty?

An honest person is truthful in her words, accurately representing to
others the way she sees the world. She presents the facts, offering what
is needed to properly address the matter at hand. But there’s more.
An honest person can be trusted around other people’s property. She
respects what they own. The same can be said about following the rules.
When they are fair and she participates voluntarily, she can be counted
upon to do what the rules say and, for instance, play a game the way it
is meant to be played. What about promises? An honest person makes
them sincerely, fully intending to keep them if the circumstances allow,
and when the time comes, she honors the promise provided there are
no outweighing considerations that have arisen in the meantime.
As we can see, the scope of honesty is wide. It pertains to a variety of
different kinds of behaviors, some of which might seem to have only a
loose connection with each other. To explore this in more detail, I will
switch from a positive to a negative characterization and examine what
kinds of behavior honesty prevents. Stated another way, these are the
kinds of behaviors which, if routinely performed, call into question
whether someone is in fact honest.
Here are five kinds of behavior that I take to be incompatible with
the virtue of honesty:
Lying
Misleading
Stealing
Cheating
Promise-breaking
This list is meant to capture the central ways in which we can fail to
be honest, but it is not intended to be exhaustive. I will consider some
additional possibilities at the end of this section. First, though, let’s ex-
plore each of these five in more detail.
Lying. It seems clear enough that someone who reliably tells unjustified
lies is not someone we would tend to call honest, especially if they are
more than just everyday or white lies.
What is involved in lying? The short answer is that there is little
agreement among philosophers about how to characterize lying rigor-
ously. On what can be considered the traditional account:
I tell a lie to you if and only if:

(i) I say something to you that I believe is false.
(ii) I intend to deceive you by saying it to you.4
The deception involved here can be understood broadly. We naturally

think of getting the other person to believe the proposition in ques-
tion, such as when the student wants his teacher to believe that the dog
ate his homework. But it can include more than that. For instance, it
could have the effect of getting the teacher to believe that the student
believes this claim about the homework.5
This account does a fine job with most cases. It counts as lies most of
the actions we believe are lies, and rightly excludes most of the actions
we do not think are lies. When a con man makes the false statement, “I
am a police officer” in a serious way to take advantage of a vulnerable
person, this is an example of the former. When an actor performing on
stage says, “I am a police officer” as part of his role as a police officer, it
is an example of the latter.
But if what we are searching for is an account that gets the cases ex-
actly right, then there is an emerging consensus today that the tradi-
tional account doesn’t quite work.6 Consider, for instance, this much
discussed example from Tom Carson:
4 For a helpful review of different subtle variations in formulating the traditional ac-
count, see Saul (2012: 3–8) and Fallis (2018: 26 fn. 2).
5 See Bok (1978: 20–21) and especially Krstić (2019: 643).
6 See Fallis (2010, 2018), Carson (2010: chapter 1), Stokke (2013, 2018, 2019), and
Krstić (2019). For doubts about whether even Augustine held the traditional view, see
Griffiths (2004: 27–30). And Aquinas famously did not (MacIntyre 1994: 316).
One way to argue that the traditional account is insufficient is to require that the be-
lief in question be false, and not just believed to be false. Tom Carson (2010: 16; see also
Barber 2020: 144) has made this argument, but like many philosophers working in this
area (e.g., Saul 2012: 5; Lackey 2013: 239 fn. 9; Stokke 2018: 32–36), I find this additional
requirement implausible and will not consider it further here.
Suppose that I witness a crime and clearly see that a particular indi-
vidual committed the crime. Later, the same person is accused of the
crime and, as a witness in court, I am asked whether or not I saw the
defendant commit the crime. I make the false statement . . . for fear of
being harmed or killed by him. However, I do not intend that my false
statements deceive anyone. (I hope that no one believes my testimony
and that he is convicted in spite of it.) . . . [In addition] suppose that
I know that the crime and my presence at the scene of the crime were
recorded on a video camera so that there is almost no chance that the
jury will believe that I believe what I am saying.7
A ‘bald-faced’ lie like this one is still a lie. But there is no intention to de-
ceive on the part of the speaker. Right from the outset, each party to the
conversation believes that the claim in question is false (and believes this
about each other’s beliefs too, and so forth). So the traditional account is
in need of revision, or so at least according to this line of criticism.8
A number of alternative accounts have been proposed to try to
improve on condition (ii) by making use of resources such as asser-
tion, intending to represent oneself as believing, warranting the truth,
common ground, narrow plausibility, and communication.9 Some
have even given up on the hope of providing necessary and suffi-
cient conditions for lying, opting instead for a prototype account.10
Fortunately for our purposes we do not have to enter into this diffi-
cult and increasingly technical discussion. Even if we cannot precisely
draw a conceptual fence around the concept of lying, it is clear that
(i) we know most lies when we see them, and that (ii) honesty pertains
to lying. All the cases used in this book will be clear cases of lying.11
Of course, there is a further and much better known debate
about lying, which has to do with whether it is morally justifiable in
7 Carson (2010: 20). For modifications to this example to try to handle criticisms, see
Krstić (2019).
8 For much more, see Krstić (2019). For a helpful review of different kinds of
counterexamples to the traditional account, as well as a defense of a view roughly in the

neighborhood of that account, see Lackey (2013). For a defense of the traditional view
against bald-faced lie cases, see Maitra (2018).
9 For helpful overviews, see Fallis (2010), Carson (2010), Saul (2012), Stokke (2013,
2018), and Krstić (2019). For some resistance, see Tollefsen (2014: 22–25).
10 See Fallis (2010: 13).
11 Furthermore, as Don Fallis (2010: 4, emphasis his) has helpfully pointed out:
certain cases. Augustine and Kant are notorious for adopting strict
prohibitions again lying in all cases.12 Some still follow their lead today,
including Paul Griffiths and Christopher Tollefsen.13 Most contem-
porary philosophers, it would seem, go in the other direction.14 They
tend to point to certain cases of minor white lies which they suggest are
morally permissible. Or, perhaps more forcefully, they appeal to cases
where lying would prevent severe harm, such as lying to save a Jewish
family from the Nazis or to stop a terrorist attack.
Suppose that in certain instances, it is indeed all things considered
morally permissible to lie. There is an interesting question about how
that bears on the virtue of honesty. Is it that lying is still an expres-
sion of dishonesty and in opposition to what the honest person would
do—yet it is outweighed by some other virtue or opposing moral
considerations? Or is it that the virtue of honesty makes exceptions for
lying in certain cases, so that lying to the Nazi at the door in no way
detracts from a person’s honesty? I will not pause to consider this ques-
tion now, but will return to it in c hapter 3.
Again, fortunately for my purposes we can bypass the controversy,
such as it is today, about whether lying is ever morally permissible. If
not all lies, then at least the vast majority of them are not morally jus-
tifiable. A person who reliably tells those sorts of lies is someone who
fails to be honest.
Misleading. Someone who reliably misleads others, not by telling lies,

but by (for instance) intentionally withholding important information
while an intention to deceive may not be a necessary condition on lying, there

are several reasons to focus specifically on lies that are intended to deceive. First,
lies that are not intended to deceive are clearly not prototypical instances of
lying. . . . Second, lies that are intended to deceive are arguably the more impor-
tant type of lie. For example, they are the lies that we build lie detectors to detect.
Also, these are the lies that philosophers tend to be interested in. It is pretty clear
that moral philosophers are primarily concerned with lies that are intended to
deceive.
12 Although this is not completely clear even in the case of Augustine. For a different
approach, see Decosimo (2010). So too in the case of Kant; for a different approach, see
MacIntyre (1994: 344) and Guenin (2005: 187).
13 See Griffiths (2004) and Tollefsen (2014). See also Finnis (1980), Murphy (1996),
Garcia (1998), and Pruss (1999). For related discussion, see MacIntyre (1994).
14 See, e.g., Carson (2010). For related discussion, see MacIntyre (1994) and Stokke
(2019).
or telling half-truths involving misleading details, for insufficiently

good moral reasons, is not someone we would tend to call honest.15
A famous example of misleading others involves Saint Athanasius.
In the process of looking for him, soldiers came across someone who,
unbeknownst to them, was indeed Athanasius. When they asked him
where Athanasius was, he told the truth, “Not far away,” and the soldiers
departed.16 A popular contemporary example comes from Bernard
Williams. A neighbor says to you, “Someone has been opening your
mail,” which is true even when the ‘someone’ is the neighbor herself.17
Typically in cases of misleading, if a speaker is making a claim, it will
be true by her lights and so would not count as a lie (Athanasius really
was nearby.).18 But the claim is made in such a way that, for instance,
it carries a conversational implicature intended to lead the audience to
form a false belief (in this case, that this person was not Athanasius).19
15 The ‘intentionally’ is important to how I am understanding cases of misleading.
Some writers argue, however, that a speaker can unintentionally mislead an audience.
Thus Stuart Green (2006: 76) writes, “Untrue statements made by mistake are not de-
ceptive, although they might cause a listener to be misled. For example, if Bill mistakenly
tells Hillary that he was at home in Chappaqua on the night of 3 February, when in fact
he was in New York City, Bill might cause Hillary to be misled, but he has not deceived
her.” Similarly Carson (2010: 47, emphasis his) writes, “It is not self-contradictory to
say that someone misled another person unintentionally or inadvertently.” See also Saul
(2012: 2 fn. 5, 71).
If these philosophers are right, then talk of ‘misleading’ in this book should be un-
derstood as restricted just to cases of intentional misleading.
16 MacIntyre (1994: 336), Strudler (2010: 171–172, 177–179), Fallis (2010: 2), and
Saul (2012: 2). For similar examples, see Adler (1997: 437–438), Garcia (1998: 516), and
Williams (2002: 96).
17 Williams (2002: 96).
18 As Don Fallis (2009: 38) writes, “you are not lying if you make a statement that
you believe to be true. In fact, you are not lying even if you intend to deceive someone
by making this statement.” See also Guenin (2005: 183), Williams (2002: 96–101), and
Tollefsen (2014: 156, 165).
The ‘typically’ in the text above is included since some writers claim that misleading
can also happen when something is said that has no truth value (Green 2006: 78).
19 As Peter van Elswyk (2020: 1158) nicely puts it, “A speaker misleads by using a sen-
tence to somehow convey but not say a disbelieved proposition. A proposition may be
conveyed but not said because it is a conversational implicature, a presupposition, or
another variety of not-at-issue content.”
Guenin (2005: 200) helpfully notes that causing the formation of a false belief need
not be the only goal of someone who is trying to mislead. She may instead be trying to
preserve a false belief in another person, or eliminate a true belief, or stop the formation
of a true belief.
For more on the contrast between lying and misleading, see Adler (1997,
2018), Garcia (1998: 518– 519), Williams (2002: 96– 101), Fallis (2010), Carson
(2010: chapter 2), Stokke (2013, 2018), van Elswyk (2020), and Viebahn (forthcoming).
Finally, if the belief is indeed formed by the audience, it is done infer-

entially. It is not arrived at through brain manipulation or hypnosis, or
at least not as I will be understanding cases involving misleading beha-
vior in this book.20
To take another example, a suspicious spouse might ask, “Where
were you last night?,” to which the person replies, “I was out with the
guys at Freddies Bar.” That’s true, but the implicature is that Freddies
Bar was the only place he was at last night. What is conveniently
omitted from the story is where he went after the bar, and with whom.
If his wife infers that he was faithful to her last night, then her husband
has misled her. If she remains highly suspicious, then he has only in-
tended to mislead her, but failed in this instance.
These examples are cases of misleading others through verbal omis-
sion. There are other ways to mislead than this, including:
Equivocation. In a famous example, Kant pledged to King Friedrich

Wilhelm II to “declare solemnly, as Your Majesty’s most loyal subject,
that I shall hereafter refrain altogether from discoursing publicly, in
lectures or writings, on religion.” Later Kant admitted that his words
were chosen very carefully to apply truthfully only during the king’s
lifetime (which was quickly coming to an end).21
Another strategy is arguably better understood as a form of lying

rather than misleading:
Mental Reservation: In a standard example, a Christian priest tries to

escape religious persecution by responding to a direct question with
“I am not a priest,” while at the same time qualifying the statement
internally in his mind with “of Zeus.”22
20 See Fallis (2010: 5).

21 MacIntyre (1994: 336) and Guenin (2005: 206). For additional discussion of equiv-
ocation, see also Williams (2002: 103), Saul (2012: 109–111), and Tollefsen (2014: 15,
163–164).
22 See Bok (1978: 15, 37– 39), Garcia (1998: 516–517), Williams (2002: 104–105),
Griffiths (2004: 36), Guenin (2005: 212), Saul (2012: 101–109), Stohr (2012: 106–107),
and Tollefsen (2014: 160–162).
It is hard not to see this as making a statement which he knows to be false,

and so cannot be a case of mere misleading. But nothing in what follows
hangs on how we categorize cases of mental reservation.23
The examples thus far have involved verbal actions. But we can mis-
lead others through our nonverbal behavior as well, say by wearing a dis-
guise aimed at leading others to draw the inference that I am some other
person and not me. Kant’s famous example involved packing bags in front
of one’s roommates so that they think you are going on a trip, even though
you are not.24 Augustine discussed Joshua being commanded by God to
pretend to retreat to get the opposing army to leave their city and fall into
a trap.25 In Tom Carson’s example, someone selling a used car first paints
over the rust.26 This marks another difference between misleading and
lying, since “[i]‌t is not a matter of debate that making a statement is nec-
essary for lying.”27
Cases of misleading behavior are cases involving deception. But
they are not the only forms of deception that can be at odds with hon-
esty. Lying is also deceptive, and we could have distinguished between
‘lying deception’ and ‘nonlying deception.’ In what follows I will stick
with ‘lying’ and ‘misleading’ instead as it is less cumbersome.28
23 For an interesting proposal whereby the priest ends up lying to the human audience
but avoids lying to God, see Saul (2012: 105).

24 Kant (1963: 226). For related discussions, see Adler (1997: 444), Garcia (1998: 515),
Guenin (2005: 182), Fallis (2010: 5, 7), and Stokke (2013: 354).
25 For a helpful discussion, see Decosimo (2010: 672– 677), who argues that on
Augustine’s view this would be treated as a case of lying rather than mere misleading.
26 Carson (2010: 57). A reviewer shared another example of leaving the lights on a
timer when I am out of town in order to make would-be thieves think that I am at home.
27 Carson (2010: 55). Similarly Stokke (2018: 7–8) writes, “all reasonable theories of
lying agree that you have not lied unless you have made what is variously called a state-
ment, saying something, or an assertion.”
‘Making a statement,’ though, needs to be considered broadly since it need not in-
volve a verbal utterance. As Green (2006: 77) notes, “One can lie, for example, by nod-
ding or shaking one’s head in response to a question, using sign language, sending smoke
signals, or making other gestures.” Garcia (1998: 515) claims that making speech acts is
the key point of difference. Doubtless there will be difficult conceptual issues here about
where to draw the line between what does and does not count as making a statement
(see Saul 2012 for extensive discussion). Historically relevant is Augustine on lying as
requiring “false signification,” which ends up leading to a very expansive conception of
lying (see Decosimo 2010 for helpful discussion).
28 For a similar approach to using the category of ‘deception,’ see Bok
(1978: 14), Frankfurt (1988: 128), Garcia (1998: 515), Guenin (2005: 199), Green
(2006: chapter 5), Tollefsen (2014: 164–165), van Elswyk (2020), and Matey (forth-
coming: 2). Some writers, such as Carson (2010: chapter 2), prefer to use the label
There is an interesting debate going on in the contemporary phi-

losophy literature about whether cases of misleading are ever as mor-
ally serious as cases of outright lying.29 Some argue that they never are.
Others argue that in certain instances they can be. But set that aside for
now. The important lesson is that, whether as serious as lying or not,
there are many instances in which misleading is incompatible with
honesty.
Stealing. Someone who reliably steals property that others have a right
to possess, for insufficiently good moral reasons, is not someone we
would tend to call honest.30
Imagine a secretary who is taking home expensive supplies from the
company every night. We would call that person a dishonest employee,
and he should get fired on the grounds of being dishonest. Or imagine
a CEO who is diverting the company’s retirement funds into her own
foreign bank account. She would be a dishonest leader of the company.
Complications arise when the societal norms surrounding property
in a given situation are fundamentally immoral or unjust. Consider
child slavery today. If someone helps to secretly rescue an orphan from
an abusive factory owner and brings him to a safe country, there is a
sense in which the rescuer is stealing. This is a merely ‘factual’ or ‘de-
scriptive’ sense of stealing.31 But it is not an immoral sense of stealing,
since there was no actual moral right by the factory owner to possess
and enslave the child. Hence one might think there was no moral
wrongdoing involved in liberating the child.
One upshot is that we can still make sense of the notion of stealing
even in cases where there is a widely held but mistaken belief that a
‘deception’ more narrowly so that lying often does not fall under the heading of de-
ception. That is what I did in Miller (2017a) as well, especially since ‘deception’ is a
success term, whereas ‘lying’ is not (Carson 2010: 46). But some people have told
me that this was confusing, so I have chosen instead to just refer to ‘lying’ and ‘mis-
leading.’ For those who prefer Carson’s approach, they are welcome to swap out the
terminology accordingly.
29 See Adler (1997, 2018), Garcia (1998: 524– 527), Williams (2002: 118– 119),
Green (2006: 78–81), Strudler (2010), Saul (2012: chapter 4), Webber (2013), Stokke
(2013: 352–353), Rees (2014), Carson (2018: 158–159), and Barber (2020).
30 Carson (2010: 63).
31 For a similar example and terminology, see Green (2006: 91).
property right exists. Let us call cases like these cases of stealing given
mistaken property norms.
There may also be cases where even though social norms sur-
rounding property in a given situation are just, stealing is morally per-
missible, all things considered. Call these cases of stealing given correct
but morally outweighed property norms. For instance, to prevent her
family from starving, a parent might steal from a supermarket. Or to
stop a hurricane from destroying their house with their children in-
side, a couple might steal some unused plywood from their neighbor’s
yard, even though it would be unreturnable after the storm hits. In
both cases we might say that the supermarket and the neighbor had a
property right to the possession in question, and that this right was ac-
curately understood by the people committing the theft. Nevertheless,
competing considerations morally justified taking those possessions
from their owners.32
We will return to these cases in chapter 3. For now I want to make
one final point about stealing. As with lying, it is difficult to pin down
the precise boundaries of the concept of ‘stealing’ via informative
necessary and sufficient conditions. But—and this will apply to the
remaining categories as well, so I won’t repeat it again—we can still
proceed without that conceptual rigor in hand. All I need is the claim
that there are many clear cases involving acts of stealing which a
person’s honest character would never permit.
Cheating. Someone who, for insufficiently good moral reasons, reliably

cheats by intentionally violating duly constituted, fair, and just rules
governing an activity to which she is a voluntary participant, is not
someone we would tend to call honest.33
Baseball players and cyclists who were using steroids when it was
explicitly prohibited by their sports were being dishonest toward
32 For a related point, see Green (2006: 92).

33 In his characterization of cheating, Stuart Green (2006: 57) adds that there must be
“the intent to obtain an advantage over a party with whom she is in a cooperative, rule-
bound relationship.” This strikes me as common in cases of cheating, but too strict as a
necessary condition. Green also provides helpful discussion of different kinds of rules
and their relationship to cheating (chapter 4). For brief comments, see also Greene and
Paxton (2009: supporting information).
their fans, their fellow players, and their sport. Tiger Woods, Kobe
Bryant, and others who broke the rules of their marriage agreement
by committing adultery were being dishonest toward their spouses.34
Bernie Madoff cheated investors out of millions of dollars with his
Ponzi scheme and is a paradigm example of someone engaging in dis-
honest activities.
It may be that some breakings of the rules are also dishonest
even when the rules are not just and/or participation is involuntary.
Consider a case like this:
The Fight. Atticus has been forcibly enslaved and thrown into the col-
iseum to fight against the Roman gladiator for the entertainment of
the crowd. Atticus is not given a fair chance; he has only a wooden
shield to use against the armor and sword of the gladiator. But he
manages to sneak in a small piece of metal which, at a key moment
in the battle, he uses to cut the gladiator’s throat. This is against the
rules, and the crowd boos and calls Atticus a cheater.
Did Atticus cheat? In a sense, he did. He intentionally violated the

rules governing this activity. This is a ‘factual’ or ‘descriptive’ sense of
cheating. At the same time, those rules were objectively unjust, and he
was morally justified in violating them. This gives rise to a distinction
between ‘factual’ cheating and ‘immoral’ cheating, which parallels the
same distinction we saw for stealing. We can call cases like this cases of
cheating given unfair rules.35
34 Here I rely on ordinary language expressions for acts of adultery, like ‘he’s a cheater’
or ‘she cheated on him.’ It may be, though, that adultery is best understood as primarily a
matter of promise-breaking rather than cheating. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which
an agreement is reached to enter into a special relationship and maintain that relation-
ship, with the understanding that each party must not violate certain rules or norms, one
of which is the prohibition against infidelity (provided of course they did not agree to an
open marriage instead).
35 Green (2006: 63) writes, “The rule that the cheater violates must be fair, issued by
a legitimate authority, enforced in an even-handed manner, and not subject to a justi-

fied exception.” But my suggestion is that there are two senses of ‘cheating’ that could
be at work, something Green noted in the case of stealing (91) but did not highlight for
cheating.
Similarly, as with stealing, there may be cases where the rules are
indeed fair and just, but where it is still morally permissible to cheat in
order to, say, save someone’s life. Here is one such potential case:
The High-Stakes Game. The well-being of a child hangs on the out-

come of a card game. If Chase wins, he will be able to buy the child
from the sex traffickers and bring her back to her family. If he loses,
she will be taken away and it will be very hard to ever find her again.
Chase is an expert card sharp. When he tries to play the game fairly,
he starts to lose. His only chance of winning is to start cheating,
which he does. As a result, he wins the game and buys the child’s
freedom.
Chase clearly cheats, but arguably in this case it is morally per-

missible. Let us call these cases of cheating given fair but morally
outweighed rules.
In chapter 3, I will return to both kinds of case at some length. Here
the only point is that there are plenty of cases where cheating is incom-
patible with the virtue of honesty, even if there are some other, more
complicated cases where we will have to take a closer look.
Promise-breaking. Someone who reliably and intentionally breaks

reasonable promises, for insufficiently good moral reasons, is not
someone we would tend to call honest.36
When making a promise, one binds oneself and assumes a moral ob-
ligation. Unless one is released from the promise, one has at least a pro
tanto obligation to do the thing promised. To break a promise, then,
is centrally to violate this obligation.37 Suppose a lawn care company
makes a promise to take care of a customer’s yard while she is away for
a month. When she returns, the neighbors report that the company in
fact never did anything to take care of the yard. The customer could
36 The ‘intentionally’ is important, since one can break a promise unintentionally,
say by forgetting or being distracted. Yet it is not clear to me that all such unintentional
breakings of promises should count as failures of honesty.
37 For helpful general discussion of promises, see Green (2006: chapter 9).
rightly complain that, absent a legitimate excuse, the company was dis-
honest in its dealings with her.
Once again there is a descriptive and a normative sense of the rele-
vant concepts.38 The lawn care company had made a morally legitimate
promise. A Nazi leader who promises to personally lead the execution
of a Jewish family, has not. Yet there is still a clear sense in which he has
made a promise. To later break the promise and release the Jews would
be a case of promise-breaking given immoral rules.
Not surprisingly, there can be cases of promising-breaking given
accurately understood and justified but morally outweighed
obligations. I make a promise to meet my friend for lunch. On the way
to the restaurant, I come across a dying person on the side of the road
who needs to be taken to the hospital. I am the only one who can do it
quickly enough to save his life. I accurately recognize that I have a jus-
tified obligation to meet my friend, but also that it is outweighed by the
well-being of this dying stranger.
Once again, there is a complex relationship here with honesty, as we
will explore in more detail in chapter 2. But for now all that matters is
that there seems to be a relationship between promise-breaking and
failures of honesty.39
Additional Ways to Fail to Exhibit Honesty. The five failures of hon-

esty outlined above will be the main focus of the rest of the book.40 But
they are not the only ones. Let me at least make passing reference to a
few more:
Combinational Possibilities. These are failures of honesty which rest,

at least in part, on two or more of the above failures. Perjury, for in-
stance, involves both lying (you have to intentionally say something
38 Ibid., 109.
39 The same applies to the breaking of vows and oaths, both of which are distinct from
promises. For helpful discussion, see Fruh (2019). While I won’t discuss vows and oaths
in what follows, much of what I say about promises will carry over to them as well.
40 For similar observations and related discussion about the broad scope of the virtue
of honesty, see Baier (1990: 259), Hursthouse (1999: 10), Smith (2003: 518; 2006: 75–
77), Guenin (2005: 222), Adams (2006: 128–130), Carson (2010: 63, 257), and Wilson
(2018: 265). For helpful analysis of these and other categories, including ways in which
they are distinct from each other, see Gert (1998: chapter 8) and Green (2006).
believed to be false) and promise-breaking (you took an oath to tell

nothing but the truth).41 Fraud involves both stealing and lying/
misleading.42
Bullshit. I suspect many consider a bullshitter to be someone who

fails to be honest. In contrast to the liar or misleader, the bullshitter
does not intend to deceive others or get them to believe false things.
Indeed, the bullshitter could make a number of true claims, even by
his own lights. Rather, as Harry Frankfurt memorably claimed, “the
essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.”43 And
again, “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—
this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the es-
sence of bullshit.”44 So what defines bullshit is not the content of the
utterance per se, but the manner in which it was produced, namely
without any concern for the truth.45
There are still other forms of dishonesty besides these, such as treason,
embezzlement, extortion, obstruction of justice, insider trading, black-
mail, and bribery.46 But stepping back from all these variations, let me
end this section by making three general observations.
First, I take the five primary forms above to be distinct failures or
kinds of dishonest behavior. In some cases, there can be more than
one kind involved, to be sure. For instance, a thief might have to lie
to a store clerk to help hide his stolen goods. But we can also imagine
cases where there is no overlap. For instance, the thief might just bra-
zenly walk out the front door with a case of beer, not lying to anyone.
Or the adulterer can give misleading answers about where he was last
41 Green (2006: chapter 12). If oath-breaking is distinct from promise-breaking, then
perjury still serves to illustrate the point about combinational possibilities.

42 Ibid., chapter 13.
43 Frankfurt (1988: 128).
44 Ibid., 125.
45 Ibid., 129. See also Saul (2012: 20). For criticism and refinement of Frankfurt’s view,
see Cohen (2002), Carson (2010: 58–63), Stokke (2018: chapters 6 and 7), and Gjelsvik
(2018).
46 For excellent discussion of most of these, see Green (2006). Some consider gossiping
to also fall under the heading of dishonesty, although it strikes me as a borderline case.
Same for humbug, which Frankfurt (1988) discusses at length in his article on bullshit.
For keeping in the dark, spin, and half-truths, see Carson (2010: 53–58).
night without lying. While his previous night’s activity was a form of
cheating, his verbal report to his wife was not. And so on—I won’t go
through every possible combination here.47
The second observation is that a deeply honest person is someone
who does not reliably engage in any of these forms of behavior.
Excellence with respect to each of them is necessary for being honest
overall. On the flip side, reliable failure with respect to just one of them
is sufficient for not counting as honest overall. If it is possible, for in-
stance, to be highly misleading in answering questions, but otherwise
refrain from lying, cheating, stealing, and promise-breaking, then still
that would be enough to fail at being an honest person overall.
Finally, with the help of these ways of failing at being honest, we
can now say something more positive about the ways of succeeding
too. With respect to each failure, I want to suggest that there is a corre-
sponding virtue:
Truthfulness: The virtue of being disposed to reliably tell the truth for
good moral reasons.
Forthrightness: The virtue of being disposed to reliably avoid mis-

leading by giving a sufficient presentation of the relevant facts for
good moral reasons.48
47 I do acknowledge, though, that there may be more subtle connections between
these categories such that, upon deeper reflection, one may collapse into another. For
instance, Tom Hurka suggested to me that lying might be understood as involving the
breaking of implicitly formed promises, and W. D. Ross, Charles Fried, and Tom Carson
have developed similar views (see Carson 2010: 24; 2018: 149–150 for references and
discussion). I am skeptical, though, that all five of these categories will collapse into each
other in similar ways. For helpful arguments supporting this claim, see Green (2006).
See also Guenin (2005: 180).
48 The ‘sufficient’ is important, since a sufficient presentation need not be a complete
presentation. This usage of ‘forthrightness’ departs from Guenin (2005: 202), who takes
it to apply to what I am calling truthfulness as well.
I am understanding forthrightness to be distinct from frankness, which can also
be a virtue. Someone who is exhibiting virtuous frankness is sharing information in a
supererogatory way, but without oversharing. More sharing is involved, in particular,
than is required for forthrightness. It is often associated with spontaneously providing
information that is unsolicited, but one can be frank even when asked a question. Hence
the reply, “To be frank . . .” The key point here is that frankness is a distinct virtue, and
one can fail to be frank while still being honest. Thanks to Emily McTernan for helpful
discussion.
Being Respectful of Property: The virtue of being disposed to reliably

respect the property of others for good moral reasons.
Proper Compliance: The virtue of being disposed to reliably follow

the relevant rules in a situation of voluntary participation when they
are fair and appropriate and when there are good moral reasons
to do so.
Fidelity to Promises: The virtue of being disposed to reliably keep

promises for good moral reasons.
A few clarifications would help.

First, I am not committed to these labels, so if they are distracting
we can use others instead. What matters is what the labels refer to.49
I do, though, call each of these a ‘virtue,’ and not just an aspect or a
facet of the virtue of honesty. Why think that they are virtues in their
own right? The reason is that it seems to me conceptually possible for
someone to succeed at one of them but fail at another (even if it is true
that the successes and the failures normally go hand-in-hand). For in-
stance, it seems to me that someone could lie repeatedly, but have no
interest in stealing other people’s property. Or someone could steal, but
abhor lying and always tell the truth (even if it is telling the truth in
a misleading way). If it is indeed possible to have one of the virtues
above without another, then they are distinct and can function as sep-
arate virtues in someone’s psychology. But if I am wrong about this and
49 In his influential discussion in Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams (2002: 11)
identified “two basic virtues of truth, which I shall call Accuracy and Sincerity.” Since
neither of these labels appears above, it is worth making the connections. ‘Sincerity’ for
Williams turns out to be the combination of what I call ‘truthfulness’ and ‘forthrightness.’
He characterizes it initially as, “a disposition to make sure that one’s assertion expresses
what one actually believes” (96), but then goes on to note that this is too narrow because
it does not encompass cases of misleading as well (97). ‘Accuracy,’ on the other hand, has
to do with the process of acquiring true beliefs. It is an epistemic virtue, rather than a
moral virtue, and so will not fall within the scope of this book.
Similarly, in her discussion of Hume on honesty, Annette Baier (1990) uses ‘ve-
racity’ as the label for what I call ‘truthfulness’ and ‘forthrightness.’ The opposing vice is
‘mendacity.’ And in his paper “Honesty in Love,” Mike Martin (1993: 499) uses ‘probity’
for what I call ‘being respectful of property’ and ‘proper compliance.’
Honesty
Being Fidelity to
Proper
Truthfulness Forthrightness Respectful Promises
Compliance
of Property
Figure 1.1. A taxonomy for the virtue of honesty.
they are only aspects of a multifaceted and complex virtue of honesty,

nothing of significance will change in what follows.
What we have, I want to suggest, is a hierarchical picture, with the
virtue of honesty as the genus and what I will call the more ‘narrow
virtues’ as the species. Figure 1.1 illustrates what I have in mind.
Of the five narrow virtues, the first two naturally pair together given
their concern for veracity in communication. Similarly the remaining
three naturally pair together, and can be considered under the heading
of trustworthiness.50
What about honesty itself—can it be subsumed under a broader
virtue? I won’t pursue this question here, other than to note that on one
historically prominent taxonomy of the virtues, there are four cardinal
virtues (fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice), and honesty is a
species of justice.51
If we add these extra refinements, we get the more nuanced picture
in Figure 1.2. Having mentioned this richer taxonomy, I will set it aside
for the rest of book and concentrate mainly on the relationship be-
tween the virtue of honesty and the five narrower virtues.
50 For a similar categorization of honesty into matters of truthfulness and trustwor-
thiness, see Martin (1993: 499). Robert Roberts and Ryan West (2020: 98–99) use two
categories as well: truthfulness and justice.
Alexander Jech suggested to me that trustworthiness could be a unifying theme
through all five categories. This is not the approach I develop in this book, but it is worth
considering.
51 See, e.g., Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, Question 109, Article 3, https://www.
newadvent.org/summa/3109.htm, although it is unlikely that Aquinas would have

categorized all five narrow virtues under the heading of honesty the way I have.
Justice
Honesty Other Virtues
Trustworthiness
Veracity
Truthfulness Forthrightness Being Proper Fidelity to

Respectful of Compliance Promises
Property
Figure 1.2. A richer taxonomy for honesty.
Hopefully the scope of honesty is now a bit clearer. But we are still
only scratching the surface of what the virtue involves.
1.3. Desiderata for an Account of Honesty
To make more progress, let’s now turn to the project of offering some
kind of account of this virtue. A first attempt will be made in the next
chapter. In the remainder of this one, I want to briefly suggest four
desiderata that any such account should aspire to meet.52 These are
each intended to be defeasible. In other words, one can make a case
for why meeting a particular desideratum is not, after all, an important
task to accomplish. If the case can be made successfully, then there’s no
blemish on the proposed account in that respect. But the key point is
that the case needs to be made in the first place. Otherwise, failing to
satisfy a desideratum is a mark against the view.53
52 Here I have been helped by the excellent discussion in Wilson (2018), which draws
in part on Miller (2017a).

53 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for help here.
First Desideratum: Meet the Unification Challenge. Suppose I am

right about the various virtues (or at least facets) which fall under the
heading of honesty. This raises a challenge which any account of hon-
esty should address. I have not seen the challenge mentioned in the
literature, and so I have called it:
The Unification Challenge: What is it exactly that these various virtues

have in common such that they all pertain to the virtue of honesty?
Telling the truth to someone seems rather different from not stealing
other people’s property, which in turn seems rather different from not
cheating at a sports game or on one’s taxes. Yet they all are said to be
related in some way to honesty. In virtue of what? What property or set
of properties do they all have in common such that they all pertain to
honesty?
There are different ways to proceed in considering this question. The
most straightforward is to offer an account of honesty which identifies
what the property or properties are. I will try to do that in the next
chapter.
Alternatively, one could argue that there is nothing which unifies
all the narrow virtues under the heading of honesty, but only some of
them. Perhaps one or two of them do not, upon deeper reflection, fall
under the heading of honesty, and deserve to be considered as sepa-
rate virtues in their own right.54 If this strategy is pursued, then there
would also need to be an error theory offered for why these narrow
virtues have mistakenly been thought to be linked to honesty even
though they are not, strictly speaking.
A third option is to say that there is nothing at all that unifies any
of these narrow virtues, and so they ultimately do not share enough
in common to pertain to honesty. Rachana Kamtekar has raised this
possibility: “although we use a single word, ‘honest’ to describe the
54 For instance, fidelity to promises and being respectful of property could be
categorized as separate from honesty and falling under the heading of justice, leaving
a unification challenge for the remaining three narrow virtues under honesty. Even if
honesty still falls under a cardinal virtue of justice itself, fidelity to promises and being
respectful of property could be separate virtues in their own right which also fall under
justice. Thanks to Michael Lamb for raising this possibility.
behaviors of not lying, not cheating, and not stealing, it does not seem
obvious that not lying, not cheating, and not stealing are the same sort
of thing, or even that they are deeply connected. It may be that under-
lying this single word are three distinct and unrelated dispositions.”55
Talk of ‘honesty’ might just function as a convenient shorthand for
referring to one of the more specific virtues.56 Here too, there would
need to be an error theory offered to explain why honesty has so often
been thought to be a distinct virtue in its own right alongside courage,
temperance, and all the rest, and why the various other narrow virtues
have so often been linked to it.57
For what it is worth, I am not opposed in principle to this third op-
tion. I see it as a reasonable fallback position if options 1 and 2 end up
proving to be unsuccessful.
Second Desideratum: Avoid Counterintuitive Results. More straightfor-

ward than the unification challenge is the desideratum that an account
of honesty gives intuitively plausible verdicts about cases and avoids
intuitively implausible verdicts.
For instance, consider an imaginary case of someone who has never
made a promise in his life. An account of honesty shouldn’t count him
as honest (when it comes to promises) simply in virtue of never having
made, or even having had the chance to make, a promise. After all, he
might be such that if he were to ever start making promises, he would
quickly break them for no good reason.
Like the other desiderata, this one is defeasible. Thus one could
argue that an honest person has capacities for knowledge or perception
55 Kamtekar (2004: 468–469). For similar claims, see Adams (2006: 128–129).
56 Indeed, as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong pointed out to me, if this approach is attrac-
tive to philosophers, it might be part of the explanation for why they have not published
very much on this topic.
57 Also worth considering is a Wittgensteinian approach whereby there isn’t one or
more unifying features to honesty, but rather family resemblance relations. Roberts and
West’s (2020) approach can be interpreted in this way. They group the five narrow virtues
into truthfulness and justice under the heading of honesty, but then go on to note that
“even if they aren’t coextensive, the virtues of truthfulness and justice overlap signifi-
cantly, bound together, not by a single shared property, but by their high degree of rele-
vance to one another. Having a shared property is not the only way that two things can
be ‘unified’ . . . the functional relevance of justice to truthfulness and of truthfulness to
justice unifies them” (101).
or judgment which need to be captured by an account of the virtue but

which are also in certain ways counterintuitive from the perspective of
folk psychology. If that is the case, then this desideratum may need to
be relaxed.
Third Desideratum: Help Provide Plausible Accounts of the

Corresponding Vice(s). The project of accounting for the virtue of hon-
esty should not be undertaken in isolation from the task of saying
something about the corresponding vice or vices. Ideally, an account
of honesty should provide resources for elucidating the vice(s) as well.
Or if that sets the bar too high, it should at the very least not rule out
or be incompatible with independently plausible accounts of what the
vices are.
Fourth Desideratum: Not Threaten the Virtue Status of Honesty. Finally,

honesty is widely accepted to be a virtue, and virtues are widely ac-
cepted to be excellences.58 So it is natural to assume that an account
of honesty shouldn’t be such that the character trait is barred from
counting as a virtue or an excellence. Or if it is, the account will need
to offer an error theory to explain this revisionary consequence. On
a stronger version of this desideratum, an account of honesty should
provide some resources for explaining why honesty is a virtue, rather
than just not preventing it from counting as one.59
Here too, caution is warranted when thinking about the desider-
atum. Someone could argue that honesty is a character trait but not a
virtue, and indeed Paul Bloomfield has done this very thing.60 Hence
the desideratum should not be taken to preclude from the start an
error theory about the virtue status of honesty, but rather to note what
is the commonsense view and what would be a revisionary approach.
These four desiderata will guide the work of the next five chapters.
Note, though, that one potential desideratum not on this list is that
the account offer informative necessary and sufficient conditions for
58 See, e.g., Hursthouse (1999: 12), Battaly (2015: 5), and Baehr (2017a: 1155). We will
return to the topic of honesty as an excellence in more detail in c hapter 5.

59 This is how Wilson (2018: 267) formulates the desiderata.
60 See Bloomfield (2018b).
the possession of honesty. I am skeptical of our ability to provide such

conditions for any of the virtues, and so I am reticent to fault a partic-
ular account if it stops short of offering them. As long as it says some-
thing true and important about the conceptual makeup of the virtue in
question—in this case, honesty—I would be more than satisfied.
So with these four desiderata in hand, let me end the chapter by
noting the possibility that perhaps no account will end up satisfying all
of them, including my own. Instead, as so often happens in philosophy,
we may need to tally the successes and failures of competing accounts
along these different dimensions, and see what the overall balance of
the ledger reveals.
At this point it is too early to say. Let’s see what views are already out
there in the literature, and add one more, my own.
2
A Preliminary Account of Honesty
The goals of this chapter are straightforward. First we will examine the
existing treatments of honesty in the philosophy literature over the
past fifty years. In particular, we will assess how well they fare with re-
spect to the four desiderata. Then I will present my own approach, at
least initially. It will end up needing some significant revision, and that
will happen in the remainder of this chapter and in the next four.1
2.1. Assessing the Existing Accounts

of Honesty
Accounts of honesty by philosophers are few and far between. While

I may have missed some, here are three of the only ones out there. None
looks to be very promising without future refinement, and in fairness
all three authors would likely acknowledge this themselves.
According to David Carr, “the disposition to seek and honor
truth . . . is the soul of honesty as a moral virtue.”2 Unfortunately we do
not get a lot more detail about his proposal than this. So one concern is
that we need to be told more about what “honoring” truth means. But
second, it seems to give rise to counterintuitive results. For it seems im-
plausible to say that the scope of the moral virtue of honesty involves
seeking out the truth. That seems to fall under the scope of curiosity
or inquisitiveness or—most obviously—truth seeking. Another way to
put this is that it seems conceivable that a person could refrain from
lying, misleading, and all the rest, without being particularly interested
in unearthing new truths about the world. Finally, the proposal is not
1 Portions of this chapter have appeared as earlier versions in Miller (2017a, 2019b,
2020a) and are used here with permission.

2 Carr (2014: 9).
Honesty. Christian B. Miller, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197567494.003.0002
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The long trail: A story
of African adventure
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The long trail: A story of African adventure
Author: Herbert Strang
Illustrator: G. Henry Evison
Release date: July 1, 2022 [eBook #68440]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Humphrey Milford--Oxford

University Press, 1919
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG

TRAIL: A STORY OF AFRICAN ADVENTURE ***
GORUBA AT BAY. See page 268
THE LONG TRAIL
A STORY OF
AFRICAN ADVENTURE
BY
HERBERT STRANG
ILLUSTRATED BY H. EVISON
With a Frontispiece in Colour by A. della Valle
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, GLASGOW
TORONTO, MELBOURNE, CAPE TOWN, BOMBAY
1919
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD.,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
HERBERT STRANG
COMPLETE LIST OF STORIES
ADVENTURES OF DICK TREVANION, THE

ADVENTURES OF HARRY ROCHESTER, THE
A GENTLEMAN AT ARMS
A HERO OF LIEGE
AIR PATROL, THE
AIR SCOUT, THE
BARCLAY OF THE GUIDES
BOYS OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE
BROWN OF MOUKDEN
BURTON OF THE FLYING CORPS
CARRY ON
CRUISE OF THE GYRO-CAR, THE
FIGHTING WITH FRENCH
FLYING BOAT, THE
FRANK FORESTER
HUMPHREY BOLD
JACK HARDY
KING OF THE AIR
KOBO
LORD OF THE SEAS
MOTOR SCOUT, THE
OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN, THE
ONE OF CLIVE'S HEROES
PALM TREE ISLAND
ROB THE RANGER
ROUND THE WORLD IN SEVEN DAYS
SAMBA
SETTLERS AND SCOUTS
SULTAN JIM
SWIFT AND SURE
THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES
TOM BURNABY
TOM WILLOUGHBY'S SCOUTS
WITH DRAKE ON THE SPANISH MAIN
WITH HAIG ON THE SOMME
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE RUINED VILLAGE

II. THE FIGHT AT DAWN
III. THE STORY OF GORUBA
IV. RUSHED BY TUBUS
V. UNDER THE LASH
VI. THE NORTHWARD TRAIL
VII. THE PYTHON
VIII. SETTING A TRAP
IX. THE BROKEN BRIDGE
X. IN HOT PURSUIT
XI. A STRATEGIC RETREAT
XII. A STAMPEDE
XIII. A NARROW SHAVE
XIV. AT BAY
XV. THE PROBLEM
XVI. A NIGHT INTRUDER
XVII. A NIGHT ADVENTURE
XVIII. ATTACKED BY LIONS
XIX. TRAINING AN ARMY
XX. THE MYSTERY DEEPENS
XXI. A BLOW FOR LIBERTY
XXII. THE DISCOVERY OF RABEH'S HOARD
XXIII. GORUBA IS CAUGHT
XXIV. A FIGHT WITH CROCODILES
XXV. CHARGED BY RHINOCEROSES
XXVI. DISASTER
XXVII. AN ATTACK IN FORCE
XXVIII. THE ELEVENTH HOUR
XXIX. TUBUS TO THE RESCUE
XXX. THE FORWARD MARCH
XXXI. THE LAST FIGHT
XXXII. A HOT CHASE
XXXIII. THE END OF GORUBA
XXXIV. THE GREAT REWARD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
COLOUR PLATE BY A. DELLA VALLE
GORUBA AT BAY (see p. 268) . . . Frontispiece
DRAWINGS BY H. EVISON
AT GRIPS WITH THE NEGRO
JOHN ADDRESSES THE SENTRY
THE PRISONER
IN THE PYTHON'S TOILS
COLLAPSE
AT THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF
FACING THE FOE
JOHN TO THE RESCUE
A FATAL LEAP
THE DISCOVERY IN THE DITCH
GAMBARU IS AMAZED
THE FIGHT WITH THE CROCODILES
THE RHINOCEROS IN PURSUIT
GORUBA HAS A BLOW
RESCUED BY THE ENEMY
ROYCE LEADS THE CHARGE
GORUBA CLIMBS THE WELL

The LONG TRAIL
CHAPTER I
THE RUINED VILLAGE
On the afternoon of a certain day in spring a party of eighteen men was

marching through the rocky, bush-covered country near the north-western
corner of Lake Chad, in Northern Nigeria. It consisted of two white men, in
khaki and sun helmets, and sixteen stalwart Hausas, wearing nothing but
their loin-cloths, but carrying on their heads boxes and bundles of all shapes
and sizes. The white men and nine of the negroes had rifles slung over their
backs.
They were marching wearily. Since early morning, almost without

stopping, they had been trudging their toilsome way over parched and barren
land, only once discovering a water-hole at which they were able to slake
their burning thirst.
For the greater part of the day the sun had beat upon them fiercely; but
the sky was now overclouded, and a keen north-east wind had sprung up—
the harmattan of the desert—blowing full in their faces, stinging their skins
and filling mouths and ears and nostrils with the particles of fine grey dust
which it swept along in its desolating course.
The jaded carriers, who were wont to enliven the march with song and
chatter, were now silent. The two Englishmen in advance, bending forward
to keep the grit out of their eyes, tramped along, side by side, with an air of
dejection and fatigue.
"We are down on our luck, old man," said Hugh Royce presently, turning
his back upon the wind. "The village can't be far away, if Drysdale's map is
correct; but we can't go on much farther without a long rest."
"It's rank bad luck, as you say," replied Tom Challis. "It's not as if we had
been over-marching; we've really taken it pretty easy; but we didn't reckon
with sickness. These Hausas look as strong as horses, but I doubt whether
half of them will be able to lift their loads to-morrow."
"When we get to the village, we'll let them slack for a day or two, and
dose them well. I'll tell John; it will encourage them to stick it a little
longer."
He beckoned up a strapping negro, the head-man of the company, upon

whom a former employer had bestowed the name John in place of his own—
a succession of clicks and gurgles which white men found unpronounceable.
Telling him the decision just come to, the leader of the expedition ordered
him to acquaint the men with it, and urge them to persevere a little longer.
The weary, willing carriers perked up a little at the prospect of a holiday,

and began to talk to one another of how much they would eat. It did not
matter, they agreed, if they made themselves ill, for the little balls out of the
white men's bottles would soon set them to rights again.
Hugh Royce was one of those hardy persons whom wealth does not spoil.
Inheriting, at the age of twenty-three, a large fortune from an uncle, he
resolved to realise his dearest ambition—to travel into some little-known
region of the world, not for mere sport, but to study its animals and birds,
and add something to the general stock of knowledge.
A chance meeting with a friend of his, named Drysdale, who had just
returned from a sporting expedition in Nigeria, led him to choose that
country as a promising field of discovery.
Being sociably inclined, he wanted a companion. Drysdale himself could

not join him, but he happened to mention that traces of tin had recently been
found near one of the tributaries of the River Yo. This led Royce to think of
his school-fellow, Tom Challis, a mining engineer who was not getting on so
fast as he would have liked. He went to Challis and proposed that they
should go together, Challis to prospect for tin, while he himself pursued his
studies in natural history.
"If things look well," he said, "we'll start a tin mine, and go half-shares."
"That's hardly fair to you, as you're going to stand all expenses," replied
Challis. "I shall be satisfied with a quarter."
"You're too modest, Tom. Well, I want your company, so I'll agree to a
third, nothing less. So that's settled."
Royce purchased a quantity of tinned goods; medical stores; prints,

mirrors, and beads for trading with the natives; rifles and ammunition; a tent
and other necessaries; and they left Southampton one February day for the
Gold Coast. Here they engaged a staff of experienced Hausa carriers—called
"boys," whatever their age might be—and started for the interior.
That was several weeks ago, and they were now approaching the tin-
bearing region marked on the map with which Drysdale had provided his
friend.
About an hour after the promise of a rest had stimulated the carriers, they
were further encouraged by striking a native track, which indicated the
proximity of a village. Tired as they were, they quickened their pace, and
another half-hour's march brought them to cultivated fields of millet and
ground-nuts.
The white men, walking ahead of the party, looked forward eagerly for
the conical roofs of the village huts, which they expected to see rising above
the crops in the distance, and were surprised to find that nothing of the sort
was in sight.
"It must be a bigger place than I thought," said Royce. "A small village
wouldn't have such extensive fields. Drysdale marks the people as friendly; I
hope we shall find them so."
The narrow track wound through the fields, high stalks growing on either
side. A sudden turn brought them in sight of an object which caused them to
halt, and struck them with a foreboding of ill.
Lying in a curiously huddled posture across the track was the body of a
black man.
Insensibly lightening their tread, they approached it, and found that the
man was dead, and bore marks of slashing and defacement.
"There's been bad work here," said Royce in a whisper.
They looked ahead; no one was in sight. They listened; there was not a
sound but the chirping of insects in the crops.
Unslinging their rifles, they went slowly on, oppressed with a sense of
tragedy; and a few steps more disclosed a scene for which their discovery of
the dead man had partly prepared them. The absence of the well-known
conical roofs was explained. The site of what had once been a flourishing
village was now desolate, a black waste. Great heaps of ashes marked the
spots where the cane huts had stood, and here and there lay bodies stiff in
death, from which a number of sated carrion birds rose noisily into the air at
the approach of men.
Their hearts sank as they contemplated the pitiful scene. It was a new
thing in their experience, though it represented one of the commonest of
tragedies in that region. The village had recently been raided by a more
powerful neighbour; its men had been killed, its women and children carried
off into slavery.
Happily, such raids are becoming less frequent as the Great Powers
strengthen their grip on the areas marked on the maps as their spheres of
influence. But in the remoter parts of those vast territories, life still proceeds
much as it has done for hundreds or thousands of years past.
The horror of the scene, the misery it represented, sank deep into the
hearts of the two Englishmen. And mingled with the distress which every
humane person must have felt, was their consciousness of the bearing this
discovery would have upon their own situation. They had hoped to make this
village their resting-place, to give their men time to recover from the
sickness which had crept upon them of late, to renew their store of fresh
provisions. But it was now late in the afternoon; the next village marked on
the map was fifteen or twenty miles away; the fatigue and weakness of the
carriers rendered it impossible for the expedition to advance so far.
"We are indeed down on our luck," said Challis gloomily. "This will just
about be the finishing stroke for our boys."
"They can't move another step, that's certain," said Royce. "We shall have
to camp somewhere about here for the night. Here they are. Look at their
faces! I never saw fright so clearly expressed. We must put the best face on it
with them."
The carriers had halted at the edge of the village clearing, and stood like
images of terror and despair. Royce went up to them.
"This is very bad, John," he said to the head-man. "Keep the boys as
cheerful as you can. They had better put down their loads against those
palm-trees yonder. Find the village well, and get some water; then the
strongest of them must build a zariba for the night. Get up our tent, and then
we'll talk things over."
"Boys 'fraid of Tubus, sah."
"Tubus?"
"Yes, sah—Tubus done dat."
"How do you know?"

"Savvy cuts on black fella's face, sah. Tubus' knives done dat."
"Well, they needn't be afraid. The Tubus won't come again; if they did,
they wouldn't face our rifles. Fix things up, and then come back. We'll see
what can be done."
CHAPTER II
THE FIGHT AT DAWN
Royce knew the Tubus by repute as a fierce and bloodthirsty tribe, living
in French territory beyond the River Yo, whose raids across the border were
notorious. It was certainly to be hoped that the peaceful objects of his
expedition would not be hindered by encounters with those turbulent
savages.
The first consideration, however, was the welfare of his boys. They
depended for their food on the willingness of the natives to sell. Hitherto
there had been no difficulty in this respect; but they carried only enough for
a few days' supply, and at present their provisions were exhausted. The crops
of this village were not yet ripe; the village itself was absolutely bare; it was
of the first importance that food should be obtained at once.
As a result of a consultation with Challis and the headman, Royce

decided to push on with John to the next village and buy food there.
"What if that has been raided too?" suggested Challis, as they talked it
over.
"We must hope for the best," Royce answered.
"And it's pretty risky, you two going alone through a country recently
raided."
"How long ago were the Tubus here, do you think?" Royce asked John.
"Two free days, sah."
"Well, then, it's likely that they've gone back to their own ground. For us
it's a choice of two evils, and we must chance it. With good luck, we shall
get to the next village before dark. I'll engage carriers there, and we ought to
be back here with plenty of grub by to-morrow night."
They set off. Both were in good condition, and they made rapid progress.
But the country was trackless, and Royce could only direct his course
roughly by Drysdale's map.
The short dusk was falling without their having come on any signs of
human dwellings. In another half-hour it would be quite dark, and Royce
reluctantly but prudently decided that they must take shelter for the night, for
fear of becoming hopelessly lost, and go on in the morning.
The country was bare, consisting of rocky ground sparsely covered with
scrub. It offered nothing that gave promise of a comfortable defence against
the night cold, and Royce had almost reconciled himself to spending the
hours in the open when suddenly he caught sight, on the crest of a low hill
about a mile to the left, of what appeared to be the ruins of a small building.
Such ruins are to be met with here and there in the remotest depths of the
great continent, the relics of ancient civilisations long vanished. There were
no signs of life about this building, and Royce resolved to take shelter there.
They struck off to the left, climbed the hill, and, after a careful survey of
the neighbourhood, approached the ruin. It turned out to be a dismantled
stone fort, overgrown in parts with vegetation, but in a fair state of
preservation. The outer wall was complete; inside, the principal chamber,
which had once, no doubt, been the headquarters of a garrison, was roofless,
and such timber-work as there had been was either burnt or had been carried
away. Some smaller rooms were still covered from the sky, and it was in one
of these that Royce determined to repose during the night.
They had brought with them a few biscuits and a small tin of preserved
mutton, and they made a meagre supper. John having noticed, as they
approached the fort, the runs of ground game among the bushes, set a few
snares, in the hope of providing next day's breakfast. He returned with a
huge armful of leaves and grasses to spread on the stone floor of the room
chosen for their night's lodging.
"It's the first time I've been littered down like a horse," said Royce to
himself, with faint amusement. "There's no telling what one may come to!"
"No berry comfy, sah," said John, when he had laid these rough beds in
opposite corners. "All can do."
"It will do very well, John," returned Royce. "I suppose we shan't be
disturbed by lions or any other unpleasant visitors?"
"No fink so, sah."
"Should we light a fire, do you think?"
"No, sah; no good. Fire make lions 'fraid; oh yes! but no make bad mans
'fraid."
"I see—it might drive off beasts, but attract men? Very well. I don't
suppose I shall sleep much, anyway."
Royce had often admired the negro's ability to sleep anywhere and at any
time, and to awake to full alertness and activity in a moment. Like a dog, he
seems to have no need of the preliminary yawnings and stretchings to which
a civilised man has accustomed himself. John fell asleep as soon as he had
curled himself up on his grass bed. His master lay awake for a long time,
listening to the rustle of the wind in the foliage that clothed the ruins,
fancying that he heard the grunt of a lion and the bark of a jackal far away,
thinking of Challis in his camp, and of the terrible scene of desolation in the
ruined village.
A more experienced traveller would have taken that matter

philosophically; Royce was greatly perturbed. He pictured in his mind the
barbarians swooping upon the village, the massacre and pillage, the driving
of women and children into slavery; and he shuddered at the misery which
had fallen upon simple and inoffensive people.
He felt anxiety, too, about the future of his own little company. The
region of which he was in search was apparently situated near the lands of
the Tubus, the raiding tribe whose name was dreaded by his boys; and the
prospect of coming into conflict with them made him uneasy. Not that he
was a coward, or shrank from the possible necessity of fighting; but his
object was peaceable, and he wished with all his heart that it might be
attained without offence to the native peoples, without the shedding of
blood. Yet his indignation burnt so fiercely within him, that he knew he
would not be able to refrain from striking a blow for any hapless villagers
who might be threatened with disaster at the hands of a savage enemy.
Turning over these things in his mind, and envying John, whose loud
breathing proclaimed that no anxieties disturbed his repose, he lay wakeful
for several hours, until he, too, fell asleep. He slept very heavily, as might
have been expected of a man tired out by exhausting marches under a hot
sun. The night was cool, the atmosphere was pure, and the young
Englishman's rest was as peaceful as though there were no wild beast or
savage man in the world.
When he awoke, the ghostly light of dawn was glimmering in the open
doorway of the room. Like his countrymen everywhere, he turned over on
his back, stretched himself, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. Where was John?
The heap of grass in the opposite corner was vacant.
"He's gone to examine his snares, I suppose," he said to himself. "I

wonder if there's a stream where I can take a dip."
He rose, stretched himself again, feeling a little stiff, walked through the
doorway, and entered one of the passages that led to the outside. He was just
turning a corner when, with a suddenness that took him all aback, he came
face to face with a negro, a man of huge stature, topping him by several
inches.
The white man and the black were equally surprised. Both came to a halt,
and stood eyeing each other for a moment in silence.
The passage was open to the sky, but the light of morning was as yet so
faint that neither could see very clearly.

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Honesty : The Philosophy and

Psychology of a Neglected Virtue

Epistemology of the Human Sciences: Restoring an

Why Study Religion? Richard B. Miller

Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory (Oxford

The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the

The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the

Oar Feet and Opal Teeth: About Copepods and

The Science of Virtue: A Framework for Research Fowers

Philosophy Beyond Spacetime : Implications from Quantum

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Preface: A Neglected Virtue  ix

1. Preliminaries to Developing an Account of Honesty  3

7. Classification and Taxonomy  159

8. Research on Stealing and Promise-​Breaking  183

Afterword: Improving Our Less than Honest Characters  274

Works Cited  289

While I do not have a good explanation for the neglected study of

Overview of the Book

11For reviews, see Fallis (2010) and Mahon (2016).

Credits for Previous Work

I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to use ideas or

Michael Lamb. For additional written comments I am very grateful

Part I of this book is a conceptual exploration of the virtue of honesty.

1.1. Framing the Virtue of Honesty

Let us begin by distinguishing the virtue of honesty from some related

her psychological makeup and character, it is true of her that she is

1. “Roberts is an honest person.”

3. “Her honest character really stands out in her application; we

causally influencing us to act in different ways without our realizing it.

(H) The virtue of honesty is a psychological disposition that, when

(C) The virtue of compassion is a psychological disposition that,

1.2. The Scope of Honesty

What comes to mind when thinking about exemplars of honesty?

I tell a lie to you if and only if:

The deception involved here can be understood broadly. We naturally

counterexamples to the traditional account, as well as a defense of a view roughly in the

Misleading. Someone who reliably misleads others, not by telling lies,

while an intention to deceive may not be a necessary condition on lying, there

or telling half-​truths involving misleading details, for insufficiently

Finally, if the belief is indeed formed by the audience, it is done infer-

Equivocation. In a famous example, Kant pledged to King Friedrich

Another strategy is arguably better understood as a form of lying

Mental Reservation: In a standard example, a Christian priest tries to

20 See Fallis (2010: 5).

It is hard not to see this as making a statement which he knows to be false,

but avoids lying to God, see Saul (2012: 105).

There is an interesting debate going on in the contemporary phi-

Cheating. Someone who, for insufficiently good moral reasons, reliably

32 For a related point, see Green (2006: 92).

Did Atticus cheat? In a sense, he did. He intentionally violated the

a legitimate authority, enforced in an even-​handed manner, and not subject to a justi-

The High-​Stakes Game. The well-​being of a child hangs on the out-

Chase clearly cheats, but arguably in this case it is morally per-

Promise-​breaking. Someone who reliably and intentionally breaks

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Preface: A Neglected Virtue  ix

1. Preliminaries to Developing an Account of Honesty  3

7. Classification and Taxonomy  159

8. Research on Stealing and Promise-Breaking  183

Afterword: Improving Our Less than Honest Characters  274

Works Cited  289

or telling half-truths involving misleading details, for insufficiently

a legitimate authority, enforced in an even-handed manner, and not subject to a justi-

The High-Stakes Game. The well-being of a child hangs on the out-

Promise-breaking. Someone who reliably and intentionally breaks

believed to be false) and promise-breaking (you took an oath to tell

41 Green (2006: chapter 12). If oath-breaking is distinct from promise-breaking, then

newadvent.org/summa/3109.htm, although it is unlikely that Aquinas would have

return to the topic of honesty as an excellence in more detail in c hapter 5.