662. Exploring Honesty: Beyond Truth and Lies in the Age of Deception and AI with Christian B. Miller

Professors fm. You're listening to the Unsiloed podcast with Greg LeBlanc. Produced by University FM, Unsiloed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. So wherever you are, enjoy today's episode. And here's your host, Greg LeBlanc. Welcome to Unsiloed. This is Greg LeBlanc, and I'm here today with Christian Miller, who is a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University. Also used to head up the Honesty Project, which I think provided the source material or some of the source material for this latest book, which is called the Honesty Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Incredibly Dishonest World. And I think this builds on your previous book, which may have targeted a slightly different audience on the philosophy of honesty. Or I guess it's Honesty the Philosophy and Psychology of a Forgotten Virtue. I think that was the name of it, if I got that right. Neglected Virtue. Very close. Yeah. All the same. Yeah. Well, look, this book, you say there's an honesty crisis. Now, I'm always like, I was trained as an historian, and so whenever anybody says that things are getting worse in any way, I'm always a little skeptical. Right. You know, because we all like to. I mean, maybe you're at that age where it's like, you know, back in the day, right, you know, people, they had virtue, and now, you know, it's all going to hell. So I'm always a little bit skeptical about that. But you actually have some empirical and some theoretical reasons to think that we might actually be experiencing a decline not only in honesty itself, but also the degree to which we value honesty. Right. To the extent that we might consider honesty to be a good thing in people and in society. You're also not just talking about honesty as a characteristic, but also as a behavior. And we'll have to, of course, distinguish between those things. But before we start making any kind of empirical claims or measuring this thing, we have to kind of define it. Okay. So you spend a big part of the book discussing the various definitions of honesty and where you think we should focus. So maybe that's where we can start off. Like, what is this thing called honesty? And how does it different from just telling the truth? Yeah. Great. So, first of all, thank you for having me on your show. Actually, thank you for having me back on your show. It's good to see you again. You're right that contextually, there was an earlier book on honesty and that was written for an academic audience. So listeners, unless you're like hardcore PhD in philosophy, I Would not recommend it to you, but that gives it a lot more detail, conceptual nuance and refinement of the view. This book here is aimed at a larger audience, a popular audience. It is initially, as you said, trying to frame what is honesty before it gets into the empirical information. I'm a philosopher, so that's where I started. I wanted to kind of be clear what we're talking about. I'm thinking of honesty as a character trait, in particular on virtue. So a good character trait would be surprising if it was a bad character trait. And it has both an outward focus, it can be, right? Well, I think in certain instances it can be outweighed by other things. So it can be bad in certain particular instances if you are honest. And maybe we can get into that later on. For example, in the famous Nazi at the door example, where you're protecting the Jewish family from the Nazis, if you're honest at the expense of saving that family that you're hiding in the basement, that's bad. So in certain instances, but as an overall characteristic of a person, I would have a harder time thinking of it as bad. So let me expand on that as just at least the traditional approach to thinking about honesty is a virtue with an outward focus. Behaviorally, I'll expand on that, but also inward focus motivationally. And I'll say more about that too. So outwardly, you're expected to act honestly in a variety of circumstances on the podcast, interview, at the party, in the courtroom, at the office, at home, stably over time. Not just one day of the week or one week of the year, but consistently over time in a variety of different ways. The go to for sure is to think of honesty as telling the truth. That's where our mind goes first. We think of things like Pinocchio. We have these kind of cultural icons associated with honesty or dishonesty as it might be. But that's only one facet of it. Honesty protects against lying, but it also protects against stealing, against cheating, against misleading, against promise breaking, fraud, Hypocrisy, self deception, BSing. There's a lot of moral territory it covers on the behavioral side, maybe one of the broadest virtues there is. And I can say more about what each of these mean and unpack them if you like. But just to get the initial picture on the table, if you behave in these ways, release the opposite of these ways. Of course you don't cheat, you don't steal, you don't lie. That's a big check mark for honesty, but it's not sufficient because we need to know why you're doing them. You know, make it more concrete. You're talking to the boss, you tell the boss the truth. Why? It could be because you just don't want to get fired, or you're angling for a raise or, or you're getting, you know, looking for rewards in the afterlife, or you don't want to feel guilty. There could be a lot of different variety, you know, variety of reasons. I think all those reasons though, aren't going to count as virtuous. All self serving, self interested, egoistic reasons where it's all about me and benefiting myself. That's not going to count. It's got to be something else. And I'll end with this. What is that something else? It can be one of two things. It can be either altruistic, I'm concerned with the good of the other person. My focus is on benefiting them. I care about them, they're my friends, I'm married to them, whatever. Or it could be obligatory, a duty because it's the right thing to do. It's because of what an honest person would do. And so if those are the kind of considerations that motivate me, then we get a second check mark. We get a check mark of good motivation and we get a check mark of good behavior. We get the consistent behavior across situation stably over time. We're doing pretty good when it comes to the virtue of honesty. Okay, so that means that you could be honest and saying things that are blatantly false and you could be dishonest and saying things that happen to be true, right? Ironically, yes. I think that's going to initially sound puzzling to people and seem like we've kind of got off track, but I think when we kind of unpack it a little bit more. That is exactly right. Now, it depends on the example and the circumstances. Here's a really easy first example. It's 5,000 years. You're just a normal citizen in your society. Someone asks you, what is the shape of the world? You say the world is flat. You're just giving a kind of transparent report. You're being honest. I want to say, even though what you're communicating is mistaken, clearly mistaken. Not clearly to you, of course, but is clearly mistaken objectively. So that's the case where you could say something that's false and still be honest, you can also say something that's true and the dishonest. So 5,000 years ago you're asked what the shape of the world is and you say the world is round. You don't actually believe that, but you're like trying to mislead someone and get them in trouble, embarrass them or something. That person believes the earth is round. I'm going to get them look like a fool or something like that. So you mislead them into thinking the earth is round. Well, it turns out actually you're saying something true, but you're being dishonest at that point in time. So, yes, the short answer, I didn't give you a short answer, but the short answer is honesty tracks the subjective truth. It tracks how you see the reality, not necessarily how reality really is. I mean, ideally, of course, you want your subjective representation to line up with how reality really is. That's what we all want. But it doesn't always and honestly tracks how you see the world, how you see reality, not necessarily how reality really is. Yeah, so there's a mens rea element to all of this. Right. And you know, I did a podcast earlier with a rhetorician who said, you know, why is it that half of the people in America think that Trump is a liar and half of the people in America think he's the only honest politician? And according to her, she said, well, the second group, their definition of honesty is that you're speaking in a non calculating way, just saying whatever comes into your head. Right. So you're providing sort of an accurate description of whatever is going on in your head, however crazy that might be. I mean, is there some element of truth in that view of honesty? Yeah, I think that's. We need to be careful here and we need, probably need a little bit more detail. So if the person is, you know, let's leave. And let's leave aside the Trump case, I think for now, unless we can get back to it. But that's a very complicated example. He knows what's going on in his head. So if the person is just informing you of what is actually going on in their head in the moment, you ask them, what are you thinking about? And they say, well, I'm thinking about who's gonna win the super bowl next year. And that's what they were really thinking about. And they had just communicated to you they're being honest. Now if it's something that, of course, if it's lying, they were really thinking about something naughty. And they kind of COVID themselves up by saying, I'm thinking about the super bowl, of course that's lying, that's dishonest. Here's an interesting case. If they're just Making something then, without any idea of whether it's true or false. So in my very example, you know, what do you think about? And they really weren't thinking about anything. And then you just like make something up. Oh, I was, I'm thinking about the super bowl. Then they're BSing. So in case of bullshitting, you verbally inform someone of something without any regard for whether it's true or false. It's just fabricated or made up. This is, I'm following here, Harry Frankfurt's very famous discussion in his essay on bullshit. And so that is also a form of dishonesty. It's not lying, it's not misleading. It's not the other ones. It's its own distinctive form. And then we kind of come back to the politics example. There's interesting empirical questions of whether politicians, are they lying all the time or sometimes are they just making it up, just BSing? I think it actually, a lot of the time it's just bs. But you also talk about authenticity. Right. And so presumably. Right. If we self censor and if we think about, hey, you know, maybe I ought not to say that. Right. Or, you know, maybe I better say this instead, then that's compromising our authenticity to some degree under some views. Right. I mean, I guess in another view, you could actually be more authentic if you carefully say things that are consistent with the person that you want to be. Right. So if I decide that I want to be a kind person, then to be authentic to my view of myself might be to censor some of the things that I would be inclined to say. Yeah, it depends. So I'm an ethicist. I'm always going to give this answer. It depends on the case. It's hard to say in the abstract. We need to kind of get our mind around a particular case, the details and nuts and bolts of what's going on in that situation. But I could see it going either way. So I could see a version where the person censors what they're saying so as to be intentionally misleading. So they're asked by their significant other, what were you doing last night? And the person, let's just make it a guy says, I was at the bar with the guys. They carefully censored their words because they left out one crucial on purpose. Left out one word. I was only at the bar with the guys. The word only they gave a truthful response. I was at the bar with the guys. That is truthful. So it's not lying. But at the same time, what they're hoping is that their audience will draw the false implication that they weren't doing anything else. They were up to, you know, they were not up to no good, and hence everything's, you know, everything's good with the relationship. That kind of tailoring and manipulating of the verbal communication, even in the service of saying something true, is, I think, still patently dishonest. Now, what you're also pointing to is that there could be other versions of the case where maybe you are working on yourself and you're trying to become a better version of yourself. And so you don't want to, you know, when you're around kids or something like that, say, you know, bad words or say cruel things because you want to set a better example for others. I don't see a problem with that because that's not a direct response to a, like a verbal question or a kind of. You're not distorting the communication that your audience is seeking with you. You are on purpose presenting yourself in a certain way so as to not cause harm to your audience. Now, you might say that was true in the first case, the bar case too. So maybe I have to think about this a little bit more. But I don't see this as a case where you're giving a misleading response to a direct question. You are just choosing how to present yourself to an audience in such a way as you don't do harm to them. Right now, to what extent do you have to consider the kind of existing belief system of the people you're speaking with? Right. So, you know, if you want to bring them to true belief, then you might actually have to kind of skew what you say in a way that might be somewhat dishonest in order to cancel out, like, their prior, you know what I mean? You don't have to exaggerate in one way or another. To what extent is that, you know, virtuous behavior? I mean, it's certainly motivated by a desire to make the person better off and closer to the truth. Yeah, yeah. So there's a question of whether Twitter says it honest and to what extent is it virtuous? I hesitate a little bit about it being honest. It sounds to me like there's something fishing going on here now that's compatible. So it might be getting kind of check minus on the honesty front. It might get a check plus on some other front, though, because there are multiple virtues that come into play. And so if you're doing a good job of promoting truth in others, you're truth promoting. You're Truth seeking and truth promoting. You might get a tech plus on that front. And so you might have competing values that are at stake here, honesty and truth promotion. And then you have to weigh the kind of comparative significance of them. Is it more important for them to come to a true view, even if it's at the expense of some honesty? I could see scenarios where that's the case. I could also see scenarios where the opposite is the case too. So it's hard to. I would say there's no blanket prescription here. But we have to keep in mind, all things considered, virtue is not the same thing as just honesty. I mean, look, I mean, there's some people where they get exposed to a peanut and they have an athylactic shock, Right. There's other people, you might say, oh, hey, did you notice that the Boeing plane crashed in Ethiopia last week? And then now they're not going to fly for the next 20 years. Right, right. And so maybe that's something you just don't mention, something you just kind of just leave aside because you're worried that it's going trigger a reaction which is unjustifiable or unwarranted. So, great question. There's this additional element we haven't explored yet, and that goes all the way back to Aristotle, associated with the idea of virtue involving doing the right thing at the right time, in the right way, to the right extent with regards to the right audience. So Aristotle also has this view that, right, every virtue is sort of a. It's a mean right. It's between two vices. Yes, that's right. It's also, I think this all hangs together nicely. So that's the doctrine of Amin. In the case of honesty, there would be a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. And this view applies not just to honesty, but to every virtue. In the case of honesty, the vice of deficiency is going to be dishonesty. The vice of excess is going to be too much honesty or brutal frankness or lack of tact, that kind of thing. And so let's approach it from that angle. The person who communicates about the airplane, that seems like that wasn't really relevant. If the person knows that, like her friend has already these kind of fears, then it's excessive honesty. It's too much information, lack of text, not being sensitive to what the audience needs to know and doesn't need to know in that particular situation. So it turns out then that you could tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and yet fail to be virtuously. Honest. Because you start heading in this direction of excessive honesty, which is a vice, not a virtue. Yeah, no. I have a friend who every time his mother calls and says, how are you doing? He's always like, everything's great. He never discusses his financial troubles or his marital troubles or anything because he knows that his mom is going to freak out. So he just sort of. And I hear, you know, people say that in order to have a successful marriage, you have to be very judicious with the truth. You know, like, if you're really angry at your spouse and they say, you know, like, what's going on? Maybe the better thing is just walk around the block rather than say, what's really going on? Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah. There are all kinds of interesting issues in this neighborhood. So when I'm walking around campus at my university, all the students will pass each other and say, how's it going? And two, like, without exception, the response is great or good or wonderful or something like that. And in that kind of case, I think they're not being dishonest because we've just suspended the norms of honesty. We just know this is not a situation anymore where you should expect an honest response. Different than your example, though, because that could be a situation where it's expected, the other party's expecting an honest response and they're not getting us. So that person would be guilty of dishonesty. But it might be, all things considered, appropriate, going back to our earlier discussion, all things considered virtuous, to protect that other person's feelings, because if they told the whole story, that would really upset the other person. And then in the marital case, this raises issues about white lies. So is lying ever justified? If so, in what situation? These white lies are the kind of common stereotypical ones that come up in these relationship contexts. And I would agree that in certain instances, it would be, all things considered, morally appropriate to tell a white lie. However, I tend to be much more cautious about them than a lot of people are. A lot of people tend to be rather flippant about it. It's no big deal. I do them all. I tell all the time. You look so nice, Nat. The dessert was so good. I love reading your book, or whatever it was. People say that to me, and I think we should be very careful about doing it as frequently as we do. Even though there might be some specific particular cases where it's okay. I think the costs associated with white lies are often underappreciated. There's the cost of having to tell the lie in the first place, that's not our normal default psychological state. Our normal default psychological state is true telling. So it's costly psychological to have to tell the lie. There's the cost of having to remember the lie. There's the cost of having to make sure you lie in the same way again the next time it comes up. And there's a cost of making sure a third party don't find out that you told a lie and they could rat you out. You know, there's a cost of feeling guilty about having told the lie. These costs are adding up over time and then if it were to be outed, you know, discovered later on, the costs of lost trust with your significant other or whoever it is, your friend when they discover that you did tell a lie. So I'm a cautious white lie person, but not an absolute prohibitionist. Well, I want to get back to this mens rea idea because you know, when it comes to other kinds of vices, right, I mean, we do have the notion of negligence, right? So you know, if I hit someone in my car, even though I didn't intend to hit him with my car, you know, I could still be held liable. And so I mean, to what extent should we view people as being dishonest when they're saying things that are untrue and they could have actually, if they really just exerted even the tiniest bit of effort, they could have discovered that their beliefs were faulty and they just didn't invest the effort. I mean, shouldn't we hold people accountable for those sorts of things? Yeah, so two different questions. One is are they failing at being honest? And second, about accountability, I'll say for sure on the accountability, depending on the case. Of course, you know, it always depends on the case. But if we're talking about praise and blame, accountability, responsibility here, it was easy thing to figure out. The person didn't take the necessary means. Then that's fine with me on blame. As far as is that a failure of honesty? Though I'm also quite prepared to say it could be a failure of some other part of the person's character, a failure of intellectual open mindedness, a failure of intellectual perseverance, diligence, intellectual carefulness, humility. Yeah, yeah, very good. Yeah, all those would make perfect sense to me. I'm just less sure that it's often going to be a failure of honesty. So, you know, a couple examples, you walk out of the store, you find out later that in your pocketbook or whatever your bag, a piece of fruit had fallen in Unbeknownst to you. Now, it would have been really easy to have figured that out if in the store you would have just looked in the bag and seen it, but you didn't. I don't think you're dishonest for doing that. Similarly, there's a table with a whole bunch of giveaway stuff on it. You take one of the things that is on the table, so the whole table is listed as giveaway. Unbeknownst to you, someone had actually left one of their pieces of property there. It wasn't meant to be given away. I don't think that's going to be a failure of dishonesty either. You're not stealing there. So what about some other cases though? If you just investigated the evidence a little bit more, you know, you're raised to believe the earth is flat, but it would have taken just a couple minutes to go online and find out all this research and look at all these pictures about the earth being round. You know, is it intellectually dishonest because you didn't do that thing? I'm not sure. But I mean, you talk about the difficult case of self deception, right? Because I mean there, I mean, how is it even possible to deceive yourself, right? I mean, that involves a split self. You offer this example of someone who has, say, a cheating spouse and the evidence is plain as day, but this person just refuses to see it, right? And so of course, when they go around and tell people, oh no, like my spouse is loyal, you're suggesting that that might actually be dishonest, right? So I mean, isn't that a case of just negligence or how do we think about that? Yeah, I don't have a settled view about this. I try to kind of gloss over it a bit in the book and you're calling me out on it to be honest. So I'll give you the honest response. I don't have a really subtle view. Self deception is a notoriously fraught and complex phenomena. Philosophers write books and articles about it. There are many views and no one's kind of figured it out, I don't think, because it is just inherently paradoxical and puzzling. In this example, the person has both the belief that looks like, I mean, if it's really a self subject, it looks like they have the belief in some sense that their significant other is cheating on them and they have the belief that their significant others not cheating on them. And so if they're asked, is your significant other loyal to you? And they say, yes, in my case, she is Loyal to me. I'm tempted to say in that case that that person is being honest because that is genuinely their belief. They're being authentic and transparent about what their belief is. At the moment, however, they did not form that belief in an honest way. So the process or mechanism by which they form that belief, which involved having to ignore boatloads of evidence for the sake of satisfying a desire. They wanted to believe that their significant other is honest. And that once drove them to form the belief that, that their significant other is loyal, led them to ignore all this evidence that the process is dishonest. But I want to say their verbal communication is still honest. That is what they indeed believe. So we could apply the same type of motivational scrutiny to one's beliefs as to one's communications with others. Right. So if you're motivated by truth seeking, but you get it wrong, that's okay. But if you're motivated by, you know, maybe it could be desire to make yourself happy or a desire to, you know, avoid unpleasant thoughts, then we should be suspicious of it even if the belief turns out to be true. Yes. So I mean, philosophers would put this way, there's the moral realm and there's what they call the epistemic realm, or Aristotle would call the electoral realm. So we, you know, in the moral realm we act and we can be assessed morally for our actions. And there are questions about motivation behind our actions. In the intellectual realm, we form beliefs and there are questions of why we form the beliefs. And we can be assessed not just on the beliefs themselves, but why we form those beliefs. And I think in the case of honesty, it applies in both realms. There's more honesty and then there's intellectual honesty and then the story actually unfolds in parallel fashion. So now we're talking about intellectual honesty here. There's the question of what the belief is and there's also the question of what motivated you to form the belief. Was it a virtuous reason or not? And so we get parallel. I try to run, at least that's my goal, is to try to run the story in parallel in both the moral case and the intellectual case. And so, yeah, you could have a true belief, but not form it in an intellectually virtuous way. If it was motivated by a self interested motivation. Yeah, I want to get back to this idea of motivation because it seems like when someone is honest just because it's their character and they, I mean, in some sense they don't really have a choice. They've just, they've made It a habit. They made it automatic. Why should we give anybody credit for that? I mean, shouldn't we give more credit to the person who actually struggles with it? Has to, you know, overcome the temptation to lie in every single instance because it's contrary to their nature, to be honest. Yeah. I mean, so this is tricky stuff. So you're highlighting a view that goes all the way back to Aristotle again, seems to be coming up a lot. Aristotle thought there's this continent person and there's this virtuous person. So the continent person and the virtuous person behave the same way externally. You can't actually can't really distinguish them from their mere behavior. What distinguishes them is the internal conflict or lack of conflict. The Conan person, who's a step down from virtue, they're still good in a loose sense. We still are glad that they're around. Better than them being vicious, of course, but what's going on with them is that they have to overcome some kind of temptation and psychological conflict in order to act. Well, the virtuous person doesn't have to do that for them. Their motivation and their judgment align in parallel towards performing the action. Now, Aristotle ranked virtuous best continent seconds. Not everyone agrees. Some philosophers today challenge that ranking and maybe even would flip the ranking and say it's, you know, it's actually commendable that you overcame that temptation to do the right thing and that actually bestow or makes you worthy of greater praise because of it. I could, you know, go either way on this, but I do tend to follow Aristotle here, but I'm not going to die on this hill. A couple of thoughts about this. One is, to the extent to which you have to overcome that temptation, the mere fact that you're tempted shows that you need to do more work on yourself. It's not a good thing that you're tempted to, you know, engage in extracurricular activities with a third party when you're, you know, married to your wife, even if you know you don't do it. The very fact that you're tempted to do it and you have, you want it and you just have to struggle against it, that's probably not a sign of a. The best kind of marriage or relationship. Similarly, you know, if it's a student and a student's really tempted to cheat on the test and they have the means to cheat and they don't, but they had to fight against that strong temptation, that's probably not what we're hoping for in our students. If the alternative, though, is it's just become some kind of mechanical program where the person comes into the situation, they automatically know what to do. They do it. It's just like flipping a switch. That's not so laudable either. I would agree with. So what I think the picture of the virtuous person is supposed to be is something like this. They flow naturally towards the right thing as a result of a long history of moral formation. They were not born this way. It did not come easy to them early on. But over the course of years they've built their character to the point where now it's a natural flow state for them. And so a lot of the commendability and praiseworthiness is not just in the moment right now. It's also honoring the fact that they've gotten themselves to the point where they can do this naturally. Don't want to turn down to the empirical evidence. Right. About the extent to which maybe we are seeing more dishonesty, maybe more lying, more cheating. And of course, I think you reference some self report data and I mean, it seems like self report data could mean two different things. It could mean that people have changed their activities or it could mean that they've changed their standards. Right. And if they report kind of more lying, it could be that now they're more aware of it and they're, you know, they're more sensitive to it. Like how should we interpret the self report data that you described? Yeah, so let me contextualize a little bit first. So in chapter two, after having framed honesty, I don't want to jump right into the honesty crises. I wanted to like soften the blow a bit and not just make it kind of depressing chapter after chapter. So this chapter two is about some good news coming out of the empirical research and the one that you're pointing us towards, actually, I think it's meant to be taken positively and it's self report data on frequency of lying behavior in psychology. Some of the earlier research found that people would average about two to three lies a day in self reporting lies. Dibello. Right. And that was taken to be discouraging, kind of negative. But more recent research, which I highlight here, which I'm a big fan of, says, well, look, you know, that was average. Averages cover up individual differences. If you actually track people individually. Let's start with a simpler study and I've just asked them, like in the past 24 hours, have you told a lie? 60% participants in this one study of a thousand participants said they'd not told a lie at all in the last 24 hours. Many of the remaining participants said that they told very few and only 5% reported a significant number of lies. Another version of the study had the tracking much more longitudinal. So it was over the course of three months. The same people were asked every day, over the course of three months, how many lies did you tell previous 24 hours? How many lies tell the previous 24 hours? So they got 90 days. For each person, similar pattern emerged. So what this has suggested to the researchers is that most of the people tell the truth most of the time. It's led to a theory called truth default theory, which is that we default into a true telling mindset and that lying is actually not psychologically natural and it's costly for us. But some people would say that that just means that self deception is unevenly distributed. Right? Say what you mean more. So the people who say they're not lying, they're the ones that are really just better at self deception and the ones that say they're lying are the ones that actually aren't as good at self deception. You could go that way. So you know, fair points. Self report research in general and psychology has notorious limitations. I'm not going to defend these researchers to the end, you know, to the end of the day. I will only note one thing, which is that when it came to the 90 days version of it, and you tracked a single individual over the course of the 90 days, they reported variation in their lying frequency. So one day they say I didn't lie at all, another day say I told two lies, other days at five lies. So those individuals were willing to report a high number of lies on particular days. So at least they weren't consistently self deceptive. Even if they might have been on the like the zero days. They were not like to the letter, always deceiving themselves about this. I would say so I'm encouraged by this data. It also has led to a theory called truth bias theory, which is that we're biased in our judgments of others too. So we default truth telling. And we're also biased in thinking that other people are telling us the truth. This is all I think for the good. However, the book doesn't end there. It goes on to some other things. Yeah, let's talk about this crisis. So if we are experiencing an increase in dishonesty, is it caused by the ease with which we can do so with imperial punity or is it reflect a change in how we think about the virtues or how we don't think about virtue? Yeah, I'M sure it's multifaceted, most over determined or multiple factors going on here. I call the Honesty Crisis. It would have been more accurately titled the Honesty Crises. Because what I highlight in the remainder of the book until the very last chapter are six areas of society, each of which are such that I see honesty eroding. An honesty Crisis. Any of those is going to have two features. It's more tempting to be dishonest than it was before. And it's easier to get away with dishonesty than it was before. So it's important to highlight that it's not that there was never dishonesty in these areas. That would be silly. That would be a bad claim. Dumb claim. Education is one of my areas. There's always been student cheating. Is that something has changed such that it's more tempting now to be dishonest than it was before and it's harder for others to detect that dishonesty. So it's kind of like, I mean, if we think about what happened in Bosnia, right, where law abiding butcher who, you know, might have been nice to all the neighborhood kids, all of a sudden, now there's a change of things and he becomes a murderer. Right, because of the environmental shift, right? I mean, is that it? Like these people who are being dishonest now, they're not fundamentally different people than they were in the past, but the environment provides them with. That's my reading. Again, I'm probably too simplistic. I'm sure there are cultural shifts going on and I don't investigate impact of things like religion or politics or moral standards, objectivity, moral standards, moral relativism. I'm sure there are multiple factors, but yes, you're right on the right track. So let me just give you the six areas and I'll tell you when I think the kind of situational change that's happened that is common in all of them. So AI student cheating. Many listeners are going to be familiar with that. You saw the Princeton got rid of its honor code just last week. I went to Princeton and I remember I went to uva and UVA had a very strict honor code. Even the military academies had them. And I guess they're probably going to get rid of them as well. I know they're not going to help with this problem. AI student cheating, deepfake audio and video, Internet infidelity, political misinformation, celebrity and dishonesty, influencer culture, that kind of thing. And religion and dishonesty in particular, Sermon plagiarism. So the thread that runs throughout all of these is the development of new technology that wasn't available in the past. The technology is, I think, neutral. It's not inherently dishonest, it's not inherently honest. It's just available now. But it's available to be used to facilitate dishonesty in ways that we haven't seen before. Dishonesty that's very fast, very easy, very efficient, very effective, and often undetectable. And so with that kind of temptation looming, it's very hard to resist taking advantage of that technology for dishonest means. And so we can unpack any of those in concrete illustrations, but that's the kind of underlying thread across the dishonesty crises. Well, I wonder, I mean, if it's just a disequilibrium. Right. So, I mean, if we think about deep fakes, you know, pictures of people doing things that, you know, they never did. Right, right. Everyone's freaking out about this. They're like, oh, my gosh, you know, what if there's false information about me on the Internet? What if there's. And it seems like the only reason why that would be a problem is if people believe it, but once it becomes well known that there's all this false information, then it will stop really mattering because people won't pay any attention to it. Right. I mean, if I see a picture of you, Christian Miller, you know, like, shooting somebody, maybe 10 years ago, I would have been like, oh, this Christian guy is a terrible guy. But now I'd just be like, ah, it's probably fake, so it wouldn't really bother you that much. Yeah. So it can go in a different. Couple different ways or a couple different directions. Right now we're not there yet because right now there are plenty of authentic pictures out there and more and more of these deepfake ones, and we're having trouble picking them out, telling which one's which. More and more of these deepfake ones. Yeah. Probably going to increase skepticism about any video that we see online and therefore lead us to not give them kind of evidentiary weight. And that would be, I think, very unfortunate in lots of cases, including criminal cases, to be very unfortunate to. To lose what is often a kind of powerful piece of evidence in criminal trials. So, yeah, that can happen like we're there. Yes. Another scenario or way this might go is the way I hope it's going to go, which is that we effectively enforce disclosures so that it's transparent to us when it is a deep fake. And so when there's no Confusion, we see it's a deep fake, there's a clear disclosure, watermark, whatever it might be. And then when there's not, we can trust that is a genuine authentication piece of video or audio. There's, you know, legislative initiatives right now in the US and elsewhere to make this happen. Non consensual deepfake pornography has been declared illegal, as it should be. You know, kind of cracking down on the high school case of typically boys making these videos of their female classmates doing these things and causing terrible psychological trauma and harm, all for the better punitive criminal measures taken in these kind of contexts. Other contexts, if it's more educational, at least have the disclosures so there's no confusion. Like JFK really did not give this talk, this lecture, even though it looks so authentic. Why not? Well, because he had already been assassinated. We can recreate this deep fake video of the lecture he would have given, the talk he would have given, the speech he would have given were he not assassinated. But we have a disclosure to make sure that no one's thinking this is the real thing. Well, you also talk about how these falsehoods travel through the Internet, right through social media. And I find it interesting that most people who will forward these things on, they may not even believe them. Right. And it seems then that this is communication that's serving a different purpose. It's not meant to be even a truth telling exercise as much as a signaling exercise. You know, like, and if it's understood that way, then it presumably won't create any harm. Right? If you say, oh yeah, you know, Pizzagate. And I'm like, yeah, pizzagate. You know, all that means is, oh, I know now that, you know, you like Trump. And it's like, okay, you know, and it's, if I translate it as you like Trump, I don't translate it as, oh my gosh, there's, you know, killers in a pizzeria, then no harm, no foul, right? I mean, how do we understand the dissemination of these falsehoods and to what extent should we be worried about them? I mean, I guess if even if one in a million of these people read it and interpret it as, you know, a factual claim, then it's a potential problem. But in the grand scheme, this is shifting to the chapter on political misinformation. And in that chapter, I, rather than going for the easy targets of picking on some politicians, left or right, Republican, Democrat, that would've been the easy chapter to write. I really wanted to make it more about us and bring it back to the reader and think about our honesty and dishonesty when it comes to political matters. And you're right, that's what I kind of honed in on is empirical research finding a startling willingness to share political misinformation on social media. The example I give, and I'll just read it, is from a 2021 study by Penny Cook and other and collaborators where participants were given the following headline, over 500 migrant caravanners arrested with suicide vests. Here's the interesting part. 51% of Republicans said they would consider sharing it. And it's not just Republicans. You get a cross party versions of this. So that's striking and disturbing. And what I want to say now back to your question directly is sure, if we're good at spotting it when it comes along our social media feeds and then we don't share it ourselves, okay, then we kind of, we block it, we stop it there. However, it's tricky to be able to spot it sometimes in the first place. But even if we do spot it, there's something about being on social media that puts us into a social media mindset. There's actually this expression and away from an accuracy mindset that makes us much more inclined to turn around and share it to our followers. For what reasons? Well, it could be a variety of reasons. It could be to enhance our standing and to get more followers to try and damage the other side to virtue, signal that we're, you know, we're with the good guys, this kind of thing. So none of that, of course, which is honest, none of us tracking. And that's all problematic. It gets more complicated though, because a lot of the stuff that comes through social media is not fake news. It's not misinformation. So you don't want to just automatically assume it is misinformation. You're going to miss out on good information. You don't assume it's all good information because then you're going to get misled by misinformation. Now finally, to circle back, what could be done about this, there are a couple different strategies that are being explored and I talk about them. I don't think there's any perfect strategy. So one of course involves community notes and people evaluating the piece of information icon X and giving some kind of assessment of it if it's not accurate. There's also source flagging certification. This is coming, be careful, this is coming from a problematic source. There are accuracy prompts. They're not talking about that particular piece of fake news. They're just putting you in an accuracy mindset. And so you have to go through this prompt on social media and then you're more trained to be in the accuracy mindset, less likely is to post this social information to retreat the misinformation. There are even pledges, honestly pledges you can sign that are supposed to bind you like an honor code. I don't know if any of this stuff really is going to make a big impact, but it seems to be making a marginal impact or some of it impact. But there's no solution right now. Well, now, you also talk a lot about hypocrisy, right? As a. I mean, you define honesty broadly enough to encompass a whole lot of different behaviors, including fidelity and authenticity, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, you talk about hypocrisy and you talk about celebrities and celebrity culture, and I think you're making the point that, you know, celebrity status is going to potentially make you more dishonest. Correct. But also that dishonesty perhaps is going to make you more likely to be a celebrity. How does that work? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. So here in this chapter, I have to first be honest, there's not a lot of good empirical data. Unlike so many other chapters here, it's a bit more just me doing armchair psychology because the studies haven't been done, but they. I mean, the arbitrary psychology seems very persuasive to me. So increase fame and celebrity can incentivize dishonesty. Why? Even if you're a famous academic? Apparently, yes. Yeah, there are some of the use cases in my world. Yep. In our world. So you know why? Well, because you want to get more famous, insatiable. You want to get more and more of it. So if it enables you to get more, you're more inclined to be dishonest. It also makes you, when you're a celebrity, get more scrutiny. And to cover up some of your misdeeds and not lose your famous celebrity, you might be tempted to be dishonest. Makes you think that you're above moral norms, that you're not one of the normal people, that morality doesn't apply to you, and so you might be more inclined to be dishonest. So that all makes sense, I think. But you're also right that, alas, increased dishonesty can fuel celebrity too. I mean, think of all the people we know who got caught, tax problems, made off. Yeah, he was a celebrity already to some extent, but he became much bigger celebrity after the Ponzi scheme was exposed. Think of CEOs already big names, but it became more so it's that feedback loop here. But to what extent might there be some altruistic motives? Right. So if you are a celebrity, you have a platform and you can make the world a better place by supporting these causes like, you know, oh, I support veganism. Right. Because you know, if people copy you and imitate you there, you've done good for the world. It doesn't really matter whether you eat meat or not. What matters is whether you can make a hundred thousand people stop eating meat. Right. So it depends on what our standards are here. If it's just the consequences, are we making the world a better place? Is it kind of utilitarian perspective? Sure. Okay, that's fine. Switch frameworks. Are we talking about honesty or dishonesty? Then no, it's not. That's not going to be. That's not going to cut it. That's hypocrisy. If in your private life you're going to McDonald's or getting the McDonald's takeout, eating the Big Mac, so you're engaging in something in private that contradicts the public perception that you're trying to cultivate, that's hypocritical and that's one of the canonical forms of dishonesty. Is it virtuous, all things considered? Yeah. Well, we have the non malevolence of preventing lots of harm to other animals weighed against dishonesty of the hypocrisy. And we have a scale, we gotta weigh these two up. How does the weighing go? I'm not gonna weigh in on that, so to speak. But yeah, I could see someone making the argument that all things considered, the virtuous thing is to continue to be promoting this cause even if you're not doing it in your private life, so long as you, of course, you don't want it to be exposed that you're not doing this in your private life because then that undermines your integrity. And people are going to ban in the cause once you see they see you as a hypocrite. So you better keep it pretty effectively secret. But if you can do that and you're making the world a better place, I can see the argument that all things considered, you're being virtuous. Well, so last question, get away from the constraints and opportunities perspective and focus on the virtue perspective. Do you think, and again, this could be pure speculation on your part, but do you think that people are less concerned with virtue? Maybe there's more of a utilitarian perspective on ethics today or could it be that maybe there are these other virtues that people prioritize over? Honesty? To what extent might be a change in the way we think about the normative life as opposed to a change in the opportunities and probability of getting caught and so forth? Yeah, I don't know. This is a hard question. I'm not a historian. I only read living people typically. So you tell me what someone said 5,000 years ago or 200 years ago, I'm gonna say, oh yeah, that sounds right. But let me give you a couple data points. One data point is that there were prominent philosophers in the past who took honestly a lot more seriously, it seems like, than happens today. So Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, all are associated with a view where honesty cannot be trumped, cannot be superseded by some other value, and a particular lying is always wrong. Now that's a crude presentation of their view. It's more nuanced than that, but that's good enough for the moment. So it seems like then that we're trending towards downplaying honesty less than it was in the past, at least philosophically. But now I'll throw a second piece of data in the mix. Our team here at Wake Forest published a study a couple years ago asking participants to rank, forced rank order, 60 characteristics, virtue terms, personality traits, and the like of that. Honesty was on the list too, but also things like intelligence, humor, kindness, humility along three dimensions. What do you like the most about someone? What do you respect the most about someone? And what do you want to know the most about someone? And all three cases, out of 60 characteristics, the number one was honesty. Honesty was number one on what do you like the most about someone? What do you respect the most about someone? And what do you want to know most about someone? That suggests that today people still care a heck of a lot about honesty. Now, third, data points. It seems to me undeniable today that students and people I talk to in audiences think that honesty is important, but that in certain very particular cases it can definitely be outweighed by something else. And Nazi at the Door is the canonical example of this. If it's a matter of saving innocent lives from a cruel enemy, honestly today is going to go out the window for the sake of saving innocent lives. And that's, you know, that's not a matter of like, people need to think about that or struggle with that. It's like it's a no brainer, it's automatic these days. But of course, getting a better grade and getting a better job is not quite the same as Nazis at the door. I'm interested in honesty in thee, but maybe not so much in me. That's a good point. So to what extent is it when honesty is not conflicting with other moral values, but when it's conflicting with self interest, it's honestly losing that conflict more today than it tended to in the past? Pure armchair speculation with no data. I would suspect the answer is yes, losing that conflict more today than it was in the past. That's the kind of downer, certainly downer to end on, but maybe fitting with a book called the Honesty Crisis. Well, there's one piece of, I guess, encouraging news, which is that when students are cheating, they seem to cheat in moderation. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Like, yeah, I'm going to cheat a little bit, but I'm not going to go full on. I mean, I'll just, you know, use AI for part of the essay. That seems right. And experimental data backs it up too. Okay, we'll end with a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of a positive spin on things. Moderation in all things, including dishonesty. Right. Well, Christian, thanks so much for joining me. The book is called the Honesty Crisis and of course we didn't dig into all of the different aspects of it and all of the potential suggested solutions for it. So check it out. Preserving our most Treasured virtue, Overlooked and treasured virtue in an increasingly Dishonest World. Thanks so much. It's great to be with you. Thanks so much. Thank you for tuning in to the unsiloed podcast produced by University fm. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a five star rating and review in your favorite listening app. To listen to our other episodes, please visit our website at www.unsilopodcast.com.