Honesty
Honesty is the virtue of refusing to fake reality — to oneself or to anyone else. Objectivism grounds it not in a duty owed to other people but in the fact that the unreal has no value, so that anything obtained by deception is not actually gained.
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value.”
~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
A selfish virtue, not a social one
Conventional ethics presents honesty as a concession: something a person would rather not practise, owed to others because society could not function otherwise. On that view a lie that is never discovered costs nothing.
The Objectivist argument is different, and it turns on what a liar is actually attempting. Facts are not altered by anyone's belief about them; see Existence and Identity. A man who obtains money, a reputation or a relationship by fraud has obtained the thing while destroying the conditions under which it could be of use to him:
- He now has to hold two accounts of the situation and act on the false one in front of the people it was told to. His attention shifts from reality to the management of their impressions.
- Whatever he obtained is held on terms he knows to be void, so it cannot support self-esteem or serve as evidence of his competence.
- He has made himself dependent on the deceived, since their continued error is now a precondition of his position. This is why the virtue connects directly to independence.
The deepest case is self-deception, where there is no one to fool and the entire cost is paid in cognition. Refusing to look at evidence does not remove it from reality; it only removes it from one's own use.
Honesty is not the disclosure of everything
The virtue governs the assertion of falsehood, not the volunteering of every truth. No one has a claim on information a person has not agreed to give, and privacy, discretion and simple silence violate nothing.
The standard hard case is the person who is using information to harm you — the textbook version being a murderer asking where his victim is hiding. Objectivism holds that someone who initiates force or fraud has removed himself from the context in which truthful dealing applies; withholding or misdirecting is then self-defence rather than deception. See Context and Justice.
Common misunderstandings
- That it forbids fiction, tact or politeness. A novel asserts nothing about fact, and "it is good to see you" is a convention both parties understand.
- That every lie is equally bad. Objectivism judges by context and by what is at stake. That is not the same as holding that lies for one's own convenience are excusable.
- That honesty guarantees being believed. It is a policy about one's own relation to facts. Whether anyone credits it is a separate question, answered by justice.
- That it is only about speech. Faking a competence one lacks, or an emotion one does not feel, is the same policy carried out without words.
See also
- Virtues · Rationality · Integrity · Justice · Independence
- Truth · Fact · Objectivity · Context
- Trader Principle · Exploitation · Initiation of Force
- Ethics · Egoism · Self-esteem
Discussion
- You find a $20 bill on the ground, do you take it?
- Why theft is neither ethical nor practical
- Was Ayn Rand a hypocrite for receiving Social Security?
References
- Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
- Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged — Galt's speech, on honesty and integrity as the two sides of refusing to fake.
- Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 8.