https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1dqlo0e/why_is_truthfulness_considered_a_virtue/
created by voxpopper on 28/06/2024 at 14:59 UTC
5 upvotes, 3 top-level comments (showing 3)
As the title states, truthfulness is considered a philosophical virtue, but why?
As we are witnessing in arguably the worlds richest and most powerful persons, being truthful is certainly not one of their virtues and lying appears to serve them well.
The argument can be made that being rich and powerful does not equal the good or bring us closer to eudaimonia, but does being honest? (There is also the circular definition of truth being the highest good because it truth, but my question is more so asking about human behaviour)
From Plato to Kantian idealism, as well as obviously Christian philosophers such as Augustine, truth appears to be among the highest of the goods, but my question is why?
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Comment by mediaisdelicious at 28/06/2024 at 15:31 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The way that Aristotle treats this is complicated by the fact that he seems to think truthfulness is heterogenous and, so too, dishonesty. Consider, for instance, this bit from NE:
In the field of social life those who make the giving of pleasure or
pain their object in associating with others have been described; let us now describe those who pursue truth or falsehood alike in words and deeds and in the claims they put forward. The boastful man, then, is thought to be apt to claim the things that bring glory, when he has not got them, or to claim more of them than he has, and the mock-modest man on the other hand to disclaim what he has or belittle it, while the man who observes the mean is one who calls a thing by its own name, being truthful both in life and in word, owning to what he has, and neither more nor less. Now each of these courses may be adopted either with or without an object. But each man speaks and acts and lives in accordance with his character, if he is not acting for some ulterior object. And falsehood is in itself mean and culpable, and truth noble and worthy of praise. Thus the truthful man is another case of a man who, being in the mean, is worthy of praise, and both forms of untruthful man are culpable, and particularly the boastful man.
Here we see Aristotle cash out a very specific kind of lying - lying about oneself - as being a specific kinds of viciousness - boastfulness, false modesty, being cruel, and so on.
Let us discuss them both, but first of all the truthful man. We are
not speaking of the man who keeps faith in his agreements, i.e. in the things that pertain to justice or injustice (for this would belong to another virtue), but the man who in the matters in which nothing of this sort is at stake is true both in word and in life because his character is such. But such a man would seem to be as a matter of fact equitable. For the man who loves truth, and is truthful where nothing is at stake, will still more be truthful where something is at stake; he will avoid falsehood as something base, seeing that he avoided it even for its own sake; and such a man is worthy of praise. He inclines rather to understate the truth; for this seems in better taste because exaggerations are wearisome.
Yet, here, we find two different kinds of things - dishonesty which is essentially injustice and then dishonesty (in the form of exaggeration) which is just, apparently, annoying and tiresome interpersonally.
You might think this is just sort of inadequate to give an answer of the sort you're after because maybe this seems sort of circular since it seems like what Aristotle returns to in each case is that the person who is concerned with the truth is concerned with the right thing. If that's how things seem, then you might ask, well, what are they concerned with *instead* and then check your intuitions about whether or not that thing is better? It seems like (perhaps because of how Aristotle begins his analysis), he often thinks that the other kinds of competing lives are the life of pleasure and the life of glory he often returns to those at this point in the treatise as being contrast classes.
It seems like the boastful person, for instance, is either motivated by (false) glory or the pleasure of being approved of. We might apply some Socratic logic here and ask, well, what's *really* good - any glory or *deserved* glory? *Felling* good or actually being of the sort who *is* excellent? It seems like the boastful person knows that the subjects of boasting value the excellent things the boaster claims to, and this already might give us a reason to doubt that boasting could be more virtuous than the alternative (actually being excellent and not having to lie about it).
Each different application of truthfulness is going to have a similar structure, but the details work differently. Acquiring external goods is certainly good, but acquiring what you don't deserve is unjust. Is it good to be unjust? Well, virtue ethicists think it isn't (rf-Plato's Republic). Moreover, is possessing external goods good in itself? Well, virtue ethicists think it isn't (rf - the earlier books of NE).
Comment by Shitgenstein at 29/06/2024 at 04:22 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
As we are witnessing in arguably the worlds richest and most powerful persons, being truthful is certainly not one of their virtues and lying appears to serve them well.
I think we should be considerate of the presence of survivorship bias here. Maybe the world's richest and most powerful persons have succeeded on the backs of lies, but it wouldn't follow from that that all or even most lying serves anyone particularly well. It's not like we don't also find lying among much less successful individuals. Some of us here might be old enough to remember the Enron scandal in which accounting fraud (a form of lying) bankrupted a 70 billion dollar company and brought charges against its corporate leaders. I think a lesson of childhood most of us learn is that getting away with a lie takes some skill. Another example is playing poker - there's real skill in bluffing and detecting a bluff. Other times lying succeeds because of aligned incentives or just sheer luck. It's actually quite risky!
However, to the philosophy, Kant's approach isn't really concerned with personal advantage. For Kant, morality is grounded in our capacity to make free, rational choices, and lying undermines that capacity. Lying undermines interpersonal trust in general. Lots of people distrust the world's richest and most powerful persons whether or not the latter they actually lied to achieve their position! And I'd expect there to be a lot of solid statistics that show low-trust societies being overall worse than high-trust societies by almost every metric - higher crime, for example.