RT Article
T1 Motivation and the Virtue of Honesty: Some Conceptual Requirements and Empirical Results
JF Ethical theory and moral practice
VO 23
IS 2
SP 355
OP 371
A1 Miller, Christian B.
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2020
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1725246570
AB The virtue of honesty has been stunningly neglected in contemporary philosophy, with only two papers appearing in the last 40 years. The first half of this paper is a conceptual exploration of one aspect of the virtue, namely the honest person’s motivational profile. I argue that egoistic motives for telling the truth or not cheating are incompatible with honest motivation. At the same time, there is no one specific motive that is required for a person to be motivated in a virtuously honest way. Instead I advance a pluralistic theory of honest motivation, which allows for motives of caring, fairness, and virtue, among others. The second half of the paper then turns briefly to the empirical literature in psychology and behavioral economics on cheating, to see to what extent honest motives appear to be operative. The upshot is that we have good preliminary evidence for the claim that most people are not virtuously honest.
K1 Altruism
K1 Cheating
K1 Egoism
K1 Honesty
K1 Lying
K1 Motivation
K1 Virtue
DO 10.1007/s10677-019-10055-1