Why Honesty Is Becoming So Hard | Christian Miller

26:25I know this person because we've been together a long time. I've seen how he or she acts in a variety of situations or a partner or significant other, those kinds of, or children, those kinds of descriptions. Yeah, those are pretty reliable. but the one-off I see you on the news or I see you on the courtroom, be very careful. Yeah, well, let's unpack that further because I think many of us have been in situations where we felt the other person deceived us. Maybe it was a photo they posted of their online dating profile. Maybe it was embellishment of what they accomplished at work on their LinkedIn profile to get that interview.

27:02And then when we're fast to label them as dishonest, we cut them out. We don't wanna go on a second date. We don't want to hire them. That has serious implications. Although I'm kind of advocating caution in ascribing someone with a certain kind of virtue or vice trait, because that is a big deal. Like if you label someone honest or dishonest, that is a label that is often likely to stick with you and your thinking. It's also likely to stick in third parties thinking when they hear that. And they're going to label the person going forward. So it's a big deal to put that label onto a person. Now, having said that, in a particular situation, when someone acts dishonestly towards you, it's entirely reasonable to be cautious going forward with respect to that subject matter, like the dating.

27:52They didn't know you. They already started off on a bad foot by saying they're a couple inches taller or 50 pounds lighter or something like that. It doesn't mean that they're dishonest in general or that you can't have a great relationship, but they're already like setting the bar pretty low as far as honesty is concerned. So I think they have to going forward, demonstrate to you that this is not symptomatic of a deeper underlying character issue. It need not be, but the bar or the burden of proof is now placed on them to say, you kind of broke my trust, our initial trust I was willing to put in you.

28:33I think you have to earn it back now. And that's a reasonable position to adopt. So for those of us who are following along with this, being virtuous 100 % of the time sounds next to impossible. What we are talking about here is quite idealistic. How do you wrestle with that personally? And then what do you share to the audience? He's like, well, I feel this is almost impossible for me to be that honest. I will say two things. First of all, I don't think you should be honest all the time. Well, let's come back to that in a little bit. I think it's a mistake. It's actually morally wrong to always be honest.

29:10That might sound jarring and alarming. And like, what is he talking about? I thought he was an ethics professor, but I can explain that. So let's take situations where honesty is a good thing. It comes in degrees. Here's the good news. It's not a matter. It's not a binary. It's not an either or. You could have someone who's moderately honest, strongly honest, perfectly honest, but I don't think any actual human being is going to get to be perfectly honest. I think that applies to all the virtues. Honestly, it's not unique here. There's no perfectly kind person, no perfectly forgiving person, no perfectly gracious person.

29:48That's an ideal to work towards, but not attainable in this life. And so does that mean we should not care anymore or give up on it? No, I don't think so at all. I think it means that we can make incremental progress over the course of our lives. We can go from what I think many of us are in, and myself included, which is a kind of mixed bag, you know, good and bad. Some areas of our lives are good, some areas of our lives are bad. We can kind of work on enhancing the good and pushing back against the bad. And we're not going to flip a switch and make ourselves perfect overnight, but we can slowly build, slowly build.

30:27It's like any skill. You don't become a chess player or tennis pro or anything like that or golf experts overnight. You've got to practice. You've got to work at it. You've got to hone your abilities. And the same is true for honesty. Now, if I may, let me make good on the point about perfect honesty might be a mistake. I like keeping my money where I can see it. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also like keeping my money. Crazy high bills, bogus fees, free perks that cost more in the long run. Stop overpaying for wireless just because that's how it's always been. Mint Mobile exists to fix that.

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31:45New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Right now, get up to 15 % off Select Storage Solutions. Put heavy-duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid, impact-resistant design prevents cracking. And the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find Select Shelving and Tote Storage up to 15 % off at the Home Depot to organize every room in your home, from your garage to your attic. visit homedepot.com how doers get more done let's just double click on on working on your honesty and what are some practical ways maybe you've shared with your students or even in your own personal life where where you have strengthened that muscle if many of us are wrestling with this in our day-to-day lives it's one thing to say you should do it in general theory and it's other thing to actually i can make it concrete and and what can we practically do the first thing i would say is actually it's very much context dependence.

32:47And so we need to think about these honesty crises in their nitty gritty and their details. Like, what should I do on social media? What should I do in a classroom? What should I do in my romantic life and this kind of thing? But I can at least say some broad general things. One thing is to right off the bat, be clear about what is honesty, what is dishonesty, and own up to areas of your life where you're being dishonest. This might sound easy and like, let's skip to the second one right away, but it's actually surprisingly hard because we often rationalize. We tell ourselves, this isn't a big deal or I'm just fudging the truth a little bit.

33:28We don't confront, especially in cases of self deception, which is a real and genuine phenomenon. We don't confront our own dishonesty. So that's step one, we got to recognize this and own up to it. Step two, I think, is we can go now in a kind of variety of different paths. One is to look to people who are in our world or in our space who have done better than us. Instead of going into philosophical arguments or abstract stuff, find a concrete person who's living the life that you're not, at least with respect to honesty. Now, some of these exemplars, these moral heroes and saints, we could label them like this.

34:10We don't want to follow them in every respect. They're going to have some areas of their lives which we probably don't want to admire. They might be ugly, morally speaking. But in this one respect, they're doing better than us. We can actually look to them. We can admire their lives. We can be inspired by their lives and want to become more like them, not dragging them down to us, but elevating us up to them. And the third thing I'll say is to have practical reminders of honesty in our lives. Because it's one thing to intellectually know, yeah, honesty is important, telling the truth is important, we shouldn't steal or cheat or something like that.

34:43Yeah, I know that when I'm kind of stopping and contemplating these things. But when I'm in the moment, when I'm on the internet, when I'm taking the test, whatever context it might be, we can get sidetracked by self-interest or convenience or efficiency, cutting corners, making our lives easier, and honestly can go by the wayside. So the point being, more reminders can help us in our daily lives get us back on track. To give a practical, and I'll stop with this, a practical example of that, in the education context, honor codes have been moral reminders for a long time. I assume most listeners are familiar with, but most schools in the U.S.

35:30have honor codes which students have to sign when they take an exam. And when they write a paper and turn it in, they're supposed to write it out and sign the honor code of pledging their honor that you don't lie, cheat or whatever in the performance of this academic task. It's not a foolproof. It's not a guarantee of no cheating. In fact, I think AI trumps it these days, unfortunately. But for a long time, it was demonstrably empirically quite effective in curbing cheating because it was more a reminder. and reminded students of their values, what they cared about, being an honest person, their integrity, their authenticity, and kept them from cheating and curbed their motivation to cheat by sometimes 20, 30 % compared to schools or groups of students which did not engage with an honor code.

36:22So that's a pretty tangible moral reminder. Yeah, I think when we contemplate our own honesty before submitting something, before pledging something, that actually ties deeper to our character and makes us more likely to act in that virtuous way. And on the practical side, I think a simple stretch for many in our audience is sharing with friends and family, hey, I value honesty. I wanna bring more honesty to this relationship. And in turn, I want you to be more honest with me. And that reflection of honesty back so that we're not trading white lies, but you can be forthright with me. Hey, I didn't like when you behaved that way.

36:59I hated that dessert. really wasn't a fan, and open that honesty and surround yourself with that, it starts to help you strengthen that muscle. Just like you would go to the gym and find a trainer and work out with other people in a group exercise class, allowing people in your life to know, hey, I'm working on this area. I want to be more honest in our relationship to build deeper trust. I think that is a practical way that many of us can have that reflected back in our life in a meaningful way. Two follow-ups on that. One is I would just want it to be done carefully and tactfully. So there are different ways of saying that you don't like the dessert, some of which I would not recommend because it turns out actually that for honesty, Aristotle taught us this a long time ago, there's one way of failing, which is dishonesty.

37:46There's another way of failing, which is the opposite, which is brutal honesty or oversharing or lack of tact and so forth. And that is not virtuous in this picture either. That is a failure too. So there are ways of saying it without coming out and brutally saying it, bluntly saying it. So I would just recommend that. And secondly, I think this fosters, what you're talking about fosters trust. A big thing for me is accountability too. So the other person or the group of people become accountability partners with me. So I can be open with them and share with them, knowing that they'll hold me accountable.

38:27They can do that reciprocally, likewise with me, and I can hold them accountable. So now we have a mutual web of accountability. It doesn't mean we're going to be perfect. And one of the things you have to do is share, if you're really doing this, share areas where you fell short. You're like, actually, yesterday, I'm sorry, I lied to you. Or yesterday, I misled you or deceived you. that's part of being accountable and being forthcoming in that relationship. It's going to be hard. It's going to be painful sometimes. But when you do that, I think it's certainly going to be advantageous and growing that muscle, as you said, cultivating that skill of honesty.

39:04And I feel like there's a time window there, right? If I tell you, hey, seven years ago, we first started dating. I was lying to you, right? I built our relationship on distrust. That has a much stronger impact than, hey, yesterday I misled you. So I think being open and honest and catching yourself, maybe not in the moment, but the closer to the act, I think, allows that honest, that virtuous side of you to shine through. Whereas if we've gone seven years dating or you've graduated with honors and now you come back and say, oh, I actually cheated my way through, that has a much more serious impact.

39:41Yes, I agree with you. Unless the thing you did yesterday was itself massively deceptive. So unless yesterday you're on Ashley Madison trying to arrange a rendezvous or something like that, well, then I don't think that person is going to give you any kind of credit that you told them it was yesterday versus seven years ago. But other things being equal, put it that way. Philosophers like to say other things being equal. Yeah, the longer ones that were significant. So it's not just that there was some dishonesty back then. It's the layers of dishonesty pile on top of it to keep it a secret. To keep the deception.

40:20Yeah. So it's dishonesty on top of the dishonesty, on top of the dishonesty. So you have to peel back so many layers. and then you just worry about, you know, given this, how can I trust the person today? Because they've layered so much deception into our relationship. Today, am I actually married to the person I think I am or, you know, friends with the person I think I am, or is this really someone who's crafted a public image that doesn't correspond to their private self? So now I want to be your accountability buddy and hold you into account. What do you mean You don't say we should always be 100 % honest.

40:58What were you getting at there? These are rare cases. So I don't want anyone to think, oh, now he's giving us kind of blanket license to go out there and lie as much as we want. So first of all, rare cases. We're lots of steak. So it's got to be, you're not going to encounter these in your normal day-to-day life. And there's going to be a lot of steak. But here's a very vivid, famous example. The philosopher Immanuel Kant came up with this hundreds of years ago. He talked about an axe murderer. The updated 20th century version is the Nazi at the door example. I think probably everyone's heard this, but I'll just go through it real quickly.

41:39So you're, it's World War II in a Nazi-occupied town. You're a homeowner. You're definitely unsympathetic to the Nazis. You're hiding a Jewish family in the basement. You know that the Nazis do a routine patrol this time of day, going through the neighborhood asking, do you know where any Jews are? Do you know where any Jews are? It's just performative. It's just perfunctory. And so you know that if you say, I don't know where any Jews are, they're just going to go to the next house. Well, here's the knock of the door. You open the door. There's the Nazi. The Nazi says, do you know where any Jews are?

42:12You are now confronted with an Nazi situation. Don't give me any kind of third options. You're not going to overthrow the Nazi, tackle him or anything like that. You're not going to invite him in for cookies and get him sidetracked to forget what he was asking about. You're not going to start responding with silences and going to make him unsuspicious. So your only options are tell the truth. Yeah, there is a Jewish family in the basement. He comes in, arrests you, takes the family away to a concentration camp. Or you say, I don't know where any Jews are. He goes to the next house. Well, I think overwhelmingly, students in my experience, people in general, and I say the same thing.

42:55We all say the morally right thing to do is to lie to the Nazi at the door. So notice that that is still dishonest. It's not like getting a past. It's like, oh, it's some kind of version of honesty. It's still dishonest. It's a lie. But it's being outweighed. Honesty is being outweighed by something that's more important. I would say, compassion towards the Jewish family. And so all things considered, when you put all the moral variables in place, what's the verdict? It's morally required to be dishonest. That might sound paradoxical or weird. How could that be? But as to say it again, it's morally required.

43:34Morality obligates us in certain unusual situations to be dishonest. And I think that's just a function of the messiness of our lives. In a world in which there were no Nazis and other kind of situations like this never arose, we would not have these conflicts and we would always be honest, or at least should always be honest. But given the existence of evil in this world, we have to sometimes compromise some of our values. Yeah, and I mean, I feel fortunate that I didn't go to school during an AI boom, but I even feel for the students who are in this situation where AI is at their fingertips and we've seen study after study that shows college education leads to so much more earnings over the course of your life.

44:19Now we're talking seven figures plus earnings that are right at your fingertips. If you can just get the good grade, get through this class, survive your ethics class and move on and then go to law school, right? And these are things that people are actually facing now as students and the stakes do feel higher than ever. And then when you're also surrounded by a bunch of other students who are clearly using AI and not getting detected and getting great scores and moving on, that pressure can feel insurmountable. That's right. You see, you've diagnosed the current situation quite accurately. What do we make of that?

44:54I mean, there are different ways to go. So one way is to say, are they doing anything morally wrong or does these considerations give them a moral past? Another thing to say is, what as a professor should I do going forward knowing all this? Because I know all this about what the students are going through. So what should my plan be moving forward? So maybe I'll say something about both those points. On the first point, even despite those challenges and those understandable considerations, it's still morally wrong to use AI in completing an academic assignment for a grade when the professor has prohibited that use.

45:33And let me add the really important caveat, too. They don't disclose it. So there are ways in which it's not problematic from an educational perspective as far as morality is concerned. Like, if the professor allows it, okay, well, look, I mean, how could it be morally wrong? Or if the student, it's prohibited, but the student discloses it to me, well, okay, that's fine too, at least from a moral perspective. What's problematic here from honesty, from a plagiarism angle, is when they submit the work as if it were their own. This paper is given to me as if it were the student's own intellectual investigation and discovery, and yet it was not.

46:18Someone or something else did it for them. Now, that, first of all, is plagiarism. Plagiarism from AI, just like it would have been plagiarism from the Internet before there was AI, or plagiarism from a book before there was the Internet. Plagiarism is a form of dishonesty, and dishonesty is morally wrong, you know, in most cases. So there's that side of this. Now, what do we do? What do I do as a professor moving forward? It would be nice if some of the strategies in the past to curb cheating would work, like the Otter Code, like really trying to call out to them to remember the deeper purpose of education, why they're here, what they're foregoing or missing out on if they don't do the work themselves.

47:08Those would be nice things. And in some students, they do move the needle, but not enough. So I'm a pessimist here, alas. Educators are listening to this like, oh, give me the solution. Give me the fix. How can I solve this? There's only one fix, which is take the AI out of their hands, which is what overwhelmingly professors are doing today. Graded assignments are all in class, or for the most part in class, because then at least we can control the environment. So we go back to the blue books. I don't know if you had blue book exams back in the day. I remember the blue books. In situations that I was in school, we were proctored exams in the room together where cheating and being caught cheating in a room full of other people had a much stronger reputational hit than what I'm assuming a lot of students are facing now, where you submit the paper online, you do the work online, some of us have gone to school completely online and never interacted with anyone else.

48:09And that has lowered that reputational, that social contract that we all feel of being called out publicly as a cheater in a room full of other people who are taking the exam honestly. So that, I guess, even increases the stakes in the classroom and puts extra pressure on the importance of honesty. The way we're doing it, we're going to have to do it going forward because that's what, you know, at least for in-person classes, that's the way we have to do it. So we're bringing back the blue books. We're bringing back people into the classroom. And yeah, I catch someone, which I did a year ago, looking at their neighbor's notes.

48:44I saw them doing in class. I called them out on this. Everyone in class turned around and looked at them. That person was embarrassed in front of, you know, 29 other peers. That has psychological impact. Maybe, you know, like, you know, damaging psychological impact, but nevertheless, you cheated, like, transparently. So, but as they, we're doing blue books, we're doing pop quizzes, we're doing oral exams, we're making a big comeback, like, just, you know, explain the material to us or walk me through it in your own terms in my office. All these kinds of things are basically our only resort that we have to rely on in the age of AI as educators.

49:22Well, I think thankfully many of us are not in the Nazi at the door scenario, but many of us are wrestling with honesty versus compassion, especially with people that we have to work with, co-workers, maybe people who are a station or two below us at work where we see they're underperforming. We want to save them, but at the same time, it takes honesty. And that's what we're wrestling with. So what do you say in those situations where compassion feels a lot easier than honesty? Here's the Weasley philosophy answer. It depends a lot on the situation. It's hard to make blanking recommendations because there's so many confounding or complexifying, if that's a word I just made up, features of particular situations.

50:06You know, what is the mental health situation of the person who's under you? How long have they been with you, worked together? How much trust do you have already built up? You know, what is their kind of disparity in salary and so forth? How big of a performance gap is there between what you expect of them and what they're actually doing? So I would be reticent to make any really kind of confident recommendations. But at the end of the day, I mean, here are at least a couple of things. One, I'm hoping that it's not a matter of either or, it's a matter of both ends. You know, honesty, but with compassion infused through and through.

50:47I never, ever recommend, you know, just cold, here are the facts. You were supposed to do this. You didn't do this. Therefore, here's the consequence. I would hope that, again, it depends on the situation, but I would hope that, you know, we have a long history working together. You've done great work in the past. Seems like maybe you're going through some things recently. You know, what can we do to try and get you back on track? Or say, you know, here's where we're trying to get to. Let's talk through some ways in which we can, you know, collaboratively work together to get you there. You see what I'm saying?

51:26And at a very general level, that's both kind and compassionate, it's bought honest. I don't think you want to just gloss over it or avoid the honest truth either, because often that will have long-term negative consequences for the company or for your team or for even your own status if your status is bound up with the performance of others who are you. So you want to, you want to, don't, don't avoid the truth, but at the same time, don't make it brutal either. Let's unpack the digital world because I think many of our listeners are just inundated with information online, news sources, even Johnny and I in our conversations back and forth, we'll say, well, what was your source for that?

52:14Where did you read? Where did you hear that? It just feels like disinformation and propaganda is at an all-time high online. And when many people think of the internet, they think of it as a place where honesty goes to die and is not found at all. That is a natural temptation. So I'm going to say yes or no. Here's the, I think the really interesting part of this. I came across this several years before I wrote this book and I ended up doing a New York Times piece on it. There are big chunks of the internet where you can find lots of honesty, more so than you would expect. Now, don't hear me wrong.

52:48I'm going to get to the bad side in a moment, but here's the good news. When it comes to, and this is, let's stretch the meaning of internet a bit, but when it comes to email, text messaging, Facebook, LinkedIn resumes, and even some dating websites, all of these are remarkably more honest than you might think. And the level of dishonesty is no higher than in face-to-face verbal communication. So you take someone's, yeah, you take someone's more concrete, you take someone's LinkedIn resume and you compare it to the old days where you might have mailed in a paper resume. Remarkably comparable. So what's going on here, and this is not me just like pontificating as a philosopher, it's, you know, I'm backing up with studies.

53:44what's going on here is that in these cases, your name's attached to it. And there's a record. So LinkedIn, obviously your name's attached to it, but it's diachronic over time. It can be recorded and you can be held accountable to it, something that was posted in the past as well as today. So there's all this accountability structure built into it such that you better be honest or come back and bite you at the rear end. So that's some good news. At the same time, you're right. This feeling we have about the Internet doesn't come from nowhere. Here are two sources of it that I highlight when I talk about Odyssey crises.

54:27One is deepfakes. So the prevalence of deepfake audio and video is more common than ever before thanks to AI-generated outputs or AI tools that are used to generate these outputs. And then the other that I highlight to this by no means exhaustive is political misinformation and fake news. So we all know that that is prevalence as well. One observation I'll make about this is it's still true we often care about the accuracy of our sources. So we don't like this situation where we're confronted with this fake news and misinformation and deep fakery. We still value honesty. We still value accuracy.

55:14And yet, not only are we confronted with it, we're often willing to share it despite recognizing that it's fake. Now, that is disturbing. right. It's one thing to say, I have a sense I'm confronted with this last, a lot of stuff, but it's so subtly done that I can't recognize it. Like I can't tell whether this is defaked or not, or this headline, you know, it's kind of, it could be real or could not. What, you know, in those kinds of cases, if you share it, that is compatible with honesty. Actually, I have no, no honesty qualms at all because you didn't realize it. You didn't know that was fake.

55:57It's not, you know, honesty has to do with your subjective sense that it's wrong and still doing the sharing. But what is alarming, especially for me is not only of course the production of this stuff, the generating of it, the manufacturing of it, but also our willingness to share it, even though we might recognize that it's fake. that's not good and that's not compounded with honesty um i can give a concrete example if you like um to make a little bit abstract um so you know in the political realm there were studies done where people brought into the lab they're given clearly fake headlines um and they're asked do you think this is accurate they say no they're asked would you be open to or willing to share this on social media?

56:52The majority of them say yes. That's not encouraging. I'll even read one to make it even more tangible. So this was done by my favorite researcher, Penny Cook, in 2021. Participants were given this headline, over 500 migrant caravanners arrested with suicide vests. So, Matthew, you saw that headline. Over 500 migrant caribers arrested with suicide vests. Turned out that when Republicans, and don't get caught up on the Republicans, because I'll come in a second, were presented with this, only 15 % thought it was accurate. Rindly so. Why? I mean, I wonder about that 15%. Like, you know, what were they thinking?

57:40You know, but only 15 % thought it was accurate. But 51 % said they would consider sharing it. 15 % versus 51%. That's the Republicans, but don't get excited Democrats because there are other variations where the Democrats in the groups did the same thing. So what's the why behind sharing it? Like, how did they square that explanation? Although we care about accuracy and we care about honesty normally, when we enter into, and this is me presenting their explanation. It may not be the true one, but it's the best one I've seen. When we enter into the social media space, we often turn off the accuracy and honesty part of our brains.

58:22And we start to care a lot more about other things. We care a lot about our reputation, our standing, our number of followers, our tribe and our group, both boosting that and denigrating or detracting from the other tribe, the other group. And so, oh, here's something I now see. I'm in the social media. You may call it a social media mindset. So now I'm thinking about all these kind of considerations. This is something that would definitely give me a boost if I'm a Republican, maybe in my group. It would denigrate the other group. it would probably give me some more followers and some likes and some, you know, good traction on social media.

59:07So I'm more inclined to share it. That's, yeah, that's the explanation that they provide. Yeah. And I think the entertainment fusion with politics now where it's like, oh, well, we can laugh at that headline. Like we are entertained by that, knowing that it's fake on both sides has created the incentives online that make it feel like it's full of disinformation. Anytime you're scrolling on any of the platforms, you name it, that you're confronted with this. And that could be true that you think it's pretty innocuous. This is just entertainment. And you share it. Alas, not everyone is going to think the same way or just discern it to be fake in the first place.

59:5015 % we got to be really worried about. Yeah, exactly. You think it's clearly false and you're sharing it for a laugh or for entertainment. The next person who gets that thinks, oh my gosh, we've got a problem here. We need to change our immigration policy. Like we got cracked down or whatever, because they don't, they don't see it. They don't recognize it. And so we're, we're, it is unintentional and inadvertent. So maybe it's not even blameworthy, but still has bad consequences and increasing the amount of false information in the world. Now, there's one last point I wanted to touch on that I found interesting.

1:00:23And I'm sure many of our listeners might have a really good friend who's great at bullshitting, or maybe they are themselves incredibly skilled at bullshitting but you suggest that bullshitting is actually often more dangerous than a line yeah and so i i didn't know if i was allowed to say that so uh but you've given me permission now to say it um uh and so then these algorithms who knows what they what these algorithms are going to do with that um but yeah yeah so i mean they might uh they might penalize this episode because we got that that word in there um uh so i i mean i'm you're supposed to talk about this and this is not the my understanding of this phenomena of bullshitting is not unique to me so i should be honest and you know as it seems appropriate um there's a philosopher very very famous philosopher named harry frankfurt who wrote a best-selling book it was really literally a philosopher writing a best-selling book is not is not very common in our world but it was called on bullshits um and he he gave us the the now classic understanding of this so it's worth saying quickly what this is it's um when you and your communication say something because you don't care about the truth or falsity of it just because it advances some of your interests.

1:01:35So it's not that you're lying. You're not saying something which you know to be false. You're saying something which you don't have a clue whether it's true or false. You don't care whether it's true or false. You're just making it up. Yeah, you're indifferent. But you do care about something else, which is it might serve your cause. It might help your self-interest. It might get you a sale. It might promote your status. It might get you more followers. So that's different from lying. It's yet another type of dishonesty. And I think, you know, I'm reticent to make, you know, blanket statements, as you've heard this entire time.

1:02:10You know, is it always worse? Is it, you know, been lying or is lying always worse? I would be reticent to make those blanket statements. But I think it's clearly true that there can be some cases where it's very harmful and severe and, yes, worse than lying. I mean, because think about what you're doing. Someone's asked you a question. It could be on a really important subject matter. There have been political examples of this, for example, where you don't know the answer and you just fabricate a response that could be so far from the truth, but the other person believes it and acts and lives their life because of it, that the downstream negative consequences could be horrendous.

1:02:57So yeah, if we're honest people, we need to be on guard against lying, of course, but also this too. It cannot be part of our psychology. All right. One last question to put you under the spotlight now. You've studied honesty for 10 years and yet you admit that your wife has to call you out, what's the most common way that you accidentally deceive yourself? Well, there's no sense in which I can't answer that question because if I'm really good at deceiving myself, I don't know that I'm deceiving myself. And so there are pockets of my mind that are so richly dishonest that I'm not even aware of them and I can't tell you what they are.

1:03:41Honestly, I can't tell you what they are because I don't even know them myself. So where have you grown in those areas where they were brought into the spotlight? There are clearly areas of my life where it's transparent that I'm dishonest or I fall short of virtue or I'm not a good person. The harder question here is what areas of my life was I actually deceiving myself about where I thought I might've been doing pretty good or I thought I was being dishonest, but actually I was BS rationalizing. I was telling myself a myth so I didn't confront the truth. Yeah. I had to think about that. I mean, part of it is such, there's so many, which one do I pick?

1:04:31You know, one, one clear one is not a super sexy answer, but was that when I started this whole discussion of character and virtue and honesty, I thought I was a lot better person than I really am. I got told myself a story that I, you know, I'm doing pretty good. but I'm an ethics professor at a top university. I haven't been arrested for anything and et cetera, et cetera. So I thought I was doing pretty good. And then as time went on and I read a lot of the empirical literature and I got into some of the unconscious stuff and the ways in which we fall short, I realized those things about myself, they were present in my life.

1:05:16And my self-evaluation start ticking down and down and down and down and down. Not, not to where I'm like, like miserable and like groveling. I'm like a wretched person. Maybe I should be, I don't know. Maybe that's, you can ask my wife about that. Maybe I am an awful person. She knows better than you. Yeah, she does. She knows. But that's often true though, because they get, yeah, yeah. Yeah. People like that often do know better than the self-deceptive individual themselves. So now I I think, to at least give you some answer, I think of myself as much more of a mixed bag and much less of a virtuous person that I self-deceive myself into thinking early on.

1:05:56And I think in turn, paradoxically, that actually makes you a more virtuous person. I think to act as if you are virtuous and self-deceive by saying, I am already virtuous, you take from your ability to be virtuous. Yeah, good. That's very nice. at least can hopefully set me on a better path to become more virtuous. Maybe there are rarests of people who are virtuous, and they would be telling the truth if they said they were virtuous, although does that make them not humble, for example? A humble person probably can't say that they're humble, right? That's a nice paradox right there. But yeah, in my case, it is true that it discloses more about my character, and that probably sets me on a better path to work on that character and become more virtuous.

1:06:44Whether I'll ever get there or not, it's a lifelong endeavor for all of us. You know, I can come back on the podcast in 20 years and we could check in and see where we are. But yeah, you're right. I think it doesn't hurt and it certainly helps. Well, hopefully in 20 years, there's fewer honesty crises. I hope so too, but I'm not going to bet on it. We can always keep the hope alive, but if you want me to wage your money, I'm not going to take the best. Well, that's better for you to have a sequel then. Very good. Very good. Something could come out of it. But yeah, it'd be nice if I didn't have to write The Honesty Crisis 2.0.

1:07:23And where can our audience find out more about the book? The book's available at all the usual places. It's published by Oxford University Press. Their website, you can get 30 % off. but you can also go to Amazon or local booksellers. That might be more virtuous, in fact. And then I have a website called ChristianBMiller.com, ChristianBMiller.com, where you can find more about the book, interviews, and all that kind of stuff if you want. Thank you for joining me. Loved our discussion. Great, great to be with you. Really enjoyed it as well.

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