Abstract

This chapter explores the nature of intellectual honesty. Honesty is the first virtue in the book that does not clearly fit into the vice-virtue-vice schema discussed in earlier chapters. This chapter attempts to home in on honesty by exploring its opposites: cheating (plagiarism), lying, bluffing, bullshit, and self-deception. The common feature of these instances of dishonesty is that they all involve an effort to distort the truth. Thus, it is argued, honesty is a virtue centrally involving a disposition not to distort the truth, but rather to represent it accurately (as one sees it). This notion of honesty (and the corresponding notion of dishonesty) suggests that truth itself depends on the way things are, rather than on some sort of “social construction.”