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Is truthfulness a moral virtue? Does it belong up there on the marquee with wisdom, courage, and temperance? Most of us would say that it does, or that was my first thought anyway. I want to be open with my friends and expect the same from them; I want children who speak their minds without subterfuge; I want to vote for candidates who are honest and honorable. Tradition sanctions this view. Moral codes, sacred as well as secular, prohibit lying. In legal proceedings, those who testify bind themselves to tell the truth. How can there be a question? But there is something puzzling: while we say that truthfulness is good and lying is bad, the way we act suggests that that is not what we really believe. We think of utterly truthful persons as a hazard, and as for lying, we all lie all the time. That there is a gulf between what we think we ought to do and what we do in fact is hardly a novel observation; the world is a wicked place. Still there is an oddity here: a person shows that she is committed to a moral rule-"Tell the truth. Do not lie"-in a variety of different ways. She follows the rule herself and encourages others to do so. She blames and perhaps tries to punish those who violate the rule. If she herself suffers a lapse, she feels guilt and remorse and sometimes a need to confess and make restitution. One can see the pattern in other elementary rules-"Keep your promises." "Help those who are in distress." "Do no harm."-but truth-telling is different. Some lies are egregious; we wince when we recollect them. But by and large we lie our ways through life with a relatively clear conscience; and we expect other people to lie, and so we make our plans accordingly. Its not just that we do not act in accord with our principles, but that we do not feel the way someone who really believed that lying is wrong would feel. If this is a fact, what explains it? It seems to me that there are two possibilities: it may be that in saying that truthfulness is a virtue we are not ourselves being truthful. Saying something...