Honesty

Honesty is defined as being truthful or having integrity. Because these characteristics are generally regarded as desirable, honesty is considered a cornerstone for any social interaction. Its value is especially conspicuous in business because commerce requires a network of transactions between suppliers, consumers, employees, and the public. For a company to thrive, it must have the trust of all these entities, something that is possible only if they have confidence in the company's honesty. Indeed, a reputation for honesty is crucial to a company's sustainability and success.

Evidence that this is widely understood is found in many business practices. Employers often attempt to screen employees for honesty by, for example, checking on the facts included in a résumé or even requiring a lie detector test. Companies routinely include a commitment to honesty as part of their code of ethics or mission statement. Contracts can also be understood as a legal tool for enforcing honesty in transactions.

The impact of dishonesty on the fortunes of companies and individual employees is also clear. Employees are most likely to be dismissed and companies are most likely to be embroiled in scandal when they attempt to deceive supervisors, the public, shareholders, or regulators about a problem. In one recent example, the chief executive at Hewlett-Packard was obliged to step down after it was discovered that the company had attempted to plug information leaks by pretexting or using false pretenses to obtain personal information about reporters and members of the company's own board of directors.

Like other ethical concepts, honesty often proves elusive on closer examination. For one thing, the ethical question of when and whether people should tell the truth is easily confused with the epistemological question of whether people can know the Truth. Philosophers continue to struggle with the question of how Truth is to be determined, how it can be distinguished from error, and whether Truth can be communicated adequately by language. In addition, the points of view of different individuals create challenging issues about subjectivity and Truth, something that is obvious to anyone who has ever asked more than one person about what happened at a meeting.

Some critics also contend that 20th-century scholarship insisting all Truth is situated and vulnerable to deconstruction has seeped into public discourse and undermined the commitment to honesty as a default position. Also, in the empirical sciences, psychologists have evidence that many successful people and companies cultivate an optimistic, if not unrealistic, appraisal of their prospects. Positive thinking as well as public relations and spin control deliberately reinterpret facts to support a particular point of view, blurring the question of what is true. Harry Frankfurt and others have argued that such efforts erode a commitment to honesty because they focus on the task to be accomplished without attempting to honestly ascertain the facts of the matter.

Even Aristotle found it difficult to pin down honesty. Although he praised it as “noble,” he also believed that honesty, like other virtues, was subject to the Golden Mean because it was vulnerable to excess and deficiency. Too much honesty becomes boastfulness or indiscretion; too little turns into false humility or leaving people in the dark about things they need to know. This understanding foreshadows contemporary tension between transparency and privacy. Some argue, for example, that honesty requires utter openness, especially about financial transactions. At the same time, many individuals and, for that matter, business entities claim that it is appropriate to keep financial information confidential.

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