Seth Dillingham has written an interesting post about honesty and why there seems to be so little of it in the world. Seth writes,
The issues discussed most [by religious and secular leaders] are related to sex, drugs, and violence: premarital sex and cohabitation, increased acceptance of “alternative” life styles, widespread use of recreational drugs, glorified violence in the entertainment industry (TV, movies, video games, etc), homicide rates in our inner cities, etc., etc., etc.
The most basic trait of a moral character is honesty, yet little or nothing is said about it by the activists. Religious “leaders” almost never use the word, but surely some of them must realize that a complete breakdown of honesty by all of the religious and secular “leaders” is a much more serious problem than who’s having an affair or getting high.
In fact, the odd thing is that oftentimes we know that leaders are being intentionally dishonest. For example, my state just went through a primary where three Democratic candidates for governor really said a lot of nasty things about each other, most of which were true. Now, though, the two candidates who lost will do what is expected of them and pretend that, in fact, they never really had serious problems with the candidate who won and endorse her 100 percent! This is so common in politics that it’s almost taken for granted. Look at someone like Sen. Joseph Lieberman who amazingly changed most of his views almost overnight when he was selected to run as Gore’s vice-presidential choice, and then amazingly found his old views again after the election was finally settled.
And it spills over into work and personal relationships. I have some relationships, for example, which remind me of Cold War politics. Nobody ever says what they mean, but instead you have to be carefully attuned to signals to figure out what’s really going on.
I do want to quibble with one thing that Seth wrote about we humanists,
Humanists like to believe that people are basically good, and that laws (including the consequences of breaking them) are needed to punish the few who are not. How, then, can the news be filled with these monumental fiascos, every day?
Enron and Worldcom and all the other companies that did something similar
Pedophile priests all over the world, and the leaders who protected them for decades, and who are still protecting them
The idea that human beings are basically good is largely a reaction to religious notions that human beings are basically (or inherently and, in some cases, a priori) sinful. Personally, I don’t think either notion really captures the psychology behind dishonesty and other moral problems.
I’ve always found the idea of Original Sin to be absurd, but equally absurd is the notion that even the worst of liars and murderers is also basically good.
Socrates, of course, famously answered Seth’s question with the claim that the non-virtuous person was simply ignorant. Educate him or her properly and the unethical behavior would disappear. There are a number of problems with that answer, not the least of which is it comes close to denying the allegedly ignorant individual any free will. Taken to its logical conclusion (as it was by Plato), it is a prescription for totalitarianism.
My view is that people are neither basically good nor bad. Instead, people are, for the most part, complex hedonists who are busy trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Now hedonism gets a bad rap because people immediately think of orgies and riots and a sort of “if it feels good, do it” sort of philosophy, but in reality there’s a lot to be said for living long, dying old and leaving a very ugly corpse.
In fact an essential part of most cultures is teaching children to delay gratification and seeing the big picture. My daughter has learned, for example, that she might indeed gain a short-term bit of gratification from biting a classmate, but in the long run she is much better off finding an alternative that might be less immediately gratifying but will produce much larger benefits for her over time (and avoid time outs and other loss of privileges).
Similarly, I frankly would prefer to lay around the house and watch the SciFi channel all day rather than go to work, but that’s not a long term winning strategy for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.
The problems that Seth talks about occur when those sort of restraints aren’t in place. What happens if I’m a CFO and I cook the books and not only do I not get caught year after year, but I’m the toast of Wall Street? Or if I’m an Archbishop and I just move pedophile priests from one area to another and nobody ever catches on? And what if, add to that, I’m surrounded by people in my organization who know what I am doing and urge me on (and, in fact, would likely sanction me if I didn’t go along with the program)?
Is it any surprise, for example, that politicians routinely lie and shade the truth? What politician ever lost an election for lying? Look at the whole WorldCom fiasco. Here are politicians who themselves regularly receive slap on the wrists from the Federal Election Commission for violating campaign finance laws turning around and demanding serious financial accountability from CEOs.
And since we’re being honest here, the odd thing is that I certainly do not experience morality this way psychologically. For example, I don’t think “okay, killing this imbecile might increase my short term gratification but will have lots of long-term negative consequences.” Instead, I happen to think very strongly that killing people is simply wrong, unless done in self-defense. Similarly, I don’t think most people avoid crimes like rape and theft because they are conciously weighing their long term pros and cons, but rather because they have a deep-seated belief that they are inherently wrong. But I think it is a mistake to assume that how we experience morality psychologically is, in fact, a true and final description of morality. Which puts me in the very odd position of defending truth telling, but admitting that our own intuitions about morality are themselves likely false!
Second, the thing that has always amazed me are the small subset of individuals who are atheists/agnostic and yet advocate for a religion on the grounds that it is the only way to instill public morality. I don’t know if Plato invented this idea of the Noble Lie, but he is certainly the most famous advocate of it. But there are a small number of conservative writers, for example, who are privately agnostic or atheist but who publicly champion Christianity on the grounds that a secular moral theory will never motivate anybody to do good. On the other hand, what sort of moral theory is based on a lie from the outset? If you really believe there is no God, I think you have to deal with that rather than try to paper it over by appealing to some sort of “the masses can’t handle it” line of reasoning.