In this episode, David talks about radical honesty, or the idea that we should always tell the truth and that any kind of lie is harmful. He discusses:
- Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty
- the television show Lie to Me
- Sam Harris (and Ricky Gervais)
- pros and cons of always telling the truth
- is it possible to be a moral, honest person without always being 100% truthful?
- does David ever lie?
- Golden Rule
- deontology

Links:

Pragmatic ethics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_ethics

Radical honesty:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_honesty

Lie to Me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me

Lying, by Sam Harris:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_(Harris_book)

the Golden Rule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule

Deontology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology

(Don't) Lie to Me: Is it a good idea to practice radical honesty?

Introduction

Welcome to the Reasoned Intuitions podcast. My name is David Tonner, and I discuss personal ideas on moral issues in modern society and try to come up with improved ways of thinking and behaving, in the hopes of becoming a better person and causing the least amount of harm. As a disclaimer, I'd like to state that I am not an expert in either philosophy, psychology, or anything else, for that matter.

My opinions and positions are provisional and open to change with new information or an improved understanding of the issues I discuss. My intent is not to provide definitive rules or to tell anyone how they should live their life. I merely want to share my ideas and insights, in the hopes that they can be inspirational or in some way helpful.

I employ pragmatic ethics and try to reason from as broad and objective a perspective as possible. Some of my basic assumptions are that unchosen suffering is bad, and we should strive to minimize it. Joy is the most pleasurable sensation, and thus we should strive to maximize it. Empathy is universal, with some exceptions, and it should be the starting point of any good ethical system.

Hello

Hello, and welcome to Reasoned Intuitions. I'm your host, David Tonner, and today I want to talk about something called radical honesty.

I should start by clarifying that, technically, Radical Honesty is a trademarked phrase coined by Brad Blanton in 1997. Blanton wrote a book with the same title a year before, in which he promoted his idea as a self-improvement technique. More informally, radical honesty refers to the practice of never telling lies, no matter what. I'm going to briefly touch on Blanton's Radical Honesty, but my main focus will be on exploring the idea that lying is always wrong and that one should tell the complete truth at all times.

Lie to Me

I was first introduced to radical honesty in the 2009 TV show Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth. In the show, Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, an expert in body language and microexpressions. If you're not familiar with microexpressions, it's a concept pioneered by American psychologist Paul Ekman, who serves as the inspiration for Roth's character.

The idea is that, through minute voluntary and involuntary facial expressions and body movements, we very briefly express our true emotional states in a manner that can be detected by an expert observer, even when it isn't our intention to do so.

I'm not sure how reliable the science of microexpressions is at this point in time, but in Lie to Me, Lightman demonstrates such a high degree of observational skill that simply by watching for these tiny microexpressions, he is able to solve difficult criminal cases. When I watched it, I thought the show was fascinating, and though I only saw the first season, it gave me food for thought. Microexpressions, however, are not quite what I want to discuss today.

One of the supporting characters on the show, Eli Loker, played by Brendan Hines, is experimenting with radical honesty and proceeds to engage in a number of mostly awkward interactions with his coworkers and romantic interests, such as telling a woman he has just met that he wants to sleep with her, since he not only refuses to as much as fib, but also insists on speaking the full truth of his thoughts and feelings as they arise.

When I originally encountered this exercise, my first thought was that it's ridiculous. I promptly dismissed it, but a few years later, I read Sam Harris’ short book Lying, which basically presents the same premise—that it's always wrong to lie. Now, despite my overall respect for Sam Harris, who remains, to this day, one of my philosophical heroes, I still think radical honesty is a silly idea.

I promise to explain my reasoning, and hopefully you will either agree with me or help me see why I might be mistaken.

Radical honesty

First though, I should clarify what radical honesty is and what it isn't, at least in my conceptualization. Radical honesty means full transparency with no deception, including white lies and fibs. This means that in a normal conversation between people, an individual practicing radical honesty would make sure to always report his or her thoughts and sensations truthfully, regardless of consequences. Radical honesty does not mean constantly reporting whatever you happen to be thinking, feeling, or experiencing. So, you wouldn't just incessantly babble away in a stream-of-consciousness manner, detailing your inner life, just because those happen to be your true thoughts and feelings. That would be an extreme interpretation of a concept that is already extreme enough.

Obviously, exhorting people to be honest and not tell lies is nothing new. Immanuel Kant, in his 1797 essay “On a supposed right to tell lies from benevolent motives”, proclaimed complete honesty to be a moral imperative, an idea echoed today by Sam Harris.

The virtue of honesty has obvious benefits and of course, dishonesty often entails harmful, even catastrophic consequence, and I think most people understand this quite well.

I would venture to say that most people are honest, most of the time. Lying is a tactic we employ in order to gain an advantage, to spare ourselves from punishment or harm, and also to deceive with malicious intent. So it seems clear that honesty, for the sake of social harmony, trust, strong relationships, non-harm, but also for one's conscience, is the preferable choice, and dishonesty should be avoided. But can this line of reasoning be extended to say that one should never lie?

I tried to come up with a list of pros and cons for this radical approach. I have to admit that, possibly due to a lack of imagination, I couldn't come up with too many pros, but here they are:

Pros

- When talking to someone who practices radical honesty, you never have to guess, or wonder, what they're thinking. You can fully trust that whatever they tell you is the truth, to the best of their knowledge.

- Engaging in radical honesty can have psychological benefits, as it allows the practitioner to be more in touch with their feelings and thoughts.

- It can also help a person create healthy boundaries with other people, especially if that's something they are generally not very good at—I'm definitely one of those people.

I did a bit more digging and found a few other legitimate-sounding pros online, such as when you're being radically honest, you can be yourself rather than pretending, and also, it allows you to accept situations more easily, since you don't have the option to manipulate or massage them.

Cons

Okay, now, for the cons:

1. In my opinion, being tactful or diplomatic is often more important than being a hundred percent truthful. I'll explain my reasoning in more detail later on.

2. I think radical honesty is lazy; the person practicing it is absolved from thinking about how their words affect others. The motto “honesty is good, so more honesty must be even better” is all they need to focus on.

3. Radical honesty requires that people dispense with most, if not all, politeness. By definition, politeness is an intentional form of mild deception, meant to facilitate conversation and engender good feelings between people. It is essentially the glue that holds communities together.

4. What about gossip? Consider the evolutionary benefits of this practice and the role it plays in traditional societies. With radical honesty, gossip, which ranges from unverified claims, all the way to gross exaggerations, becomes practically impossible.

Pushback

So, let me try to push back against some of the arguments for radical honesty. While I agree that never having to doubt what another person says is a net benefit, I think that people generally trust each other to be honest, except in situations where a clear motive for deception exists. Obviously, there are high-trust and low-trust societies in the world, but overall, trust of strangers is determined by much more than simple truthful speech, and there are significant underlying factors that must be addressed in order to improve this, such as poverty and corruption. Additionally, I would argue that most of the time, people don't want to hear the complete, unrefined truth about most things. Of course, sometimes the full truth is necessary, but in those situations, there are ways to obtain it without requiring an unfiltered vomiting of inner thoughts and expositions.

I also think that most people, most of the time, prefer a semblance of truth, or a flattering version of their interlocutor’s reality. This is certainly the case when it comes to small talk, which, arguably, makes up the bulk of our interactions with other people. And, as I mentioned before, in the type of discussion that isn't considered small talk, people do tend to be sufficiently honest, without requiring the complete effacing of any sort of ambiguity or filtering

I think people are generally only interested in a very limited amount of information from another person, whether following a query or not. This isn't due to a general disinterest in a conversation or the other person, but rather the fact that pure unfiltered thought is messy, often jumbled, long-winded, and can be needlessly inconsiderate or hurtful when improperly vetted by the speaker.

Additionally, and this is no small matter, there are numerous cultural factors that may dictate that complete honesty is to be avoided as a matter of etiquette. So, when confronted with an individual who practices radical honesty, a person from Japan, for example, may feel uncomfortable or even offended and hurt.

The other pros that I mentioned earlier, like psychological benefits or boundaries, just don't strike me as being very strong or convincing, or at least they're not things that would require an extreme modification in the type of behaviour that comes naturally to people, so I don't find them to be compelling enough to justify the practice.

Cons deep dive

Now, let's look more closely at why I oppose radical honesty. Number one, I mentioned tactfulness and diplomacy. Obviously, if your intention is to promote your own self-interest to the detriment of another, then that's clearly not a morally permissible lie. On the other hand, if fudging the truth is done with the intention of sparing someone's feelings, is that a bad thing? Someone like Sam Harris might argue that one can never know 100% in advance whether a well-intentioned fib will have the desired effect, but then I would counter that you don't have that kind of certitude when telling the truth either! But if you have a strong reason to think that, in a given situation, telling a lie is consequentially the optimal course of action, I think it can be permissible.

A few types of situations come to mind: anytime you are placed in a situation where telling a clever lie can avert disaster, I think you are morally responsible to do so. My favourite, and probably most cliched example, is that of Anne Frank hiding in the attic from Nazis. Would you condemn an innocent child to death in the name of honesty?

Sometimes you need to lie to protect yourself. Say if you're in a situation of danger or if you stand to lose a large sum of money due to a technical rule, et cetera.

How about something lighter, such as when someone's feelings are at stake? Let's say somebody asks you for your opinion—and let's go as far as making this person emotionally fragile and volatile. Maybe they ask you what you thought of a meal they cooked. You didn't love the food, but you anticipate that saying so will cause them to become emotionally distraught, for no good reason. What's the harm in saying you enjoyed the meal? I can't think of a plausible one.

Or perhaps they come from a culture where it is more important to compliment a meal than to be truthful about how it tasted. Is honesty important enough as a virtue to hurt someone's feelings in such a casual way?

Maybe you want to comfort someone who is suffering or dying by telling them a white lie about your feelings, details of their condition, or even the afterlife.

Sometimes, it's simply a question of timing: in some circumstances, it may not be ideal to reveal the truth, but if the consequences aren't dire, you can admit to telling a white lie later on and hope to be forgiven, if you believe that the benefits of delaying what a person is aware of outweigh the harms.

I think the key considerations here are intention and sound judgment. If your intentions are good and your judgment about a situation is sound, it can reasonably be argued that sometimes, telling a soft lie is the best thing in a situation.

2.

I also said that I think radical honesty is lazy. This is because it absolves the speaker from contemplating the consequences of their words. If we accept the premise of my previous argument, about intention and judgment at times when truth-telling may lead to disaster, injured feelings, or simply inappropriate timing, then not thinking about these factors and simply stating the plain truth is easier and serves as a convenient excuse.

That's not to say that someone practicing radical honesty is doing so out of laziness, necessarily, but it makes the task of negotiating conversations and relationships easier, because there's always only one option—to tell the truth. Obviously, the person still has to reckon with the consequences that the effect of their words may have, but that's only half the job of communicating with people.

3.

My third point is about politeness. Politeness, or courtesy, is one of the key factors in harmonious and cohesive relationships between people. We use it to demonstrate respect, maintain boundaries, express gratitude and appreciation, et cetera. At the same time, much of politeness is either vacuous or technically dishonest. We utter simple phrases that lubricate conversation and relationships themselves, but many of them are not literally true, nor are they intended as words that convey accurate information. A person who practices radical honesty has to completely dispense of any form of politeness that is even remotely untrue, and I think this, by definition, leads to an awkwardness in discourse and even behaviour.

4.

And four: gossip is an evolutionary adaptive strategy that humans have engaged in since the dawn of verbal communication. Again, by definition, someone practicing radical honesty must avoid gossip, but doing so isn't always noble. While gossip can be pernicious and spiteful, it is often just the opposite: gossip strengthens bonds between people in a community and those who have things in common. Even more than an exchange of information, gossip is a way of signalling affinity, membership, even loyalty. Now, while I don't always agree with or support ideas such as loyalty, as I mentioned in my Illusions episode, they are a conceptual framework that can have benefits for people's lives and for the cohesion of communities.

Better way

So, if radical honesty is not an optimal method to approach the way in which we communicate with others, with respect to the honesty–dishonesty spectrum, what might be a consequentially more practical mode of honesty? Well, what about just strong, healthy honesty that isn't necessarily radical? To tell you the truth—pun intended—I don't even like the name radical honesty. In my experience, most things that are radical are far from beneficial. In fact, if something is radical, it's usually poorly thought out, rash, and by definition, extreme. I prefer courses of action that are balanced and reasoned rather than extreme.

So, what am I advocating for? Obviously, as someone who values morals and ethics, I think honesty is, overall, a desirable goal to strive for in life. I think we should attempt to be as honest as we can be in any given situation, as a general rule, but I don't think complete truthfulness must supersede all other considerations. As you may know by now, I generally avoid rule-based ethics, or deontology, and I try to keep my values consequential, or pragmatic.

Personal relationship with honesty

Now, you might be wondering what my personal relationship with honesty is like. Well, like most things, it has morphed over time. Growing up, honest speech and behaviour was always stressed to me as something that was very important; not only was I taught to always be truthful, but I was punished whenever I lied.

As a perpetual shit-disturber and troublemaker, I often saw lying as the easiest and most painless way to cover up my mistakes, and I admit that I didn't give much thought to the value of integrity when I was a child. I certainly wasn't a pathological liar, and I didn't derive joy from being deceitful; it was just a tool that I used to my advantage when it seemed like the best option.

As time went by and my need to hide things I broke decreased, both because I no longer needed to answer to a parent, but also because I got into trouble less often, I got away from having to lie as much.

At some stage of my life, as I began to value honesty more explicitly, I did my best to be honest, even if it meant that I would have to deal with negative consequence. This meant that over time, I resorted to lying less and less often—and to be clear, I'm talking about blatant lies, not white lies. I'm sure I tell plenty of those without even realizing it, as do we all. Even to this day, I'm not above fibbing or even committing minor deception in situations where there is no clear victim and where the alternative—telling the complete truth—seems like a net harm to me.

For example, I might lie to my insurance company, customs officers, or people in bureaucratic positions who don't have a personal stake in my complete honesty, but to whom telling the full truth isn't always ideal for my own interests. Does that make me dishonest? Well, I suppose technically it does, but I nevertheless consider myself someone who is conscientious and holds fairly high moral standards, and I wouldn't do anything to knowingly hurt anyone.

Golden Rule

A few nights ago, I was listening to a podcast between Sam Harris and Ricky Gervais, two of my favourite celebrities, and they were talking about lying. I know total synchronicity! Call the police! Sorry, inside joke.

Anyway, one of the points Harris made was the use of the Golden Rule, which gave me pause; I asked myself, if I was in the other person's place, wouldn't I want to be told the truth at all times?

This is a question each person has to answer for themselves, of course, and perhaps, depending on the answer, they can use it as a guide to their behaviour. For me, the answer is yes. I would want to know the truth in just about any situation. A crucial point to remember though, is this: I am not another person.

What I mean is that, each one of us has a unique personality, but we also exist within unique circumstances. Some people can objectively handle the truth, no matter what it is, because they are mentally balanced, emotionally stable, and sufficiently self-aware. This cannot be said about everyone, however, especially people who carry heavy psychological burdens, and that's what I talked about earlier: when you're dealing with someone who clearly demonstrates symptoms of mental or emotional imbalance, telling the full truth can have disastrous results. Let's also remember that the Golden Rule is a deontological guideline, and I'm not a big fan of deontology.

Anyway, thank you again for listening, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Reasoned Intuitions