Why Be Honest When Cheating Pays?

So there's two themes here, honesty and crisis. So let's just start with honesty. What is that? You might think honesty is a really easy thing to define. You might think it's just a matter of telling the truth, not lying, kinda f long as you do that, you're an honest person, and we're done. I think that's a good starting point, but I think it's a lot richer and more nuanced than that. So I think it has an outward manifestation and behavior. And an inwards component to it in our psychology. So maybe I could unpack both of those briefly. Why in a society would we care about honesty? Well, here's one reason. Without it, trust breaks down. It's hard to trust other people if we know that there isn't honesty. Well, if you have a religion in place that can enforce honesty, that's gonna also nicely help secure trust amongst people. This is kind of counterintuitive. I did a a New York Times piece on this kind of counterintuitive that significant spaces online are much more honest than you might think. You have your name attached to it, and there's a track record of it being there, and you have lots of eyeballs on it. So you post that resume on LinkedIn, hundreds of people can see it. Any one it takes is one to just catch that error like you were talking about. That that false degree or that you know fake community service activity, and that person can be torn down once that's caught. It's permanent in the sense that it can be recorded, time stamped, and this kind of thing. Something that stays with you. So there's lots of incentive.

Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. My guest today is Dr. Christian Miller. He's the AC Reed Professor of Philosophy. at Wake Forest University He's the author of

Over 130 articles as well as a moral psychology the book Moral Psychology, and four books with Oxford University Press. Moral character in empirical theory. Character and moral psychology. The character gap. How good are we? Oh, we'll have to find out today. And

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