Confronting the Honesty Crisis

ChatGPT was released to the public in 2022. Within one year of this release, disturbing survey findings were already emerging. One found that three-fourths of students who had learned how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help with assignments indicated that even if their professor banned the use of AI, they would continue to use it. Similarly, in early 2024, The Guardian cited a British survey, which found that over half of British undergraduates admitted to employing AI for graded schoolwork.

Students, of course, cheated long before generative AI. But thanks to these tools, cheating is far easier to get away with than in the past. Using one of these systems can save students hours of work while still producing a paper or block of code likely to receive a good grade. As such, it is clear that we are confronting an honesty crisis in education today.

An “honesty crisis” is a label I developed to refer to a disturbing scenario: when we see a sudden increase in dishonest behavior caused by at least two factors. For whatever reason, dishonest actions have become harder to detect, so people deem them easier to get away with than previously. At the same time, dishonest behavior has become more tempting than it was in the past. When we find ourselves in the midst of such a crisis, dishonesty accelerates around us.

In my new book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, I explore other areas in addition to education that are facing an honesty crisis. These include deepfakes, pornography and infidelity websites like Ashley Madison, fake news, celebrity culture, and dishonesty among religious leaders, including the plagiarism of sermons.

When it comes to each of these cases, I argue that people are facing increasing pressure to think and act in ways that are at odds with the virtue of honesty. This is a tremendous loss, both individually and for the surrounding society.

Clarifying What Honesty Is

First, what is this thing called honesty? At first glance, it might seem as simple as just telling the truth. But there is more to it: Honesty prevents lying, but it also forestalls a host of other negative behaviors, such as misleading, cheating, stealing, hypocrisy, bulls—ing, and self-deception. It is remarkably broad in scope. At its core, though, honest behavior involves not intentionally distorting or misrepresenting reality. Honest people authentically present matters as they truly see them.

Honesty is also a virtue, which means it is an excellence of character. It is both valuable in its own right and contributes to a person’s flourishing.

Underlying psychology matters too. For instance, what motivates honest actions makes a considerable difference in whether we are behaving virtuously or not. If a student does not cheat on a test even when he has the opportunity to do so, that is the honest thing to do. And if his reason for not cheating is that he believes cheating is wrong, or that he does not want to disrespect his professor, those are excellent reasons. If, instead, he refrains only out of fear of punishment or a desire to avoid feeling guilty, then we do not have a case of virtuous motivation. This even includes hoping to get rewarded in the afterlife or avoiding divine punishment. These four motives are all self-centered or egoistic, making honesty all about how it benefits the person in question. Virtue demands that we act well regardless of whether we think we will benefit or not.

Why We Should Care

Even if honesty is under pressure today, it is worth asking why that matters. Who cares if, in the areas of society where honesty is eroding, people are cheating on their significant others, sharing political misinformation at a higher rate, or plagiarizing on their academic work (or sermons!) to a greater extent than they were in the past?

Very likely, though, most people already care tremendously about whether honesty is eroding in society. Indeed, in one of the studies our team at the Honesty Project at Wake Forest University ran, honesty ranked first among sixty traits when participants judged which characteristics made a person likable, respectable, and worth knowing. It turns out honesty is highly valued.

For good reason, I might add. Think about what life would look like if dishonesty prevailed. Trust would be in peril. Everyone would be instrumentalizing one another for their own self-interested gain. We would also likely live in perpetual anxiety, worrying about whether another person is always on the brink of cheating or stealing from us.

Contrast this with an honest society, where people trust one another and depend on others to do as they say they will do. People are treated with respect, and their contributions are valued and dignified. Calm and peace would be expected in place of fear and anxiety.

What Do We Do?

Of course, there is much more to be said about what honesty is, why it matters, and what each of the various honesty crises involves. But the major question we are left with is: What can be done to preserve our most treasured virtue?

In some cases, I fear we are too late. When it comes to students cheating with AI, for instance, I believe there is little that can be done—at this point—to disincentivize this behavior. Instead of being able to rely on students' virtuous sense of honesty, professors are requiring students to complete assignments by hand in the classroom. For other crises, however, there is still time to take concrete measures to address them. For instance, in the case of deepfakes, there are legislative initiatives already in place to punish those convicted of distributing nonconsensual deepfake sexual material. In the case of internet infidelity, there is new empirical work suggesting that empathizing with our significant other and what they would feel if they found out we were cheating on them online can significantly decrease motivation to pursue those other relationships.

Yet for now, honesty remains in danger throughout our society. We need to face these crises head-on if we hope to preserve what might just be our most cherished virtue.

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. Specializing in ethics, virtue, and character, he is the author of over one hundred and thirty articles and six books, the most recent of which is The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, which was released this May with Oxford University Press.