On Truth-Default Theory
“Society is facing an honesty crisis, argues Christian B. Miller, a professor of ethics and moral philosophy at Wake Forest University. Plagiarism, fake news and political deception are all commonplace in contemporary culture—and even the little white lies we tell every day are more problematic than you might think. Here, he recommends the best books on honesty and dishonesty... Levine is my favorite empirical researcher working on honesty and Duped deserves to be the classic discussion of truthful communication for years to come. On his view, which is called truth-default theory, most people tell the truth most of the time. It is only a small minority of people in a given population who lie frequently. This idea is now well supported with actual data finding that often the majority of participants report not telling a lie in the past 24 hours.”
Cal Flyn interviewing Christian B. Miller, “The Best Books on Honesty” - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/honesty-christian-b-miller/. Interesting summary of relevant books on honesty. They cite Shisaku Endo’s Silence, which I’ve written about recently here. The final book Miller recommends is on empirical research about most people’s truth-default disposition. It seems to me contemporary anxieties about honesty come out when they start their sentence with, “to be honest.” Presumably they don’t mean, everything else I said was a lie. Rather, they’re signaling a default disposition that is commonly shared, but seems under threat these days.
In a few weeks in the ethics of emerging technologies course, I’ll be discussing Kant’s controversial “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies for Benevolent Motives.” This is in the context of blockchain technology which aims to remove the need for trust altogether. It’s part of a series of weeks that starts with cryptography and ends with students using a Habermas machine they can apply to a controversial topic they disagree about. Can such a machine enhance social trust? Or does it deskill our problem solving capacity to deliberate about what matters most?
