An appealing account of dishonesty subsumes it under the paradigm of lying. However, the account faces clear trouble from a wide range of cases, including cases of bullshit and brazen dishonesty. Such cases show not only that lying is inessential to dishonesty but also that honesty requires more than the absence of dishonesty. We propose an alternative account grounded in norms associated with games. On our account, dishonesty is better understood in terms of cheating or of breaking the rules of a game; being honest requires upholding those rules.
and
What is it to be honest with someone? A natural answer goes something like this: you’re honest with them when you’re
Philosophical focus on paradigmatic cases of a phenomenon like this is often helpful. Discussions about
However, excessive focus on paradigmatic examples of a phenomenon can also lead us to mistake their incidental features for essential characteristics. It may seem that leopards essentially have spots until we realize that black panthers are leopards. We argue that the natural answer, which has seemingly tempted all recent
Preliminary challenges to the natural answer rooted in this mistake are easy to spot. For example, it forces us to say that if someone plays a card game honestly, then they play it truthfully. It also forces us to say that unless you lie to someone, you’re not, strictly speaking, being dishonest with them. Implications like these move us to reconsider the natural answer.
We think that honesty and dishonesty instead are better understood through
We begin with some preliminary challenges to the natural account from cases of bullshit and of brazen theft and cheating. Accommodating these cases in a theory of dishonesty leaves us with the following question: what about these activities – speech (in the case of lies and bullshit), property ownership (in the case of brazen theft) or game playing (in the case of brazen cheating) – allows them to be pursued dishonestly? We argue that pursuing each of these activities involves trusting others to follow the rules associated with the activity. As a result, these activities can be pursued honestly when this trust is vindicated by respecting the relevant rules.
This model allows us to preserve what’s natural in the natural answer by arguing that truthfulness is a norm of assertoric speech (or entailed by its norms) without also adopting the natural answer’s procrustean limitations, which hamper its explanation of forms of honesty or dishonesty that involve neither truthfulness nor mendacity. The natural answer may nevertheless seem so obviously true as to suggest that its core can be preserved simply by refining it to address these limitations. Indeed, some philosophers have attempted to preserve the natural answer in exactly this way. We criticize these attempts along the way.
Contemporary philosophy largely neglects the analysis of honesty.
Its core is that honesty and dishonesty are forms of truthfulness and lying, respectively. Since (part of) what it is to
The Lying Model captures a natural way of explaining what makes certain actions dishonest, such as Bernie Madoff’s decades-long Ponzi scheme, Lance Armstrong’s doping in professional cycling, or Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. If your friends and family are anything like ours, conversation about dishonesty will centre on intentional deception.
Inverting the Lying Model suggests that what it is for S to φ
While perhaps initially appealing, we’ll show how these two models are too narrow. The Lying Model imagines too close a connection between dishonesty and mendacity. Likewise, the Truthfulness Model ties honesty too closely to truthfulness. These ties handicap their accounts of honest or dishonest activities where concern for the truth is irrelevant.
Some basic, perhaps even obvious, cases show how anchoring an analysis of honesty in truth makes it unacceptably narrow. While these cases challenge the familiar-but-flawed analysis’s
But this claim is false. When you cheat at a game, you exploit others’ good-faith acceptance of the rules of the game. So cheating is dishonest. But cheating doesn’t (essentially) involve representation. So it seemingly cannot be connected to truth in the way that the Lying Model requires. Likewise,
There are at least two places to resist this response. The first is to question whether cheating and stealing are, necessarily, representational acts in the manner that the proposal requires. We doubt this but this doubt engages in opaque and slippery questions about the nature of representation probably better avoided here. So, we’ll merely register some skepticism and oppose the move on different grounds.
A second challenge to subsuming cheating and stealing under the Lying Model comes from
Trump is clearly being dishonest in this case; after all, he’s cheating. Yet he’s not misrepresenting his cheating to Tiger or anyone else. Since the cheating is brazen, it involves no misrepresentation whatsoever. Consequently, dishonest actions need not involve misrepresenting the content of norms.
The case is particularly illuminating because Trump’s aims depend on
Similar cases of brazen rule-breaking involve theft, where a Trump-like bandit wants to display his impunity by openly stealing another’s property. In the cases that we imagine, the theft does not misrepresent the rules governing property. Indeed, the fact that the bandit wrongfully possesses
Indeed, Trump’s recent (as of January 2026) claim of power and control, amounting to a claim of ownership, of Venezuelan oil assets provides a real world analogue. Trump has openly asserted control over assets that are not his and has done so without pretending that the ordinary rules governing property and legal process confer any such entitlement. By executive order, his administration blocked judicial attachments, liens, and creditor claims against Venezuelan oil funds, declaring ordinary legal processes null and void and placing the assets under executive control for policy purposes. No one imagines that these actions aim to misrepresent ownership. Their purpose is rather to display the power to take and hold them regardless. Like stealing another person’s name tag, the wrongfulness is not concealed or denied; it is made conspicuous.
Brazen cheating and theft involve no misrepresentation. But they are dishonest: cheating (theft) is dishonest, so when Trump brazenly cheats and steals, he’s brazenly dishonest. So misrepresentation is not essential to dishonesty.
Some might prefer to bite the bullet and deny that Trump’s cheating is dishonest precisely because it’s brazen rather than give up the link between dishonesty and misrepresentation. But it seems plain that cheating a competitor is dishonest. After all, by competing against you, they can expect you to play by the rules – that is, they are entitled to trust you to play by the rules. By cheating, you subvert this expectation. This subversion is dishonest.
Crucially, however, subverting this expectation doesn’t involve
Cheating subverts this expectation, whether it’s brazen or not. Now it’s reasonable to wonder whether Trump’s golf partners
None of the challenges we’ve raised is plainly decisive. Our aim in presenting them isn’t direct refutation but rather to illustrate the range of honest and dishonest activities. Any adequate theory of honesty must identify what unifies these activities, making them candidates for honesty or dishonesty.
This alternative model begins by reconsidering the common property shared by honest and dishonest activities. Consider the following case. Suppose that Jim agrees to bring John coffee every morning at 6am for the next month if John gives Jim his tickets to the ballet. Deep down inside, Jim knows that he won’t be able to get up that early: he’s a night owl not an early bird. On some level, he’s fully aware of how his weakness for ballet often leads him to make bad decisions. Only last month he took out an ill-advised second mortgage to fund a week at the Bolshoi. He’s done unspeakable things for just one more fix of Swan Lake. Consequently, Jim knows better than to agree to John’s arrangement because Jim knows that he’ll disappoint. Nevertheless, Jim’s love of ballet clouds his judgment with unearned optimism, leading him to agree.
Jim is making a “lying promise,” to use Kant’s term. He’s agreeing to an arrangement that he, at least on some level, knows that he will not fulfil. But characterizing this agreement as a “lying promise” isn’t literally correct. Broadly speaking, Jim makes a
Likewise, Jim isn’t promising anything to John, strictly speaking. Rather, Jim and John enter into an
Broadly liberal traditions in moral and political philosophy have long recognized the importance of agreements to what we can properly expect of each other. On the political side, the concept of an
One straightforward argument for this suspicion comes from the practice of promising.
Why do unspoken agreements have the normative power that they do? This important question is orthogonal to our discussion. Perhaps unspoken agreements can be powerful because they’re tied to what we would agree to, hypothetically speaking, were we fully rational. Perhaps they’re grounded in what we would agree to if we’re pursuing our deepest values. Perhaps they’re underwritten by prudential necessity. We needn’t decide between these views here.
Rather, we wish only to underscore how unspoken agreements underpin a wide range of actions, such as promising, for we think that only
Property and games similarly depend on unspoken agreements. In a world of thieves without conventions governing the rightful acquisition and transfer of possessions, property amounts to no more than mere physical possession. Likewise, if neither of the two would-be chess players respects the rules of chess, they are not playing chess but merely playing with chess pieces.
Because neither cheating nor stealing intrinsically involve representation, the common property linking activities with the potential for honesty seems not to be the property of being representational,
It’s tempting to rush from this link to a flawed analysis. Perhaps because honest actions are ones governed by norms, one acts dishonestly by violating those norms. When someone lies, for example, they violate an unspoken agreement to assert truths. When they steal, they claim rights of possession that they deny to others. When they play a game, they insist that others uphold the very rules they’re breaking. Dishonest action, on a first pass, seems to fit the following pattern:
But this can’t be right. Dishonesty is (
To illustrate the point, imagine cheating at a game like solitaire by moving cards around in a way that’s prohibited by the game’s rules. Cheating like this isn’t dishonest even though it violates the rules that govern solitaire. So rule-breaking doesn’t suffice for dishonesty. It’s merely necessary. The Norms Model is missing an ingredient.
Contrast cheating at solitaire to cheating at competitive chess. Cheating in the latter case is dishonest but not in the former, yet both involve cheating at a game by breaking “cheap” only weakly “normative” rules. So what’s the difference? Answering this question is the key to finding the missing ingredient.
We propose that the difference is the following. When you intentionally cheat at solitaire, you’ve given yourself permission to do so, in some sense. You’re both the judge and jury. If you’ve permitted yourself to cheat, you’re not entitled to expect yourself not to cheat. But that’s not true when you cheat at competitive chess. Your opponent normally expects you to follow the rules in a way that you’re not expecting yourself to follow the rules when cheating at solitaire. That’s because when you participate in an activity governed by an unspoken agreement, you participate in the unspoken agreement. By choosing to play chess, you participate in the agreement governing chess, which requires you to play by the rules. Similarly for, e.g., assertion and games.
Both chess and solitaire can give rise to cheating, but only in the chess case do we see an added element of
Here is the big idea, in broad strokes: only activities governed by certain norms can be assessed for honesty or dishonesty. One performs an activity honestly by upholding the norms that govern it; culpable violations of those norms are dishonest. Such violations are dishonest because they breach others’
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s focus on the notion of
Rather, what it is for someone to act in bad faith, in the colloquial sense, is for them to freely participate in an agreement while intentionally refusing to follow it. Because bad faith presupposes agreement, it offers a promising lens through which to examine the nature of dishonesty for, as we’ve just suggested, honest activities rest on unspoken agreements. When someone uses an agreement to achieve their goals without abiding by it, they exploit both the agreement and its other participants. This exploitation is what makes participation in the agreement
Some examples will help make these abstract claims concrete. By intentionally lying, one breaks a norm that governs assertion. By breaking the norm, you fail to live up to the unspoken agreement underlying the norms that govern assertion. Moreover, because you’ve intentionally chosen to assert, you’ve entered into this unspoken agreement. But you’ve entered into the agreement with the intention to break it, by intending to lie. So your lying counts as bad faith because you’ve entered into an agreement while planning to break it.
Likewise, by intentionally cheating, you break a norm that governs the game. By breaking the norm, you fail to live up to the unspoken agreement underlying the game’s governing norms. Moreover, because you’ve intentionally chosen to play, you’ve entered into this unspoken agreement. But you’ve entered into the agreement with the intention to break it, by intending to cheat. So your cheating counts as bad faith because you’ve entered into an agreement while planning to break it.
Similarly, by intentionally stealing, you break a norm that governs property. By breaking the norm, you fail to live up to the unspoken agreement underlying property’s governing norms. Moreover, because you’ve intentionally chosen to participate in the system of property – by claiming the stolen goods as your own – you’ve entered into this unspoken agreement. But you’ve entered into the agreement with the intention to break it, by intending to steal. So your stealing counts as bad faith because you’ve entered into an agreement while planning to break it.
So understood, bad faith can, perhaps, be described as a kind of self-misrepresentation. For example, by lying you represent yourself as accepting the rules that govern assertion. But you don’t end up following those rules. Because bad faith can be described as creating a kind of false expectation, and so a kind of
In a
By contrast, we can also expect things – typically individuals but also institutions – to behave in a certain way in a
We can distinguish these two kinds of expectation by their connections to different clusters of non-cognitive attitudes. For example, failures of descriptive expectations characteristically license surprise or bafflement. Failures of normative expectation, in contrast, typically license disappointment or outrage. Of course you can be both baffled and outraged at the same time, so these two forms of expectation are compatible.
The natural answer focuses on descriptive expectations. In particular, it focuses on how lying creates false descriptive expectations – this is what makes many lies deceptive. But lying doesn’t automatically falsify normative expectations: people remain entitled to expect you not to lie, in the sense that they remain entitled to believe that you ought not lie, even when you do. Therefore, instead of
To illustrate, consider that when Jim enters into an agreement with John in bad faith, Jim violates John’s normative expectation for Jim to deliver John’s coffee – that’s what makes Jim’s participation in the agreement dishonest. But Jim’s bad faith doesn’t – or needn’t – falsify any of John’s descriptive expectations. For example, John might know full well that Jim is a night owl, so that he’s unlikely to rise to the challenge of getting the coffee on time. He doesn’t
These two senses of expectation correspond to two senses of misrepresentation. Jim doesn’t misrepresent himself to John in the sense of
Our proposal also resembles the “natural answer” in a second respect. The latter not only holds that lying is the
While our proposal is consistent with the idea that lying is the paradigmatic example of dishonesty, it offers an analysis both of why lying is dishonest and of why lying is a paradigmatic form of dishonesty. Truth-telling is widely recognized as
Second, speech is a paradigm of social engagement. If an act is dishonest because it violates an important kind of social trust, then a type of speech that breaks that trust would naturally emerge as paradigmatic of dishonesty, given that speech is paradigmatic of social interaction more generally. Consequently, our proposal can not only explain why the natural answer seems so natural; it can also explain its motivation by ratifying the centrality of lying to the genus of dishonest action, more broadly.
Here’s our official statement of this view:
The Trust Model improves on the Norms Model. The institution of property relies on an agreement that one’s possessions should be one’s property, with allowances for borrowing, loans, renting, and so on. By possessing something that isn’t one’s property, one breaks this agreement. The Kantian thought highlights how thieves simultaneously claim the rights of property, and so participate in the institution of property, yet try to exempt themselves from its duties. By wrongfully possessing another’s property, the thief enters into a kind of bad faith agreement with others concerning the norms that regulate property, violating a special kind of trust to which others are entitled by the institution of property.
Likewise for cheating in a game. Games are goal-oriented activities in which participants voluntarily agree to abide by rules that artificially restrict the most efficient methods of achieving those goals.
The Trust Model also accounts for the challenging cases presented at the outset of the paper. When someone asserts, you’re entitled to trust them to be sincere, and bullshit is insincere speech.
A second attraction of this approach is its
Famously, golfer Bobby Jones lost an important golf tournament when he logged a penalty that no one else witnessed. This was an honest action. On the Trust Model, it’s an honest action because Jones vindicates the trust of his fellow golfers by following the rules of the game when he logs his penalty stroke. This seems like exactly the right thing to say about Jones’s action.
It’s also true that Bobby Jones’ representation of his score was truthful. So, the familiar-but-flawed account
Proponents of the analysis are aware of this obvious challenge. But rather than abandon the analysis, they take it to motivate a seemingly minor revision. For example, the following analysis has been proposed:
But what licenses gerrymandering the model in this way besides the need to avoid a counterexample? Why is it that an analysis of honesty can plausibly remain silent about so-called “factual environments”? What gives rise to such environments? Preserving the model in this way is akin to preserving utilitarianism by restricting the scope of utilitarianism to exclude inconvenient implications involving trolleys or the harvesting of organs.
By contrast, the Trust Model easily explains why it’s ok to misrepresent one’s position in poker but not in golf. That’s because accurately representing your play is a norm of golf. But it is not a norm of poker. As a result, others are entitled to trust you to be truthful when playing golf but not poker.
When we participate in social practices like assertion, promising, game-playing, or property exchange, we implicitly invoke norms that make those practices possible. These norms do double duty. Not only do they help characterize the relevant practices. They also structure what we expect of each other, licensing a reciprocal trust between participants in the practice. For example, speakers trust one another to assert only what they believe; players trust one another to follow the rules; co-owners trust each other to respect property boundaries. Culpably violating these norms while still presenting oneself as a participant in the practice exploits the trust generated by those norms. This kind of bad faith is what makes such behavior dishonest – not because it distorts facts, but because it exploits the normative expectations to which others are entitled within the practice.
We’ve said that cheating is dishonest. But imagine that we unfreeze baseball legend Ted Williams and, once his confusion and fear of the modern world abates, we trot him onto the field and ask him to do his thing. The rules of baseball have changed since Ted’s time. So, he’s likely to unintentionally break them, violating, for example, the new pitch clock requiring pitchers to pitch the ball within a certain amount of time after stepping on the mound. But he’s not playing baseball in bad faith. So, if breaking a game’s rules is cheating and cheating is dishonest, then you can be dishonest without bad faith.
However, we don’t really think Ted is being dishonest here. We doubt that breaking a game’s rules suffices for cheating, we think only
A similar point applies in cases of unintentional misrepresentation. Suppose that Rosa is giving a museum tour and, relying on reputable training materials that nevertheless contain undiscovered falsehoods, misattributes a particular painting to Vermeer. Unbeknownst to her, the painting was recently reattributed to a lesser-known Dutch artist. The members of the tour are misled by her testimony. Nevertheless, Rosa is not being dishonest. She believes what she says and makes the claim in good faith, trusting her training and aiming to fulfill her role as a guide. The mere fact that she is mistaken does not make her dishonest. After all, dishonesty requires that she culpably betray the trust that museumgoers place in her – either by knowing that her claim is unsupported or by being negligent in failing to update her knowledge. As with Ted Williams, the absence of culpable rule- or norm-violation means that, despite the factual error, no dishonesty occurs. In both cases, the norms characteristic of the activity are violated, but without culpability, and hence without dishonesty.
Our account implies that were Rosa’s deception culpable, she
The cases of dishonesty we’ve used to illustrate our account feature relative agreement between the parties about the relevant rules,
Brazen rule-breaking, we’ve argued, is dishonest when it violates a certain kind of trust. Nevertheless, we don’t claim that
Given the setup, it’s natural to suppose your friends have given you leave to cheat, just as you do for yourself when you cheat at solitaire. Because they’ve let you cheat, they’re not entitled to trust you not to. Likewise, when Tiger doesn’t give Trump leave to cheat, Trump’s cheating is dishonest. If Tiger did, it wouldn’t be.
The case raises the important question of how and when we permit others to break the rules. For example, group projects in school are governed by norms. It’s natural to divide work roughly evenly, for members to have a say in what part they accomplish, and for members to do their part, though circumstances often force us to negotiate. When a lazy group member says, “Don’t rely on me; I’m irresponsible and disorganized!” and proceeds to contribute poorly to the project, are they being dishonest? It seems not. But the norms of collaboration seem to entitle participants to trust that others will do their part, and the lazy member’s laziness seems to violate that trust, presenting a challenge for the Trust Model.
Nevertheless, though the norms of collaboration normally license trusting others to do their part, this entitlement is defeasible. If the members continue collaborating with the lazy member, particularly if they do not persistently hold the lazy member to account, then the norms governing collaboration come under dispute. By allowing the lazy member to continue collaborating without criticizing them, the lazy member could reasonably expect to have been given leave to be lazy by the group. This ignorance exculpates their rule-breaking like how ignorance of which set of pool rules governs a game can exculpate rule-breaking, as discussed immediately above.
Conversely, if the group continues to criticize the free-riding, lazy member – insisting that they either contribute or quit – then the lazy member acts in bad faith and, in doing so, dishonestly exploits their team. This scenario arises only when the group is powerless to change its membership, as when a teacher forbids regrouping. In such cases the group is vulnerable to the free-rider’s exploitation, and that exploitation is dishonest. After all, the free-rider claims credit they have not earned. Because everything is out in the open – the free-rider’s intentional exploitation and the group’s explicit criticism – there is no deception here. But, as we have seen, not all dishonesty involves deception. In this respect the free-rider resembles a brazen thief: someone who openly takes what they do not deserve. Theft is dishonest even when it is brazen, and likewise, wrongfully appropriating the fruits of others’ labour as one’s own, even when done openly, is dishonest.
Our explanation of why a dishonest action is (
However, whether the failure to disclose is in fact dishonest depends in part on how the terminal patient regards the rules governing medical practice and what they expect of their physician as a result. For example, if the patient accepts those rules, then it seems natural to deny that a failure to disclose is dishonest. It may not respect the patient’s autonomy (or it may, in fact, if the patient endorses the rules), but it is no more dishonest than a failure to disclose one’s hand in poker. On the other hand, if the patient rejects rules that permit physicians to withhold distressing diagnoses, then they do not participate in the local practice of medical disclosure, at least as governed by the rules of 1950s medical practice. Instead, they
We’ve advocated for the Trust Model by stressing its explanatory depth. But this explanatory depth also yields explanatory breadth. Some apparent kinds of dishonesty do not involve bad faith. Consider the following case:
Cases like this, which involve multiple relations to distinct agents, are particularly challenging for the
The source of this awkwardness is the simple fact that different sets of norms can overlap on a single action. The accountant’s testimony to the auditors participates equally in both the practices of speech and promise-keeping. The lie keeps a promise, so it is honest in this respect. But it violates the norms of assertion, so it is dishonest in this respect. But these respects are clearly compatible. So the case leads us to believe that honesty and dishonesty are relational properties between actions and sets of norms.
Dispositions – at least the dispositions thought to underlie Neo-Aristotelian virtues – are not, by contrast, thought of as relational. They are naturally understood as monadic. This is why the Neo-Aristotelian approach has such trouble with the case.
By contrast, actions are especially well-suited to capturing honesty’s relational nature for actions often have multiple patients. For example, a single transaction can benefit one party but harm another. The Trust Model incorporates this feature of actions. Just a single action can benefit one person but harm another, a single action can
Another instance of this difficulty arises when someone “games the system.” This happens when someone exploits a system of laws while respecting the law as written while contravening its spirit, especially when the laws allow for loopholes or are subject to interpretation. For example, suppose that a free-rider creates a chain of shell companies to exploit a tax loophole that reduces her liability to almost nothing, fully complying with the written tax code while deliberately undermining the code’s purpose of fair contribution by the wealthy. The notion of exploitation here cannot be a
A second example helps illustrate the phenomenon.
Consider the first fact: does our account entail that the batter is dishonest because they intentionally violate the rules of cricket by walking from the crease? Whether our account implies this depends on whether walking from the crease in the case violates other cricketers’ expectation for batters to stay in the crease in that circumstance. Since cricketers are seldom sanctioned, if ever, for leaving the crease in this circumstance and since walking from the crease works against the batter’s self-interest, we find it hard to see how breaking this rule constitutes a
Walking from the crease in this circumstance inverts gaming the system. Gaming the system involves following the rules in a way that is objectionable by another set of standards. By contrast, walking from the crease involves breaking the rules in a way that is admirable by a different standard – namely, the standard of fair play. Winning because the umpire missed a call is still winning – c.f. Maradona’s “Hand of God” – but it is dissatisfying. And insofar as players count on one another to play the game well, not merely to comply with its rules, they can expect one another to act as though they are out even if the umpire has missed it. Walking from the crease vindicates that trust.
In shifting our focus from deception to trust, and from falsity to bad faith, we’ve offered a model of honesty that explains not only why lying is paradigmatic of dishonesty, but also why dishonesty need not involve lying at all. On the Trust Model, dishonesty is best understood as a culpable betrayal of the norms that make social practices possible, and honesty as the good faith vindication of those norms. This framework does justice to the full range of honest and dishonest actions – whether interpersonal or intrapersonal, spoken or unspoken, subtle or brazen – while avoiding the distortions imposed by a narrow focus on truthfulness. In doing so, we reject the natural answer and replace it with a unified view that accounts for why honesty matters.
Consider the evolution of collective thinking that took philosophers from Singer’s (
See
Start with Hom (
We’ll often use the phrase “analysis of honesty” as shorthand for inquiry into the nature of
Consider Miller’s (
Miller 2023, p. 31. As we’ll see, Miller nuances this view over several chapters.
See Section 1 of the
Miller 2023, p. 45.
Miller (2023, p. 48) discusses similar cases.
For a small sampling of Trump’s long history of cheating at golf, see Reilly (
Miller (2021) discusses cheating at golf; though not
Cf. Miller’s (2023, p. 24) discussion of the “unification challenge.”
See Gilbert (
Cf.
See Raz (
This kind of normativity is also sometimes called “genuine” or “robust.” However, unlike some, we are skeptical of the philosophical significance of the distinction supposedly marked by these terms (
Indeed, since unspoken agreement about norms makes activities like assertion and chess possible, it’s not a stretch to suggest that the relevant sense of dependence between these rules and activities is
For more on this distinction between kinds of expectation, see Jones (
See Howard (
We favor the account of trust of Hawley (
For an influential account of games along these lines, see Suits (
See Frankfurt (
Miller 2023, p. 71.
With thanks to a historically-informed referee for a minor correction involving the periodization of Dutch art.
Many of these challenges come to us from a referee for
We owe this example to Taya Cohen.
We supplement our skepticism with Hurka’s (
This feature also explains why there can still be honor among thieves.
Thanks to the editor at
Thanks to a referee for
Thanks to audiences at The Honesty Project’s Initial and Final Research Conferences, Pepperdine University, UC Davis, and University of Maryland, College Park. Thanks especially to Frank Hong, Robert Long, Nate Sharadin, Elliot Thornley, and Mitch Barrington for helpful discussion. Special thanks to Wes Sisco for written feedback. This project began when the authors received funding from the Templeton Foundation, whom we thank for support. The authors contributed equally to this article and are listed in the byline alphabetically by surname.
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.