Honesty - How do you practise it?

a reply to: schuyler

Very well explained, schuyler. You are right, of course, though with some reservations.

It's more important to the community that you be honest than it is to yourself. Honesty is for the good of the community.

Yes. But do not forget that if a community values honesty, it awards status to honest individuals. This constitutes an inducement to honesty — or at least to the appearance of honesty. You receive the kudos of the community, which translates into social influence and better mating opportunities. None of this calculation need be conscious, and most of the time it isn't.

To the individual honesty may not be the best characteristic to promote survival.

Indeed, it is often to one's detriment. But this actually enhances its status value. In evolutionary-biological terms, honesty is a fitness advertisement: the honest individual is so fit (in evolutionary terms) that he or she can afford to compromise that fitness voluntarily without taking harm from it. A reputation for honesty is a peacock's tail, an inconvenient decoration that is also a badge of pride and a magnet to the opposite sex.

If someone is honest and professes this as the correct way to be, it is because the community has inculcated the idea into him, perhaps by threatening the dire consequences of Hell as a punishment if he is not, as a desirable characteristic of a person with "good character."

I disagree with this. Honesty, like all human morality, is instinctive in origin, although moral codes will vary from culture to culture, usually under the baleful influence of sexual or ethnic prejudice, patriotism or religion. We are honest because we prefer to be honest — compulsive liars exist, but they are a deviation from the norm.