Honesty refers to a facet of moral character Moral character or character is an evaluation of a particular individual's durable moral qualities. The concept of character can imply a variety of attributes including the existence or lack of virtues such as integrity, courage, fortitude, honesty, and loyalty, or of good behaviors or habits. Moral character primarily refers to the assemblage of and denotes positive, virtuous attributes such as integrity Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcomes. In western ethics, integrity is regarded as the quality of having an intuitive sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions.[citation needed] Integrity can be regarded as the opposite of hypocrisy,, truthfulness, and straightforwardness along with the absence of lying A lie is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement, especially with the intention to deceive others, often with the further intention to maintain a secret or reputation, protect someone's feelings or to avoid a punishment or repercussion for one's actions. To lie is to state something that one knows to be false or that one does, cheating Cheating is an act of lying, deception, fraud, trickery, imposture, or imposition. Cheating characteristically is employed to create an unfair advantage, usually in one's own interest, and often at the expense of others, Cheating implies the breaking of rules. The term "cheating" is less applicable to the breaking of laws, as illegal, or theft In criminal law, theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. The word is also used as an informal shorthand term for some crimes against property, such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, shoplifting, fraud and sometimes criminal conversion. In some jurisdictions, theft is[1].
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Discourse
In discourse a statement can be strictly true and still be dishonest if the intention of the statement is to deceive its audience. Similarly, a falsehood can be spoken honestly if the speaker actually believes it to be true, assuming the speaker doesn't unfairly reject or suppress evidence. Conversely, dishonesty can be defined simply as behavior that is performed with intent to deceive or to manipulate the truth.
Morality
While there are a great many moral systems, generally speaking, honesty is considered moral and dishonesty is considered immoral. There are several exceptions, such as egoistic hedonism, which values honesty only insofar as it improves ones own sense of pleasure, and moral nihilism Moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is the meta-ethical view that nothing is moral or immoral. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is not inherently right or wrong. This view can lead to amoralism, which denies the existence of objective morality outright. Honesty may also be challenged in various social systems with ideological stakes in self-preservation (many religious and national formations might be so characterized, but so too might be many family structures, and other small social collectives). In these cases honesty is frequently encouraged publicly, but may be retroactively forbidden and punished in an ex post facto An ex post facto law or retroactive law, is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences (or status) of actions committed or relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law. In reference to criminal law, it may criminalize actions that were legal when committed; or it may aggravate a crime by bringing it into a more severe manner if those invested in preserving the system perceive it as a threat. Depending on the social system, these breaches might be characterized as heresy Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma. It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one's religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion. The founder or leader of a heretical movement is called a, treason In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more serious acts of betrayal of one's sovereign or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife . A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor, or impoliteness Rudeness is the disrespect and failure to behave within the context of a society or a group of people's social laws or etiquette.These laws have already unspokenly been established as the essential boundaries of normally accepted behavior. To be unable or unwilling to align one's behavior with these laws known to the general population of what is. So ultimately, there are a great number of opinions about honesty. Even in moral systems which approve in general of honesty over dishonesty, some people think there are situations in which dishonesty may be preferable. Others would not define preferable behaviors as dishonest by reasoning that they are not intended to deceive others for personal gain, but the intent is more noble in character, for example sparing people of opinions that will upset them. Rather than dishonesty, that behavior is often viewed as self sacrifice - giving up one's voice for the happiness of others. But it can hardly be a universal approach to either determining honesty or morality. In many circumstances, with-holding one's opinions can legitimately be viewed as cowardly, dishonest and a betrayal to those who will be hurt, discriminated against and unfairly judged due to false beliefs that are left unchallenged. For this reason, many people insist that an objective approach to the truth is a necessary component of honesty as opposed to an ideological or idealistic approach.
Psychology
Two theories of honesty exist.[2] First, the ‘‘Will’’ hypothesis in which honesty comes from the active resistance of temptation and links to the controlled cognitive processes that enable delay in regard to reward. Second, the ‘‘Grace’’ hypothesis in which honesty comes from the absence of temptation and links to research upon the presence or absence of automatic processes in determining behavior. Most people tend to favor the Will hypothesis.[2] However, functional imaging As opposed to structural imaging, functional imaging centers on revealing physiological activities within a certain tissue or organ by employing medical image modalities that very often use tracers or probe [disambiguation needed]s to reflect spatial distribution of them within the body. These tracers often are proportional to some chemical and reaction time Reaction time is the elapsed time between the presentation of a sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response. RT is often used in experimental psychology to measure the duration of mental operations, an area of research known as mental chronometry. In psychometric psychology it is considered to be an index of speed of processing. That research supports the latter hypothesis since individuals who are honest in a situation in which they can lie showed no sign of engaging additional controlled cognitive processes.[2]
References
- ^ "Oxford English Dictionary honesty". http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107669?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=honesty&first=1&max_to_show=10. Retrieved 2010-01-12.
- ^ a b c Greene JD, Paxton JM. (2009). Patterns of neural activity associated with honest and dishonest moral decisions. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 106:12506–12511 PMID 19622733 doi A digital object identifier is a character string used to uniquely identify an electronic document or other object. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location and other metadata:10.1073/pnas.0900152106
Categories: Deception Categories: Core issues in ethics | Injustice | Public relations terminology | Human behavior | Risk
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