Few paragraphs from the chapter ' Defining Honesty '

DEFINING HONESTY

Do you know what is HONESTY? You may be thinking what a stupid question I am asking. And now you might be smiling and thinking “knowing that it is a stupid question, still I asked it!”

OK, I surrender and agree that you know what is honesty. Dear friend please educate me and tell what is honesty.

Let me guess your answer!

You said that speaking TRUTH is honesty. Before you make me agree with this, please consider the following:

• Doctor knows that a patient has cancer but he also knows that telling him this can kill him immediately as he is also a heart patient. Is this honesty to tell truth to the patient?
• Your two friends have some misunderstanding. One friend speaks a lot of bad about the other in emotional outburst to you. You know that he still has good feelings and want to be friendly with the other friend. Should you share all of his uttering, truthfully with other friend?

What you say now? I know, you will say that, saying truth in all circumstances is not Honesty. Better you surrender and agree that TRUTH is not same as HONESTY.

You can give more answers like ‘Not Stealing’, ‘Not taking favours’, Loyalty, ‘non-selfishness’, ‘Lawfulness’ is honesty but in each of the cases I can give you examples, which prove that any of these is not an honest act in all circumstances.

Inspite of this if you don’t have any doubt as to what is HONESTY, you may skip this chapter, but if you want to know a definition, which can tell clearly, and in all situations, whether the act is HONEST or not, better carry on here.

And don’t worry. Even I was thinking that I know very well about honesty. When I started to write this book, I found that there is no single definition of honesty which fits everywhere. Without clear definition of honesty/dishonesty, how can we examine it?

So, it is essential to derive a definition of HONESTY.

Let us start by having a look at what the dictionary says about honesty.

Wikipedia gives the following definition for Honesty -

“Honesty refers to a facet of moral character and connotes positive and virtuous attributes such as integrity, truthfulness, and straightforwardness, including straightforwardness of conduct, along with the absence of lying, cheating, theft, etc. Furthermore, honesty means being trustworthy, loyal, fair, and sincere.”

Another dictionary(The Free Dictionary) on internet gives the following definition -

“1. Marked by or displaying integrity; upright: an honest lawyer.

2. Not deceptive or fraudulent; genuine: honest weight.

3. Equitable; fair: honest wages for an honest day's work.

4.

a. Characterized by truth; not false: honest reporting.

b. Sincere; frank: an honest critique.

5.

a. Of good repute; respectable.

b. Without affectation; plain: honest folk.

6. Virtuous; chaste.”

So we get a group of words (fair, truth, absence of deception, Legal, non stealing, candid, straightforwardness etc.) collectively indicating honesty. However, none of the single word can define honesty in all circumstances. Saying the truth may sometime be a dishonest act. In some cases stealing or even murder (e.g murder of a terrorist) can be an honest act. Many acts are not illegal, but they are dishonest acts. And in some situations, even an illegal act can be an honest act (i.e jumping red light while taking emergency patient to hospital)

So it becomes clear that the intent of the act is more important than the act itself.

How can we define the intention as honest or dishonest?

Little drilling on this issue brings us to a concept of larger interest versus narrow interest. Any act with the intention of narrow interest and ignoring the outcome on others concerned can be termed as dishonest. Being totally self centered brings us to dishonesty. Being concerned of the interest of others also in any act of us brings us to honesty. Let us discuss it in more detail.

In all acts done by human being, the affected parties can be himself (let us call this ME), directly concerned person (let us call this YOU) and all others (such as organisation, city, nation, humanity, environment) who may be indirectly affected (let us call them OTHERS). As a result of the act, these parties may have GAIN or LOSS. The GAIN or LOSS may be in money terms, in kind or in terms of emotions. Let us see it with some examples of acts.

A labourer works for a day in constructing a house. At the end of the day, he gets a fair wage for it. The wage is a GAIN for him. Owner also gets progress in construction which has more value for him than the wage given by him. So he also GAINs. Labourer spends the earned money in purchasing goods for himself, thus circulation of money takes place in the country and economy progresses. Thus whole country also GAINs.

So this act results in MY GAIN YOUR GAIN OTHERS GAIN.

Most of economic activities of mankind involve earning by one and spending by another. This is done by exchange of some service or product. As long as there is fairness in this transaction, both the parties GAIN from it, and others concerned indirectly also gain indirectly due to rotation of the economic wheel.

Let us now see what happens when someone steals money belonging to another person. In this case one GAINs, another has LOSS. What about the others? As a result of this activity, the trust in society reduces and if this happens in large scale it will lead to anarchy. With that whole country will have LOSS. Thus the act of stealing will result in MY GAIN YOUR LOSS OTHERS LOSS.

So we see that normally an honest act results in GAIN for for ALL concerned and a dishonest act will result in GAIN for ME and LOSS for YOU and OTHERS.

Thus we have derived a definition of an honest act as an act - - -