Hierarchy and Honesty
by Joseph Rowlands

One interpretation of the hierarchical theory of knowledge suggests that you arrive at the principle of honesty through more fundamental ideas. It might include life as the standard of morality, man's need for principles, and rationality as the primary virtue. From there, you can see honesty as a kind of clarification of rationality, or an aspect of it. Where rationality emphasizes a need to focus on reality, one of the ways in which this is practiced is by avoiding constructing a false picture of reality. Honesty can be understood in this light.

Part of the hierarchical theory suggests that the way to validate honesty, or defend it in argument, is to refer to these more fundamental ideas and show how honesty stems from them. One problem with this view is that it creates the impression that honesty is somehow derived, or deduced, from these more basic premises.

Let's take a different view, and see the principle(s) of honesty as a kind of integration. This is more of an inductive approach, and is more compatible with a hierarchy that is founded on perception and induction than on axioms and deduction.

Take one aspect of honesty, which is the problem of acting on false information. Without needing to bring in the virtue of rationality, we could look at concrete examples of dishonesty. We could see that when you lie to yourself about your ability to drive while drunk, you get into accidents. When you lie to yourself about the state of your relationship, you find it ending abruptly. When you lie to yourself about whether you can afford to buy an expensive house, you end up going bankrupt and losing it.

But we also see what happens when you lie to other people. When you tell someone the check is in the mail, and he acts accordingly, he'll end up suffering negative consequences. When you lie to an employer about whether you'll have your part of the project done on time, he make plans that inevitably fail and hurts the profitability of the company. If you tell a friend that a girl really likes him, when she doesn't like him at all, he'll get rejected or worse.

From all of these examples, and many more, it's easy to integrate a single element. We can formulate a principle that says when you act on false information, it leads to failure and harm. When you lie to yourself, you're just hurting yourself. When you lie to others, they get hurt and they will rightly blame you for it.

We can also look at examples where you lie in order to get something from someone. Even when you manage to get what you were trying to get, you create a permanent problem. The victims of your lies will take it out on you if they find out that you lied to them, and especially if they find out the reason you lied to them. From that point on, you have a risk that they will find out that you lied to them. And in order to limit that risk, you may have to continue telling lies to support the first one and continue to obscure the truth. The danger of being found out will constantly be there, waiting for the right circumstance.

This can be seen easily from examples. We don't need to deduce this, or derive it from wider principles. Laymen with no interest in philosophy recognize that when they lie, they take on a burden to try to maintain the lie, or suffer the consequences. It is easily observed. Television programs and movies have made extensive use of this idea to create tense or comedic situations.

So we can formulate a second principle here, which is that when you lie to others, you make an enemy of the truth. This can be stated in different ways, but the essence is the same. To achieve a value through deceit usually requires the deceit to continue, which means the truth will always be a threat to you.

Another principle can be put into a positive form. Maybe you're in a relationship and you realize after telling the truth at some point that you actually gained.   Maybe you told her that you didn't really enjoy the meal she always prepares. Instead of ending the relationship, she promised not to make it anymore. She might have admitted that she made it because she thought you liked it.

In this case, the truth actually benefitted you. By communicating important information to her, she was able to better understand the consequences of her actions and act accordingly. If she cares about you, then knowing what you value or don't value allows her to act in a way to promote your values as well as her own.

With this case, and many others, you might realize the importance of communicating the truth. You might not think of this as being about honesty, since honesty is usually thought of in negative terms like don't lie. But it is a policy that recognizes the value in the truth, and the value in making sure people recognize the truth.

So we can abstract from specific situations and come up with a few broad principles. Acting on false information leads to bad results. When you lie to others in the pursuit of values, you create a lingering threat from the truth. And the truth is actually beneficial to your life.

More principles can be discovered, of course. These are just three significant ones. You could have other principles, like that maintaining lies requires effort, concentration, and leads to mental strain as you try to prevent the falsehoods from being integrated with your own understanding of the world, but also attempt to track all of the falsehoods and where they diverge.

And one could generalize even further from them and say that any attempt at faking reality will lead to negative consequences. Not only will acting on falsehoods lead to trouble, but so does telling other people falsehoods, and so does letting people work under false pretenses.

The point, though, is that these principles are derived inductively from different examples. They are not deduced from more fundamental ideas (meaning closer to the axioms). Once inductively derived, you can see how these principles of honesty connect to rationality. In fact, they go further than rationality. Honesty isn't just a means of being rational. It is a focus on the truth in your own life, and in your dealings with other people.

What does this say about hierarchical knowledge? It suggests that our ideas are inductively derived from simpler, and more concrete, data. This is in opposition to the idea that they are applications of wider principles. Honestly is not an application of the wider principle of rationality or even life as the standard of value. It is an integration of facts and ideas that can be seen in relation to life as the standard.

Once the principle is formulated, it explains all of the concretes. This creates the impression that the principle comes first and our understanding of the concretes comes from the principle. But in fact, the concretes came first, and we already recognized the costs of dealing with lies, both personally and while interacting with others. The principle abstracted that detail and generalized it. We can then go in and provide a justification for why the generalization is expected to be true. But all of that comes afterwards.

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