For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about a groundbreaking initiative exploring the complex landscape of honesty.
Until the last few years, most academic studies touching on the nature of honesty were actually focused on variations of its opposite: on lying, cheating, or deception. Recent studies have shifted the focus to the virtue of honesty, but have yet to capture robustly what honesty is, how common it is, and how it develops and functions in relationships, groups, organizations and institutions.
A new three-year project, funded with $4.4 million from the John Templeton Foundation, aims to significantly advance the science and philosophy of honesty. Led by Christian Miller, the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, The Honesty Project will involve key researchers from Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon as well as more than a dozen subgrantees — each receiving between $40,000 and $200,000 in funding —investigating aspects of the philosophy and science of honesty. The collective goal of the project is to examine honesty and its moral and intellectual consequences.