Prindle Institute
Is Honesty Really the Best Policy?Andy: From my home office, on behalf of the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, this is Getting Ethics to Work, the podcast that tackles the trickier moral dilemmas that you might face in the workplace. I'm your host and Prindle Institute Director, Andy Cullison. And with me is our producer, Kate Berry.Kate: Hello. For each episode of Getting Ethics to Work, we discuss a case or issue and unpack the difficult and often hidden ethical tensions that can make it hard to get along with others at work. And by the way, case is just an ethicist word for story.Andy: Now, before we get started, I want to remind everyone that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal expertise, but as an ethicist, I can help you get out of that corner that your nosy coworker just backed you into.Kate: And if you like what you've been hearing and want to help us out, the best thing you can do is recommend the show to a friend or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. I hope you'll consider doing that.Andy: So Kate, what's the case today?Kate: Well, it's not a very complicated case, but I do think it's one that pretty much everyone has had happen to them. So we've got Elisa, and her boss Steven comes up to her and asks if her friend and coworker, Cara, is pregnant. Elisa knows that Cara is pregnant, but she feels trapped. If she says yes, she's betraying Cara's confidence. If she says no, she's lying to Steven. And if she tells Steven that he should really talk to Cara about this, then she's essentially telling him that yes, she is pregnant.Andy: Wow, this is tough. Okay. Let's get to work. So, yeah, I mean this could pop up all over the place in the workplace, right? Is someone sick? Is something going on at home? You know, is so-and-so looking for another job? All these sorts of things where, if the answer is no, you might as well just say no. And I think the person asking me the question knows that's the case. They know they're going to get it out of me, no matter what.Kate: Right.Andy: And so it seems like the only option here is to lie and say no. Give the answer away in some way. If I say yes, I give the answer away. If I say, “Oh, I don't know why don't you talk to them?” Kate: Right. That feigning ignorance doesn't really work because I think the reason that the Stevens of the world ask the Andys or the Elisas of the world is because they know you have a relationship with the person that they're asking about. Right? They ask someone who is good friends, or really seems to know that person better. That's why you're the person they're asking in the first place. So to say, “Oh, I have no idea” does not seem very credible.Andy: Right. And that's the sense in which they've backed you into the corner. Right? They've almost exploited the friendship to put you in this uncomfortable position.Kate: So, is there a non-lying option that doesn't give away that Cara's pregnant? Is there something Elisa could say that wouldn't just automatically reveal that, yes, Cara is going to have a baby?Andy: You know, it's a really good question. There's at least one time in my past where I've tried, like, a non-lying option in this situation. And basically, Igive a long-winded answer that sort of goes like this. I acknowledge the awkwardness of the situation, right? I just say, “Hey, look, you've just asked me an interestingly private question about a friend. And here's the awkward position you've put me in.” I'll just use pregnancy as an example, “I've been in these situations before. So I've always just told myself, I'm going to just do what I'm doing right now, which is identify this as a kind of question that I rather you not have asked me. And whether the answer is yes or no, I'm not giving you the information.” Kate: Can I ask how that went? What was the rest of the conversation like?Andy: Their eyes glazed over about 20 seconds into my long-winded “identify the awkwardness.” So I'm not exactly sure how it panned out, actually.Kate: Well, I really… I respect that, but I feel like you have to have a certain social confidence to say something like that. And also if you're saying it to a boss or coworker that you need to feel really secure in your job to do that sort of pointing out, like, “you have committed the social faux pas. You've put me in a bad position. Like, why are you mining for information from me?”Andy: Right, right. No, that's right. And I can tell you, I did that in a situation where I wasn't feeling particularly vulnerable. I didn't think the person in question had any significant power over me, that kind of stuff. So that's a much easier answer to give in the kind of situation I was in. So, there might be a shorter, non-accusatory way, which is just to acknowledge that this is the sort of thing that you don't want to be a source of information about, whether the answer is yes or no. Right? Because you just say, “Look, I don't want to be a source of information on this. If the answer is yes, they might want it to be private. If the answer is no, they might want it to be private. I just don't know what they would want. And if you want this information, you've got to go straight to them.”Kate: Yeah, I think that's a good way to deal with a pretty uncomfortable situation.Andy: That might be a non-lying kind of way. Kate: So Andy, as an ethicist, how bad is the lying option? How bad is it for Elisa to say, “Nope, she's not pregnant.”Andy: Well, philosophers have set the bar pretty high for lying. Immanuel Kant is very famous for being like, “No, absolutely not. You can't ever tell a lie. Telling a lie always disrespects the rationality of the person and blah, blah, blah. Never do it.”Kate: Oh. That's exhausting.Andy: Yeah, it is. But, I mean, philosophers have written about this. There are plausible views about the ethics of lying that, you know, are going to say, “It's not always bad or wrong to lie,” I think especially when there are competing values in play.Kate: Well, I mean, Kant's great. He's a gold standard of philosophy, but there are other philosophers, right? Or other kinds of ethical systems?Andy: Oh, sure. Loads of them. One simple example is some ethicists think that right and wrong action is just doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. That's a simple way to state it and the technical term for those folks would be something like “act utilitarians.”Kate: They may think it's totally fine for Elisa to cover for or lie for Cara, as long as it ends up doing the most good for the most number of people?Andy: Yeah. They say it would depend on that. So they'd say, “Look, is there going to be more overall good that comes from telling Steve this thing? Or is there going to be more overall good from protecting Cara's privacy?” There are versions of utilitarianism. So some ethicists think that we shouldn't worry about each individual action. Some of them think, like, “Look, we ought to adhere to certain rules that, if we all follow them, they tend to yield the greatest amount of good for people over time. So, don't worry about each individual action, just pick a set of rules, stick to them. Don't deviate from them except in maybe rare circumstances.” And so, what they might say is, you know, “Truth is important and it would be a disaster if people went around lying all the time. So, there needs to be a strong culture of the idea that lying is unacceptable, and we should adhere to a very strict rule of not lying.” But maybe they have a rule that kind of admits of exceptions. Right? Some rule utilitarians might think this is one of those cases.Kate: That kind of makes me think of, I think it's called “social contract theory,” that it's better for everybody if we all follow the rule, that it just creates a better environment altogether.Andy: Yeah, that's a good example. So yeah, so social contract theorists think that ethics is a matter of going along with a certain set of rules, like rules of a game, but these rules are things that don't ever get explicitly stated. The rules are binding on us because we've all implicitly agreed to follow these rules. Right? And so they might say, very similar to the rule of utilitarian, they might say, “Look, we all know this is one of those things that we've all implicitly agreed to, which is that we should, in almost all cases, be honest with each other.” Now, one thing they might say though is, in this case, they might say, you know, “We were saying in most cases. We didn’t think about cases, like, you know, when the rules cropped up, we didn't think about cases like Steve basically putting Elisa in this weird position where her only option is to lie or protect privacy.” And they'd be like, “That was not part of the implicit rules, like, we didn't implicitly agree to anything like that. There is no playbook for this that we've implicitly agreed to.” And so a social contract theorist might say, “Yeah, in this case, this is a weird case that wasn't ever really considered when we came up with the implicit rules of the game as a society.”Kate: So, we've heard from Kant, and two kinds of utilitarians and social contract theorists, but are there other ways that we could think about this problem of lying?Andy: Oh yeah. There's an approach to ethics that thinks that really what ethics is, it's fundamentally grounded in certain sets of rights that we have. And someone from this kind of tradition might look at this case and say, “Well, yeah. I mean, I guess in a sense maybe there's some kind of right to be dealt with honestly. But we also think there's this thing, a right to privacy, and you know, but sometimes these rights conflict.” And if this really is a forced choice between, you know, one person's right to be dealt with honestly and another person's right to privacy, you know, a rights theorists (and they might disagree on this case), but at least some of them might say because Steven is forcing Elisa into a position where she can't protect Cara's privacy without lying, then maybe he's the one who loses the right, in this case, to be dealt with honestly. At least in this particular case, I mean, it's not like Elisa gets to lie to him about anything she wants from here until the end of the time, but in this particular case. And then, I mean, there's another ethics tradition called “care ethics,” which roughly thinks that our ethics, morality need to focus on A) the nature of our relationships between people, because that can affect what's right and wrong and prioritizing duties of care. Now, there's some disagreement about what care ethics is. If I had to pick a camp that I'm in, I like to think of care ethics as a kind of, particular kind of virtue ethics, where what care ethicists have zeroed in on is an interesting and novel way to talk about a particular kind of virtue, like a virtue of care. A common definition of care that some care ethicists latch onto is this. They say it's, “getting people the things they need that they can not get themselves.” And they'll distinguish “care” from something called “service” by noting that it's service if you get people the things they need that they can get themselves. Right? So, it's care if you're getting them something they need that they can't get themselves. It's mere service if you're getting people things they need that they could do on their own. And then they go a little deeper, at least some care ethicists do, that there are certain features. That if someone really is exemplifying the virtue of care that they'll exemplify in certain cases. So, there's at least five of them. You've got to be attentive or aware of needs. So, you've got to be sort of constantly on the lookout for needs. It's a failing if you lack the attentiveness. You have to be willing to help people with their needs. You have to be competent. I mean, you shouldn't be trying to care for needs that you have no business caring for. Right?Kate: So, I won't be, like, doing dental surgery?Andy: Exactly. Unless your dentist.Kate: I'm not.Andy: But there's also, we talked about relationships. There's this idea that someone who's exemplifying this virtue will be sensitive to the ways in which differences in relationships can affect what is or is not appropriate when thinking about care. So you might call this a kind of “relational awareness.” So, you know, sometimes the relationship in question determines what's appropriate and whether it's an appropriate instance of care. And that's also something, you know, there are all sorts of ways in which you could do something that's caring, but it might be an abuse in some way. Like a doctor giving someone a treatment that they've vehemently said they do not want. Right? They might need the treatment, the doctor might know they need the treatment, but maybe there's something abusive about the care relationship if they go ahead and do it anyway. So, that's a kind of lay of the land of what the virtue of care might involve.Kate: Okay, Andy. So, if someone embraced a care ethics approach, what would they think of this problem between Elisa, Steven, and Cara?Andy: There's so many moving parts to care ethics that I could imagine care ethicists even coming to disagree. But I can at least see one way in which a care ethicist might look at this and say, you know, “Elisa might not be doing so bad by not giving up information about Cara to Steve.” I mean, she was attentive to the need. She's attentive to Cara's need for privacy, you know, looking at Cara's need versus Steven's need. One, maybe he doesn't need it as much. And he's perfectly capable of doing it himself. He could go ask Elisa if he really wanted to know. Right? So it's like, you know, it's care, in the case ... If Cara needs privacy, and this is a case where she can't protect it herself, right, she might be caring for Cara by protecting her privacy, but not really doing anything wrong by Steve, because this is something that he could go get himself if he really wanted to. “You go develop you go develop that relationship with Cara and get it yourself.” And the relationship between Elisa and Cara seems to matter here, right? I'm assuming they're friends. If Elisa knows this very private bit of information, I'm reading it into the case, that there's some kind of relationship there where a secret has been given. And, you know, an important part of being friends is being a secret keeper, and if Elisa is in a situation where she's forced to either give up the secret or tell a lie to someone who doesn't really have a right to this information, you know, then maybe a care ethicist would say it's not so bad. You know, that's one of the overlooked values of privacy here that I think people often don't think about when they think about the value of privacy. It's that our secrets can function as a kind of “social currency” to signal important information to people about the nature of your friendship.Kate: Yeah. I mean, if you tell someone a secret, you've entrusted them with something pretty precious.Andy: Exactly. Right? And, you know, I mean, think about all the times that you've been told a secret. Don't you see how that communicates that like, “Whoa, I must be a pretty important friend to this person if they're entrusting me with this.”Kate: Yeah.Andy: There's value there that I think we need to be careful not to overlook.Kate: So all of these ethical systems leave at least some room for lying. Why do you think it is that we have such a problem with it? Andy: I think part of our issue with lying is our most vivid examples of it are clearly cases where it's all about personal gain, right? People are always lying to someone else for their own benefit. And so it's that “for your own benefit” aspect of the lying that I think is almost always salient and before our mind, but, you know, this is a case where there are competing values at stake. If Elisa were to lie, she wouldn't be doing it just to protect itself, she'd be doing it in a space of competing moral values. And I can think of at least two. One, is there's a privacy right. When we say people have a right to privacy, there's a technical notion of privacy here, which we call “informational privacy,” which is roughly saying that people have a right to control what information is known about them. That's the idea.Kate: And that seems particularly true of pregnant women.Andy: Exactly, right? So there's a strong reason to think that Cara has a pretty stringent right to informational privacy. That is something known about her, what can be known about her and who gets to know it.Kate: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Andy: And so if you think there's that privacy right, which I'm inclined to think there is, then, you know, you're in a situation where you're maybe forced between a choice between just quickly saying, “No, no, she's not pregnant.” Or violating her privacy because it does seem like the case is set up that all the other options result in something being known about Cara that she didn't want to be known.Kate: Right.Andy: You might also think that there are duties of friendship that are in play here as well. And this is connected to privacy, but I think there's more to it. Kate: And we did an episode a while ago called Friendships at Work, where we talked about being friends with your coworkers.Andy: And in that episode, we talked about some features of friendship that we thought were important. And one of the things that we talked about is that when you're friends with someone, it seems like you've made a commitment or a promise to align your interests with theirs in some way. Or to be an ally to whatever their interests are. And so, in this case, Cara might have an interest in not having her pregnancy widely talked about or not having it be disclosed to certain persons. And so you might have this beyond just generic rights to privacy that everyone might have. You might think Elisa has an extra special reason to protect this information on behalf of Cara because of that duty of friendship. And you might think that friends are entitled to act in ways that we think are perfectly appropriate for that person to act. So let's just do a little quick thought experiment. Kate, what do you think about this? If Cara were asked point blank by Steven, “Hey Cara, are you pregnant?” We wouldn't have any qualms with her saying, “No, Steve, what are you talking about?”Kate: Right.Andy: Even if it were true, right?Kate: Yeah.Andy: So if we think it'd be totally fine for Cara to be like, “No, what are you talking about?” Then as a friend aligned with Cara's interest, you might think that's a reason to think that Elisa could carry on as if she were Cara, because, you know, she's aligning herself with Cara in some way.Kate: Yeah. That makes sense to me. So if Elisa were to do that, if she were to say, “No, Steve, what are you talking about? She's not pregnant.” Would you consider her dishonest in that situation?Andy: You know, this is an interesting question too. And it has to do with, you know, what the virtue of honesty even is. Right now it's become a bit of a hot topic to just talk about what the heck is honesty. Is it dishonest for Elisa to do this? Just to say no, like, give a flat-footed no. Is that when you look at the virtues, most virtues have a what I'll call a quote unquote, “what you would have first thought the definition of that virtue is.” But it ends up not standing up to much scrutiny. So for example, people will often say the virtue of courage is never being afraid. That doesn't sound like a terrible approximation of how you might define courage. But if you're just reflective for a moment, most real examples of courage involve people being very afraid, right? Like, you know, soldiers who jump on the grenade, it's not like the soldier isn't afraid. The soldier's probably terrified. And so, what philosophers have done is they've zeroed in on things that are close to that definition, but more nuanced. Like with courage, they'll say things like courage is not letting your fear master you in some way or not letting your fear lead you to do bad things, or knowing which things are worth being afraid of and which things are not worth being afraid of. Kind of you know when to stand and you know when to run. Right?Kate: Yeah, yeah.Andy: And so I sort of wonder if honesty might not be kind of like that, right? If someone lied to the terrorists about where the armory was, because they were going to go unload the armory and do terrible things, would we call them a dishonest person if in that moment they lied?Kate: No, it's probably showing judgment, right?Andy: Yeah. There's a kind of discretion about the truth that is being displayed here. It seems to me like there might be something similar going on with the virtue of honesty. Just like in the case of courage, there's a kind of discernment or wisdom about knowing when to fear something and knowing when not to fear something. You might think honesty is like that. That you're sort of an appropriate steward or honorer of the truth and honesty comes from the word honor. Where in almost all circumstances, the honest person would let the truth come to light because in almost all circumstances it's appropriate. But there might be a rare set of circumstances in which that's not appropriate and a good steward of the truth wouldn't let the truth come to light in the cases where the truth might be mishandled by terrorists or nosy bosses.?Kate: (laughs)?Andy: That's just my first thought on this, but I, you know, I think there's likely something a little bit more nuanced about what the virtue of honesty even is, similar to where there's something nuanced about what the virtue of courage is.Kate: That still seems to be doing some philosopher-y dodging. Do you think that she's being honest or dishonest?Andy: It depends. I'm inclined to think that she's not a dishonest person if she were to lie in a situation like this. I suspect the virtue of honesty is a little bit more complicated than always telling the truth. Just like I think the virtue of courage is more complicated than never being afraid, ever. How we work that out, there's still work to be done there, but I suspect this is not a case of being a dishonest person.Kate: So, it sounds like for multiple reasons, Elisa and those of us who get asked inappropriate questions about our friends can feel pretty good about knowingly misdirecting and protecting our friends' privacy.Andy: And maybe the only philosopher you would've upset is Immanuel Kant. Thanks so much for joining us as we try to Get Ethics to Work. I'm Andy CullisonKate: And I'm Kate Berry. If you have a question about business ethics you'd like answered on the podcast. Email me at katherineberry@depauw.edu. And maybe we'll talk through your issue on the air.Andy: We hope you are staying safe and healthy in this crisis. We also hope you can take some of what we discussed here and get it to work.Kate: If you want to learn more about what we talked about on the show today, check out our show notes page at getethicstowork. That's all one word, getethicstowork. Remember to subscribe to get new episodes of the show wherever you get your podcasts. But regardless of where you subscribe, please be sure to rate us on Apple Podcasts. It is still the best place for us to meet new listeners. Getting Ethics to Work is hosted by the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. Our logo was created by SmallBox. Our music is by Blue Dot Sessions and can be found online at sessions.blue. Our show is made possible with the generous support of DePauw alumni, friends of the Prindle Institute, and you, the listeners. Thank you for your support. The views expressed here are the opinions of the individual speakers alone. They do not represent the position of DePauw University or the Prindle Institute for Ethics. ................
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