# Virtues related to honesty

*Status: musings. I wanted to write up a more fleshed-out and rigorous version of this, but realistically wasn't likely to every get around to it, so here's the half-baked version.*

Related posts: [Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases-1), [Deep honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/szn26nTwJDBkhn8ka/deep-honesty)

## What I mean by 'honesty'

There are nuances to this, but I think a good summary is 'Not intentionally communicating false information'.

This is the only one here that I follow near-absolutely and see as an important standard that people can reasonably be expected to follow in most situations. Everything else here I'd see as either supererogatory, or good-on-balance but with serious tradeoffs that one can reasonably choose to sometimes not make, or good in some circumstances but not appropriate in others, or good in moderation but not in excess.

## Forthrightness

...or perhaps frankness?

I was originally inspired to write this up due to a conversation in which I wanted to emphasize the distinction between honesty and forthrightness: where honesty is about not giving false information, what I mean by forthrightness is a tendency not to hold back relevant true information.

Being forthright enables people to justly assume that if you haven't spoken out against something you're likely okay with it, that if you haven't expressed an interest in something you're likely not interested in it, and so on.

Personally, I follow a policy of near-absolute honesty, but am not particularly forthright; I think it's good not to hold back relevant true information without a good reason, but good reasons are not all that uncommon.

## Circumspection

I'd describe circumspection as the virtue of holding back information when there *is* a good reason to do so; the counterpart to forthrightness..

## Tact

I don't have as confident a concise description of what I think of tact as meaning, but my best attempt would be something like... recognizing that whatever you say isn't just a transfer of information, it's also a [speech act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act), and avoiding speech acts that would cause problems.

It seems particularly easy for this to run counter to some of the other virtues here described, especially forthrightness and deep honesty, but it's certainly *possible* to have both at once.

## 'Accurate signalling'?

I don't have a good term for this one, but I think there's a concept related to honesty wherein one attempts to give accurate signals even when not explicitly communicating.

Perhaps, for example, there's reason not to, say, wear a suit, if there are widely understood assumptions about suit-wearers that are broadly true and reasonable (and that you're therefore not deliberately challenging) but that are not true of you - you'd be giving the wrong impression.

I don't know of anyone who takes this idea very seriously. I don't think I'd even endorse taking it very seriously. But I also don't know anyone who's mentioned giving it any thought at all, and I do think it bears some consideration.

## [Deep honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/szn26nTwJDBkhn8ka/deep-honesty)

The main point of this post as originally conceived was to frame a description of this concept, which I didn't have a term for at the time. But before I got around to attempting to write this up, Aletheophile did a much more thorough job of describing a very similar idea, so I'll just refer you to that post.

(Although maybe I'm making a [conceptual rounding error](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FGHKwEGKCfDzcxZuj/conceptual-rounding-errors) here and the version I had in mind was slightly but significantly different, in which case I might ought actually write it.)

## 'Proactive honesty'

Even when committed to not *intentionally* communicating false information, you can still be misunderstood. In some situations you can predict in advance that misunderstanding is likely, and I would say that it would be dishonest to take advantage of that and deliberately be misunderstood, but it's not dishonest to just shrug and decide it's not worth clearing up the misunderstanding.

One might then consider the virtue that I'd dub proactive honesty, for lack of a better term: not just *not deliberately* giving false information, but *deliberately not* giving false information; going out of one's way to not be misunderstood.

## [Meta-honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/)

Again, I refer you to a previous post that describes this more thoroughly than I could.