Website owner:  James Miller

Honesty

   Why is honesty the best policy?

      -  the importance of honesty lies in the value of trust.  It 
          is of great value to us if others feel they can trust 
          us, depend on us, believe what we say.  It is much to 
          our disadvantage if others feel we cannot be trusted or 
          depended upon.  There are a multitude of ways in which 
          one can be dishonest and if we do dishonest things other 
          people realize very quickly that we cannot be trusted.


   Types of dishonesty.

      - lying       
      - not keeping one's word    
      - cheating     
      - pretense    
      - deceiving    
      - stealing


   Types of honesty. 

      - always speaking the truth to the best of our ability.  If 
          we are biased on some matter and present a case in a 
          biased way we are not being honest.  Honesty calls for 
          an unbiased, fair representation of facts.  Thus honesty 
          is closely related to objectiveness, impartiality, 
          justness and fairness.  If we are asked a question and 
          we don't know the answer we must say we don't know.  If 
          we pretend to know when we don't we are not being 
          honest.  When we state facts to someone, honesty calls 
          for conscientiously attempting to keep our 
          representation of the facts as accurate as possible.

      - always doing what we say we will do

   Dec 1989