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Honesty or truthfulness is a facet of moral character that connotes positive and virtue attributes such as integrity, , straightforwardness (including straightforwardness of conduct: Good faith), along with the absence of lying, cheating, theft, etc. Honesty also involves being trustworthy, Loyalty, , and Sincerity.
A reputation for honesty is denoted by terms like Reputation and trustworthiness. Honesty about one's future conduct, loyalties, or commitments is called accountability, reliability, dependability, or conscientiousness.
Someone who goes out of their way to tell possibly unwelcome truths extends honesty into the region of candor or frankness. The Cynics engaged in a challenging sort of frankness like this called Parrhesia.
William Shakespeare described honesty as an attribute people leave behind when he wrote that "no legacy is so rich as honesty" in act 3, scene 5 of "All's Well that Ends Well."William Shakespeare. All's Well That Ends Well MIT Shakespeare.
Tolstoy thought that honesty was revolutionary: “No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity.... it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ("Live Not By Lies," 1974) and Václav Havel ( The Power of the Powerless, 1978) agreed. Havel wrote:
The 18th century enlightenment philosopher William Wollaston argued that all religion ultimately reduces to ethics and all ethics reduces to honesty ( The Religion of Nature Delineated, 1722). “Every intelligent, active, and free being should so behave himself, as by no act to contradict truth; ...treat every thing as being what it is.” All else would follow from that.
Immanuel Kant made the duty of honesty a core example of Kantian ethics.
Others noted, however, that "too much honesty might be seen as undisciplined openness". For example, individuals may be Perception as being "too honest" if they honestly express the negative of others, either without having been asked their opinion, or having been asked in a circumstance where the response would be trivial. This concern manifests in political correctness, with individuals refraining from expressing their true opinions due to a general societal condemnation of such views. Research also found that honesty can lead to interpersonal harm because people avoid information about how their honest behavior affects others.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines honesty as "the quality of being honest." Honest is, in turn, defined as "Free of deceit; truthful and sincere...Morally correct or virtuous...(attributive) Fairly earned, especially through hard work...(of an action) done with good intentions even if unsuccessful or misguided...(attributive) Simple, unpretentious, and unsophisticated.
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