The virtue of honesty, nazis at the door, and Huck Finn cases

Abstract

I begin by outlining some of the central conceptual features of the virtue of honesty. But the real focus of the paper is on seeing how my account of honesty can handle certain challenging cases. One case is the "Nazi at the door" example. The other is Mark Twain's Huck Finn, who seemed to think that what he was doing in helping Jim was morally wrong, and yet we would be reticent to count it as a case of failing to be honest. I argue that my proposed account of honesty can recommend plausible ways to think about both of these famous cases.

Keywords

• honesty
• huck finn
• lying
• cheating
• stealing
• virtue
• character
• misleading