The Virtue of Honesty

Honesty “is the refusal to fake reality—i.e., to pretend that facts are other than they are.” It can be described as the flip side of rationality.

Author’s note: The following is a section on the virtue of honesty from chapter 6 of my book Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Richmond: Glen Allen Press, 2002). The book is an introduction to Ayn Rand’s morality of rational egoism.

Honesty “is the refusal to fake reality—i.e., to pretend that facts are other than …