Mark Labberton: Welcome to Conversing. It’s a particular honour today to have Dr. Christian Miller, the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, as our guest on Conversing. He’s the author of 130 articles as well as Moral Psychology, which he published in 2021, and four books from Oxford University Press, including Moral Character: An Empirical Theory, Character and Moral Psychology, The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. I thought it was a fascinating thing, too, that he received a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to direct what was called simply the Honesty Project, which is one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. Christian Miller, welcome to Conversing. We’re so glad that you’re here.
Christian Miller: It’s great to be with you. I really look forward to our conversation.
Mark Labberton: You know, I’m a sort of pseudo-philosopher myself. Having been trained really in theology and literary critical theory means that I’ve overlapped in some philosophical conversations. And the beauty of your book, The Honesty Crisis, that we’re going to be discussing is that it is a philosophical treatment. I say that only with the pause that anyone doing philosophy or theology, for that matter, needs to often say to audiences. But that doesn’t mean it’s inaccessible. So it’s a very readable book, and it’s very thoughtful, and it’s raising issues that I think could not be more urgent or important for our day. So thank you for taking the care to do it and for the gift that the book is.
Why don’t you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your own work in general, and then we’ll come to this book.
Christian Miller: Sure, sure. I’d love to. So I’m a professor here at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I’ve been for the last twenty years. But I grew up in Florida, mostly. That’s where I became a Christian, where I first fell in love with philosophy in high school. Went off to Princeton, became a philosophy major there. PhD at Notre Dame, where I wrote a dissertation on the foundations of ethics and morality. And then I got hired at Wake Forest, and I’ve been there ever since.
And it’s been just a wonderful fit for me as a place of values teaching, as a place of values research. And I love both. I love to be in the classroom, engaging with students, talking about big questions and getting paid for it, which is an amazing job, amazing opportunity. And at the same time, having some time set aside to write and publish and think about these questions and get my ideas out there in the world. I love being here, and if all goes well, I’ll be here until the very end.
Mark Labberton: That’s really great. How wonderful. You and I both share a great affection and respect for Nathan Hatch, who’s been the longtime president at Wake Forest, now retired. Wake Forest has always felt inspirational to me, partly because of Nathan’s presence for so long and his extraordinary leadership.
Christian Miller: Couldn’t agree more. It was inspirational for me when he was here, and he still lives in the area, and we get together and do things. So that’s been one of the many blessings of being here at this school.
Mark Labberton: So given the dissertation that you wrote on the foundations of ethics and morality, what was it that stirred you to move in that specific part of the philosophical domain?
Christian Miller: Yeah, so originally I was just learning about philosophy, kind of being exposed to lots of different things. And then I think the reason ethics appealed to me is that it was both, on the one hand, very interesting and deep and profound, and there are lots of great questions to wrestle with, but it was also quite applicable and practical. There are certain parts of philosophy which would check one of those boxes, but not another box. So you can spend time doing metaphysics and some other areas where you’re very much heads in the cloud, not clear what the real-world relevance is. So I wanted something that was both. It would be, like, stimulating and challenging to think about, but also would make a difference in everyone’s life or real application. So that’s what I think drew me to ethics in particular.
I started, though, not with what we’re talking about today, the virtue and character. I started at the foundations, literally the foundations of the topic. Where does morality come from? Is it objective? Is it subjective or relative? Does it require God for it to exist or not? So I thought, you know, I better work through those questions and come to some kind of answer before I got into other topics in ethics. And I did that for the dissertation. I did that for several years when I was here at Wake Forest in the tenure track. And then I kind of said what I wanted to say and was getting restless, kind of looking around, wondering, you know, what else is out there? And I pivoted into the topic of virtue and character. That’s what I’ve really been working on for the last fifteen years.
Mark Labberton: Right. Now, this area of virtue and virtue thinking has been obviously part of the historical tradition of philosophy from the beginning. But at the same time, it feels to me, at least as an outsider formally to the philosophical work that’s being done these days, that there’s a kind of revival or strengthening or surge of interest in virtue. Where does that come from? And what is it really about? And just along the way, define virtue for us.
Christian Miller: Well, that’s a lot. That could be the rest of the episode right there. Let me take it in two stages: a little bit about the history and then what is virtue.
I think you’re right. Thinking about virtue and having that be central to ethics and morality, that was just assumed, say, in the ancient Greek period, also in other ancient periods, like in China. Then there’s a long, complex historical story I’m going to kind of gloss over. But especially in the Enlightenment period, this went by the wayside. Other ethical traditions rose to prominence. This would continue into the twentieth century. Views like Kant’s ethics and utilitarian thinking were really the contenders out there.
But then this revival you talked about happened, I think, really in the 1970s and in the ’80s, led by people like Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Slote—I mean, just Rosalind Hursthouse, Christine Swanton, just name after name after name. And then there’s also a kind of parallel in the Christian community, like Stanley Hauerwas and others doing the same kind of thing in more overtly Christian terms.
Why that happened then and what were the factors? I’m sure it’s overdetermined, or there are probably many factors, but I think one clear factor was a growing dissatisfaction with the existing options. We’ve been working on Kant’s view for a long time, and it was just not going anywhere. There were these kind of perennial problems. And we’ve been working on utilitarians for a long time, and it wasn’t going anywhere—these perennial problems. So people were casting around for an alternative. And it’s hard to come up with an ethical theory out of nothing, like invent one that’s never been discovered before, as if, you know, thousands of years of philosophers have missed it. But instead of having to invent one, what they did was rediscover one. There had been one all along here in the ancient tradition that had faded from prominence, but it had a lot to offer and needed to be restored and regenerated, maybe updated, maybe discard some of Aristotle’s claims, some of Plato’s claims, make them more contemporary, and get them on the menu of ethical theories today. And that actually happened. I mean, we went from this being not on the menu at all to it now being a legitimate contender to the alternatives I’ve already mentioned.
Now, what are we even talking about, though, when we’re talking about virtue and character and virtue ethics? Well, there’s no consensus. People have different definitions. People have different approaches. So I’m just going to give you a kind of standard position inspired by Aristotle. Doesn’t mean it’s correct, but I think people like MacIntyre would be proud of me for doing this.
So take virtue. A virtue is first and foremost part of your character. If you have it, if you possess it, if you’re a virtuous person, it resides in your character, in your psychology, when it comes to moral thinking. And it has a couple of features. It’s going to be something that leads you to behave a certain way. Well, it’s virtuous, it’s positive—leads you to behave well. Not a one-off, though: a pattern of behaviour across situations, a pattern of behaviour over time. You’re not Tuesday virtuous or Christmas virtuous. You’re virtuous, period, throughout time and across situations. That’s the outward-facing side of virtue.
But it stems from a certain kind of underlying motivation and psychology that gives rise to that behaviour. In other words, you can’t be virtuous just by acting well. It has to come from a good place. And in particular, we could use the language of heart—from a good heart. We could also use the language of good motivation. I’m more comfortable with the motivation language. So, you know, if you act well, but for pretty bad, self-interested, egoistic reasons—it’s all about yourself and benefiting yourself and getting goodies for yourself—that’s not going to cut it. You have to have the heart or the motivation be in the right place to demonstrate actual virtue.
So those are some general features. I’m happy to illustrate in the case of honesty, make it a little bit less abstract. But I think that’s a pretty generic picture of virtue that a lot of people in my world, my space, would subscribe to.
Mark Labberton: Yes. I want to go right into the book. But just before we do that, one further thing. As a Christian who is also a philosopher, who is also a virtue ethicist, how does the Christian faith figure into your understanding of virtue ethics?
Christian Miller: So I will have to be honest, which seems appropriate for our discussion today. I don’t think I arrived at virtue ethics because of my Christian faith. I don’t think that’s the way the causal—you know, we say, like, the causal chain went or the causal arrow went. But I also think that it’s perfectly compatible and consistent with my Christian faith.
So, you know, Old Testament, New Testament, scriptural passages talk about things like the fruit of the Spirit. There’s a long tradition in Western theology of emphasizing virtue. I mean, after all, there are the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues. Giants like Aquinas centre their ethics on virtue. And then just, you know, one more aspect of this: there’s a Trinitarian element, too, where we think of, you know, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit—one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is sanctification. It’s to—what is that? Cultivate virtue, or at least assist in the cultivation of virtue in the believer. So one of the main works of the Holy Spirit is precisely bound up with becoming a more virtuous person. So I think the point being, I think it meshes nicely and fits well together. Although in my own case, I arrived at virtue ethics on strictly philosophical grounds.
Mark Labberton: Sure, sure. Yeah, that’s very helpful. Thank you for that. The subtitle to The Honesty Crisis is this very interesting phrase: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. So among virtues, honesty is the one that you would say is the most treasured. Why is that? And then let’s get into the details of what that actually means.
Christian Miller: Sure, sure, sure. So if I’m being fully transparent, I’m not so sure I would take this fight to the bitter end of saying it’s the most treasured in this sense—the most important, the most valuable, the analogue of pride, which is the worst vice. So you would think that the corresponding virtue would be the most important if pride is the worst vice.
So to be clear, what I meant there was something like this: What is it that people, as a matter of fact, treasure and value a lot? What do people really care about? And we actually had some empirical data to explore this here at Wake Forest. So I work a lot with psychologists, and my team did some exploratory work polling people with respect to sixty different characteristics. So that’s a lot. What do you want to know about someone? What do you respect the most about someone? And what do you care the most about someone being like? And so on these dimensions, participants had to force-rank the sixty. In other words, they had no choice but to put the sixty in rank order. So take, what do you want to know the most about someone? They had to rank those sixty. And in all three cases, honesty bubbled up to number one.
Mark Labberton: Wow.
Christian Miller: It wasn’t just, like, idiosyncrasy. It looks like that is—I mean, that’s not proof, but it’s some evidence that we really value honesty in our interpersonal relationships with other people. I really, really care about that more than any other characteristic.
Mark Labberton: Right. That is a remarkable thing. When you approached that study as it was being done, did you expect that result, or were you surprised by it?
Christian Miller: So I have to say also—I’ll probably say this a lot, you know—full disclosure on what I did and what I didn’t do. You know, these were the psychologists. They carried out the study. I’m a philosopher, so please note that I’m quite, you know, incompetent when it comes to doing empirical research. But I certainly had expectations, and I did not expect this. I think there were some other characteristics that you might have thought would be number one, like kindness or compassion or something like helpfulness or whatnot. I wouldn’t have expected honesty to be number one. I probably would have put it in the top ten, but it was stunning that it was one in all three cases.
Mark Labberton: Yes, that is really quite stunning. So unpack that for us then, because if that is the case from your study, it is the case, then what accounts for why honesty ranks that high? This gets in—and then we’re going to follow a little bit more of the book itself—but what accounts for that, do you think?
Christian Miller: So I don’t know. I can’t peer into the minds of the folk, as we call them—the folk, the masses, the general public. But I have some suspicion. So this has to do, I think, with why is honesty valuable? What reasons can we come up with for why it matters? Why, you know, if you have a choice between being honest and being dishonest, what’s the case for being honest? I think there are just a number of reasons why it’s natural for us to value it so much.
So, you know, think about from a societal perspective what society would look like if there wasn’t honesty. Well, I think a couple of things. One, we would not be able to trust other people. We would not be able to have genuine relationships and friendships with other people. Instead, we would just instrumentalize other people. We would use them for our own self-interested gain. And, you know, at the end of the day, frankly, we would live in a kind of state of fear. I couldn’t go to bed at night without worrying: Is someone tomorrow going to cheat me, steal from me, lie to me, mislead me, BS me? All these ways in which you would fail to be honest. And so my life would be dominated by this fear from, you know, from uncertainty about how other people are going to treat me, because I don’t know whether they’re honest or not. And in fact, if I know they’re dishonest, it’s even worse.
So for these kinds of powerful societal reasons, we don’t want to live in a society of dishonesty. It would be a miserable existence. So that’s the kind of way of emphasizing the importance of honesty: by thinking about what society would look like if we didn’t have it.
Mark Labberton: Right. To just state the obvious, I’m sure there are many listeners hearing this thinking, well, that’s exactly why the horror story of today’s circumstances in the United States and in places around the world seems so extremely stressed and overwhelmed—it’s because of the very need for honesty that seems to have eroded so much. That’s obviously part of the timing and beauty of the book, because it puts its finger exactly in the light socket of this phenomenon of declining honesty. And your description could just be a description of the state of America in many, many ways. And I’m not trying to hammer the United States, but we have our own particular concern. Plenty of other countries also have those issues, but I am living in this context, as you are. So it’s a notable thing to actually just observe.
Take us through the arguments. You focus in on a series of kind of classic areas where dishonesty makes a huge difference—whether it has to do with personal relationships, whether it has to do with public life, whether it has to do with educational practices, whether it has to do with just moral behaviour in the world, where there’s a kind of interaction between any two people or groups of people where honesty either frames and enables something to happen, or the absence of that cripples and disables and distorts things. I mean, that’s the rough paradigm that you’re describing. So just walk us through why you chose the big buckets that you did, and then what you think ties them together.
Christian Miller: Yeah, good, good, good. So the book is called The Honesty Crisis. It’s really the honesty crises, because as you notice, there are these different buckets, and in each one, there’s an honesty crisis going on. So maybe let me back up a little bit first to clarify what I mean by honesty crisis, and then give some examples of these crises. And then I’ll end by talking about what ties them together.
So I think an honest—an honesty crisis arises whenever two features are present in a society. One, dishonesty is becoming more incentivized. It’s more tempting; it’s more appealing to be dishonest than it was before. It’s never going to be the case that there was no dishonesty. I’m never going to be talking about that. I’m going to be talking about: there was dishonesty, and now there’s been a change such that it’s more appealing than it was before, and so people are engaging in it more frequently than they were before. Also, though, side by side with that, it’s easier to get away with the dishonesty. It’s harder to catch people being dishonest. So when you put those two features together, you have a really bad recipe for preserving honesty. So you’ve got greater incentive to be dishonest, and it’s hard to catch people.
Well, where is this happening in society? I think it’s happening in lots of places. I give six case studies in the book. So how about I mention all six and then maybe use one by way of further illustration. So the six that I go through in chapter-length detail are deepfakes—audio and video AI-generated and manipulated images; internet infidelity—things like pornography, Ashley Madison, more recently AI romantic companions, which I’ve been writing a lot about; political matters—political misinformation and fake news. In the world of celebrity and influencer culture, I’m quite worried about dishonesty ramping up there. Educational spaces—so I’m in education; of course, that’s kind of front and centre for me—with AI student cheating, using AI on graded assignments. And then the last one, which I found has gotten the most attention from people I’ve talked to and maybe the most surprise, too, is in the religious space. And here in that chapter, I talk about sermon plagiarism in particular and AI.
So what an—what kind of runs through all of them? And I’ll give a kind of elaboration, further elaboration, on one of them. The thread that goes through all of these is new technological developments. It didn’t have to be that thread. I mean, I can imagine other societies where, because of changes in religion or changes in broader ethical values or whatnot, they’re undergoing an honesty crisis. And maybe that’s also contributing to our society too. But the one I’m really honing in on is the technological change, where I don’t say technology is evil. I don’t think it’s inherently dishonest. I think it’s neutral. But there have been some developments—and in particular, ones I’m talking about are the internet, social media, and AI—those developments, which are giving people tools which they can use, if they choose, for dishonest means, making it very tempting to be dishonest, and also, when they use those tools, making it hard for other people to figure out that they are, to detect that they are.
The easiest illustration—and we don’t have to pursue it, but just to make it a little bit more maybe tractable for listeners—the easiest illustration of all this, I think, is the student case. So I think it’s well known. It’s not going to come as a surprise to any listeners that starting at middle school these days, going through high school, college, now graduate school, and even into academic research, people are using AI to shortcut what they otherwise would have done in the old-fashioned way through their own cognitive efforts.
So in my case, as a college professor, my students—you know, I assign them a paper. I shouldn’t speak to them specifically. They’re very virtuous, you know—like, they’re wonderful. But students—you have to worry that students in general, when you give them a paper or a problem set or a computer coding assignment or whatnot, they’re going to feed it into the AI, have the AI do the work for them, and then submit that without disclosing the AI’s work and getting graded based on what they’re presenting as their own work.
It’s understandable, the psychology of this. Although I disapprove from a moral perspective, it’s understandable. It’s very efficient. You save a lot of time. And it’s very effective. You can probably get a better grade than you would otherwise. It’s very evasive. It’s very hard to catch people doing this kind of thing. And there’s this sense that it appears everyone else is doing it—I got to do it too. So I can understand all that. But at the end of the day, if it’s not disclosed, it’s plagiarism. It’s dishonest. That’s morally wrong. It’s an honesty crisis.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. The rhythm of that pattern repeated across these six examples is really a fascinating part of the book. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so valuable to have a philosopher write on this topic, because there’s a rigour and a logic that you continue to press on, which then continues to force the issue, when in fact we quite easily introduce other factors than virtue that have to do with self-care, people might say, or have to do with trying to free ourselves from the anxiety of a production that’s going to be compared to other students, for example, who are going to use AI. And therefore, if you’re going to legitimately try to keep up with students who are using AI, then it almost feels like it’s necessary pressure to use AI to be able to establish your paper or your assignment of whatever kind.
How does that loop—which is repeated in many ways in each of these six examples; they each have their own nuances, of course, and the exact way that they play out—but as you were studying this, what was it that surprised you about the way that loop worked?
Christian Miller: Yeah, so—so as I hear your question, these competing forces, especially self-interested forces, which are maybe having to keep up with other people or reduce anxiety or gain, you know, maintain some kind of grade performance or whatnot—these kind of self-interested benefits keep appearing in the different honesty crises and push against any kind of motivation we might have to be honest. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right.
Now, one thing that surprised me—I guess there are a couple of things that surprised me. One is how powerful they are and how strong they are. So let’s keep with the education one, and I’ll go to some other examples. The single biggest predictor of student cheating is perceived cheating by peers. And this is before AI. In fact, this is before even the internet. Go back to the old, like, the dinosaur days of when people were just cheating by, you know, passing notes or bringing something in their pocket that they would pull out during a test or whatnot. If there was a perception that other people were doing that, that very likely made it, you know, tempting to do it yourself. And that continued with the internet, continued with AI. So that was illuminating to me, to discover that and see that pattern continue even with a technological change.
When we come to some of the other honesty crises, I think we have to be attuned to what’s motivating people to do what they do in that crisis. It’s not always the same motivation. For example, let’s bring another one into the discussion. When it comes to things like celebrity and influencer culture, a lot of the motivation there is going to revolve around status and keeping a certain kind of level of status, if not augmenting it. So celebrities—and they don’t have to be Taylor Swift–level celebrities. It could be anyone with any kind of social media accounts, a Facebook following or whatnot, a pastor in front of a congregation or whatnot. They’re going to have a public persona and a private self. They’re going to be a celebrity vis-à-vis their public persona and how people view that public persona and how people admire them for their public persona.
But celebrity is something that’s quite addictive. When you get a little bit of it, you want more. And so that can lead you to do dishonest things as a means to acquire greater celebrity. Also, when you get a little bit of it, you want protection. You don’t want to give it up. So it can lead you to do some dishonest things to hide your transgressions so that you don’t jeopardize your celebrity.
So what’s the point here? The point here is we have another honesty crisis fuelled by a different self-interested motive, I think, here. It’s one having to do with wanting to maintain and grow our public status in front of others, because we like that praise. We like that acclaim. We like to be lauded by our peers. And so we don’t want to give that up.
And so what I would say across the crises is that the underlying thread is going to be self-benefit, egoism. You know, we can actually, you know, make some connections to the Christian context and think about sin and how that’s probably related to sin. But what manifestation that self-benefit is going to take could be different in the education context, the celebrity context, certainly in the relationship—sexual and emotional infidelity—context. You can see how that would be a quite different kind of self-interest and motivation. But it ultimately comes back to us.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. Which in part was why I found what you wrote about honour codes very interesting. Because in a way, this topic of honesty is, as you said, in part about character in a very rigorous sense. So it’s not about how do we legislate schools, or how should schools prevent this sort of behaviour, or, in the other examples, likewise, not about how do you limit freedom, but how do you channel freedom in a way that actually manifests goodness and truth rather than dishonesty and deception. So I’m just curious if you could go into some of the findings about honour codes, because they are an appeal to character, fundamentally. It’s an appeal to character, or at least that’s how I would understand them.
Christian Miller: Yeah, that’s great. So I mainly talk about this still in the education context, although I think it could have interesting overlaps to other—like the work context. But let’s stick with education. Honour codes have been around for a while, long before AI and long before the internet. And we’ve had good empirical evidence backing up their efficacy. So we’ve, you know, going back even fifty years, we’ve seen these studies, say, comparing a school with an honour code and a school without an honour code and looking at rates of comparative cheating, seeing a notable difference. Even when we came to—you know, time went on, and we had the internet provide other new forms of temptation to cheat—I think there’s still a powerful influence of the honour code in reining in that cheating. AI? Well, I’m not so sure anymore. I’m not so sure the honour code is going to be able to push back against AI.
But let’s pause for a moment to think about why it was that the honour codes were efficacious. The story that’s emerged, I think, is quite fascinating. It’s not a story where students are just rampantly dishonest—they don’t care about right and wrong; they’re just out to benefit themselves. It’s a more nuanced and complicated story. On the one hand, it is true that students, maybe like all of us, have a motivation to cheat if they think they can get away with it and benefit themselves sufficiently. At the same time, there’s good evidence that they think that cheating is wrong. They’re not ignorant about that. They haven’t been taught it. They know it’s wrong. They believe it’s wrong. And they also care about how other people think of them and their honesty, as well as they care about how they think of themselves. Can they think of themselves as honest? That matters. Can we think of ourselves as honest people?
And so honour codes are going to tap into that, because you go about your normal day, you may not be thinking much about considerations of right and wrong and honesty and dishonesty, but an honour code—what it can do is serve as a moral reminder. You kind of trigger something in our minds, like, okay, bringing to conscious awareness values I already care about: the wrongness of cheating, the importance of being perceived by others as honest, the importance to me of being able to think of myself as an honest person. All this gets brought to my attention, brought to the forefront of my mind, by an honour code, which again is functioning as a kind of moral reminder.
And you see it even in experimental studies. So when you bring people into the lab and you put them into different situations where—no honour code, they will cheat. They will fake performance on exams. Honour code, the same opportunity to cheat, same opportunity to fake the performance on the exam—they don’t do it. It eliminated the cheating completely in the experimental context. So it is powerful. My only footnote to all that is, is it powerful enough to push back against AI?
Mark Labberton: Right.
Christian Miller: And there I have to admit, I’m not so optimistic.
Mark Labberton: Right. So as a person who wrote the dissertation that you told us about earlier, does this finding about honour codes surprise you, or does it feel like it’s something that fits your larger paradigm of how ethical and moral behaviour unfolds in the world?
Christian Miller: Yeah, good. So it’s a great question. I have to admit I was surprised by this. I didn’t quite see it coming—the extent to which it looks like it has an impact. So on the basis of my previous work, I had thought most people, as a matter of fact, are not virtuous. Most people, as a matter of fact, are not vicious. Most people are a kind of mixed bag of good and bad. I think this is well backed up in the psychological literature. This is well backed up in the history of philosophy. Aristotle held this view. And it’s also quite a natural view to hold from a Christian perspective, if you’re balancing both the image of God and original sin—the fallenness and the good side of imago Dei.
So I was already prepared to think, you know, we’re a mixed bag. You shouldn’t expect great behaviour from students, but you shouldn’t expect abysmal behaviour either. You should expect something in the middle. But what I didn’t see coming is how much you can move the needle on that behaviour using a simple reminder. This is not a training program. This is not a twelve-step course. This is not a book you have to read. This is: we read the honour code, then we sign our name, and then we take the test. Now, simple reminder—if the experimental data is to be believed, which these days is not always the case, but if you believe the experimental data, that was enough to nudge people out of a cheating mindset and into an honesty mindset. Even though the same self-interested rewards were in place—the same opportunity to cheat and get the same benefit was there—and yet that one nudge did the work. That was surprising to me.
Mark Labberton: So would you understand that to be an extrinsic pressure or an extrinsic invitation? It’s probably both. But I mean, on the invitational side, it’s like calling forth the best from a person. On the other side, it’s creating a kind of moral weight that frames the test that you’re about to take, for example. What do you think? Is it just a combination of those two, or is it more complicated than that? How would you understand?
Christian Miller: I’ve never thought in those terms, but I think it’s definitely a combination of those two. So, you know, on the one hand, it is externally imposed. So it’s not as if the students are coming with the honour code in their back pocket or having written it. They’re coming to a school where they’re probably learning about it for the first time. Then they’re seeing it implemented in their classroom by the teacher in a top-down fashion, imposed upon them.
But at the same time, I’m hoping that they understand the importance of it and the significance of it, and they buy into it. Like, yes, I’m not going through the motions here. I want to align myself with what is being expressed here, the values that are being expressed here, because they are in part my values too. I care about honesty. I care about being a good person. I want to make sure that others think of me as good and I can be able to think of myself as a good person. So it starts as externally imposed, but hopefully it calls for something internal in the person, so that they’re not just mechanically making this a formality, but that they are—you know, and it looks like the evidence backs it up—that they are actually personally aligning themselves with it.
Mark Labberton: Right. And it seems as though it also implies the appeal of sharing a social orientation that embracing the honour code provides, even in the choice of a school with an honour code, and then in identifying with the nobility of the honour code in the context of a particular test or paper.
Christian Miller: Good. Yeah, I mean, that’s right. There’s another aspect to it as well. In my classes in particular—although this would apply across the board—students recognize that they’re not doing this in isolation. They’re part of a community where everyone is doing this simultaneously. So it would be one thing if they felt like they had to do this, but their peers were exempt. But say at Princeton, every paper had to have the honour code signed when it was submitted. And we all knew that.
In my classes, I actually take it a step further. They have to sign the honour code on papers, but on exams—bluebook exams, old school, you know, you had to write out your answers in the bluebook—we all verbally recite the honour code together as a class before they’re allowed to begin the test. And it’s not just I tell them to do it and they do it. I do it as well. So they see all their peers doing it. We’re all kind of committing to the same thing at once. And the professor is also binding, in my case, himself to the honour code too, so that in his grading and in his research and in his personal life as well, he’s going to have that same integrity too. So it’s very communal.
Mark Labberton: Right. So one of the things that I thought was very interesting about the book is just realizing again how much virtues are about social relationships and not just about an individual person’s character. And in the earlier comment that you made about the reason that the internet and social media and AI are so problematic—it is a social reality that you’re experiencing on one hand, but there’s also this sense of hiddenness that can easily be perpetuated, in which the individual can think that they’re getting away with this, when in fact it’s really—that’s a fictional kind of creation itself that has isolated us. Whereas the recitation of the honour code like that immediately makes it a social experience. And so now we are—it also, I think, would have the effect of norming the curve, so that you’re not as conscious of trying to compete against the person who is obviously cheating, because the norm of the assignment and the class is to try to operate inside the honour code. Is that right?
Christian Miller: Yeah, that’s all very good. I don’t have anything to add to that. I think that nails it. I can zoom out a bit and comment on the point about hiding and publicity with respect to internet, AI, and so forth, because I think you hit the nail on the head there, too.
It turns out that there are parts of this new technological world where honesty does quite well, even with respect to social media. So when we look at studies of résumés on LinkedIn or Facebook profiles or, you know, details you report about yourself on dating websites, the data there is actually quite encouraging. There’s remarkable honesty. Very little evidence of dishonesty. Same thing with emails, text messages, all these kinds of things. Well, you know, wait, wait—now, why would that be? Isn’t this the honesty crisis and all bound up with technology?
Well, it goes to your point, though. In all these cases, your name’s attached to it in a public manner. And so there’s no hiding. You put your résumé out there on LinkedIn—hundreds of people can see it, who have known you, you know, in the past. And if they spot something, they’re going to call you out on it, and it could have really bad consequences.
But then there’s this other side. And that’s where I think the honesty crises arise. So, you know, the other side in the education space of secretly using AI and passing it off as your own work. You know, the other side of secretly manipulating audio and video files as deepfakes and then making them seem like they are the real thing. Or the one that comes to mind most of all, the relationship context: secretly going online and viewing pornographic material. Or—my book is dated, even though it just came out in May. That’s now where I’m not as—that’s not the most worrisome thing to me now. It’s secretly participating in a romantic relationship with an AI, a romantic companion, where in the relationship space, I’m especially worried that we’re going to have an honesty crisis.
So this does track what you said. We want to not paint with a broad brush across the technological landscape as if it’s going to all be dishonesty promoting. But that transparency versus that hiddenness is going to make a big difference.
Mark Labberton: Yes, yes. Now, all of this had a particular poignancy to anybody who, like me, is a preacher, when you wrote the chapter about plagiarism of sermons. I’d love to have you unpack that. I’m sure that there are a number of pastors who listen to this podcast, and all of us know the temptation that you’re describing. But I think the statistics you suggest are really something to pay attention to. So give us the portrait of that particular chapter.
Christian Miller: Sure. And while I speak, I’m also going to pull up the exact—so listeners know what I’m doing—I’ll pull up the exact numbers and just quote them to you, because those carry a lot of weight, and they’re really, I think, pretty disturbing.
So I think of this as being quite parallel to the phenomena of the educational space and cheating there, in the religious space. Before AI, we had the internet. Before the internet—we didn’t have any of that at all—there was sermon plagiarism going on. What I mean by sermon plagiarism: pastors preparing sermons in which they drew upon material from other sources and didn’t acknowledge it. Substantive materials informed the content of their sermon, but they didn’t acknowledge it. Maybe they got it from a commentary. Maybe they got it from a, you know, Mark Noll’s book or Tim Keller’s book or whatever it was—pass it off as their own work. That’s plagiarism. All right.
This has been around for hundreds of years. This is nothing new. There was a time in which, in England, the king even put in place a law requiring ministers to try and give one original sermon a month. Like, you know, pretty low bar. However, it wasn’t, I don’t think, widespread in the U.S. prior to the internet.
Internet comes along. That has certain advantages from a plagiarism perspective. You can get the material much more accessibly, much quicker. You can sort through lots of different kinds of material to see what you’re looking for. And you can watch other people’s sermons, steal their—not only their content, but even their delivery. That’s been happening. So no surprise that you see an uptick in plagiarism there, to the point where you can see statistics—a third to a half of pastors would be willing to engage in some kind of substantive internet plagiarism. All right.
But even there, you see some drawbacks if you’re trying to be discreet about it. After all, it takes some work to go and search for the material, dig around, then you have to adapt it to the rest of your sermon, make sure the kind of style is consistent. Plus, you’re always vulnerable to the risk that someone’s going to run it through a search engine and stumble upon your source.
AI comes along. Here we have the honesty crisis 2.0. 1.0 was the internet; 2.0, I think now, is AI. Because AI takes care of those problems from the perspective of someone who wants to be dishonest and makes the whole thing pretty effortless. Just like in the student—note the student parallel—just like in the student case, what would have been a day’s amount of work or multiple days’ amount of work can now be shortened to ten minutes. So it’s extremely efficient from a time perspective. What might have been a mediocre sermon if the person wrote it by hand can be a much better sermon if AI does it for them. So there’s that effectiveness, just like in the student case. They can have a better output with a lot less time spent as an input. And then there’s the evasiveness. So it’s a lot harder to detect AI-generated work than it is to detect stuff that’s stolen from the internet.
So you’ve got those three factors—efficiency, effectiveness, evasiveness—put into place in a context where pastors may feel like they’re overworked, undervalued, have too many responsibilities on their plate. They don’t have as much time to devote to their sermons. It’s natural to expect that this would become tempting. How tempting? Some surveys have found as many as 50 percent of pastors admitting to incorporating some content from AI into their sermons.
Now, what does that have to do with this dishonesty? Well, again, in the student case, it maps over. But I think it’s actually worse in this case, for a variety of reasons. There is dishonesty in a form of plagiarism—so you’re taking material from another source, presenting it as your own. That’s just like in the student case. So there’s that kind of plagiarism dishonesty. There’s also a form of misleading the congregation. So the congregation is expecting this to be the pastor’s own work, or if it’s not, the pastor is citing. But that’s not what’s going on. So the pastor is misleading the congregation about the work. There’s a form of cheating, because the pastor is violating the standards, the rules put in place for the position.
And then finally, if I’m allowed to say it, there’s a kind of BS that often happens, where some kind of justification is put forward. Like, you know, well, it’s all for the good of the kingdom. Why does it matter if it advances the kingdom? You know, I’m just doing God’s work. Or, you know, the other kind of justification: I didn’t have enough time. You know, life is too busy these days. I can’t do it the old-fashioned way anymore. I think these are BS justifications after the fact. They weren’t really the reasons why the person did it in the first place. So rampant dishonesty in multiple forms has me worried.
Mark Labberton: One of the things that I think is so fascinating about this topic is that, in the best sense, a sermon arises out of characterological reflection and consideration, attentiveness to the Spirit of God, attentiveness to the scriptural text, attentiveness to the congregation, and attentiveness to the circumstances of the world in which this sermon is landing. And it’s a characterological formation that is meant to be harvested then in the context of a sermon. But when you bypass character entirely and make it really about performance purely—that it’s about being the most clever, having the best turn of phrase, having the best joke, having the particular poignant story, whatever it might be—then it really becomes a mimicry as opposed to anything authentic.
And I have to say that, as a professor of preaching and as a preacher, all of those temptations that you’ve highlighted in the book, including this, are not foreign to me. I’m not going to pretend that they’re not foreign, certainly as temptations and sometimes behaviour. There’s something so—for me, there’s something so valuable about bringing in, in a way, what we might call the honour code.
So this is partly why I’ve said often in teaching preaching that the honour code that is lifted up for you in preaching should be the worship of the church itself. So when the church gathers and you are naming who’s God and who’s not, and when you’re naming what matters and what doesn’t matter, and when you’re confessing the things that have gone wrong, and you then dare to stand up in front of this community, you need to have embraced that honour code that the church has been calling itself to through the course of its service of worship. So that then, the moment when you actually dare to open your mouth to supposedly speak on behalf of God and the Bible and the history of the Christian tradition, there should be something exceedingly sober about what that moment is meant to be.
And it’s not because these other things don’t make sense to me. They all make sense to me. We all live in the same world where these things—temptations are always at every hand. But it’s this contrast between sermon as an expression of character versus sermon as an expression of performance that feels to me it lies near the heart of the problem that you’re describing.
Christian Miller: Yeah, beautiful. I mean, I wish I had talked to you before I wrote this chapter, because I would have liked to have used that material with proper acknowledgement—not plagiarized—but I would love to have described it that way. That was really beautiful, although disturbing too.
One thing right off the bat—I keep harping on this, but notice it’s the exact same thing in the student case. In the student case, you’re cognitively bypassing. You’re taking shortcuts, and thereby you don’t develop yourself educationally, cognitively, intellectually. You’re not, you know, fostering skills of critical reasoning and communication and so forth. Also, just like there’s an honour code in the student case, there’s a code here. The form of the honour code is less important as compared to what is it actually doing. So in the student case, it’s something like, you know, a written pledge we’re making. You point out an honour code could take a very different form and still function in the same way. How is it functioning as a reminder—moral, spiritual, religious reminder—of why we’re here, what we’re doing, and what our deepest values are? And so honour codes can take radically different forms but still accomplish the same purpose.
But alas, now to complete the story with the student: in the student case, I’m not so sure honour codes are going to be effective enough to counter the temptation to use this. So too, I’m worried—maybe I’m less worried, but still worried—whether the honour code that you just described is going to be effective enough to counter the temptation to take these kinds of shortcuts. I think it certainly was in the past, pre-technology—internet technology—even with the internet technology. But AI is such a game changer. It’s such a powerful tool that I just don’t know if there’s any going back.
Mark Labberton: Right. So we often hear debates about the intelligence of AI versus human intelligence. But in this case, it’s about characterological intelligence as opposed to performance intelligence. And those two things can’t really compete in that way.
You know, I periodically have conversations with Claude, Anthropic’s AI agent, about Claude, where I’m asking Claude to reflect on Claude’s own sense of identity and how Claude understands itself in relationship to human beings. And I was once having this conversation, and Claude said, “The thing that I want to emphasize is that I can describe love. I can even imitate love. I can give you an experience through my vocabulary that I am loving. But in actual fact, I have no stake in the world. It costs me nothing. And I cannot instantiate love.” Especially, as Claude went on to say, in a very mirroring-like way, especially the love depicted in the Christian gospel.
Now, that little quotation of Claude’s was, in a way, just a reflection of Claude understanding my own values, right? But on the other hand, to have Claude sort of lay it out in that way was provocative. And going back to the preaching example, part of what is happening, or is meant to happen, I think, in the proclamation of the gospel is that we are seeking to both be people who instantiate the gospel—albeit in a fallen and never perfect way—but also, how do we actually show the congregation that we’re teaching or preaching to how this actually works out in real life? If your sermon is imitated, then the connection between that and the reality of living out the faith that is being proclaimed feels like it’s just that much more tinny and inaccessible.
Christian Miller: Yep, yep. No, no, that’s really powerful. My mind went in a way that’s maybe disturbing. Maybe it’s a reflection on me, as I spend so much time in this world. So here’s—not specifically on the pastor side, but on the point about love. So I think it’s just going to broaden the significance of using AI and what it can and can’t do.
Recent study comes out: one in seven people in the U.S. in a serious relationship with a human being are also at the same time in a serious relationship with an AI companion. One in seven. I’m not so sure I believe that it’s quite that high, but it’s a reputable study. Now tie that to what you were talking about. They are in a relationship with something that cannot love them back. It cannot—it cannot be a source of genuine love. It can only be performative. Just like what we’re talking about with the pastor being performative in front of the congregation, here’s this new technology we have which can mimic. It can say the words. It can do the things maybe you expect of someone who can love, but it, at the end of the day, cannot love me. And yet so many people are searching for love in their lives and hoping to find it here, only, I think, at the end of the day, to be disappointed that it’s not going to be able to genuinely love them.
Whereas, you know, in a Christian context—you know, at the end of the day, we are searching for love too. We’re hoping to find it. And we can find genuine love, and not just limited human love, but perfect, flawless, infinite love that will, you know, far surpass our needs and far surpass anything we could probably ever comprehend or grasp. So what really worries me here is the search for something that will never be able to satisfy this desire, to the neglect of another way to satisfy this desire, which has always been available to human beings throughout human history.
Mark Labberton: Well, that’s a beautiful summary of the arc, I think, of the book and the way you even close it. I do want to underscore for listeners how valuable I think it would be for you to read this book, because of the diagnosis and the careful analysis of how honesty is in crisis. And you don’t let us get away with very much in this book. And the force of your logic continues to find us out in various ways. I don’t know if that’s a good advertisement for the book or not.
Christian Miller: That might discourage people from reading it.
Mark Labberton: Yeah, well, it may for some, but I think for others it’s an enticement. I do think also that this theme of honesty as characterological as opposed to simply performative is really one of the most profound parts of the book. And the fact that it’s placed so solidly on that ground makes sense not only, of course, from the common Christian faith that you and I share, but from the wider logic of what honesty really requires of any human being and human beings in relationship to each other. So thank you for the gift that it is. And thank you very much, Christian, for this conversation.
Christian Miller: Thank you for having me on the show. This was a great conversation.
