what is the honesty essay

Essay on Honesty for Students and Children

 500+ words essay on honesty.

Honesty implies being truthful. Honesty means to develop a practice of speaking truth throughout life. A person who practices Honesty in his/her life, possess strong moral character. An Honest person shows good behavior, always follows rules and regulations, maintain discipline, speak the truth, and is punctual. An honest person is trustworthy as he always tends to speak the truth.

Honesty is the Best Policy

A major component for developing moral character is Honesty. Honesty helps in developing good attributes like kindness, discipline, truthfulness, moral integrity and more. Lying, cheating, lack of trust, steal, greed and other immoral attributes have no part in Honesty. Honest people are sincere, trustworthy and loyal, throughout their life. Honesty is valuable and it is the habit of utmost importance. There are famous quotes, said by a great personality like “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom”. It holds good due to its ability to build, shape and motivate integral values in one’s life.

Benefits of Honesty

Honesty is always admirable in the family, civil society, friends and across the globe. A person with honesty is respected by all. For one to build the character of Honesty entirely depends on his/her family values and ethics and his/her surrounding environment. Parents showing honest behavior and character in front of their children create an impact on the children and we say “Honesty lies in their genes”. Honesty can also be developed practically which requires proper guidance, encouragement, patience, and dedication.

An honest person is always known for his/her honesty just like a sun is known for its eternal light and unlimited energy. It is a quality which helps a person to succeed in life and get much respect. It gives identification to the moral character of a person. Dishonest people may easily get trust and respect from other people. However, they lose that forever whenever they get caught.

Being dishonest is a sin in all the religions, however, people practice it for their short time benefits and selfishness. They never become morally strong and their life becomes miserable. An honest person moves freely in society and spread his/her fragrance in all directions. Being honest is never mean to bear the bad habits of others or bear ill-treated activities. Everyone has rights to reveal and take action against what is going wrong with him.

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Importance of Honesty in Life

Honesty plays an important role in everyone’s life and it is a character which is visible with open eyes like an open book. Having considered as an Honest person, by society is one of the best compliment one can dream of in his/her entire life. It is the real character a person earns in life by being sincere and dedicated towards it. Lack of honesty in society is doom. It is due to the lack of proper interpersonal relationship between parents-children and students-teachers. Honesty is a practice which is built slowly and patiently, firstly at home and then school. Hence home and school are the best places for a child to develop Honesty since his/her growing times.

Home and school are the places where a child learns moral ethics. Thus, the education system should ensure to include some essential habits and practices to keep a child close to morality. Children must be instructed right from the beginning and their childhood to practice honesty. Youths of any country are the future of that country so they should give better opportunities to develop moral character so that they can lead their country in a better way.

For all human problems, Honesty is the ultimate solution. Corruption and various problems are everywhere in society. It is because of the decreasing number of honest people. In today’s fast and competitive world, we have forgotten about moral and integral ethics. It is very important and necessary for us to rethink and remodel, that we bring the honesty back in society so that everything goes in a natural manner.

Moral ethics of a person is known through Honesty. In a society, if all the people seriously practice getting honest, then society will become an ideal society and free of all the corruptions and evils. There will be huge changes in the day-to-day life of everyone. It can happen very easily if all the parents and teachers understand their responsibilities towards the nation and teach their children and students about moral ethics.

People should realize the value of honesty in order to manage social and economic balance. Honesty is an essential requirement in modern time. It is one of the best habits which encourages an individual and make capable enough to solve and handle any difficult situation in his/her life. Honesty acts as a catalyst in strengthening our will power to face and fight any odds in life.

FAQs on  Essay on Honesty

Q.1. What are the basic principles that were followed by Gandhiji?

Ans: The six principles followed by Gandhiji were Truth, Non-Violence, Simplicity, Faith, Selflessness, and Respect for an Individual.

Q.2. Who gave the proverb, “Honesty is the Best Policy”? Ans: Benjamin Franklin one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, gave the proverb, “Honesty is the Best Policy”.

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Sample Essay- "The Real Meaning of Honesty"

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(Sample Definition Essay)

I think it was my mother who taught me the meaning of honesty. Not because she actually was honest, but because she lied all the time. She felt that the easiest way out of any given situation was generally the best way out. And, for her, that generally meant telling a “little white lie.” As a young child I thought it was kind of cool. And, naturally, when I would come to her with a concern or question wondering what I should do, she generally advised me to lie.

“Mom, I told Theresa that I would go over to her house, but now I would rather go to Sue’s house to play.”

“Tell Theresa you’re sick,” she would advise. And generally I did. But I didn’t seem blessed with her lack of conscience. On many painful occasions Theresa would find out that I really went to Sue’s house without her. These occasions taught me that it is more painful to be caught in a lie than it is to tell the truth in the first place. I wondered how it was possible that my mother had never learned that lesson.

I started thinking of all the lies that I’d heard her tell. I remembered the time she told someone that her favorite restaurant had closed, because she didn’t want to see them there anymore. Or the time she told Dad that she loved the lawn-mower he gave her for her birthday. Or when she claimed that our phone lines had been down when she was trying to explain why she hadn’t been in touch with a friend of hers for weeks. And what bothered me even more were all the times she had incorporated me into her lies. Like the time she told my guidance counselor that I had to miss school for exploratory surgery, when she really needed me to babysit. And it even started to bother me when someone would call for her and she would ask me to tell them that she wasn’t there.

So, I started my own personal fight against her dishonesty. When I answered the phone and it was someone my mother didn’t want to talk to, I said, “Louise, mom is here, but she doesn’t want to talk to you.” The first time I did it, I think she grounded me, but I refused to apologize. I told her that I had decided that it was wrong to lie. And the next time it happened I did the same thing. Finally, she approached me and said, “I agree that lying is not the best thing to do, but we need to find a way to be honest without being rude.” She admitted that her methods weren’t right, and I admitted that mine were a bit too extreme.

Over the past few years, the two of us have worked together to be honest- and yet kind. Honesty should mean more than not lying. It should mean speaking the truth in kindness. Though I started by trying to teach my mom the importance of honesty, I ended up gaining a deeper understanding of the meaning of the term.

• What is the term that the speaker is trying to define?
• Did someone teach her the meaning of the term, or did she really learn from her own experience?
• Is the term defined here presented with more complex reasoning than a dictionary definition

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The Philosophy of Honesty

• Philosophical Theories & Ideas
• Major Philosophers

• Ph.D., Philosophy, Columbia University
• M.A., Philosophy, Columbia University
• B.A., Philosophy, University of Florence, Italy

What does it take to be honest? Although often invoked, the concept of honesty is quite tricky to characterize. Taking a closer look, it is a cognate notion of authenticity. Here's why.

Truth and Honesty

While it may be tempting to define honesty as speaking the truth and abiding by the rules , this is an overly-simplistic view of a complex concept. Telling the truth — the whole truth — is, at times, practically and theoretically impossible as well as morally not required or even wrong. Suppose your new partner asks you to be honest about what you have done over the past week when you were apart. Does this mean you’ll have to tell everything you have done? Not only may you not have enough time and you won’t recall all the details but is everything really relevant? Should you also talk about the surprise party you are organizing next week for your partner?

The relationship between honesty and truth is much more subtle. What is the truth about a person, anyway? When a judge asks a witness to tell the truth about what happened that day, the request cannot be for any particular detail whatsoever but only for relevant ones. Who is to say which particulars are relevant?

Honesty and the Self

Those few remarks should be sufficient in clearing up the intricate relationship there is between honesty and the construction of a self . Being honest involves the capacity to select, in a way that is context-sensitive, certain particulars about our lives. At the very least, honesty requires an understanding of how our actions do or do not fit within rules and expectations of the other person — any person we feel obliged to report to (including ourselves).

Honesty and Authenticity

But then, there's the relationship between honesty and the self. Have you been honest with yourself? That is indeed a major question, discussed not only by figures such as Plato and Kierkegaard but also in David Hume’s "Philosophical Honesty." To be honest with ourselves seems to be a key part of what it takes to be authentic. Only those who can face themselves, in all their own peculiarity, seem to be capable of developing a persona that is true to the self — hence, authentic.

Honesty as a Disposition

If honesty is not telling the whole truth, what is it? One way to characterize it, typically adopted in virtue ethics (that school of ethics that developed from Aristotle ’s teachings), makes honesty into a disposition. Here goes my rendering of the topic: a person is honest when he or she possesses the disposition to face the other by making explicit all those details that are relevant to the conversation at issue.

The disposition in question is a tendency that has been cultivated over time. That is, an honest person is one that has developed the habit of bringing forward to the other all those details of his or her life that seem relevant in conversation with the other. The ability to discern that which is relevant is part of honesty and is, if course, quite a complex skill to possess.

Despite its centrality in ordinary life as well as ethics and philosophy of psychology, honesty is not a major trend of research in the contemporary philosophical debate.

• Casini, Lorenzo. "Renaissance Philosophy." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020.
• Hume, David. "Philosophical Honesty." University of Victoria, 2020, Victoria BC, Canada.
• Hursthouse, Rosalind. "Virtue Ethics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Glen Pettigrove, Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University, 18 July 2003.
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Home / Essay Samples / Life / Honesty / Honesty: A Virtue That Cannot Be Overemphasized

Honesty: A Virtue That Cannot Be Overemphasized

• Category: Life , Philosophy
• Topic: Honesty , Moral , Values of Life

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Guest Essay

Cyrus Vance: What It Takes to Keep Harvey Weinstein, and Men Like Him, Behind Bars

By Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

Mr. Vance was the Manhattan district attorney from 2010 to 2022 and prosecuted Harvey Weinstein in 2020. He is a partner at Baker McKenzie.

Many interpreted Harvey Weinstein’s conviction and sentencing in 2020 as a painfully overdue moment of reckoning for powerful, sexually abusive men like Mr. Weinstein. As the district attorney who brought the charges against Mr. Weinstein, I certainly felt so.

That is why I was surprised and troubled when New York’s highest state court, the Court of Appeals, recently reversed Mr. Weinstein’s convictions on two grounds. The first ground was that the trial judge erred by allowing the prosecution to introduce testimony from three women Mr. Weinstein had allegedly sexually assaulted but were not part of the indictment, or so-called Molineux evidence. The other ground was that the judge also erred in giving the prosecution permission, if Mr. Weinstein testified (he did not), to cross-examine him on an overly broad range of “bad acts.”

I was not naïve about the challenges in bringing a winnable and legally sustainable case against Mr. Weinstein. I had been a criminal defense attorney for more than 20 years before I was elected Manhattan district attorney. I knew that appeals follow convictions like night follows day, and until the last appeal is heard, the game is not over.

The appeals court decision surprised me because I had been to the trial and witnessed the honesty, raw pain and power of the survivors’ testimonies on the witness stand. It troubled me because with no deference provided to the lower court, the Court of Appeals, in a 4-to-3 decision, had reversed a lengthy, objectively thoughtful, well considered and, importantly, unanimous opinion by a panel of the distinguished intermediate appeals court that sustained every single aspect of the jury’s verdict and evidentiary rulings by the trial judge. That’s rare.

Perhaps the opinion and last word from the Court of Appeals reveals more about the internal politics of New York’s highest court than about providing clear guidance on the legal distinction between rape and consensual sex, or giving clear guidance on what evidence can be admitted distinguishing between the two.

How do we in New York reconcile the decisions of law by members of our highest court that seem disconnected with the factual realities around rape and power differentials that lead to sexual abuse in the workplace? After this Weinstein decision, how do we give faith to victims that the system can work to hold sexual abusers like Weinstein accountable? The answer lies not in the Court of Appeals, but in the Legislature.

In California, state law allows the admission of allegations of sexual offenses not listed in the indictment. Specifically, in sex crime cases, in accordance with the California Evidence Code, prosecutors have a right by statute to introduce evidence of a defendant’s past but uncharged sexual misconduct, calling in witnesses whose accusations are directly relevant to, but are not part of, the indictment against the defendant. And it is only Mr. Weinstein’s subsequent conviction in California on one count of rape and two counts of sexual assault that keeps him in jail today. Federal Rules of Evidence 413 provides the same for trials in federal court across the country.

Two New York lawmakers have introduced bills in the State Legislature that could allow evidence of a prior sexual assault to be admissible in court. Statutory authority eats common law authority for lunch every day. In Mr. Weinstein’s case, without a basis in New York state law like the one provided in California that addresses admissibility of uncharged bad acts, a conviction was always vulnerable to a discretionary decision by the Court of Appeals in the future. That vulnerability will always be there for sex crime cases unless we pass a law that lays out the legal standard for admissibility of uncharged crimes in all courts, for all cases.

In my reading of the New York case, there is no doubt that Mr. Weinstein was, in fact, a serial sexual abuser. No doubt that he used the power of his celebrity and industry prestige and physically aggressive tactics to overbear the will of innumerable women and forcibly assault them sexually. No question that before trial, when the protective dam Mr. Weinstein had created made up of his lawyers, investigators and nondisclosure agreements was finally breached in the fall of 2017, his only defense would be that the women were making it up; that these were all consensual, sexual encounters; that he, in fact, was the victim because the women were using him to advance their careers.

The dissenting judges, represented most forcefully by Judge Madeline Singas, a former elected district attorney from Nassau County, looked at the same facts as the majority and admissibility under Molineux , but they did so through a modern lens and understood the reality accepted by sexual assault experts that the majority refused to acknowledge. In the contemporary understanding of sexual assault cases involving “acquaintance rape,” it is often relevant and necessary to introduce testimony of other survivors who experienced the same behavior to rebut the defense that the sex was consensual — or, quoting from an earlier opinion by the Court of Appeals involving a Molineux analysis, a “repetition, duplication and similarity of defendant’s acts” that has “a direct bearing on the question of premeditated intent.” The defense at trial capitalized on what Judge Singas called “rape myths, and rape culture at large, asking the jury to believe that, despite their words and actions, the victims were consenting.”

The Court of Appeals decision does not change the law under Molineux. But in cases of sexual violence, going forward — absent legislation like California’s or that proposed now but not yet passed in New York — it will tend to prevent relevant and important evidence of uncharged criminal acts to be admitted in acquaintance rape cases. Such evidence could give the jury, with appropriate limiting instructions by the trial judge, a more fair, complete and balanced understanding of a defendant’s motive and intent. In New York at least, it is likely that prosecutors will be less inclined to investigate and prosecute the most challenging cases, like Mr. Weinstein’s.

After the Weinstein guilty verdicts came down in 2020, I met in my office with the survivors who had testified. I was overwhelmed by the courage of these strong women, who agreed to tell their stories under oath and subject themselves to cross-examination in court and attack outside of it by the Weinstein media and investigation team.

Until our Legislature acts, the Court of Appeals’ decision in the Weinstein case is a loss for New York State, for prosecutors who want to bring these difficult cases and for the survivors who may be even less inclined to testify in court. As Judge Singas said, “New York’s women deserve better.” I agree.

Cyrus Vance was the Manhattan district attorney from 2010 to 2022 and prosecuted Harvey Weinstein in 2020. He is a partner at Baker McKenzie.

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An earlier version of this article misstated which Federal Rule of Evidence provides the right to introduce evidence of a defendant’s past but uncharged sexual misconduct. The relevant provision is Federal Rule of Evidence 413, not 404(b).

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