Why does truthfulness matter?

Before looking at the importance of truthfulness, it is necessary to clarify first what truthfulness is. We have a lot of notion of the word “truthfulness.” The main source of the term’s ambiguity is the many ways we use the term, whether to denote truthfulness of a belief or truthfulness of a person. Truthfulness of a belief is how close your belief to the actual “truth.” I will not discuss the nature of truth and its existence in this essay, but we will assume one view of the truth throughout this paper: that there exists an actual “truth," although it's still debatable whether human beings can achieve it or not. Since the conventional definition of knowledge is "a justified true belief," truthfulness of a belief connects the concept of truth and knowledge.

Truthfulness of a person, on the other hand, is defined as one's character to always tell something with a certain confidence that it is close to the truth. Truthfulness of a person is different from being honest. Although both are related, truthfulness of a person involves conscientiousness of a being towards his/her beliefs, while honesty only involves telling what one thinks is true and doesn’t involve the responsibility to be conscientious about it. It is clear that truthfulness of a person also involves truthfulness of one’s belief. In this paper, we will talk mostly about truthfulness of a person, yet we can still connect it to the concept of knowledge because it still involves truthfulness of a belief. For the rest of the paper, truthfulness will denote truthfulness of a person for simplicity and convention of the reader.

When we talk about truthfulness, it always revolves around an interaction between two or more people. To state the importance of truthfulness, we will look at a certain situation where person A said something to person B that is truthful. We will call person A as the sender and person B as the receiver. Note that A and B can also be a group of persons who assume the character of senders or receivers in an interaction. We will look deeply at the benefits of truthfulness of person A in the interaction both to the receiver and the sender. After that, we will enlarge the scope of the situation to discuss about the importance of truthfulness in a society.

From the given situation, if person B doesn't know what person A had stated to him/her, the benefit of truthfulness has a direct effect to the receiver. It is direct since the benefits will come directly from the statement relayed by person A to person B. The true statement is important to the receiver because it will give additional knowledge for person B. Living in a world where a lot of things, good and bad, happen all the time, knowledge is important because we use them in practical purposes especially in decision making. You can come up with the best decision in any situation that you encounter if you know something about it.

The main source of knowledge is our experiences. But then, we all know that we can't experience everything that could be experienced by human beings, simply because we have limited time in this world and we can't do everything all at once. Our interaction with other people alleviates this specific problem; it gives way to another source of knowledge aside from our experiences which is the experiences of other people. For example, we need to decide what to wear based on the weather for today.  We don't need to study the whole science of meteorology in order to predict the weather for making the decision on what to wear. We just have to get weather updates from meteorologists. Our inexperience to predict the weather was alleviated by them and they become our new source of knowledge that we can use for decision making on situations that involves the weather.

If person B does know what person A had stated or knows something that is conflicted with person A's statement, it still gives benefit for the receiver. It gives him/her the chance to verify what s/he believes. Another problem imposed by acquiring knowledge from our own experiences are the differences of perceptions created by our own faculties from person to person. Most of the time in order to check the information we got from one of our faculties, we use other faculties. This is not a great gauge for the checking of the truthfulness of our beliefs, since we already stated that these faculties are not always accurate in acquiring knowledge. Interaction with other people gives us another "checking machine" of what we perceived. Person B in our situation broadened his/her perspective to that of person A. Not only does it give person B supplements for decision making for practical purposes, but it also gives him/her a chance to make sure that his/her belief is somehow close to the truth, which in turn gives relief to the receiver that s/he is not living in a deception, either created by oneself or created by others. This relief allows person B to live comfortably. The truthfulness of the receiver's belief is more important if s/he has a high level of epistemic demand about it. If our family are important to us, we tend to value the truthfulness of the identity of our family. If we are made to believe all this time that we are related by blood to our parents, and then there's a sudden revelation to us that they are not really our parents, we have a tendency to live uncomfortably. This aspect of knowledge is important even though we don't use them in practical purposes because it affects our well-being.

Truthfulness has indirect and direct effect to the sender of information. Using the previous situation where person A is sending an information to person B, if person A is truthful to person B, that truthfulness will induce trust from B to A. This trust will improve the connection between the two persons. This is an indirect effect because it affects person A that is not related from the statement person A gave to person B.

Trust is the attitude towards another person expecting something good will come out of him/her. This trust affects the way we interact with other people. The higher your level of trust to another person, the more probable you will interact with him/her in a comfortable way. Trust from a person to another person is affected by the experiences between them and the truthfulness of them to each other when they are interacting. The importance of trust is that it holds the relationship between two persons, and if that is lost, then also the breakage of the relationship.

Another indirect effect of truthfulness to the sender is the ability to influence other people, which just feels good for what it is. Aside from the trust that you earn from other people, it will also earn you self-trust since it shows you your own power to change other people's thinking and influence them to create decisions for the betterment of many.

A direct effect of truthfulness of person A is the same as that of its direct effect to the receiver; it verifies the truthfulness one’s knowledge. We can classify knowledge based on the persons involved in giving and acquiring it: intrasubjective knowledge and intersubjective knowledge. Intrasubjective knowledge is knowledge acquired by a person by oneself that will be understood more if one thinks about it deeply. Intersubjective knowledge is the kind of knowledge that you need to state to other person in order to have a deeper understanding of it by verifying it with other perspectives. Verifying something that you believe to someone else gives it a higher probability of being closer to the truth than if you just let it to yourself.

We will now take away the previous situation between two persons and look at the general point of view of a society. We don't solely just become a sender or a receiver of information. Most of the time we both do these things during interactions. We tell a person an information, and that other person tells another thing back to us. Looking at the bigger picture, we are an interconnected web of senders and receivers. Since this is the case, everyone benefits directly and indirectly from the truthfulness of everyone.

In society's perspective, truthfulness is a key thing to the creation of the agreed sense of reality. We already stated that different perceptions of human beings to a single thing is one of the problems in acquiring knowledge based on our experiences. Because of this, each one of us has different sense of reality. At a larger point of view, truthfulness gives a solution to this problem by creating a conventional reality. For example, if person A said to all of the people that s/he thinks that grass has a specific color, which is green, and everyone agrees to him/her, then it will be established that the grass has this specific color. Every one of us could look at the grass and see it in different shades of green, but the society can agree that the grass is green. It’s like a Venn diagram involving billions of circles wherein some parts of every circle don’t fit with other circles, yet all of them converges to a single point. Although there are parts of our faculties that isn't exactly the same as that of other persons’ and we perceive grass in different shades of green, there is still something in the grass that is common for us all: the grass is green. These conventional truths about the color of grass and other plant information that were agreed by everyone to be true allows for the inner workings of the society that depends on plants such as agriculture. A society comprised of people with conflicting beliefs who can't agree about anything will not succeed to their common goals.

A society is always founded on the interactions of human beings; if there’s no human interactions, then there’s no society in the first place. And interaction based on truthfulness is higher in form than mere interaction. We can tell lies to each other and we can still call it an interaction. The thing that distinguishes interaction with truthfulness is the inclusion of trust. We already stated that trust is the glue that holds the relationship between two persons. Looking at the point of view of a society, trust solidifies connection of every people in it. Since the society depends in the unification of its constituents, a society with interactions not based on truthfulness will not hold for itself and at a point of time will no longer be considered a society. Additionally, interaction with truthfulness ensures that the interactions will always exist. These truthful interactions will then multiply the benefits we already stated for every one of us that is both a receiver and sender of information.

If you are lying or just telling bullshit to other people, even though it benefits you a lot, it certainly will give the receiver of your statement harm. A special case, wherein it feels like lying is the best path to resort to since s/he might not be able to accept the truth very well, is still a bad thing since you are deceiving him/her. The moment the lie was uncovered, the “bad effect” is multiplied since s/he lost his/her trust to you, the decision s/he made would not be the best one for any situation that involves something about the truth that you didn’t say, and the receiver still found out about the truth anyways. It is a lot safer to not take this risk and still be truthful all the time. There’s nothing wrong about finding the truth, and we should accept it, because it is what it is and we can’t do anything about it. What we need to do is change our attitude about the truth because it will not mold itself for our convenience. The bottom-line is this: truthfulness is always important since it will benefit all of us as individual persons and as a part of a society all the time.