Christian B. Miller: Try To Develop a Thick Skin
In this interview, author Christian B. Miller discusses the fracturing of honesty in society in his new book, The Honesty Crisis.
Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the author of over 130 articles as well as Moral Psychology (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a contributor for Forbes, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Thanks to a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.
In this interview, Christian discusses the fracturing of honesty in society in his new book, The Honesty Crisis, his hope for readers, and more.
Name: Christian B. Miller
Book title: The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release date: May 19, 2026
Genre/category: Nonfiction, ethics
Previous titles: Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue; Moral Psychology; The Character Gap: How Good Are We?; Character and Moral Psychology; Moral Character: An Empirical Theory; Edited Volumes: Integrity, Honesty, and Truth-Seeking. Ed. Christian B. Miller and Ryan West; Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character. Ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian B. Miller; Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology. Ed. Christian Miller, R. Michael Furr, Angela Knobel, and William Fleeson; The Continuum Companion to Ethics. Ed. Christian B. Miller; Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. Ed. Christian Miller
Elevator pitch: Honesty is our most treasured virtue, but it is eroding in many areas of society today as we are confronted with a number of honesty crises ranging from the dissemination of fake news, to student use of AI to cheat on assignments, the increasing prevalence of deepfake videos, religious figures plagiarizing sermon material from the internet and AI, and online infidelity websites. This book examines this landscape of dishonesty and proposes concrete steps we can take to try to address it.
What prompted you to write this book?
I had three things that motivated me at the same time. One was that I noticed writers didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to honesty. In my own field of philosophy, for instance, I found only a couple of articles written in the span of 50 years! At the same time, it seemed to me (and still does) that honesty is tremendously important, and that at some level most of us recognize this fact. Indeed, the subtitle of the book says that honesty is our most treasured virtue, and there is some data to back that up. Yet sadly—and this is the third motivation for the book—it became apparent to me that honesty was (and is) under attack, eroding at an alarming rate in multiple areas of society all at once. If we don’t do something to stop this erosion, we are all going to be much worse off.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I had the idea five years before I started writing a sentence of the book. This was at the beginning of the Honesty Project, the largest research project on honesty ever undertaken, and I had the thought that after doing a lot of research on the topic and writing an academic monograph on honesty, it would be great to bring the findings and my views to a larger non-academic audience. Five years later, I had a research leave from Wake Forest University, which meant that I didn’t have to teach for a year, and so I could finally transform this idea into reality. The idea itself never changed. But the specific topics covered in the book evolved over time. I never thought I would talk about deepfakes or about online pornography when I first had the idea for this book!
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I have published seven books before with Oxford, so I am pretty familiar with the publishing process! There were some small twists and turns I had never experienced before. Abstracts for chapters had to be in the first person (who knew!). I had to do some quality control on the online cover image. But for the most part, this was familiar stuff.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I was surprised by how creative and philosophically interesting the writing process was for me personally. Sometimes it can seem like all an academic is doing is taking something they have already published in their professional lives and merely translating it for a general audience. But this book wasn’t like that for me. Easily 70 percent of the book involved me wrestling with issues I had never thought about before, which was both challenging but also really rewarding. I hope readers feel the same way too!
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope that readers would be more aware of places in their lives and in society where honesty is being threatened, care more than they did before about the erosion of honesty, and take concrete steps to try to grow in honesty in their own lives. I don’t want the book to just be of academic interest. I hope it can help bring about change for the better.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Speaking to my fellow academics, make sure to have as many non-academics read drafts as possible. We are rarely trained in writing for popular audiences, and it is hard to switch gears. Often we’ll carry bad habits with us—using jargon, assuming readers are familiar with something that only fellow academics would be, forgetting to include examples and personal relevance/application, and so forth. Try to develop a thick skin and welcome others saying that something about your draft is too academic or boring or unintelligible.
