Honesty and Bad Faith

An appealing account of dishonesty subsumes it under the paradigm of lying. However, the account faces clear trouble from a wide range of cases, including cases of bullshit and brazen dishonesty. Such cases show not only that lying is inessential to dishonesty but also that honesty requires more than the absence of dishonesty. We propose an alternative account grounded in norms associated with games. On our account, dishonesty is better understood in terms of cheating or of breaking the rules of a game; being honest requires upholding those rules.