This post examines a cluster of virtues that includes straightforwardness, frankness, sincerity, earnestness, candor, and parrhêsia. I hope it helps people who want to know more about these virtues and how to nurture them.

I am a technical writer by trade and have some strong opinions about the value of, and the techniques of, clear and accurate communication, and so I also draw on that experience to inform this post.

What are these virtues?

“[L]et sincerity and ingenuousness be thy refuge, rather than craft and falsehood: for cunning borders very near upon knavery. Wisdom never uses nor wants it. Cunning to the wise, is as an ape to a man.” ―William Penn^[1]

These virtues have to do with communicating in clear, precise, efficient, and useful way. They show respect for those you communicate with by “giving it to them straight” and not requiring a lot of second-guessing and interpretation.

I briefly mentioned some of them in my post on the related virtue of honesty, but now I want to look at them more closely.

In short, what these virtues have in common is “saying what you mean, and meaning what you say” (but also not talking a lot of rot that’s not to the point). If honesty covers “the truth,” the rest of these virtues help to cover “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Other closely related virtues include trustworthiness, reliability, and authenticity.

In opposition to these virtues are things like beating around the bush, candy-coating, ambiguity, euphemism, flattery, winks-and-nods, insinuations, exaggerations, incantations, ostentation, deflection, pretension, evasion, false modesty, irony, sarcasm, manipulation, insincerity, flippancy (making light of serious matters), changing the subject, playing rhetorical motte and bailey, or being “all hat and no cattle.”

There is some tension between these virtues and the virtues of tact and discretion (see below).

These virtues span a spectrum of outspokenness. On the more reserved end, you may rarely speak, but when you do, you speak sincerely and straightforwardly to the point. Towards the middle, you may try to anticipate what people would want to know and, with frankness and candor express this, warts and all, whether they ask or not. At the unreserved extreme, you may feel compelled to reveal things that people don’t want to know but need to be confronted with: this is the parrhêsia that made the Cynic philoso...

Hypocrisy

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See also