Comfortable invention
You call it perfect although you noticed an important problem.
They lose information they explicitly asked you for.
Sincerity
Tell the truth without making it a weapon.
Franklin’s Sincerity begins with avoiding hurtful deceit and thinking justly before speaking. It is more demanding than saying whatever feeling arrives first. An honest account should separate what happened, what you inferred and what you do not know. The aim is to let another person understand, without misleading them through either invention or a carefully chosen omission.
Franklin’s Virtues · Try a practice
Reading the historical wording
Franklin’s original precept
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Part II · Harvard Classics 1909 text
Sincerity combines avoiding hurtful deception with thinking innocently and justly, then speaking accordingly. It concerns how thought and speech meet. It does not say that every private thought must be disclosed.
A contemporary adaptation
Let your words fairly represent what you think, without deception, cruelty or unnecessary disclosure of another person’s private life.
An ordinary choice
A friend asks what you thought of their draft. You have two responses ready: a magnificent compliment that you do not believe, and a devastating sentence that you are rather pleased to have composed. The draft needs neither a fan club nor a firing squad. It needs an accurate observation the writer can use.
An invented contemporary illustration.
What Sincerity gives
Sincerity gives another person usable grounds for trust. They can respond to what you actually believe when you make its basis and limits clear.
What becomes possible
Disagreement need not depend on discovering a hidden insult behind a compliment. A group can improve a draft or plan when members can describe both its value and its weakness without competing to be the bravest critic.
Sincerity: finding the balance
Someone asks for feedback on a piece of work.
An honest useful account
You identify the strong part, explain the confusing passage and distinguish uncertainty from a factual error.
The person can understand and use your judgment.
Cruel frankness
You announce that honesty requires the harshest possible wording.
Accuracy becomes an excuse for a needless injury.
The truth of a statement does not settle whether its presentation helps someone understand.
If the issue is urgent and dangerous, be direct. A tactful delay that leaves someone exposed can be another kind of misleading kindness.
Which part of this account do I actually know?
Sincerity in ordinary life
The uncertain report
Say that a claim is unconfirmed before passing it on. Repetition does not turn uncertainty into knowledge.
The convenient omission
If you helped cause a delay, include your part when explaining it. An account can contain only true sentences and still mislead.
Nearby virtues, different work
Honesty
Honesty rejects deception; Sincerity adds the concern that your expressed position reflect what you actually think.
Tact
Tact makes truth easier to receive without changing it into false reassurance.
Justice
Justice asks whether your judgment has given the affected person a fair hearing.
Sincerity and its counterfeits
Honesty as a blow
This is a counterfeit of Sincerity and courage: choosing the most humiliating true sentence enjoys the injury while claiming moral credit.
A technically true account
This is a counterfeit of Sincerity and honesty when selected facts hide your relevant part. Genuine Sincerity supplies the context needed to understand the claim.
How to cultivate Sincerity
- Distinguish observation, inference and preference before speaking.
- Include a relevant uncertainty instead of claiming certainty for emphasis.
- Ask whether a necessary truth could be expressed more clearly and with less needless injury.
Try it today
In a low-stakes account of something you know, identify one fact and one interpretation. Keep that distinction visible when you speak.
Questions worth returning to
- Which part of this account do I actually know?
- What might the listener wrongly infer from my omission?
- Am I helping someone understand or enjoying the effect of my sentence?
Keep the practice proportionate
Sincerity does not require surrendering privacy or disclosing personal experience to an unsafe person. A threat cannot create an obligation to provide information that helps carry it out.
Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause or skip an exercise. Putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.
About these practicesQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage. These quotations retain their historical wording; the notes offer contemporary interpretations.
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Thought and speech both enter this precept, and the ban concerns hurtful deceit. A technically true sentence can still need context before it gives the listener a fair account.
Does anyone bathe hastily? Do not say that he does it ill, but hastily.
Description and moral verdict are separated in this small example. It directly supports saying what was observed before claiming to know another person’s motive or character.
79th. Be not apt to relate News if you know not the truth thereof.
Passing on news requires attention to whether it is known to be true. The source’s further secrecy rules are separate from this warning against presenting rumor as knowledge.
Speak to them the language of truth and soberness, and away with the lullaby strains of condescending endearment!
Mary Wollstonecraft · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · Chapter V, section II · excerpt
Wollstonecraft challenges writing that flatters women instead of addressing them truthfully. This later comparison makes respect part of sincere delivery: a pleasing tone can conceal a refusal to treat the listener as capable of judgment.
Wherefore it is necessary to distinguish among the projects of the present times between the honest and the dishonest.
Daniel Defoe · An Essay upon Projects, Cassell 1887 text · Projects and public advantage · excerpt
Defoe insists on distinguishing an honest proposal from a dishonest one before praising improvement. In this documented work-level influence, attractive claims do not replace examination of how a project actually treats people.
The foundation of justice, moreover, is good faith—that is, truth and fidelity to promises and agreements.
Cicero · De Officiis, 1913 Loeb edition · Walter Miller translation · Book I, §23 · excerpt
Cicero places truth beside fidelity to agreements. This classical comparison makes sincerity something a listener can rely on, rather than merely a speaker’s confidence in having expressed a feeling.
there is hardly that Person to be found, who is not more concerned for the Reputation of Wit and Sense, than Honesty and Virtue.
Richard Steele · The Spectator, Henry Morley edition · No. 6, 7 March 1711 · excerpt
Steele’s narrator criticizes a preference for the reputation of cleverness over honest conduct. His sweeping social complaint is not a factual survey; the useful question is whether a polished performance has displaced what the speaker actually owes.
Continue through the collection
Practice this collection
The optional workbook uses contemporary adaptations. Original historical wording and quotations remain on the reading pages.
Explore the contemporary practice program · Choose in My Virtues