Would I be honest if no one was watching?
Someone hands back too much change, and nobody would ever know. Or a report could be padded, and nobody checks. The thought comes afterwards, whatever was done: if no one had been there, what would I have done? And if the answer is unclear, maybe the honesty was never mine.
The oldest version of this question is in Plato's Republic, Book II. It is a story about a ring.
The ring
Gyges is a shepherd in Lydia. After an earthquake he climbs down into a chasm and takes a gold ring from a dead body. Sitting with the other shepherds, he turns the ring on his finger and finds that no one can see him. He turns it back and reappears. Then he goes to court, seduces the queen, kills the king and takes the throne. All of it fits in a few lines.
Glaucon, who tells it, draws the conclusion plainly. Give a just man and an unjust man one ring each, and they will end up doing the same things.
"wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust"
— Plato, Republic, Book II, tr. Benjamin Jowett
A speaker who does not agree
Glaucon does not hold this view. He says so to Socrates directly. He tells the story at its strongest because he wants to hear it answered, and he has never heard anyone answer it well.
So the ring is a test that a man who wants to be honest sets for himself, out loud, in front of a friend. He does not know how it ends.
The same goes for anyone who lies awake over this. People who don't care about honesty rarely ask whether theirs is real.
Who the honesty is for
Glaucon adds one more detail. If an invisible man stayed honest, the people who knew would think him a fool. In front of each other they would still praise him.
So imagining the ring is really a question about now. Whose eyes am I being honest for? Maybe it is fear of being caught. Maybe it is wanting to be thought decent, or caring what I see when I look back at what I did.
The page on being different with different people follows William James on how the self shifts with each audience. Here the audience is the thing in question.
What stays open
Socrates spends the rest of the Republic answering Glaucon. The page stops before that, with Glaucon's side of it: when people can see me, whose look am I being honest for?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.