Family

The appearance of honesty is the antithesis thereof. Integrity abhors pretension.

Let me be the first one to say that telling your mother she is beautiful even when she bears no resemblance to Hollywood’s definition is absolutely the right thing to do; to tell your mother how she looks in comparison to a 21-year-old starlet would be needless and cruel.

Presuming that we agree on that principle, however, is no excuse for anything but absolute honesty in our financial dealings with others. Whether we are talking about honesty in the grocery store or when buying the store-or an entire chain of stores-there is no room in our doctrine for anything other than complete honesty.

Here are five tips to help you decide when you have been honest in your dealings.

1. Was it the truth? Let’s start with the basics. In financial transactions, most issues can be reduced to an objective, factually defined condition of being either true or false. The things we say and do should simply be the truth. Either the bananas we picked up at the store are organic or they are not. Both selling bananas that were not raised organically as organic and telling the clerk your bananas did not come from the organic shelf are equally incorrect and morally wrong.
2. Did you convey the whole picture? It is our obligation as Latter-day Saints to take upon us the responsibility not only to be factual in our statements, but to convey the whole picture. Take, for instance, the response to a car buyer’s question, “have you ever had an accident in this car?” It may be factually correct to respond in the negative if you weren’t in the car when it was involved in an accident, but that doesn’t mean that you can respond negatively and count yourself honest if you know the car was involved in a crash regardless of whether you were in the car or not.
3. Was it fair? This is a particularly challenging notion for honest people in business. Determining fairness requires judgment and is inherently subjective. Even acknowledging that, we can generally recognize when a proposed transaction isn’t fair. If you have greater leverage or information than the person with whom you are doing business, you have to take responsibility for treating him or her fairly. Selling someone a generator in a power outage for twice the price you were asking before the power went out isn’t fair, even if you can justify the price hike because the demand for generators has suddenly risen.
4. Was it pleasant for both parties? What sort of a question is that, you may ask. As Latter-day Saints, we should take great caution in engaging in a transaction that leaves the other person feeling cheated, robbed or abused, even if we can genuinely pass the preceding tests. If the person across the table feels cheated, that should be a sign that something isn’t right. It may be that a more full disclosure of the facts may change your counterpart’s feelings toward the deal, but you should use the other’s perspective to measure your performance.
5. Did you take license? When we justify our bad behavior because of other good behavior, psychologists call this licensing. If you have justified a little chicanery in business because you pay your tithing, for instance, you may be in double trouble. The Lord neither needs nor wants a share of your ill-gotten gains. All the good you do in the world does not justify your cheating even a little bit.

All around us, even among some members of our church and our friends of other faiths that teach honesty, we find a buyer beware attitude in business that suggests that whatever can be negotiated is fair. That is just the first lie such people tell. Beware indeed.

A standard of fairness in a negotiation requires that both parties have relatively equal leverage; if one is under duress of any sort to do the transaction, the negotiated outcome is unlikely to be fair. If one party has substantially more information that she refuses to disclose to the other party, the outcome of the negotiation will again fail to be fair.

Being honest in our dealings is an important tenet of our religion-though it is certainly not unique to it. Really being honest, being truly fair in our dealings requires a commitment and practice.

Devin Thorpe is the author of Building Wealth for Building the Kingdom, which addresses these and other financial topics; you can connect with Devin on his blog at BuildingWealthForBuildingTheKingdom.com, on Twitter or Facebook. Be sure to share your experiences in the comments below.