Sincerity

Aristotle gives sincerity a narrow, technical sense that the modern English word has since worn smooth. In Book Four of the Nicomachean Ethics he is working through a list of character virtues, each one a mean state between an excess and a deficiency of some disposition, courage between rashness and cowardice, generosity between wastefulness and stinginess, and when he reaches the virtue concerning how a person represents their own qualities and achievements he calls it truthfulness, aletheia, a word this atlas renders as sincerity to keep it distinct from the separate virtue of truth telling about facts in general.

The excess is boastfulness, claiming for oneself more credit, skill or honor than one actually has. The deficiency is a kind of false modesty, what Aristotle calls irony or self-deprecation, understating one's own real qualities, which he treats as a fault in its own right and not merely a safe distance from boasting. The sincere person occupies neither position. They neither inflate nor deflate the report they give of themselves, and Aristotle is explicit that this is a matter of habitual disposition rather than occasional honesty: a single true statement about oneself does not make a person sincere any more than a single act of restraint makes them temperate.

This sits outside the Christian architecture that organizes most of the other entries in this section. It is not one of the three theological virtues, not one of the four cardinal virtues, and not one of the seven virtues later Christian writers paired against the seven capital sins. It belongs to a longer, less systematized catalogue that the Nicomachean Ethics works through virtue by virtue, several of which, wit, friendliness, proper ambition, have no equivalent named virtue in the Christian scheme at all.

English sincerity, Quranic ikhlas and Confucian xin are commonly given as translations of one another, and each names something a reader would recognize as a virtue of truthfulness. They are not, on inspection, the same virtue, and treating them as interchangeable loses exactly what each tradition thought was worth naming separately.

Aristotle's sincerity, as the article beside this one sets out, concerns self-report: whether a person represents their own qualities and achievements accurately, neither boasting nor understating. Ikhlas, in the vocabulary of Islamic ethics, concerns intention rather than self-report. It is purity from admixture, the state of directing worship and good deeds toward God alone without any secondary motive of human praise mixed in, a fault the tradition names riya and treats as a distinct and serious spiritual danger in its own right. A person could satisfy Aristotle's sincerity, giving an accurate account of their own good deeds, while entirely failing ikhlas, if the deeds themselves were performed for the sake of being seen doing them.

Xin, one of the Confucian constant virtues, concerns neither self-report nor intention but the keeping of one's word. The character combines a person and speech, and the virtue it names is reliability, doing what one has said one will do, the trustworthiness that makes an oath or a promise mean something. It is closer to the Aristotelian virtue of a different name, keeping faith, than to truthfulness about oneself.

The three sit near each other in ordinary translation because English has one common word, sincerity, standing in for self-report, purity of intention and reliability of word alike. The traditions that produced ikhlas and xin drew the boundaries differently, and each is described here in its own terms rather than folded into a single cross-tradition virtue.