No-one wants to appear lacking in moral judgement. That is why we so often claim to recognise dishonesty when we see it. In the criminal context, it may well be obvious. But where civil proceedings based on allegations of dishonesty are brought against professionals, the courts have not found it quite so easy. This article addresses the state of the art in testing for dishonesty.
First of all, there was Lord Nicholls’ test in Royal Brunei Airlines v Tan [1995, Privy Council]. He said: “Acting dishonestly means simply not acting as an honest person would in the circumstances,” and that this was an objective standard even though “honesty, indeed, does have a strong subjective element in that it is a description of a type of conduct assessed in light of what a person actually knew.”
