Which is better: to be a truly good person even though everyone believes you're bad; or to be a truly bad person, while everyone thinks you're good.

Socrates, in Plato's Republic, famously argued for the former. Virtue is its own reward.

Plato's brother, Glaucon, disagreed, challenging Socrates to prove to him that goodness itself, rather than an irrefutable reputation or goodness, leads to happiness.

Comes now Jon Haidt, late of the University of Virginia, with his new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics (New York: Pantheon, 2012).

Haidt praises Glaucon not only as "the guy who got it right" but "the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.

In experiment after experiment, when confronted with an ethical decision people trim their sails to please others, Haidt notes, and then go to often extreme lengths to justify those decisions to themselves.

Honor, to paraphrase the novelist Tom Clancy, is indeed a debt: behavior you think you owe to the depth of your being, to people who expect it of you.

In experiment after experiment, the less transparency, the more dishonesty, in decisions (and behaviors) large and small.

Hence the value of a free press, the Freedom of Information Act, and transparency in general.

Governments large and small should convene and make decisions in "secret sessions" only in the most urgent of circumstances. "Closed" sessions should be EXTREMELY rare and closely monitored by a disinterested party to make sure they are only as secret as they need to be.

And on no occasion should they serve as a screen to protect mere process, or public servants engaged in those processes, from legitimate public scrutiny.

The Middleburg Town Council recently decided that minutes should be kept of the minutes of Town advisory boards and committees.

That's an excellent start.