The floor under everything

A customer asks if the part is new. It's refurbished, works fine, and "new enough" would close the sale. A guest asks if the kitchen's out of the salmon; there's one portion left, going to staff. The report says on track when on track is generous. None of these is a lie you'd be ashamed of. Each is just a small smoothing of the truth, the kind everybody does, the kind that keeps the day moving.

This week is about those. Not the big betrayals — the small ones, the white lie and the padded number and the thing you didn't quite mention.

Cicero, writing to his son about how a decent person actually conducts himself, put honesty at the very bottom of the stack: "The foundation of justice, moreover, is good faith—that is, truth and fidelity to promises and agreements" (De Officiis 1.23, Miller). Good faith first. Everything else you'd call fair dealing rests on it. Smooth the truth at the foundation and the whole structure tilts, even if no one notices for a while.

That's the move we're naming this week: good faith in the places small enough to skip it.