Integrity

What Integrity means in shared life

Your association has agreed that each stall at the fair gets one display board. Your own stall has brought three, joined by hinges. A friend admires the engineering: technically, it is one board. You fold the wings away. The rule was about shared space, not inventive carpentry.

Integrity gives…

Others can plan around a standard that does not change whenever your badge appears. You also give your collaborators a usable example of correcting an advantage before someone has to demand it.

Finding the balance

Integrity concerns considered convictions. Revising a rule for defensible reasons can express it; quietly suspending the rule for your friends cannot.

In ordinary life

Shared expenses

Describe a reimbursement honestly even when nobody is likely to check it.

A campaign promise

Explain a changed position and its reasons to the people who relied on the original commitment.

Nearby virtues, different work

Candor

Candor makes the relevant truth plain; Integrity requires acting consistently with it.

Fairness

Fairness tests whose claims count; Integrity keeps that test in force when your side is affected.

Recognizing a counterfeit

A counterfeit of Integrity is loyalty used as a moral exemption: “We must protect our people” becomes permission to mislead everyone else. Supporting a group can include helping it meet the standards it asks of others.

How to cultivate Integrity

• State the purpose behind a shared rule.
• Notice the moment you begin inventing a special description for your own conduct.
• Correct an inconsistency in your own conduct while it is still small.

Try it today

Choose one low-stakes rule you already apply to other participants. Check one of your own choices against its purpose and adjust it if needed. This is an exercise in conduct, not a demand to disclose private information.

Questions worth returning to

• What benefit makes my exception tempting?
• Would I accept this explanation from a competing group?

Choose your practice

The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.

1. It is quite obvious that the ethics of none of us are clearly defined, and we are continually obliged to act in circles of habit, based upon convictions which we no longer hold.

   Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics
   Chapter Ii — Charitable Effort

   Habits can outlast the convictions that once supported them; acting consistently requires noticing the gap.

2. For if our wants are few, we shall have but little chance of being driven by our wants into injustice; and if we are fixed in the principle of giving every man his due, how can our self-respect bear that we should give too much to ourselves?

   William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art
   The Art Of The People

   Morris applies the principle of giving others their due to the share we reserve for ourselves.

3. but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not perfectly, obeyed.

   Theophrastus (fictional narrator), in George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such
   VI. Only Temper.

   The narrator distinguishes isolated good acts from a character that others can reasonably count on.

4. When we say that their point of view is too particularistic, we do not mean that they should give up the dictates of their own conscience to a collective conscience.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   VI the unity of the social process

   Follett asks conscientious objectors to test how their convictions developed through exchange with others. She rejects simple surrender to a majority while arguing for a conscience shaped through shared life.

5. The masterly man's attitude to the world is not exclusively this or that: whatsoever is right, to that he will be a party.

   Confucius, The Analects of Confucius
   Book Iv;
   Chinese; English translation by William Jennings

   In Jennings’s translation, allegiance follows what is right. A group’s identity does not decide whether its convenient exception is defensible.

6. but if righteousness be put last and profit first, they will not be satisfied without snatching all.

   Mencius, The Sayings of Mencius
   Book I, Part I;
   Chinese; English translation by James Legge

   Mencius warns a king that making advantage the governing aim spreads through the whole society. The excerpt is the closing clause of that warning, applied here to the advantage our own stall takes.

7. Because success is the object and justification of a machine, while goodness only is the end and purpose of man.

   Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
   Nationalism in the West

   Tagore distinguishes success as an organizational aim from moral purpose. Achieving the group’s result does not by itself justify the means it uses.

Continue through the catalog