Integrity

Integrity gives a principle that survives the opportunity

A buyer offers a large order if your repair shop will put its “reconditioned” label on untouched appliances. The label roll sits beside a generous deposit envelope. You leave the roll on its spindle and offer the actual inspection and repair service instead. The labels are cheap; that is not what makes the proposed job costly.

An illustrative scene.

Integrity: finding the balance

A profitable order asks a repair business to apply a claim its work has not earned.

A principle can be revised for a good reason. The question is whether the reason withstands scrutiny beyond the benefit of this particular exception.

What Integrity makes possible

Practised integrity gives a venture a coherent way to choose its work. Colleagues can see which opportunities it will pursue and which methods it will refuse. This may cost income; it also keeps a worthy aim from becoming a permanent excuse for means that undermine it.

Integrity in ordinary life

Attribution

Keep a contributor’s credit even when removing it would make your role look larger.

A recommendation

Disclose a relevant interest when the recommendation is presented as independent.

Nearby virtues, different work

Honesty

Honesty concerns truthful representation. Integrity concerns the consistency between a considered conviction and the action it governs.

Temperance

Temperance moderates the desire for gain. Integrity applies the ethical limit even when the gain is genuinely useful.

Integrity and its counterfeits

The printed principle

A values statement counterfeits Integrity when actual decisions routinely make profitable exceptions to it.

How to cultivate Integrity

1. State the ethical limit in words that describe an actual choice.

2. Apply it to a tempting case, including costs to yourself.

3. Reconsider principles for ethical reasons rather than merely profitable circumstances.

Try it today

Privately choose a modest ethical commitment and imagine a convenient exception. Identify an alternative you could responsibly take; do not risk livelihood or disclose protected information as an exercise.

Questions worth returning to

• Would this reason justify the same action by someone else?
• What remains of the principle after the convenient exceptions?

Keep the practice proportionate

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. Mr. Berry has never refused to serve colored men at his hotel—indeed, he says he would rather lose his customers than to be guilty of that sort of disloyalty.

   Booker T. Washington · The Negro in Business
   Printed p. 67, account of Edward C. Berry; PDF page index 75
   Booker T. Washington · Hertel, Jenkins & Co., 1907; Internet Archive scan negroinbusiness00washgoog.

   Washington reports Berry refusing racial exclusion despite commercial pressure. The historical setting and language remain explicit. The shared principle is maintaining an ethical limit when keeping it may lose custom; the appliance scene does not equate its stakes with racial discrimination.

2. It is impossible to conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists.

   John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
   UNTO THIS LAST: / ESSAY II. / THE VEINS OF WEALTH.; paragraph beginning “The whole question, therefore, respecting not only the advantage, but even the quantity, o…”
   John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.

   Ruskin insists that accumulated wealth does not certify the means by which it was obtained. The deposit cannot turn an unearned label into a legitimate claim.

3. I grew convinc’d that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I form’d written resolutions, which still remain in my journal book, to practice them ever while I lived.

   Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography
   Autobiography — First narrative portion: resolutions on truth, sincerity and integrity; paragraph containing “I grew convinc’d”; paragraph beginning “I grew convinc’d that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were…”
   Benjamin Franklin · Harvard Classics, edited by Charles W. Eliot; P. F. Collier & Son, New York, 1909; Project Gutenberg #148.

   Franklin connects an ethical conviction to resolutions governing actual dealings. The appliance label is the point at which a declared standard must become a commercial decision.

4. I should be a rich man, and my peace of conscience would be gone!

   Elizabeth Gaskell · North and South
   North and South / CHAPTER L CHANGES AT MILTON.; paragraph beginning ““I should be a rich man, and my peace of conscience would be gone!”…”
   John Thornton, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South · Walter Scott, Limited, Paternoster Square, London; title page undated in preserved Project Gutenberg #4276 capture.

   Thornton refuses the suggestion that a successful gamble would erase the wrong of risking creditors’ funds. The appliance seller likewise judges the means before accepting the profitable outcome.

5. Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, “It’s business.” That is, “it’s business” has to come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges. It is a common enough thing to hear men arguing that the ordinary laws of morality do not apply in business.

   Ida M. Tarbell · The History of the Standard Oil Company
   Volume II; CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CONCLUSION; paragraph beginning “Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has emp…”
   Ida M. Tarbell · Volume II, McClure, Phillips & Co., New York, MCMV (1905), second impression; copyright 1904; Project Gutenberg #60692.

   Tarbell reports and rejects the claim that business suspends ordinary morality. This directly challenges the buyer’s invitation to attach an unearned label for a profitable order; display must identify the argument as one she criticizes.

6. The effects on the very men who fight these methods on the ground that they are ethically wrong are deplorable. Brought into competition with the trust, badgered, foiled, spied upon, they come to feel as if anything is fair when the Standard is the opponent.

   Ida M. Tarbell · The History of the Standard Oil Company
   Volume II; CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CONCLUSION; paragraph beginning “The effects on the very men who fight these methods on the ground that they are ethically…”
   Ida M. Tarbell · Volume II, McClure, Phillips & Co., New York, MCMV (1905), second impression; copyright 1904; Project Gutenberg #60692.

   Tarbell describes the corruption of an opponent’s own standards through retaliation. The business must preserve the meaning of its label even when competitors appear to prosper through deception.

7. And ‘tis only lawful, upon the account of private interest, to excuse breach of promise, when we have promised something that is unlawful and wicked in itself; for the right of virtue ought to take place of the right of any obligation of ours.

   Michel de Montaigne · Essays, translated by Charles Cotton, edited by William Carew Hazlitt
   Book III; CHAPTER I——OF PROFIT AND HONESTY; paragraph beginning “And ‘tis only lawful, upon the account of private interest, to excuse breach of promise, w…”
   Michel de Montaigne · Charles Cotton translation, edited by William Carew Hazlitt, 1877; Project Gutenberg #3600.
   Translated by Charles Cotton; edited by William Carew Hazlitt

   Montaigne gives ethical limits priority over a wrongful promise. If the seller has provisionally entertained the buyer’s proposal, that does not create a duty to put a false reconditioned label on an appliance. This is moral reasoning in a historical essay, not legal guidance.

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