Too little
The audience decides
If nobody noticed, it cannot affect anything.
The presence of a witness replaces the reason for keeping an honest account.
Integrity
Keep your standard when the convenient witness is absent.
Consistency between considered ethical convictions and deliberate action.
Integrity connects considered ethical convictions with deliberate action. Sport repeatedly asks whether the standard survives a change in audience: a missing official, an unnoticed mistake, a result you would prefer to report differently. Consistency gives your choices a shape that does not depend entirely on being watched.
Integrity gives a score you do not have to explain away
After a friendly golf round, you notice that your card omits a stroke you plainly remember. Nobody else is looking at it. The score is pleasantly low, and your memory offers a generous suggestion: perhaps arithmetic could take the afternoon off. You correct the total. The number becomes less pleasing and the account becomes yours again.
Finding the balance in Integrity
A player corrects an understated golf score after noticing an omitted stroke that nobody else has questioned.
A fitting response
The same account
I left one out. I’ll correct it.
The standard used when observed is kept when the correction is private.
Pursued too far
Punishment beyond correction
Perhaps there is another error. I should throw the whole round away.
A commitment to accuracy becomes a demand to punish yourself for uncertainty. Check a real doubt through the appropriate process rather than inventing a penalty.
An honest correction restores the account. Accuracy does not require a performance of self-punishment.
What Integrity makes possible
Integrity lets an achievement carry a credible account of how it happened. You do not need to split the story into the public result and the private exceptions that produced it. It also makes correction less theatrical: an error can be acknowledged because accuracy matters, rather than because exposure has become likely. Consistency is a practice, not a claim never to have failed.
Integrity in ordinary life
The shared practice record
Include the attempts that did not work when they are relevant to the record you agreed to keep.
Applying a club agreement
Do not quietly excuse yourself from an arrangement you still expect others to honor. Raise a needed change openly.
Nearby virtues, different work
Fairness
Fairness examines whether the terms give people their due; Integrity concerns living by considered ethical terms consistently.
Courage
Courage may be needed when an honest correction has a cost. Integrity also matters when nobody will applaud or object.
Integrity and its counterfeits
A clean-looking record
Removing awkward facts can protect an image while making the account less trustworthy.
Principle as a weapon
An inflexible rule invoked only to punish others is not evidence of consistent ethical judgment.
How to cultivate Integrity
Identify the reason behind a standard instead of relying only on the chance of being caught.
Make small corrections while they are still small.
If an agreement needs changing, distinguish a proposed change from a private exception for yourself.
Try it today
Check one ordinary account or commitment you control. Correct a small inaccuracy or clarify an exception rather than leaving a more flattering impression in place.
Questions worth returning to
- What would I record if the audience changed?
- Is this a considered principle or a convenient rule I have stopped examining?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
I take no little pride in the fact that throughout my racing career covering sixteen years I was never charged with an unsportsmanlike action.
Marshall W. “Major” Taylor · The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World · Chapter 3
Taylor measures his career partly by the conduct he can answer for, despite the racism recorded throughout his account. A result and the manner of pursuing it form one sporting record.
It is truly absurd for a man to attribute his actions to external things instead of to his own capacity for being easily caught by them; or, again, to ascribe the honourable to himself, and the base ones to pleasure.
Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics · Chapter I. · D. P. Chase translation
Aristotle challenges the convenient division that claims credit for good actions but makes temptation responsible for bad ones. An omitted stroke belongs to the same account as the strokes one is proud of.
You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices.
Epictetus · The Golden Sayings of Epictetus · Saying VIII · Hastings Crossley translation
Epictetus asks a person to consider what their own conduct is worth to them. The surrounding example concerns public performance under Nero; the sporting application is the quieter question of what a pleasing result would cost.
In the first place, I knew that what I did aright, I did not for the sake of lookers-on, but for my own.
Euphrates, quoted by Epictetus, describes acting well without advertising a philosophical identity. Correcting a private scorecard puts that commitment into practice: the action still matters when nobody is watching.
In the first edition of this book Mr. Stewart is said to have been bowled off his legs; this is inaccurate, and the author apologizes for the blunder.
R. H. Lyttelton · Cricket · Chapter XI · The University Cricket Match · note 35
Lyttelton corrects his own published account of a famous over. Keeping a credible record includes repairing it when evidence shows an error.
If you seek Truth, you will not seek to gain a victory by every possible means; and when you have found Truth, you need not fear being defeated.
Epictetus · The Golden Sayings of Epictetus · Saying CXLIX · Hastings Crossley translation
The priority of truth limits the means by which victory may be pursued. In sport a result becomes worth claiming partly because the account and the method can withstand examination.
If it be not fitting, do it not. If it be not true, speak it not.
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations · Book XII · XIII · Meric Casaubon translation
Marcus gives conduct and speech the same test. A private correction on a golf card belongs with the honesty one would expect in a public explanation of the score.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.