[Vision2020] Installment 16: Integrity

[Jeff Harkins]

  I rather favor this perspective about integrity (from the Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aug 1, 2008):

"Integrity is one of the most important and oft-cited of virtue terms. 
It is also perhaps the most puzzling. For example, while it is sometimes 
used virtually synonymously with 'moral,' we also at times distinguish 
acting morally from acting with integrity. Persons of integrity may in 
fact act immorally---though they would usually not know they are acting 
immorally. Thus one may acknowledge a person to have integrity even 
though that person may hold importantly mistaken moral views.

When used as a virtue term, 'integrity' refers to a quality of a 
person's character; however, there are other uses of the term. One may 
speak of the integrity of a wilderness region or an ecosystem, a 
computerized database, a defense system, a work of art, and so on. When 
it is applied to objects, integrity refers to the wholeness, intactness 
or purity of a thing---meanings that are sometimes carried over when it 
is applied to people. A wilderness region has integrity when it has not 
been corrupted by development or by the side-effects of development, 
when it remains intact as wilderness. A database maintains its integrity 
as long as it remains uncorrupted by error; a defense system as long as 
it is not breached. A musical work might be said to have integrity when 
its musical structure has a certain completeness that is not intruded 
upon by uncoordinated, unrelated musical ideas; that is, when it 
possesses a kind of musical wholeness, intactness and purity.

Integrity is also attributed to various parts or aspects of a person's 
life. We speak of attributes such as professional, intellectual and 
artistic integrity. However, the most philosophically important sense of 
the term 'integrity' relates to general character. Philosophers have 
been particularly concerned to understand what it is for a person to 
exhibit integrity throughout life. Acting with integrity on some 
particularly important occasion will, philosophically speaking, always 
be explained in terms of broader features of a person's character and 
life. What is it to be a person /of/ integrity? Ordinary discourse about 
integrity involves two fundamental intuitions: first, that integrity is 
primarily a formal relation one has to oneself, or between parts or 
aspects of one's self; and second, that integrity is connected in an 
important way to acting morally, in other words, there are some 
substantive or normative constraints on what it is to act with integrity.

Ordinary intuitions about integrity tend to allow both that integrity is 
a formal relation to the self and that it has something to do with 
acting morally. How these two intuitions can be incorporated into a 
consistent theory of integrity is not obvious, and most accounts of 
integrity tend to focus on one of these intuitions to the detriment of 
the other. A number of accounts have been advanced, the most important 
of them being: (i) integrity as the integration of self; (ii) integrity 
as maintenance of identity; (iii) integrity as standing for something; 
(iv) integrity as moral purpose; and (v) integrity as a virtue."

(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/integrity/)

On 12/31/2010 7:48 AM, Tom Hansen wrote:
> "Integrity: is to act according to what is right and wrong."
>
> Two questions, Mr. Harkins:
>
> 1)  What is "right"?
>
> 2)  What is "wrong"?
>
> What is "right" for some people may be "wrong" for others . . . and
> vice-versa.
>
> Tom Hansen
> Moscow, Idaho
>
> "Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do"
>
> - Don Galer
>
>
>

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