Furthering Individual & Community Integrity in our society

Integrity is one of the most important 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.

Living with integrity means:

***Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships.

****Asking for what you want and need from others.

****Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension.

****Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values.

****Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe.

However, 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

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


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.

What is it to be a person of integrity? This involves two fundamental intuitions:

(1) Primarily a formal relation one has to oneself, or between parts or aspects of one's self
(2) That integrity connected to an important way to acting morally by knowing difficulties and outcomes of every action you do.

A number of other accounts about integrity have been advanced, the most important of them being:

1. Integrity as Self-Integration

On the self-integration view of integrity, integrity is a matter of persons integrating various parts of their personality into a harmonious, intact whole.: integrity is primarily a matter of keeping the self intact and uncorrupted.

2. The Identity View of Integrity

Integrity is also about a person’s way of being truly committed to something (a person's holding steadfastly true to their commitments), rather than ordering and endorsing desires.

‘Commitment’ is used as a broad umbrella term covering many different kinds of intentions, promises, convictions and relationships of trust and expectation. One may be, and usually is, committed in many different ways to many different kinds of thing: people, institutions, traditions, causes, ideals, principles, projects, and so on. Commitments can be explicitly, self-consciously, publicly entered into or implicit, unself-conscious and private. Some are relatively superficial and unimportant, like casual support of a sporting team; others are very deep, like the commitment implicit in genuine love or friendship

3. Integrity as Standing for Something
. Persons of integrity do not just act consistently with their endorsements, they stand for something: they stand up for their best judgment within a community of people trying to discover what in life is worth doing.:

4. Integrity as Moral Purpose
A person of integrity cannot be morally mistaken. Understood in this way, one only properly ascribes integrity to a person with whom one finds oneself completely in moral agreement. This concept of integrity does not, however, closely match ordinary use of the term. The point of attributing integrity to another is not to signal unambiguous moral agreement. It is often to ameliorate criticism of another's moral judgment. For example, we may disagree strongly with the Pope's views of the role of women in the Church, take this to be a significant moral criticism of him, and yet admit that he is a man of integrity. In such a case it is largely the point of attributing integrity to open a space for substantial moral disagreement without launching a wholesale attack upon another's moral character

5. Integrity as a Virtue

All of the accounts of integrity we have examined have a certain intuitive appeal and capture some important feature of the concept of integrity. Integrity stands as a mean to various excesses. On the one side we have character traits and ways of behaving and thinking that tend to maintain the status quo even where acting with integrity demands a change. These are things like arrogance, dogmatism, fanaticism, monomania, preciousness, sanctimoniousness, and rigidity. These are all traits that can defeat integrity in so far as they undermine and suppress attempts by an individual to critically assess and balance their desires, commitments, wishes, changing goals and other factors. Thus, refusing to acknowledge that circumstance in a marriage, or one's passionate desire , have dramatically changed (for whatever reasons) may indicate a lack of integrity—a giving in to cowardice for example, and a refusal to acknowledge new or overriding commitments. These same factors can defeat integrity, or an aspect of one's integrity, whether one decides to stay with a marriage or abandon it. In one case staying may indicate a lack of integrity, while in a different case, abandoning the marriage would indicate such a lack.

Whenever you make a new commitment to yourself, such as to begin a new exercise program, you will undoubtedly be challenged. A large part of life lies outside your direct control, and one of those external influences will eventually impact you and press you to abandon your original plan at least temporarily.

Integrity as a choice.

**It’s often unwarranted to abandon a plan prematurely in the face of a minor setback. But to say that you should always follow your original plan no matter what is to ignore the unpredictability of reality.

In such situations you must exercise integrity in the moment of choice. You cannot simply put your plan on autopilot and assume the intervention of your intellect will never be required.

**Integrity in the moment of choice means you must revisit your original intention and apply it to the situation at hand, a situation you probably did not foresee. What’s most important is not that you follow the letter of the original intention but rather the spirit of it. Sometimes this is an easy choice to make; other times it can be very difficult.

For example, suppose you make a resolution to exercise every day, and after a few days you injure yourself. Is it best to press on with your injury, or should you allow it time to heal? If continuing to exercise with the injury could further endanger your health, it would be unwise to continue until you are well. But you can still honor the spirit of your intention by devoting some of your recuperative time to the improvement of your health, such as via yoga, meditation, reading, or preparing healthy foods.

This is why clarity is so important — knowing the “why” behind your actions. When you encounter obstacles, you can either press on, or you can find another way to satisfy the same intent. So, if your plan was to exercise daily and the “why” was to improve your health and self-discipline, your plan may be thwarted at some point, but your intention need not be.

Integrity in the moment of choice does not mean making excuses upon encountering an obstacle that does not warrant surrender. It means adapting your plan to the situation at hand while still honoring the true spirit of your original intent.

***Repeatedly exercising integrity in the moment of choice builds strength of character. Repeatedly failing to do so fosters weakness of character.

Social integrity

Social or community integrity is individual integrity expanded to incorporate one's relationship to others and to the community as a whole.
A community's character or integrity is derived from its citizens' collective practice of the basic virtues.
A community's integrity can be viewed as the synergistic combination of individual and social integrities and their related virtues.
Integrity-Building Virtues = Individual Integrity = Community Character

*****Parents, teachers, and other concerned citizens can nurture the development of children's individual and social integrity through:

Interpersonal support
Informed authoritative parenting
The promotion of healthy relationships with age peers
Direct instruction that includes examples from history and an age-appropriate understanding through stories and literature
Exposure to models
Reinforcement and related expectations
Opportunities to practice moral emotion, moral thought, and moral behavior actively within classroom, school, and neighborhood communities

Individual integrity: the key to ending conflict by Judith Miller

***If there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character

***If there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home

***If there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation.

***If there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world. (Confucius)

Soul line

****Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

***Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

***People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. (Barbara De Angelis)

****In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock. (Thomas Jefferson)

****To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right. (HH the Dalai Lama)

****Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.

****The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

By Emmanuel Mungwarakarama