Quick recap.  In the paper I discussed the other day, integrity is defined as:

honouring one’s word, or, more precisely, one’s word, period.

There are three other aspects of integrity I want to discuss today.  They are three beauties:

• one’s word includes one’s word to one’s self
• how to maintain integrity while acting illegally
• how we use sincerity to mask absences of integrity.

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One’s word to one’s self

As Erhard et al note, one’s word includes one’s word to one’s self.  For example,

when I give my word to someone to meet them at a given time tomorrow, in effect I have also given my word to myself to be there tomorrow at the appointed time and place.

Trouble is, while it would seem “obvious to us that we have in fact given our word”, we often fail to see it.  We fail to see we have given our word on both counts: we fail to see we have given our word to someone else, and we fail to see we have given our word to ourselves.

Say, for example, I declare I’m going to start getting up at 6am to go for a run, and then a few days later, a week later, with ruthless efficiency the occasion rolls around that I don’t get up at 6am and I say to myself, “just this one time.”

What happens here? The authors say

we take the conversations we have with ourselves as merely ‘thinking’.

That is, when that day comes that I don’t get up at 6am and go for a run,

I have either simply forgotten my word to myself, or if remembered, I easily dismiss my word as nothing more than a thought (a good idea) I had yesterday.

It’s here we’re oh-so-touchingly human.  For how many of you reading would consider yourselves to be a “man of integrity” or a “woman of integrity”?  I know I do, and I’ll bet you do too.  Yet, here’s the thing: without honouring our word to ourselves, it’s not possible to be a person of integrity.  As Erhard et al state,

… we consistently hold ourselves up as people of integrity but do not honour our word to ourselves, and moreover are blind to this contradiction.

Integrity vs Legality: Gandhi and the US helicopter pilot

The paper sets out to distinguish integrity per se, and to distinguish integrity, morality, ethics and legality from each other.  Because the authors find the concepts, in our common and “immature” grasp of them, all horribly vague and tangled up.

To address the problem they define two realms:

• a positive realm, devoid of normative values
• a normative realm of virtues.

Integrity, they say, belongs to the positive realm, meaning it describes “what is” or “the way the world behaves”.  It does not deal in “what ought to be”.  As such, it is also empirically testable.  That is, whether or not one honours one’s word can be directly tested or verified.

The other three phenomena – ethics, morality and legality – belong to the normative realm, meaning they describe “what ought to be”.  They refer to what’s desirable or undesirable, right or wrong.  The authors define morality as a normative phenomenon within the social virtue domain; ethics, as a normative phenomenon within the group virtue domain; legality, as a normative phenomenon within the governmental virtue domain.

After disentangling the phenomena it becomes much easier and instructive to analyse, for example, exactly what’s happening in cases of civil disobedience.  The paper gives two examples.  One is the most famous of all: Gandhi.  The other is the case of a helicopter pilot with the US Navy.

“Gandhi was a citizen of India when under British rule”, and therefore, “had given his word to its laws.”  However, when he broke the law, for example, by protesting the British-imposed salt tax and mobilising others to do so on the famous salt march of 1930, he nevertheless maintained his integrity.  Because he honoured his word.  He was:

clear and open about those laws he would not be keeping, and was clearly willing to accept the consequences.

The same structure applies in the 1980 case of the US Navy helicopter pilot who defied an order not to land his helicopter on the deck of an aircraft carrier when he had less than five minutes’ fuel.  At the time, all Naval Officers swore an oath of office based on four principles of allegiance.  One of the principles sets out the protocol to be followed when an individual confronts a legal order that cannot be obeyed.  The principle contains the following points, amongst others:

• Disobedience must be public and not hidden in any manner
• The individual, who violates the order, is willing to accept the consequences for his/her actions – eg, courts martial, loss of qualifications, poor performance evaluation etc.

As Erhard et al discuss, the pilot followed each of the principles to the letter, made his disobedience clear, and accepted the possible consequences.  He was reported as saying to his co-pilot:

‘better to be alive without wings than dead with them’ (ie, better to lose his pilot qualifications and live than to keep those qualifications and die).

In the end he landed his crew, and was not punished.

Sincerity

The third aspect of integrity that’s particularly intriguing is how we use sincerity to mask our “outs” in integrity.  As Erhard et al say,

When an individual, group or entity fails to deliver on their word and pleads sincerity, doing so is often an attempt to avoid confronting that the real issue is that they did not keep their word.  They are saying ‘I was sincere’ or ‘I really meant it’ as a substitute for saying ‘I did not keep my word.’

Yet, as we’ve established, integrity is a matter of my word, “not my state of mind when I give my word.”  Why do we do this?  Because we want to avoid taking responsibility.

Substituting the virtue of sincerity for integrity is often a subconscious (and sometimes effective) ruse to avoid taking responsibility for a failure to keep my word and the mess that has created.

It’s exactly what Kevin Rudd, our recently deposed Prime Minister, did in his farewell speech.  He rehearsed over and over his sincerity, and his wife and family’s “goodness” (and by implication, his).  She/he “is a very good person”, he declared many times.  Never mind that he had not honoured his word over numerous matters including the Emissions Trading System.

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Read previous posts on integrity: Integrity vs Special Pleading and Integrity.

To download a copy of the Erhard et al paper on integrity, click here.

Images: Gandhi (unknown photographer) (top); Kevin Rudd (photographer: Ray Strange, for www.news.com.au) (bottom)