OpenPolitics.ca : integrity

Integrity

A person has integrity if their thoughts, speech, and their actions are constantly being more rather than less aligned. One may have both hypocrisy (failing to live up to one's own standards) and integrity, though many failures without changing one's approach would signal a lack of integrity not just a lack of success.

An individual who is so aligned and has sucessful long term relationships with others beings of integrity, can be said to be a person of integrity. It is a very simple concept that is very difficult to implement.

The benefits of integrity are well known: such people can commit and deliver on long term goals even if there is controversy over tactics, thus they can be trusted by their peers, and are dangerous only to their avowed enemies: they keep promises when promises to them are kept (and go to great lengths to cover when they are left hanging), they are mindful of their reputation with others of integrity (though may sometimes be unconcerned with reputation with those who lack it - to please your enemies is to fail), act with honour? at least on matters important to their peers, and are in general worth dealing with even if they are difficult, because they mean what they say, and say what they perceive to be real.

For civics and communities integrity has sometimes been represented as having three elements basic to cooperation?:

1. Being truthful. - That one gives an honest answer to an honest question, or at least a substantially similar question that resolves the same dilemma or enbles the same choice (not every honest question should be answered)

2. Being true to one's word. - That an individual should make and keep their promises, and should take some pains to ensure that the conditions and constraints on the promise are understood by those who receive it. For instance when promising something to children it is important to be very clear.

3. Being true to oneself. - An individual who declares personally their code of ethics?, their philosophy and their values? has relatively more integrity than one who doesn't, or who constantly changes these.

A person of integrity? is then someone who achieves all of these, most of the time, and is honest about any lapses in their conduct. For instance, issuing apology? when wrong, whether they were caught by others or not.

[+] less social tests of integrity

A problem with all these definitions of integrity is that they are social in nature - they can be satisified by persons who are popular but not determinedly honest, and persons who are honest but not popular can fail them. In general, this happens by examining performance in minor non-critical situations and ignoring it in the most important major situations - and tolerating others doing the same.

Although political virtues and social capital measures may be ways of reducing the subjectivity of assessments of integrity, more objective definitions of integrity have often been proposed, e.g. three types of integrity and different means of testing or enforcing them have been proposed by Efficient Civics Guild based on the radical enactivist? approach to ethics. See also defer/infer/refer?.

Separating deference, inference and reference let different tests be establisehd for each and relate other concepts of integrity to the cooperation or civic tests as follows:

the moral integrity? of an authority which is what justifies people deferring or obey?ing them - for instance as held by a credible religious leader?, or a chief editor demanding deference of senior editors - these persons must demonstrate a greater integrity than those they demand follow them, or they cannot said to exercise moral power.
the intellectual integrity of an expert which justifies people believing their accounts of fact or even considering their arguments; in time-limited or trust-limited situations, perhaps also their positions on important but complex matters that can be understood as equivalent to an account of fact, even if they are actually only opinion?s; the expert is expected to infer effectively and be familiar with a range of references custom writing and not to be overly committed to any one of them and also not to be seeking any moral authority for oneself - see Lowest Troll.
structural or design or logical integrity as demonstrated by an existing structure or longstanding accepted argument, e.g. a mathematical proof? or an ancient building, which is subject to challenge but has never been shown to be deficient. It is not the expert or leader or person that has the integrity, but rather the work; personality factors are thus subordinated; patents or other instructional capital for instance must contain detailed enough instruction essay writers to reproduce a work, without the original inventor
1. artistic integrity, a related concept in which it is the longstanding uniqueness and influence of the work on an aesthetic? level that is thought to be proof of its value; by contrast, copies have less integrity; copyright? law is based on this principle

Quality of inference is not part of integrity in this model, but is instead called fidelity.

See also intellectual integrity of trolls? which expands on the ECG model in more radical directions.