ABSTRACT
As we conceive it, integrity is not a kind of wholeness, solidity of character or moral purity. It involves a capacity to respond to change in one’s values or circumstances, a kind of continual remaking of the self, as well as a capacity to balance competing commitments and values and to take responsibility for one’s work and thought. Understanding integrity involves taking the self to be always in process, rather than static and unchanging or containing an inner ‘core’ around which reasonably superficial changes are made. Rather than presenting integrity as a merely formal quality characterizing the ‘good order’ or ‘well-functioning’ of a person’s psychology, we take it to be a complex and thick virtue term. It stands as a mean to various excesses: on the one side, conformity, arrogance, dogmatism, fanaticism, monomania, preciousness, sanctimoniousness, rigidity; on the other side, capriciousness, wantonness, triviality, disintegration, weakness of will, self-deception, self-ignorance, mendacity, hypocrisy, indifference. Although the second of these lists dominates contemporary reflection on the nature of integrity, the first also represents an ever-present threat to our integrity. The person of integrity lives in a fragile balance between every one of these all-too-human traits.
