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Message from the Director: Integrity

Stephen L. Carter's 1997 book entitled Integrity makes good reading as this nation moves into the impeachment trial of President William Jefferson Clinton. Carter, a professor of law at Yale University, points to three steps or dimensions of our being able to act, lead, or respond to life's challenges with integrity:

• We must be able to discern what it right and what is wrong. This first criterion captures the idea of integrity as that which requires a degree of moral reflectiveness, funded with a moral sense and with principles of justice and right.

• We must be capable of acting on what we have discovered, even at personal cost. This second quality marks the integral person as resolute and steadfast, with the determination to keep commitments and the courage to act on principle.

• We must be able and willing to say openly that we are acting on our understanding of right from wrong. This third criterion reminds us that a person of integrity is unashamed of doing the right and is willing to declare and justify the principles and values that inform her or his decision.

As the impeachment trial begins, we face the tangled morass of presidential moral failures, the use of questionable tactics in the Independent Counsel's investigation, and the partisan character of the congressional debate. We find a lot of fodder for reflection on why and how personal and corporate integrity has been put at such risk in this situation.

Often, in arrogance or pride, we do not take the time to focus questions on the rightness or wrongness of our direction. Engaging in principled moral analysis involves temporarily suspending our or our party's position and applying the plumb line to tests for ethical bias and moral failure. If we are precommitted to ideological positions or are indebted to interests that require that we act in accordance with their programs, integrity is placed at risk.

Even if we are willing and able to try to discern the ethically right course or direction, connecting our knowledge or discernment of what is right with action can be costly. In the film Silkwood, Karen Silkwood, portrayed by Meryl Streep, gradually becomes aware that the Oklahoma nuclear power plant in which she works regularly exposes workers to radioactive elements. The company covers the evidence and ignores the resulting prevalence of cancer caused by the radiation. Ms. Silkwood becomes an activist, helping to revitalize union leadership and animating workers to challenge the company. She carries an appeal for intervention to a Washington regulatory agency. At each level of engagement she encounters increasingly dangerous retaliation. Yet she persists in her efforts to unmask the company's practices, eventually dying as a martyr to this cause.

Living with integrity can be difficult and costly. This fact underscores the importance of Carter's third step, that of setting forth the reasons and basis for the ethical decisions we make or commend to others. The willingness to spell out our reasons and to make them morally answerable opens a level of conversation that can hold others, our organizations, and our selves, accountable for attending to the ethical justifications of our acts or policies.

[ Posted by James Fowler at February 1, 1999 09:30 AM | More Opinion articles ]

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