Integrity is a good thing, isn’t it? In ordinary parlance, we sometimes use it as a near synonym for honesty, but the word means much more than honesty alone.
It means wholeness or unity of person, an inner consistency between deed and principle. “Integrity” shares etymology with other unity-words - integer, integral, integrate, integration.
All derive from the Latin integrare, to make whole. And the person of integrity is the person whose conduct and principles operate in happy harmony.Our psyches always seek that happy harmony. When our conduct and our principles clash with each other, the result, social psychology teaches us, is cognitive dissonance. And dissonance theory hypothesizes that one of our fundamental psychic mechanisms is the drive to reduce dissonance.
You can reduce dissonance between conduct and principles in two ways. The high road, if you choose to take it, requires you to conform your conduct to your principles. That occasionally demands agonizing, sacrificial choices: to resign your job, for example, when continuing to do what your client asks requires you to cheat and shred and cover up. Think of the Enron lawyers. This is a lot to ask of people, particularly when those around you send the message that the actions you object to are nothing more than what the grownups do to keep a competitive edge in a dog-eat-dog world.[494] In the business world, gaining a competitive edge is universally recognized as good rather than bad, and if it conflicts with Sunday-school morality, those around you will send artfully mixed signals about which you’re supposed to obey. They will say “Both,” deny the conflict, and leave you to draw your own conclusions about what their denial is supposed to mean. It’s hard to maintain the courage of your convictions when your convictions are at war with one another, and those around you say they back one side, but behave as though they back the other.
Taking the high road to integrity may prove unappealing as an intellectual matter as well, because we recognize that hanging on to principles regardless of situations often bespeaks a kind of rigid inflexibility rather than a virtuous soul.
Training in the common law teaches lawyers that the meaning of principles gets determined only in their application to specific cases, so that someone who insists on taking general principles literally can be fairly accused of misunderstanding the basic realist insight that rules have no existence apart from cases. For this reason, some leading legal ethicists argue for contextualism, the view that ethical judgment must be sensitive to situational differences that cannot be captured in abstract principles.[495] Con- textualists will not necessarily endorse rigid moralism - and the high road to integrity seems nothing if not rigidly moralistic.The low road is so much simpler - that, of course, is what makes it the low road. If your conduct conflicts with your principles, modify your principles. This is the path of least resistance; so much so that apparently we follow it unconsciously all the time. That, at any rate, is what fifty years of research in social psychology teaches us. In situation after situation, literally hundreds of experiments reveal that when our conduct clashes with our prior beliefs - when, in the jargon of social science, we act “counterattitudinally”- our beliefs swing into conformity with our conduct, without our ever noticing.[496]