Synonyms

Integrity: character; Value: belief, principle

Definition

Ethical values are beliefs that provide guidelines for acting rightly in specific roles or for living morally in general. Personal integrity is consistently sound moral character.

Introduction

In addition to defining key terms, an account of ethical values and personal integrity must explain where ethical values can exist and where they originate; question whether values are ephemeral or enduring, and explain why some values endure while others do not; examine whether there is one greatest ethical value or if there are many values of equal importance; suggest how to resolve conflicts among ethical values; inquire whether values are relative or universal; clarify the relationship between ethical values and personal integrity; and point out obstacles to developing ethical values and personal integrity. This article sketches ways to approach each of these tasks by appealing to ancient and modern philosophy and moral psychology. The result is a general account applicable to the practice of public administration and policy making.

Ethical Values: Definition and Kinds

Values are beliefs that provide guidelines for acting or living. Values help individuals or groups perform specific roles such as jobs to their satisfaction or live their lives in ways they find meaningful. Values may be variously expressed: as goals one should strive to achieve and sustain in various aspects of life, as principles that help choose and prioritize alternatives, or as rules that offer specific guidance for particular situations.

Not all values are ethical. Some, such as the Mafia’s principle of omertà, often called the code of silence, facilitate criminal acts. By many standards omertà is an unethical value, though a mafioso might disagree. Other values seem more practical or aesthetic than ethical. For example, a carpenter may value a well-organized workshop, a musician may strive for energy and precision while performing, an Olympic athlete may prize concentration and dedication to training, and a famous chef may value the attractive presentation of prepared food on the plate and table.

But some values are clearly ethical. They express what people strive to do and be in every aspect of life, professional and personal, not because of a payoff such as pleasure or fame but rather because of an obligation that is self-evidently moral. The musician, the athlete, the lawyer, and the stay-at-home parent all value honesty, for example, even though in each of these occupations it is often hard to tell the truth or shun an opportunity to cheat. The honest person recognizes no moral holiday in which the duty to tell the truth and play fairly is suspended; honesty as an ethical value is binding everywhere and all the time, no matter whether one is at home playing with the kids or in the office working with colleagues or at the supermarket shopping for groceries.

The division between ethical values and values that are practical or aesthetic is not absolute. A medical doctor must know her craft well not just as a matter of personal pride or workplace convention but more importantly because the business of preserving and restoring health is an ethical undertaking. So technical competence in medicine is both an ethical and practical value. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” says Shakespeare’s Lord Polonius to his son Laertes in the course of a mini-lecture on values (Hamlet 1.3.). The admonition serves as both a practical and an ethical value in a culture that believes it is morally necessary to live within one’s means and to encourage others to do the same. In 1735 Benjamin Franklin advised his fellow Philadelphians that “…an Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure…” when handling hot coals that could set their houses on fire. Foresight and initiative are certainly practical values, but they are also ethical values in so far as they help people avoid homelessness and the suffering it causes.

So much for defining ethical values and differentiating kinds of values; what remains unclear is their source and location.

Who or What Can Have Ethical Values, and Where Do Values Come From?

Individual persons and collectives such as cultures, nations, churches, and service organizations have ethical values. Environment is their most obvious source (Wilson 2000). A person adopts the values of the people and institutions surrounding her, often without questioning why the values exist and whether they are worth the effort it takes to live up to them. For most people, socialization starts with family and friends who impart their own values in the course of everyday life. The process continues in the earliest years of schooling. Robert Fulghum’s bestselling book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986) celebrates ethical values introduced in early childhood. By Fulghum’s homespun account, these earliest lessons exercise lifelong power. An individual person’s particular culture, often associated with nationality, contributes further values. The United States’ Declaration of Independence holds up “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as ethical values (though it calls them “Rights”). Subcultures such as religious confession and institutions likewise offer ethical values. San Francisco’s GLIDE Memorial United Methodist Church values being “Radically Inclusive…We welcome everyone.” Later in a person’s life the work place introduces values of its own. For example, Bob MacDonald, a past CEO of the US corporation Procter and Gamble, proudly listed the corporation’s values as leadership, ownership, integrity, passion for winning, and trust (MacDonald 2008). Similarly, each of the military services in the United States has core values. The three core values of the US Air Force, for example, are: “Integrity first. Service before self. Excellence in all we do.”

Although it is relatively easy to identify possible sources of values, how they are adopted into individual and collective lives is somewhat mysterious. Similarly, it is difficult to say why some individual and collective values fall by the wayside while other values seem to last a lifetime in individuals and persist in perpetuity as group values. For instance, Judaism and its values have endured for about 4000 years and counting. What explains why some values, individual and collective, are stable while others are not?

How Stable Are Values, and What Makes Them Stick?

As discussed above, most people encounter and adopt ethical values as they grow up. The process is osmotic: Human sources such as parents and cultural influences such as religion impart values, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly, but rarely ask the recipient to understand completely the reasoning behind the values. Sometimes interrogation of values is even actively discouraged, as when an exhausted parent may answer the persistent “Why?” with “Because I said so” or a religion urges adherents “to trust and obey,” as an old Christian hymn has it.

But at some point in their lives many people begin to interrogate some or all of their values. “For the human being, the unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato 1966, Apology 38a). So said Plato, urging his young followers to question the values they had inherited from their parents, religion, the city-state of Athens, and other sources. Scrutinizing life can be difficult and disorienting. After discarding values found to be wanting, a person may feel untethered and directionless. This is small wonder, because gaining a deep new understanding of long-held values may oblige one to do uncomfortable things. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn exemplifies this sort of disorientation and discomfort after pondering the ubiquitous racist values of his society. Adrift on the Mississippi River, Huck struggles to decide whether he should go with the flow and turn in runaway slave Jim for a monetary reward and social approbation. Or should he discard those old values and instead help Jim achieve freedom? Doing the right thing will cost Huck dearly even if it also has its benefits. For Huck and everyone else, values still standing after facing an ethical quandary and those values newly forged in response to the moral challenge will impact life more powerfully than values that are simply inherited and accepted unthinkingly.

One Value or Many?

The Boy Scout Law lists twelve values, including trustworthiness and loyalty, and exemplifies the multiplicity of ethical values that individuals and collectives may choose to embrace. Organizations such as Procter and Gamble and the US military services likewise set a number of standards for their members to meet. At the same time, however, institutions often tend to identify one big thing that they hope to achieve. Procter and Gamble’s five values serve the corporation’s overall stated purpose: “to improve the lives of the world’s consumers” (MacDonald 2008). The US Air Force’s three core values serve its single mission: “To fly, fight, and win in air, space, and cyberspace.” A centuries-old tradition holds that the Old Testament contains 613 commands, including many recognizable as ethical values – e.g., “Thou shalt not kill.” But the story goes that when a pagan challenged him to stand on one foot and explain everything a Jew is obliged to do, Rabbi Hillel replied “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah [the entirety of the law]; the rest is commentary. Go and study.”

These examples may prompt the inquisitive to ask: Is there one ethical value, or are there many? Is there one value that is good in itself, so that all other values are instrumental to reaching it? Aristotle describes numerous virtues that might also be called values, among them the so-called cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. Yet he also insists that “the Good is That at which all things aim” (Aristotle 1934, Nicomachaean Ethics, 1094a). For Aristotle, the one good thing for the individual turns out to be a flourishing spirit, and analogous well-being is the single greatest good for the city-state.

The problem of whether there are many values or just one may not be soluble, or it may be that a linguistic approach is needed. Perhaps the term “value” is used in different ways such that it makes perfect sense to call Procter and Gamble’s five aspirational guidelines “values” in one sense and its overall aim a “value” in a different sense. The five values are instrumental, while the single value believed to be most important is ultimate. This distinction is not just academic; it is helpful in reacting when values collide.

Resolving Conflict Among Values

Perhaps there is just one ultimate value in human life, but people tend to speak of multiple values. This sets the stage for values to come into conflict with one another in certain situations. For instance, imagine a patient admitted to the hospital because of poor blood flow. Doctors might consider performing an invasive procedure to restore health – to remove a blockage in an artery by inserting a balloon catheter, say, or implanting stents. However, before beginning the doctors will ask themselves if there are any possible downsides to these procedures. Perhaps the patient is old and frail enough that statistically speaking he probably would not survive any operation. Or maybe the patient had not previously consulted a physician, meaning the doctors can try several noninvasive therapies such as administering oral blood thinners before considering resort to surgery. These noninvasive measures might improve the patient’s quality of life even if they fail to get at the root problem of clogged or weak-walled arteries.

In this situation two longstanding values of the medical profession are in tension. On the one hand, there is the value summarized by the old saying “First, do no harm” (often given by the Latin Primum non nocere). This rule expresses what ethicists sometimes call the principle or value of nonmaleficence, that is, of not doing harm. On the other hand, doctors prefer to solve problems rather than just treat symptoms; they hope to restore optimal health whenever possible. In the case of the patient described, however, it makes no sense to seek optimal health if doing so would likely kill him. Some ethicists generalize from situations like this and say that prima facie – at first appearance – the duty of nonmaleficence trumps the duty of benevolence (Ross 1930). In other words, absent overriding reasons to solve a medical problem directly and completely when doing so would likely harm the patient, the doctor will choose to do no harm and seek other means of alleviating symptoms. Sometimes there are overriding reasons to risk harm – e.g., when a living will expresses a patient’s desire not to live dependent on life-support equipment.

But how does one decide which value trumps which in case they conflict? The most obvious way to decide is by using the distinction made in the previous section between instrumental and ultimate values. The first step is to examine each of the conflicting values. What is each supposed to do? Is it an end in itself or does it serve some higher good, that is, the ultimate value (whatever that might be)? It appears that at least for a practicing physician, neither the value of beneficence nor the value of nonmaleficence is ultimate; each serves the higher goal of the patient’s well-being. The rule “First do no harm,” a special instance of the broader principle of nonmaleficence, expressed the conviction of medical doctors that the ultimate goal of the patient’s well-being, the value both the two competing principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence serve, is best achieved by first doing no harm.

While much more would need to be said before one had anything like a foolproof decision algorithm, this example points to one way conflicts between competing values might be resolved. However, there is no guarantee that it will always be clear which of two competing values would best serve the ultimate value in any particular context. Isaiah Berlin perceives the ethical values of liberty and equality as being in perpetual conflict. He labors not to show how the conflict can be resolved but rather to explain why the conflict is unresolvable (Berlin 1958). Even if Berlin is right, at least some serious conflicts can be resolved when one is clear about the distinction between instrumental and ultimate values. The example of the heart patient, above, demonstrates that fact at the level of the individual person. At a political level, Dame Stella Rimington, author and former Director General of MI5, the British internal security service, assures her audience that although democracy and security are two important political values that can conflict, shrewd leadership can ensure both aspirations are met (Rimington 1994).

Whether Rimington is right or not, Berlin makes it easy to imagine cases where instrumental values conflict and where there is no simple way to decide which value trumps based on appeal to an ultimate value. In such instances, people of high integrity might fail to live up to one or more of their values simply because they are unsure what to do; they transgress while trying to comprehend their duty. But at other times people know what their ethical values demand of them and yet still fail to meet the standard. The obvious question is, Why? Moral psychologists are increasingly interested in this question, and their research reveals that environmental factors can overwhelm even strongly held ethical values (Ariely 2010; Doris 2005; Haidt 2012). When under time pressure, for example, habitually kind people who would otherwise take time to help a stranger may rush by even the neediest of their fellow human beings.

Are Values Objective or Relative?

It is fair to characterize a value as a belief that someone holds strongly. But beliefs may be true or false, and individual people have different, sometimes conflicting beliefs. Is it possible to know who is right when beliefs differ? A related question: Can values be objectively good or bad, that is, good or bad for all people, all the time? These questions get at a more general doctrine that ethicists sometimes call relativism. There are different kinds of relativism, but a common form holds that no value is objectively right or wrong because there is no universal standard that could serve as arbitrator. This contention seems most palatable when applied to norms, personal or cultural, that do not involve physical harm. For instance, one person may believe strongly that it is morally corrosive to see nudity in public – at topless beaches, say – while another person believes just as strongly that so-called body taboos are nothing but culturally instilled prejudices. The ethical issues at stake here are not unimportant, but they pale in comparison with other differences in intercultural practice. An example is the female genital mutilation widely practiced in parts of Africa and the Middle East. A thoroughgoing cultural relativist would say such mutilation is neither right nor wrong in any objective sense, and in fact the very term mutilation expresses no universal moral truth but rather just one among many possible perspectives. Others would find this attitude appalling and argue that gratuitously injuring a child is always wrong. This example helps make clear why the question above – Can a value be universally true? – matters so much.

Knowing what ethical values are and how they function in the lives of individuals and groups provides a good basis for understanding the second concept in this entry’s title, namely, personal integrity.

Personal Integrity: Definition

Integrity manifests itself in consistently good action. The Latin integritas, the root of the word integrity, means among other things wholeness, consistency, and uniformity; similarly, in math the word integer means a whole number. But often integrity is used to mean not just wholeness or consistency, which a person could demonstrate by being wholly or consistently bad, but complete and constant good character. When integrity is understood in this way, the phrase “has integrity” is just another way of saying, “is a good person.” Even in Latin, that which has integritas is often not just whole but also sound.

Here one may be tempted to question how strong the link between wholeness and soundness – moral soundness, that is – must be. Suppose there is someone who acts in a way that is consistent with his or her values, yet moral intuition suggests this person is unethical? Perhaps it is possible for good and bad people to be equally consistent, that is, have equivalent integrity in the sense of wholeness.

To make this possibility concrete, suppose Heinrich is an SS officer who, though not foolhardy, rushes into the hottest spots of every battle where angels would fear to tread. Does Heinrich therefore have the cardinal virtue of courage? To answer, it may help to imagine Joe, a lieutenant in the US Army a few hundred yards on the other side of the front lines from Heinrich. Joe acts courageously too, though he serves a very different cause.

Is Joe’s courage of a different sort than Heinrich’s? Or are both men equally courageous? Here moral intuition may bog down in paradox and fail to give a satisfactory answer or even any answer at all. Taking this case to its logical extreme would yield not just a continental divide of values in a single person, with good values at home and horrific values at work, but a wholly bad person – a person of integrity (wholeness), yet the very worst kind of person. This is worth exploration.

Can a Bad Person Have Integrity?

Since at least the fourth century BC courage has been considered one of the four cardinal virtues, along with wisdom, justice, and temperance. So if one decides Heinrich and Joe are equally courageous, then it follows that Heinrich, bad actor though he is in every other aspect of life, has at least one virtue. His values are not totally corrupt. And yet Heinrich would do less harm if he were not courageous, so we have a paradox that courage, a virtue, facilitates wickedness. Does this make sense? Does it make sense that having a virtue, or one could also say the right ethical value in an aspect of life, can actually be a bad thing? Is there a way out of the apparent paradox?

One way out would be to argue that in fact Heinrich is not courageous; he only appears to be so. How could that be? Since at least the fourth century BC the West has entertained the possibility that virtues have a cognitive component: to have the virtue of courage, for example, means to know something about the aspects of life where courage is at stake. Not that all virtues are primarily acquired by learning. Aristotle thought only some were; others, including courage, were gained largely by practice. Yet even these practice-heavy virtues required particular knowledge. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, has Socrates and interlocutors agreeing that courage is knowing what one should fear and what one should not fear (Plato 1969, Republic IV 442c). So, for example, a foot soldier defending one end of a bridge realizes that unless she flees from the advancing enemy, she will be killed. On the other hand, she knows that if she fails to delay the enemy, her homeland will be overrun and her family and friends killed and enslaved. Which outcome should one fear – guilt-ridden survival in a world without family and friends or one’s own death? Following Plato, it appears the courageous person knows that of the two alternatives, death is not the frightening one.

Arguably all the virtues similarly require knowledge. For example, one must know what it means to live moderately before one can do so. How much fat is too much and how little is too little in a daily diet? What about carbohydrates, and does it matter whether they are simple or complex? Humans are not born knowing the answers to these questions. Shelves and shelves of nutritional studies and how-to diet books attempt to provide answers. One must have an inkling of these answers in order to live temperately, that is, with the right ethical value of moderation. The same is true of the cardinal virtue justice. In the US over the last few years, the Supreme Court’s nine members have often split five to four on the most important legal issues. Deep knowledge is necessary to discover and do the just thing.

Stipulating for the moment that all virtues require extensive knowledge, how much overlap is there among the respective kinds of knowledge that each virtue presupposes? For example, how much overlap is there in the kind of knowledge one must have in order to be temperate with the kind of knowledge one must have to be just? Presumably the overlap could be substantial. Consider the question of whether the US government may require a citizen to purchase health insurance if she earns sufficient money to do so. This amounts to a question not just of justice but as well of moderation: How much should a government interfere with personal decisions on what to buy? Is requiring the purchase of health insurance too intrusive, or would the government be negligent if it did not insist that citizens who earn enough buy health insurance? In 2014, the US Supreme Court found for the Obama administration in a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, King v. Burwell.

Perhaps the epistemic overlap is significant enough that anyone having one virtue will have them all. Perhaps Heinrich’s supposed courage amounts to mere recklessness. As a committed Nazi he serves an unjust cause, after all, and so apparently does not know what is worth fearing and what is not. Lacking that knowledge, he necessarily also lacks courage. How could someone not fear a thousand-year Reich in which Jews, Roma, Sinti, gays, lesbians, and others had been systematically eliminated? And yet that is the end state that Heinrich’s courage serves.

But does Heinrich have personal integrity? He is, after all, a thoroughly committed Nazi; he is consistent in his beliefs and actions. One can reasonably answer yes or no. Yes, Heinrich exemplifies integrity-as-personal-consistency, but no, he fails to demonstrate integrity as having the whole set of ethical values that make for the life most worth living.

Developing Ethical Values and Personal Integrity

It is perhaps most natural to think that to remedy a dearth of ethical values and personal integrity in any walk of life, including public administration and public policy making, those who teach aspiring practitioners ethics must optimize their methods. But before asking how, exactly, one could improve the teaching of ethics, it makes sense to ask whether ethics can be taught at all. Once again, ancient Greek philosophy recognized the problem. Plato’s dialogue Meno begins with a challenge to Socrates: “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught, or is acquired by practice, not teaching? Or if neither by practice nor by learning, whether it comes to mankind by nature or in some other way?” (Plato 1967, Meno 70a). Arguably these questions are never answered once and for all either in the dialogue or even in all of Western philosophy since. But Meno’s questions are critical to the issue of how to ensure tomorrow’s public administrators and policy makers have the right ethical values and personal integrity.

Arguably, ethics training has placed too much emphasis on developing the individual leader’s character and too little on training leaders to seek out, build, and maintain ethically healthy environments. Moral psychologists are amassing increasing empirical evidence that character, no matter how ethical, can ward off environmental temptations to err for only so long and to only a limited degree (Ariely 2010; Doris 2005; Haidt 2012, 2014). To overstate this thesis a bit: put a saint in a scofflaw motorcycle gang, and before long he will be just another biker. There might be some rare individuals whose character is truly impervious to the seductions of perverse environments. But most people are not that morally tough. Most can act consistently well only when they are in environments that help them do so. Although moral psychology is now contributing more evidence of this, the basic insight is quite old. “Be careful to choose the right friends and associates”: that is venerable advice that is based on the same sense of human frailty. Good people can go wrong if they are in the wrong company, or more broadly, the wrong moral environment.

So of course we should try to gird each future public administrator or policy maker with the best possible character, but that is not sufficient. Just as important is to teach a preventive mindset that will encourage the individual to shun corrupt environments, including associates, and instead choose salutary ones. The corresponding obligation on the part of leaders in public administration and policy making is to create and maintain healthy ethical climates, ones where otherwise good people are not tempted to transgress beyond their powers of moral resistance. As universities and on-the-job training teach young people the nuts and bolts of administration and governance, it is crucial that another lesson be imparted as well –leaders of communities and organizations must be moral architects who build and maintain environments conducive to ethical behavior.

Conclusion

Scholars of ethical values and personal integrity differ on important questions. Monists argue with pluralists over the question of how many values there are. Moral relativists and absolutists wrestle over the question of whether there can be universally valid ethical values. And on and on the scholarly disagreements go. Even the general approach taken in this entry – of developing a general theoretical account of values and integrity for application to specific practical issues – would strike some as questionable (Capaldi 1996). But none of these disputes undercuts an important point of consensus: In the day-to-day practice of public administration and policy making, ethical values and personal integrity are critical cornerstones. Neither individuals nor organizations can achieve long-term success without them.

Cross-References