No matter how strictly written the mandates or how clearly the hierarchy, at some point commitments prescribed will come into conflict. High officials regularly feel cross cutting tensions amid the requirements of protecting an institution, building support for a policy, and accounting to superiors. But even an inspector who vigilantly fills out a priority check list must make the choice between sending it to an overworked agency that may be slow in acting on it and trying to negotiate immediate compliance.
An official drawing up a budget proposal not only must decide what his or her division needs to fulfill its goals but also assess the nature of competing budgetary claims and the politics of the budgetary process. In any public office, goals and values will compete and collide. No one should assume that clear judgment will come out of any of these situations.
The ideal of personal integrity is a state in which people hold multiple domains of judgment in tension while keeping some coherence in their actions and lives. In this sense, personal integrity is a normative ideal for which people should and almost always do strive. The notion of moral responsibility depends upon the assumption that individuals can achieve integrity in their actions. Integrity provides a vital framer, work in which to discuss how individuals can simultaneously hold several commitments and achieve a morally defensible balance among them. In a complex world, integrity is the essential virtue for a moral life.
Personal integrity has several aspects. First, it demands consistency between inner beliefs and public actions. Integrity depends upon people integrity.
Personal commitments at the center of the web form the moral, intellectual, and emotional links that individuals use to connect other clusters of commitments embedded in roles. These central values have been acquired independently of, and usually prior to, office. The central values can be revised in light of experience, and such values are often reinforced by intersecting threads of family, religious, or professional commitments.
These values provide the capacity for critical reflection and judgment, which enables individuals to stand back from, hold together, and reshape roles.
The moral philosopher John Rawls has called this process reflective equilibrium, a state in which individuals seek a balance and coherence across actions, roles, and commitments. For a public official, these central values would include respect for self and others, commitment to truthfulness and public good, care, fairness, and honor. In maintaining integrity across their lives, individuals use reflection, will, and character.
To assess their various roles and commitments each role can be lived with different amounts of empathy, conscientiousness, optimism, or courage, respect. Individuals personalized roles and change the shape of each job they do by integrating their own personal values and character through the office.
The personal integrity as a moral ideal does not envision integrity as a hard, implacable nugget but as something dynamic. The experience of some roles can lead people to modify their central commitments in light of the demands of the roles. They might learn to expand their definition of respect or of professionalism.
Given the unity of people life, most values and commitments crisscross, intersect, and often reinforce one another. Individuals have difficulty when commitments or roles pull at the centering values. Within a role, actions that violate central values disturb all other aspects of people live and raise most of the serious issues of personal integrity in office. In these situations, the strains and pressures on the web of values can be so great as to destroy health or energy.
In response to such tensions, people sometimes disentangle themselves commitments that can no longer be sustained, and they resign from office. At other times, they may dissent in office or modify or resist actions to make them compatible with personal integrity. Sometimes the demands of a role so strain the central web of values that connections snap, leaving certain roles intact but loosely dangling from the rest of oneself.
People go to work but perform their jobs as if sleep walking with the job having no relation to the rest of their life. People can fall into self deception and not acknowledge their role as part of their identity. When individuals lives disintegrate like this, personal integrity and responsibility fragment.
People in office lose commitment burn out deny responsibility, performance and their personal lives suffer. In another variant of undermined integrity, the personal infiltrates the official, and people can confuse desires with office. On the other hand integrity can also be undermined when the requirements of the role so dominate self consciousness that the central web of values unravels into longer center of balance the job takes over life In people lose not only perspective on their actions in office but also the capacity to integrate and change roles through reflection and will the central commitments and capacities anchor the moral and cognition the matrix by which people can live personality of a self and judge and ground their actions in the role commitments when central commitments or character capacities are undermined, individuals themselves change in a moral when basic attributes of self can no longer be or when they change, then the centering identity that held the roles and commitments of life to get her no longer holds. This violation or unraveling go from integrity calls into question all the commitments and promises made on the basis of the older self and can undermine people ability to commit and keep promises in the future.
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