This academic paper, published in the "Journal of Academic and
Business Ethics," explains the similarity between the
common integrity failings of public officials and the everyday
integrity breaches of the rest of us.
Abstract:
The ethical breaches of government officials and business leaders are not
simply the product of temptations to which they succumb in those positions, but rather the
culmination of commonplace failures of integrity that they, like most people, commit on a
daily basis, and which tend to pass unnoticed, unexamined and uncorrected. These traps can
be observed in three principal ways:
1. People commonly cling to their beliefs and
opinions—making life-altering decisions affecting themselves and others—with little or no factual support for such beliefs and opinions
2. They insist on the purity of their intentions, blinding them to the unethical nature of their actions
3. They tend to view integrity's requirements through a distorting lens that justifies self-interest: for instance, creating self-
promoting categories of false duties such as the duty to survive or loyalty to self, and viewing
integrity as an uncompromising stand of personal conviction rather than the deliberate
accommodation of competing interests.
As a consequence of these defects in discernment,
most remain blind to their own breaches, even as they judge the breaches of others. The
paper challenges the assumption that the practice of integrity is an innate skill and asserts that
it is a methodology that must be systematically deployed to be effective. The paper lays out
the tenets of this methodology.
