Promoting Integrity Integritively: Avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of Abdication and Zealotry

Abstract

There is more than a bit of ‘ethical neediness’ in society. One good question is what can be done about it. The answer pursued here is that we should promote integrity aggressively and integritively. Directing attention to the arena of higher education and problems associated with academic or educational integrity, the chapter (a) discusses honor codes as a device for promoting academic integrity; (b) identifies and explains a key virtue and a vice of honor codes and, in relation to the values an honor code is meant to safeguard, a significant way in which honor codes are like a professional ethic; and (c) argues that success in this project requires abandonment of an attractive but misleading conception of ethics that suggests, wrongly, that acting rightly is simply a matter of rigid adherence to standards. To be sure, some questions about what one should do are straightforwardly and quite legitimately answered by reference to rules. In this, ethics may seem quite like law (adjudication). But one has to be careful here, lest one be seduced by the siren song of what Roscoe Pound called mechanical jurisprudence, for in law and ethics, as in the Greek myth, this does not have a happy ending. There is more to the story. In ethics (adjudication too) one confronts genuine complexity that cannot be dealt with algorithmically. This is something that we have to face head on, if we are committed to promoting integrity integritively.

Citation

Wueste, D.E. (2014), "Promoting Integrity Integritively: Avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of Abdication and Zealotry", Achieving Ethical Excellence (Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 5-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-209620140000012001