Ethics & Integrity in Professional and Personal Contexts Dr. Nancy A. Stanlick Department of Philosophy University of Central Florida

What is Ethics?  Ethics? –Rules (lower level, externally imposed) –Reasons (higher level, internally determined)  Sources of Ethical Concepts –Transcendent –Cultural –Individual  Does the Origin of Ethical Concepts Matter?

What is Integrity?  Stephen Carter, Integrity (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 7: “The word integrity comes from the same Latin root as integer and historically has been understood to carry much the same sense, the sense of wholeness: a person of integrity, like a whole number, is a whole person, a person somehow undivided…. The word conveys … the serenity of a person who is confident in the knowledge that he or she is living rightly…. A person of integrity lurks somewhere inside each of us: a person we feel we can trust to do right, to play by the rules, to keep commitments” (bold emphasis added).

Ethics and Integrity  What does it mean to say that a person is “whole” or “undivided”?  What is it to “live rightly”?  What is the connection between these questions, and the conceptions of ethics and integrity, to the social context in which we live?

Wholeness of a Person  What is it to be a person? (Persona, Mask, Appearance and Reality)  Knowing Oneself and Others –Trusting Oneself and Others  This concept leads to an understanding of the notion of trust in a community of persons.  The community of persons is composed of individuals, their interests and needs, and the competing interests of the community –“The very stress on individualism, on competition, on achieving material success which so marks our society also generates intense pressures to cut corners” (Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, New York: Vintage, 1999, 244).  How can the competing interests converge?

Converging/Diverging Views  Individual and Community Ascendancy –In which type of society do you wish to live?  Individual Ascendancy: present orientation, hedonism, duty to self  Community Ascendancy: future orientation, takes responsibility, duty to others  ***From Kibler, Nuss, Paterson and Pavela, Academic Integrity and Student Development: Legal Issues and Policy Perspectives (College Administration Publications, 1988).

Relationships to Others, Individual Value and Community Value  Personal Relationships on the Model of Friendship –From Aristotle’s Ethical Theory  Pleasure  Utility  Mutuality –Ask yourself what your relationship is to others with whom you work, how they see you, and how you see them. –Can a community really survive without mutual trust?  “Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity” (Bok, 249). –What is lost for the individual AND the community when trust is broken?  Self Respect?  Respect from and for Others?  And why does this matter?