Download Ethics & Integrity in Professional and Personal

Ethics & Integrity in
Professional and Personal
Contexts
Dr. Nancy A. Stanlick
Department of Philosophy
University of Central Florida
[email protected]
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?