The Operational Virtue of Integrity

I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action — in other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it.

Theodore Roosevelt

Integrity is the virtue¹ of translating one’s professed values² into action in the world.

Put more idiomatically, this is walking the walk or walking the talk.

The idea behind this word is consistent wholeness. Being one thing. Not cutting yourself into multiple people who operate in a contradictory, undermining fashion.

You can see this in integrity’s etymology. It comes from the Latin “integer,” which means “intact, whole, uninjured.” Compare this to modern English words that share it as a root:

• Integrate: to incorporate multiple things into a whole.

• Integral: essential to make something complete or whole.

• Integer: a non-fraction number, a whole number.

The common antonym of integrity is hypocrisy—Although it might more properly “disintegrity” or “disintegral.” We already use the word “disintegrate” when something comes apart.—There are two distinct versions of hypocrisy:

• Unintentional inconsistency: an unrealized lack of integrity that would be resolved if it were brought to an individual’s attention, or if they realized it. The practice of bringing some behavior or way of thinking into consistency with one’s values is called “integration.” For example, overcoming the coping mechanism of splitting allows an individual to integrate a whole view of life and act according to it. Or if someone doesn’t want to start a fitness routine because it will take a while to get the results they want, you can say to them “Remember when you learned how to play the guitar? Remember how the first few weeks felt rocky, but then it got easier the more you learned, and how it kept getting better the further you went? Realize that the same learning/results curve is present in most things, including fitness. You can have confidence that your emotions will follow the same curve too. Do not let upfront discouragement overcome your desire to achieve a value—you already know this in other areas of your life.” Resolving unrealized inconsistencies is a regular part of human life.

• Intentional inconsistency: a known lack of integrity that an individual does not resolve. Lack of resolution can result from many things. For example: fear or shame (facing up to an action or pattern of behavior and changing it), or a vice (attempted profit from willing deception)—this is willful disintegration.

Vertical and horizontal integrity

In my post “What are the Liberal Arts?”, I said that integrity was one of the two principal operational virtues of the liberal arts:

The second operational virtue of the liberal arts is integrity: loyalty to one’s understanding of reality. How is that different from courage? Well: you can be courageous in some areas of your life, but not others. Integrity is the uniform practice of it in all areas of your life. It demands that all virtues be practiced in all instances. It understands why a deficit of courage in one area of your life can interrupt and weaken its practice in another.

Integrity as a method of living and achieving values requires an individual to stay loyal—in thought and action—to their best understanding of reality, no matter what they’re doing. How you are in one area of your mind and habits inevitably bleeds into other areas. Teaching and practicing the liberal arts requires this knowledge, and the deliberate cultivation of integrity. Why? Because one cannot read well, or think well, without integrity. One cannot be “free” as a result, since one’s thought will be measured against something other than “one’s best understanding of reality.” For example, consider Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Gell-Mann Amnesia is one of the most common ways that a lack of integrity manifests. Here’s how the author Michael Crichton described it in a 2002 speech:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

What’s actually happening here is the person reading the newspaper does not have patterns of thought, or habits of thinking, that prompt them to evaluate information generally³—they only evaluate it when it’s in their area of expertise, or related to “their team.”⁴ Because they have not learned or practiced these patterns of thought and habits of thinking—the methods of integrity—they do not possess intellectual integrity, which, of course, bleeds into larger disintegration in thought, emotion, and action.

This little illustration from Crichton also shows that integrity can be considered in two ways:

• Vertical integrity: loyalty to one’s understanding of reality within a particular domain, like physics.

• Horizontal integrity: loyalty to one’s understanding of reality across all domains, as a character trait.

“Lack of integrity,” in the technical sense of a lack of good habits and methods of thinking, is how you get the “dumb smart people” phenomenon where experts in one domain boldly venture completely backwards ideas in other domains. They have vertical integrity, but it is undermined by a lack of horizontal integrity.

Of course, without horizontal integrity, vertical integrity can break down more easily. Even physicists (!) will begin to ruin their own science if they do not possess integrity, enabled by courage, in other areas of their lives.⁵ The replication crisis is a prime example. My favorite discussion of scientific integrity comes from Richard Feynman’s 1974 Caltech commencement address:

I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.

Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics.

Three concluding notes on integrity

We have some cultural touchstones of disintegration, and we know how painful it can be. A common one is being completely different, incompatible versions of yourself among different groups of people. This happens to gay individuals before they’ve come out—where “coming out” is part of the process of integration, coupled with honesty, courage, etc—but it also happens to us all. Maybe you have a group of friends you’ve grown apart from, but you can’t bring yourself to be honest with them, so you put up a front for fear of rejection. This is a horrible way to live that only invites further emotional and characteristic degradation, especially into resentment. This is disintegration.

Integrity is a habit. It is not something you simply “have” or “don’t.” It is the sum total of your actions and ways of thinking. In matters large and small,⁶ vertically and horizontally. Like physical strength, it is built over time, not all at once.

While “lack of integrity” is often used as a phrase of scolding or condemnation, I often mean it in a purely descriptive sense: a wholeness is not present, which results in a lack of structural integrity of a person, their emotions, or their habits. Of course there is moral evaluation to do there, but integrity can be thought of diagnostically just like physical strength and weakness. If you have it, “x” happens. If you don’t, “y” happens. If you want “x,” perform integration.

Note: opening pull quote is from page 187 of TR’s autobiography, from the chapter on his time with the New York police: Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter VI: “The New York Police,” (1913).

1. Virtue: the method(s) by which one acts to gain or keep a value

2. Value: that which one acts to gain or keep

3. One either evaluates information and the world directly, evaluates the character of knowledge proxies one listens to, or forbears an opinion in varying degrees. The only other options are, in the literal sense, unreasonable.

4. One could also think of the “actor-observer fallacy” here—where one evaluates one’s own actions based on full, broad context (“I was having a bad day, etc”), and other’s actions based on projected character traits (“They cut me off because they are inconsiderate and bad.”).

5. This specific breakdown in science and personal character is perfectly manifested in the character of Dr. Robert Stadler in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

6. For example, see Luke 16:10: “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.