Philosophy Club Meeting Nov. 3
Please join us at our next meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club this Wednesday, Nov. 3 from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. in Room 420 Auerbach Hall at the University of Hartford. You can also join the meeting online by clicking on the WebEx link:
https://hartford.webex.com/hartford/j.php?MTID=m41d9f7fef15de4bb58eebaf6645a1ffe
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Meeting Number (in case calling in): 171 628 0135
This week, Brian Skelly will present the topic:
Integrity as a Social Obligation
It is accepted almost as a truism that individual integrity is an obligation each of us has to ourselves. Polonius's declaration in Hamlet: “to thine own self be true” reverberates in our culture, even against a backdrop, in many cases, of psychosocial fragmentation based on competing dictates that we must learn to "compartmentalize", “reinvent ourselves”, “start over”, and “not look back” at key junctures in our lives. All this prompts questions about individual integrity. What is it? Is it really a necessary virtue, or is it perhaps incompatible with our doing what we have to do to "get by" in these times? Moreover, is it merely a private or is it something we owe to our fellow human being?
The term ‘integrity’, of course, has a meaning outside of morality, and we do well to start our reflection there, where it means something like unity or unbroken wholeness, such as territorial integrity or the integrity of a pristine ecosystem. This sense is borrowed pretty much intact from the Latin ‘integritas, whose main heading in Lewis and Short is “the unimpaired or undiminished condition of a thing”; its “completeness” or “soundness” (A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: 1984 [1879]), and is the nominalization of the adjective integer: whole, entire (this latter being a cognate of integer).
In English, the bulk of the usage of the term has been in moral contexts, as mere mention of the term echoes in our minds. It is something we urge upon ourselves and others practically without controversy as a sort of moral quality, rarely asking or perhaps even being sure of what exactly it is being urged. It is not as much that our mind draws a blank on its meaning as that it is hard to corner and inspect at length on its own merits. For one thing, it is sometimes used as a synonym for moral virtue inside and out; the disposition to do the right thing for the right reasons. But focusing on this usage allows the core meaning of the term to give us the slip, since although integrity may be a quality which empowers us to do the right things for the right reasons, this does permits us to conclude that is what it is. Given the term’s history and other associations, it is sloppy and even wasteful – in the sense of underuse - of linguistic resources to take ‘integrity’ as a mere synonym of ‘moral uprightness’.
For a similar reason, we would confuse matters in our attempt to understand the term in moral contexts by attempting to parse a distinction between ‘integrity’ and ‘moral integrity’ as if they were two different moral qualities or shades of the same quality. To be sure, the context, say, of our obligation to preserve the integrity of ecosystems is a moral one, but the term ‘integrity’ here does not refer to a moral quality. Although the flexibility of the term’s usage in English is ample enough to allow for one to ascribe integrity in a certain sense or other even to immoral choices and actions, this usage is controversial and only muddies the water for us in attempting to come to grips with the basic moral usage of ‘integrity’. Perhaps at a later stage than what we are attempting here we would be able to reconsider such subtleties with a more clear and distinct definition of ‘integrity’ in hand (See attached for full document).
An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Please be a part of us as we continue this great tradition live and online.
Brian D. Skelly, Philosophy
413-273-2273