It assumes a level of charity and sophistication in the people you’re appealing to.
And that statement assumes you’re trying to do PR instead of acting with honor. Having integrity isn’t about whether you’re appealing to people, but whether you’re willing to stick to your principles even when they’re not appealing to people.
I think the point of this article was that, the very moment you’ve chosen “always appealing to people” as your goal, you’ve already lost. (And it rather seems to point towards a reason for the current moral bankruptcy of corporations and political parties, these days.)
One overlooked complication here is the extent to which honor is still socially constructed in particular circumstances. One helpful way to frame practical ethics is to distinguish between public and private morality. Almost nobody subscribes to a value system that exists in a vacuum independent of the at least somewhat subjective influence of their social environment. Having integrity can sometimes still mean subverting one’s personal morality to live up to societal standards imposed upon oneself.
To commit suicide after a sufficiently shameful act has been part of a traditional code of honor in some aspects of Japanese culture for centuries. Presumably not everyone who commits suicide in Japan out of a sense of duty and honor feels in their heart of hearts is what definitely the right choice. Yet they still feel obliged to act upon a code of honor they don’t believe in the same way a soldier is still supposed to follow the orders of a commanding officer even if the soldier disagrees with them.
This mixture of what public and private morality mean for one’s honor and integrity to the point people will sacrifice their lives for the sake of relatively arbitrary external societal standards points to how honor can’t be so easily distinguished from PR in this way.
I certainly think that some people attack principle P with conscious intent to erode it, based on valuing V, an alternative principle W, or trying to get X from you. Standing up for P in the face of such anti-P partisans can only be done by rejecting their anti-P stance.
However, people will also attack principle P for a variety of other reasons.
P is the foundation of principle Q, which they support. But anti-P propaganda has severed this link in their mind. Appealing for P on the basis of their value for Q might be more effective than a straightforward defense of P.
They actually support P, but they’re surrounded by punitive anti-P partisans. You have to appeal to them by building trust that you’re not an anti-P partisan.
They support P intellectually, but feel no urgency about defending it. You don’t need to defend P to them, but to appeal to them by showing that P is under attack.
And that statement assumes you’re trying to do PR instead of acting with honor. Having integrity isn’t about whether you’re appealing to people, but whether you’re willing to stick to your principles even when they’re not appealing to people.
I think the point of this article was that, the very moment you’ve chosen “always appealing to people” as your goal, you’ve already lost. (And it rather seems to point towards a reason for the current moral bankruptcy of corporations and political parties, these days.)
One overlooked complication here is the extent to which honor is still socially constructed in particular circumstances. One helpful way to frame practical ethics is to distinguish between public and private morality. Almost nobody subscribes to a value system that exists in a vacuum independent of the at least somewhat subjective influence of their social environment. Having integrity can sometimes still mean subverting one’s personal morality to live up to societal standards imposed upon oneself.
To commit suicide after a sufficiently shameful act has been part of a traditional code of honor in some aspects of Japanese culture for centuries. Presumably not everyone who commits suicide in Japan out of a sense of duty and honor feels in their heart of hearts is what definitely the right choice. Yet they still feel obliged to act upon a code of honor they don’t believe in the same way a soldier is still supposed to follow the orders of a commanding officer even if the soldier disagrees with them.
This mixture of what public and private morality mean for one’s honor and integrity to the point people will sacrifice their lives for the sake of relatively arbitrary external societal standards points to how honor can’t be so easily distinguished from PR in this way.
That’s a good thought.
I certainly think that some people attack principle P with conscious intent to erode it, based on valuing V, an alternative principle W, or trying to get X from you. Standing up for P in the face of such anti-P partisans can only be done by rejecting their anti-P stance.
However, people will also attack principle P for a variety of other reasons.
P is the foundation of principle Q, which they support. But anti-P propaganda has severed this link in their mind. Appealing for P on the basis of their value for Q might be more effective than a straightforward defense of P.
They actually support P, but they’re surrounded by punitive anti-P partisans. You have to appeal to them by building trust that you’re not an anti-P partisan.
They support P intellectually, but feel no urgency about defending it. You don’t need to defend P to them, but to appeal to them by showing that P is under attack.