Fordham Law Review Volume 72 Issue 2 Article 4 2003 Integrity: Its Causes and Cures David Luban Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation David Luban, Integrity: Its Causes and Cures, 72 Fordham L. Rev. 279 (2003). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol72/iss2/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. INTEGRITY: ITS CAUSES AND CURES David Luban* Integrity is a good thing, isn't it? In ordinary parlance, we sometimes use it as a near synonym for honesty, but the word means much more than honesty alone. It means wholeness or unity of person, an inner consistency between deed and principle. "Integrity" shares etymology with other unity-words-integer, integral, integrate, integration. All derive from the Latin integrare,to make whole. And the person of integrity is the person whose conduct and principles operate in happy harmony. Our psyches always seek that happy harmony. When our conduct and principles clash with each other, the result, social psychology teaches us, is cognitive dissonance. And dissonance theory hypothesizes that one of our fundamental psychic mechanisms is the drive to reduce dissonance. You can reduce dissonance between conduct and principles in two ways. The high road, if you choose to take it, requires you to conform your conduct to your principles.