Integrity In Public Service

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Integrity is one of the most important and fundamental values of the public service. The term ‘integrity’ stands for consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcome. When used as a virtue term, “integrity” refers to a quality of a person’s character. Some people see integrity as the quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one’s actions. Persons of integrity do not just act consistently with their endorsements, they stand for something: they stand up for their best judgement within a community of people trying to discover what in life is worth doing. Some commentators stress the idea of integrity as personal honesty: acting according to one’s beliefs and values at all times.
The word "integrity" stems from the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete). In this context, integrity is the inner …show more content…

Some regard integrity as a virtue in that they see accountability and moral responsibility as necessary tools for maintaining such consistency.
Halfon (1989) offers a different way of defining integrity in terms of moral purpose. Halfon describes integrity in terms of a person’s dedication to the pursuit of a moral life and their intellectual responsibility in seeking to understand the demands of such life. He writes that person
“……….embrace a moral point of view that urges them to be conceptually clear, logically consistent, appraised of relevant empirical evidence, and careful about acknowledging as well as weighing relevant moral considerations. Persons of integrity impose these restrictions on themselves since they are concerned, not simply with taking any moral position, but with pursuing a commitment to do what is best”. As Carter (1906) has stated, integrity requires three

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