A Little Word Play

So, a little word thing here. No deep evaluation or anything. Someone asked me recently what the word would be to describe someone as having integrity -- the adjective form of "integrity." I worked that over and over in my brain and decided we don't have that word. The internet gives "integrous" as a possibility, but classifies it as "rare" and observes that it's not even accepted as a term in most English circles. "Use a different word," they all say, "like 'honest' or 'virtuous'."

So I hunted down the differences between integrity, honesty, and virtue. Honesty is obviously in regard to truthfulness. No lying. Virtue is a bit farther along. To be virtuous is to do good deeds and follow moral values. Now, if you look up "integrity," you'll see something like this: "adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty." Well, then, okay ... there you have it. But ... not.

There is a different component to "integrity" that is neither "honesty" nor "virtue." It is found in the root of the word. Certainly you can see that the word origin is in the idea of "integer." In math that's a whole number. In every other use it is a complete entity -- no fractions or decimal points, so to speak. There is, buried in the word, "integrity," the concept of being whole. Thus, integrity carries more of a sense of being united in one's actions and attitudes to a unified set of principles. It is internal and external consistency.

You can see in this version of the word that it may or may not be virtuous. Peter Singer, for instance, is a bioethicist and an atheist. His philosophy of bioethics, then, reflects consistently his atheist principles. Humans are no more valuable than animals. Apes should have the same rights as humans. Children should be able to be killed as animals are killed. All rather horrible, but consistent. He could then be said to be a man of integrity simply because he is internally and externally consistent in his principles and views.

In the conversation I mentioned at the beginning my friend was saying that someone lacked integrity. I said, "So, he's not honest?" "Oh, no," my friend responded, "that's not what I'm saying." Because, although the language recognizes "honesty" and "virtue" as synonyms for "integrity," there is a distinction. Isn't it odd, then, that we have no adjective or adverb for "integrity"? Perhaps it's because we rarely need to describe someone as actually being "integrous"?