Public Integrity. By J. Patrick Dobel. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 260p. $38.00.
Integrity is a shifty, furtive concept. Philosophers have had a hard time defining the idea because it raises a couple of recurrent perplexities. First, consider former Speaker Jim Wright's remark that "integrity is ... the state or quality of being complete, undivided, [and] unbroken," or the Oxford English Dictionary connotation of an "unbroken state" of "material wholeness." The problem is that integrity, so understood, seems to leave no room for the possibility of individuals whose lives display any kind of self-critical revision, changes in course, or ...