Abstract
I. Stephen Carter believes that America is facing a crisis of "integrity." His new book, simply entitled Integrity, argues that as individuals and as a society "we care far more about winning than about playing by the rules," 1 and he gathers examples from throughout American life. A prominent football coach glories in the fact that his team won a game on an official's call that he knows was wrong. Spouses break their marriage vows at unsettling high rates when their romantic love begins to wane. Journalists distort stories to fit their preconceived notions or evoke an audience reaction. And politicians - well, it seems as though almost everything they do smacks of non-integrity. Carter says integrity is "the most important virtue in politics;" 2 and he warns that "nothing but an all-out effort to demand integrity of our political leaders - and of their bosses, by which I mean us - will preserve democracy as we have come to know it in the century to come." 3 He also thinks that even though Americans do not always act with integrity, they sense that there is not enough of it and want more of it; he recalls mentioning the term at the outset of a commencement speech and being cheered, before the crowd knew "what I was going to say about it, or, indeed, whether I was for it or against it." 4 His project is to define the virtue that he calls integrity, show why it is important to ...