Honesty and Integrity

                                                                               

1. I was watching Dr. Subhash Chandra show on Z-TV, in which he was taking to IIM, Lucknow students and the topic as I gathered was related to honesty. He gave an example of a business owner who got a contract from the government and in executing the contract made a huge profit for the company. The means to obtain the contract was not a straight forward tender but by dubious means. The question was whether the person was honest or not. It was not the question but the answer given by a girl student which amazed me when she said that the person was honest as he made a huge profit for the company and the stake holders and the means to get the contract was not important. This gave me an insight into the new definition of honesty in the present young generation. Honesty in her opinion was related to only the narrow world of making profit. Another example quoted was that the owner of a company called for some persons for an interview in relation to a job in his company but after taking the interview he choose to select a person who was recommended to him by a public servant. In this case the answer was more relevant as the boy said that he should not have called the persons to interview and he has a right to choose the person of his choice. Here he said the end result was honest but the means to achieve the end were dishonest. These two examples brought forward a variety of conceptions and differences in opinion about honesty. It is the same trick being employed by the persons accused in 2G and coal gate scams where they said that they did their job honestly and in public interest and have made no money for themselves but still the government ended up losing huge amount of  money and Supreme Court calling it a scam.

2. This whole show put me thinking whether the present generation understands the difference between honesty and integrity or they are so wholly concerned about honesty that they do not know what integrity is. The whole show took me to the classes which I used to take on business ethics while teaching MBA students, where the first lecture used to be to explain the difference between honesty and integrity. It is not easy to explain the difference between honesty and integrity to young MBA students as they come from a society where a lot of things are accepted as honesty and it is very common to do them. It is very common to break a queue, or to break a traffic rule, or to drive on wrong side, to pay bribe to get a berth on a train or get a seat in a professional college, or to pay for getting a medical certificate or a driving license, hide the income from Income tax department by accepting in cash, or to buy a thing without a receipt so as to avoid tax and so on. The list is endless and majority of us do these things without batting an eyelid.

3. I use to start my lecture either by a story or give a situation and then derive the main subject from the lessons learnt in these. This normally initiated an interest and the students did remember the story/situation and hence the morale. In this case I used my favorite situation of you standing outside your house and a person comes running with torn clothes and blood on the clothes and asks you to help him as some persons are going to hurt him badly. You can either help him by asking him to hide in the basement or not and asking him to go away and that is not important because in either case the end result is the same. Within a minute or two some persons come running carrying a pole and knives and ask you whether you have seen the man and where he has gone. Here I ask my students as to what are they going to do. You can either tell them the truth that the person is hiding in the basement or show them the way he has run or you can deceive them by sending them in the wrong direction. In the first scenario you are honest but you have no integrity and in the second scenario you have integrity but you are not honest just because you have no right to judge whether the person is guilty or not and of what crime and does the crime justify the mob attacking or even killing him.

4. Another example I give is that I leave my purse on the table and tell the students that pretend I have gone home and then ask them as to what they are going to do. Invariably the answer is that the purse will be picked up and the person will come after me to give my purse back to me. Of course this is the ideal situation and probably in most case I will end up losing the purse or its contents. But that is another story. The main point then I explain is that by picking up my purse you act is dishonest as the purse does not belong to you but you have integrity as your intention was to return my purse and that my dear students is the difference between honesty and integrity. Honesty is a value but integrity is the principles. A value may change over a period of time or may change given different circumstances or environment but principles do not change. It is either you have them or you do not have them at all. Values are like a map of the city in which you live but the principle is the precise address of your house. It is when you do not understand the subtle differences between the two that confusion and contradictory answers arise and you are accused of changing values. If the honesty flows from integrity then the end result is right but not possible to derive integrity from honesty The answers given on the show brought out this fact very clearly that the public at large do not know the difference between the two and hence their off springs or students also grow up with the same confusion and end up thinking that it is only honesty and integrity and honesty are the same things.

5. Of course I can give the dictionary meaning and the difference between the two but the examples given above bring out the thin line dividing them more clearly. Honesty has been just defined as the quality of being honest and honest is being truthful, sincere, fairly earned, etc. It is defined in terms of the end results and not in terms of the process. Integrity on the other hand is defined as the quality of being honest and morally upright. The difference is hardly anything but the emphasis on being morally upright in integrity is the core thing. Honesty as it is understood nowadays is mainly concerned with the end result being truthful and fairly earned but in the integrity the emphasis is on the process of being morally upright. If the process is morally upright then the end result will always be right but if the process is not morally upright then even though the end result is fair or justified but you cannot call the person as having integrity even though other persons may label them as being honest. In the coal gate scam this is the main differences. All the accused may shout from the rooftops that they were and are honest and upright public servants but since the process employed was not morally right hence they have no integrity and the Supreme Court has rightly labeled as a scam.