18. Integrity in the past predicts present and future integrity
A past error by an SP can have implications for the present and the future, causing them to leave office or not to be selected for new positions. An important reason for this is that transgressions, even in the distant past, give an impression of lack of integrity – because integrity does not change quickly – damaging confidence that SPs can continue to fulfill their roles properly now and in the future. Screening of candidates for office is important, as is self-screening. SPs should consider integrity long before they apply for office.
In the previous chapters we saw how an error damages integrity. In this chapter we discuss how past errors, as well as those of today, have implications for the present and future.
A past error can prevent the perpetrators from being appointed to positions they might otherwise have held. When mayoral nominations were announced, a national newspaper reported that a candidate had been involved in construction fraud as a committee member for a university and tax evasion as chairman of a football club 10 years previously. As a result the candidate was not appointed. Evidently behavior from a decade ago is still relevant for evaluating current integrity and can even be a decisive factor in evaluating candidates for an SP role. Similarly it is claimed that Senator Edward Kennedy’s chances of becoming US president in 1980 were significantly damaged by an incident 10 years previously in which he had made insufficient attempts to prevent a female passenger from drowning after a car accident.96 The candidate nominated by President Obama as US ambassador to Iraq also had to withdraw when the media learned he had had a relationship with a journalist as advisor to the US government four years previously and leaked emails in which they joked about exchanging sex for information.97
Similarly those already in office may be forced to relinquish their positions when errors in previous jobs are revealed. Simply looking for SPs who have been removed from their positions for plagiarism in their PhD dissertations we find many examples, such as German minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg,98 German minister of education, Annette Schavan,99
Taiwanese minister of defense Andrew Yang100 and Hungarian president Pál Schmitt.101
Similarly a congressman was removed from his post because a historian revealed that he had sympathized with the enemy 10 years before the war, a secretary of state resigned on the day she was sworn in because photos were published a few hours after her appointment showing her parading around in the uniform of a reprehensible regime, and a secretary of state for education resigned when it emerged that in his previous position as professor he had had a job on the side for which he had used university writing paper, while being paid privately for the work. A politician was also sacked when it was revealed that as an activist against nuclear energy he had broken into the ministry and threatened officials, another for having intercourse with female subordinates as a sergeant in the army, subsequently earning a conviction for his actions, and another when it was revealed that she had provided incorrect personal data for her naturalization application.
The present relevance of past mistakes relates to their future relevance. Past mistakes often say a great deal about a person’s integrity or lack thereof. Since integrity relates to character traits that are difficult to change, a mistake, even from the distant past, tells us about a person in the present and how they will remain in the future (termed predictive attribution). A past mistake therefore damages confidence that people will be able to do their jobs in future. If a virtue is essential for the job, a vice will impede it.
Integrity problems are exacerbated when SPs keep quiet about their past, indicating a lack of honesty and candor, or if it is done unintentionally, a lack of alertness and care, virtues which are equally important for many SP roles. Silence is also often indirect proof that a person knew that their behavior was unacceptable. If it had been acceptable, it would have been possible to be open about it, or so others might see it. So keeping quiet about a past mistake contributes to condemnation. The longer the mistake is covered up, the more heavily it weighs, not only because it has been covered up for longer, providing more missed opportunities for openness, but also because the dishones