56. Integrity is not moralistic
Although desirable standards cannot be unified with practice, they should not be too distant from practice, otherwise they become moralistic. For that reason it is important that demands of SPs’ integrity are realistic, and that SPs make realistic demands of their own and others’ integrity.
In the previous chapter we saw that SPs must take care not to elevate practice to the status of a standard. This would cause a lapse in ethics, making reflecting on practice pointless because practice would then be the desired standard and would always be seen as morally acceptable. Avoiding unifying standards with practice is one side of the coin.
The flipside is that the standards set should not be counter to practice. Integrity is sometimes seen as moralistic, preaching, idealistic, superior,and overly fastidious. SPs will then set aside criticism of their integrity because they do not feel it applies to them. In their view the criticism fails to take their situation into account. It is therefore important to keep an eye on SPs’ situations when setting demands of their integrity. Machiavelli indicated the risks involved. When studying what is desirable we should not ignore the circumstances: “There is such a gap between how one lives and how one should live that he who neglects what is being done for what should be done will learn his destruction rather than his preservation.”341
This means that realistic standards should be set for SPs, with attention for practice without automatically allowing standards to follow practice. SPs do not need too much integrity.342
It is unethical to set excessively high expectations of integrity among SPs. If the demands of integrity are too high, this will only lead to continual fault finding, a recipe for defeat and withdrawal of SPs, as Stephen Carter notes.343 Integrity would lose its attraction and would only repel when the gap between standard and practice became too great. “Politics is the art of the possible,” as Otto von Bismarck put it.344 The same goes for integrity: integrity must be attainable; we cannot ask the impossible. This means that we should not make excessively many demands of SPs, nor excessively few.
When it comes to judging SPs’ behavior, the unruly situation in which they operate should be taken into consideration. For SPs themselves this means maintaining standards that are neither too high nor too low in criticizing one another. Otherwise you come across as a know- it-all or moralist (if you set standards too high), or as immoral, cowardly, unresponsive, and inactive (if you set them too low). Realistic standards are also important for self-evaluation. Otherwise you risk wrongly talking yourself into an inferiority or guilt complex (if standards are too high) or conceitedness, overconfidence, and passivity (if standards are too low).
If you are confronted and criticized, it can be sufficient defense to dismiss criticism and the critics as moralistic. This transfers attention to the critics and their knowledge and understanding of the situation in question. It is also important to avoid creating the impression of lacking morals yourself when pointing out excessively high morals applied by others, as this exacerbates the problem.