Welcome to Episode 3 of Being Integrity, and today we’re going to discern or recognize integrity as compared to other types of knowledge that discuss right and wrong, such as morality, legality, ethics and so on.

Well, what does the Buddha say about integrity? He says:

“And how is a person of integrity endowed with qualities of integrity? There is the case where a person of integrity is endowed with conviction, conscience, concern; he is learned, with aroused persistence, unmuddled mindfulness and good discernment. This is how a person of integrity is endowed with qualities of integrity.” — Cūḷa-puṇṇama Sutta (MN 110)

I love how the Buddha always tells us how; not just what, but how. So we’ll go into some of these other qualities later on in this series. But right now we want to talk about unmuddled mindfulness and good discernment.

So, to discern something means to be able to pick it out, to recognize it, to identify it even among a bunch of other similar things. So for example, if I had a pet dog, and there were a whole bunch of dogs running around, I’d be able to pick out my dog from among the pack. Similarly, there are many different ideas dealing with right and wrong, good and bad, what to do, what not to do. And we’re going to go over the difference between integrity and these other ideas.

We use a positive model of integrity; and the reason we do that is because it gives us access to enhanced performance. And we’ll get into that later on in the series. But basically, if you have integrity, you will be able to perform far greater than a typical person without integrity. And of course the same goes for groups, organizations and societies that have integrity built-in. They will have a much higher output, much greater creativity and so on than others who don’t have integrity.

In our model, we discern or recognize four phenomena dealing with right and wrong: morality, ethics, legality and integrity. So let’s go over those briefly. Philosophical discourse and common usage misdefine and confuse morality, ethics, legality and integrity. This causes people to misunderstand these four phenomena, so it is very difficult to apply them properly. Their integrity declines as a result.

So what is the difference between morality, ethics, legality and integrity? Can you tell me right off the top of your head? Probably not; and that’s a problem. It’s a problem because these words actually refer to different things; and unfortunately in the ordinary dictionary definitions, they are defined in terms of one another. So there’s a lot of circular definitions going on: morality is defined as ethics, ethics is defined as morality, and so on.