Stephen L. Carter's The Insufficiency Of Honesty

Many people mistake the word “integrity” to hold the same weight as the word “honesty;” however, Oxford Dictionary defines integrity as: “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” Therefore, we can conclude that being honest is only a part of having integrity, so just because someone says what he or she means, doesn’t mean that this person has integrity. In “The Insufficiency of Honesty,” Stephen L. Carter discusses the misconception that many people have about the difference between honesty and integrity by presenting examples of how people that are completely honest lack a sense of moral behavior. Through a clearly reasoned discussion, Carter raises some insightful points about how honesty alone cannot make someone or some action morally correct. …show more content…
Just after telling the audience the topic of his discourse, Carter uses dramatic diction of illustrate how the “crowd broke into applause,” because they were “starved” from hearing the word “integrity” (337). Carter then instantly knew that no one in the crowd knew the meaning of integrity, by comparing integrity to the weather: “everybody talks about it but nobody knows what to do about it”. (337) Carter didn’t even tell the crowd the way in which he was going to talk about integrity, but since they all cheered once he just said the word “integrity,” it was clear to him that the audience had no idea what integrity was. So, in order to clarify the definition of, Carter uses rhetorical questions to explain that integrity is not the same thing as honesty. He then states that “one cannot have integrity without being honest, but one can certainly be honest and yet have little integrity”(338). This seeming paradoxical statement proves Carter’s point by explaining that honesty is only a subset of integrity, and unlike honesty, integrity entails people to have good moral