Morality began to be outdated and replaced by integrity as a basis for human existence roughly in the middle of the 20th century.  Still, it began to evaporate with the rationalism and empiricism of Descartes and Hume, and with the positivism and analytical philosophy of the 20th century. Kantian ethics was slowly replaced by brute rationalism and, later in the 20th century, by a sheer void. Neither morality nor ethics is essential for a conception that reduces a human being to speech acts and other types of mechanical determinism. 

But, as I argued in this post, the subtle interplay between ethics and morality lies at the centre of human sustainability. Since both are memetic, not physical, they can exist only as constantly reinterpreted, constantly resymbolized. If they exist, they can exist only in the form of stories that try to make sense of them. And as we know, stories are stories only as communicated, and communication always involves at least two parties. We make sense of our words and thus also of ethics and morality in a constant dialogue. If such dialogue does not take place, such memetic reality disappears. 

The disappearance of morality

Ethics and morality disappeared not only from the vocabulary of mainstream philosophy in the second part of the 20th century, but also from mass media and other channels of communication, and sometimes even from the church liturgy. Alas, with the church being only a dispensible companion to real life, ethics and morality became negligible values, dispensable characters of our everyday stories.

I used the term »void« by intention, for it is like the void to be filled in sooner or later. Indeed, in place of ethics and morality, integrity stepped in. Check contemporary codes of conduct for commercial companies, public institutions, NGOs, and state institutions; whenever they seek to define how to operate and conduct various activities, integrity is the solution. And since integrity, as such, must be more specific, various key performance indicators (KPIs) are devised to measure it and derive a single number that indicates a person’s or an institution’s integrity level. And as we know, KPIs are measured over time to show whether the score improves or worsens.

To repeat: you cannot find much of ethics, or even morality, in contemporary guidance on how to conduct our lives*. Even “self-healing how to do« popular books on self-development replace morality with various more or less clever measurable (if possible) concepts, from happiness to motivation, responsibility, and selflessness. 

Disappearance, why?

I hope that, now that we realise how important measuring integrity is as a core contemporary concept that has replaced morality and ethics, the message from the cited post becomes clearer. It should be clear that humanity cannot survive without both domains. Suppose we could pretend that integrity paves the path towards some contemporary ethics, as something at least potentially measurable. In that case, there is nothing there that would replace morality, even in theory.

To quite an obvious question, why, there is a straightforward answer: because humans (Western civilisation I am talking about) replaced a concept of human as a living biological creature with identity and various levels of non-rational existence, for a concept of a rational, mechanical, manageable creature. Management of companies, management of nature, management of humans. All management levels are on the same level, are explainable by a logical algorithm, and are reducible.

Integrity as a fake morality

Let me be even more direct. Contemporary man indulges himself with integrity, for it lacks the energy and will to face morality as something that must be discussed to exist. A discussion was the starting point of Western civilization. The discussion of the 10 Commandments, for instance, is the prerequisite for morality to emerge. 

Those who understand, namely, know that the 10 Commandments should not be taken as a logarithm, as operating instructions. The negative attitude towards the Bible, for instance, stems precisely from the notion that it prescribes how we should live. In fact, it only offers a ground to make our own story; our own sense devised orally in a dialogue out of it. For that reason, the revolt against Aristotle, with Hume and others in the Enlightenment, was both ill-understood and ill-conceived. For Aristotle, as well as the Bible, should not have been understood as an authority as defined by Scholastic teachers, but as a starting point for your own authority, for your own story.

Contemporary man is afraid of being self-authoritative; he is afraid to perform constant sense-making; he is searching for quick-fix algorithms in the form of KPI’s and measurable integrities. Contemporary man is indulged in humanism that is abstract and far enough from himself, for he is afraid of himself as an authority. He thus likes the nanny state and is afraid of homonism.

Let me conclude: nothing less than morality and nothing less than homonism are worth living.

• I do not intend to imply that there is no literature devoted to ethics and morality in contemporary management. There is, but it does not enter the practice of management. And morality is all about practice.