Integrity as Ethical Operational Value in Public Administration

Integrity is a prerequisite of every official in the public administration. It is generally justified by the need to build confidence in the public position. We consider that integrity represents an operational value of the functioning of the public systems, which controls the limits of legitimacy of the administrative systems in the context of the modern paradigm of the democratic and legal state. Correlative to integrity – at the same axiological level – and sometimes semantically interchangeable, there are the values of equity and impartiality. Integrity, like impartiality and fairness, is seen in correlation with equity, and in general with justice, both in its distributive, and in the procedural side. We will show that one of the sources of social construction of impartiality and fairness is represented by the modern ideal of axiological neutrality, transferred from the area of knowledge into that of social action. The ideal of neutrality represents a consequence of postulation inside the modern paradigm of dichotomy and epistemic compatibility between the subject and the object. The ideal of epistemic neutrality is congruent with the requirement to act towards achieving the values, by divesting the moral agent by its axiological competence. In applied ethics, including the social and political ones, the axiological competence, namely the capacity to establish values, belongs to the collective subject. From the perspective of the ethics of communication (Habermas, 2000; Apel 1992; 1993; 1999), the axiological competence is the result of communicative action.