Integrity in American Culture

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Alba Dominguez Todd Fox English 100 11 March 2014 Integrity in American Culture Throughout people’s lives, they are faced with countless decisions. Whether to cut corners on upcoming school projects, lying to a police officer for speeding on the road, or doing anything to make themselves a little bit better than their coworkers, colleagues, or neighbors. American culture is based on winning on a variety of aspects. Morality and ethics go hand-in-hand with these issues because sometimes being the best in something requires people to bend the rules. Because American culture is based on people’s desire to succeed at all cost, this negatively affects their values. A negative effect on integrity, morality, and ethics means contempt of these three concepts. Ethics are society’s normal view of morals, morals are spoken beliefs about what is right and wrong, and integrity of an individual’s ability to uphold these standards of morality and ethics. However, American society is focused on winning at all cost and this sometimes displaces a person’s integrity, morals and ethics. Americans do not care about have integrity as long as they win. Winning is the ultimate goal and it does not matter what do they do to succeed. A student, which Mark Clayton interviews, states that college students cheat because although it “[may] not be a good answer, but none the less it is an answer.”(198). The problem with this philosophy is that people expect integrity from others even when they lack it themselves. For example, students expect teachers to grade fairly even though they plagiarized the work they are handing in. Changes in American culture have a bad influence on children; it affects their development and the ability to develop integrity. Steven Carter states “integrity is like the weather: everybody talks about it but nobody knows what to do with it”(181). Children know the
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