Personal integrity

An individual is said (John Kleinig) to acquire a specific personality or identity through learning, constructing a unity through deliberation, experimentation, and accommodation of inherent capacities which are too many and various for all to be developed fully or even developed at all. This building is a life's work for which each individual is responsible, partially dependent on formative training in early years and partly on the coherence and cohesiveness which the individual manages to develop himself. He may or may not succeed to his own satisfaction, as a lack in maturity of purpose may lead to careless and foolish departure from his own more permanent and central projects and commitments.

This approach to personal integrity differs from that which assumes that everyone is born with a particular fixed pattern of development, with which no-one else has the right to interfere, and which will lead naturally to the most propitious results.