15. Tiger - no champion of moral integrity

Tiger’s not perfect, he tells us, but that’s hardly the point. While I have no feelings and no opinion on his life (or sport), I do detest the ‘I’m sorry, I’m not perfect’ excuse for moral failings. Nobody’s perfect, but not everybody lies and cheats.

Going by his speech, Tiger Woods seems more concerned with the effect his behaviour had on others rather than on himself. That is to misunderstand what 'integrity' means, and encourages the attitude that so long as you don't get caught, it doesn't matter what you do (after all, if you don't get caught, you don't have to worry about affecting others in your life). Integrity means acting consistently with the values you hold in the quiet moments of life, the values that you would like to say you have lived by when you reflect on the question ‘what kind of a person have I been?’ at the very end of your mortal time. When our integrity fails there is always someone who knows, and there is always someone who is affected - that someone is oneself. Oscar Wilde's 'Picture of Dorian Gray' made this point with force - the portrait in Gray's attic is the consciousness in each of our heads, mirroring our shames and guilts, and even hiding them away in one's subconscious "attic" fails to negate their overarching power. This is the only worthwhile answer to the question set up in Plato's 'Republic': 'Why should I be moral?'

For each of us, the values that inform our integrity are things that we have to come by and develop over time. When we are young, we typically use the examples of others as a guide, a reference point from which to start developing our own personal compass of right and wrong, of shoulds and should nots. I don't know who Tiger Woods' heroes were, but if they had moral integrity the point is not that they were perfect; it is that they were grown - moral integrity requires maturity, not perfection.

And when we do fail? Eliot Spitzer handled it best I thought in his short resignation speech, though critics scoff that this was merely political maneouvring to seed a future return. The duplicity of politicians is never to be underestimated, but if he had been drinking Hemlock along with Socrates, that speech would have been a worthy addition to Plato’s dialogues.