Paragraph:
People often talk about a leader’s integrity, sometimes as if it is a
psychological quality and sometimes as if it is a moral quality. The
description of moral integrity has as many definitions as there are writers
in the leadership literature. Leadership scholars often define integrity as
a cluster of moral concepts that usually include honesty
and sometimes they use integrity to refer to all aspects of a leader’s
ethics. The descriptive meaning of the word “integrity” is wholeness and
that wholeness is the umbrella over all aspects of morality or as Aristotle
says, “the rule”. When a person has a virtue, it is a hexis because we do
not expect moral qualities to be selectively exercised or exercised in
isolation from other virtues. As David Baum notes, integrity refers to a
personal completeness that describes a person’s unbroken or uncorrupted
character
Question:
From the information given in the passage, the meaning of the term “hexis”
can be said to be:
A. something that is complete
B. something that is a subjective state
C. something that is unadulterated
D. something that is a gift
E. something that is a dilemma
I chose option A because of the word “because” after hexis which according
to me clearly explains what a hexis is. But according to them the correct
answer is B.
Explanation given by them:
The sentence that the term “hexis” appears in, talks about a person who has
virtue, who in turn is a hexis. The determiner “a” used before the term
gives us the clue that hexis is some sort of a noun. With this information,
we can cancel out options A and C as they are adjectives. The part of the
sentence that follows the term *“..because we do not expect moral qualities
to be selectively exercised or exercised in isolation from other
virtues” *tells
us why a person with virtue is a hexis. This partial sentence suggests that
virtues can’t be applied in isolation. Thus, it most certainly can’t be a
gift (Option D). The most likely options are B and E. Out of the two, a
hexis is more likely to be a subjective state because of the hint given by
the word ‘selectively’ in the sentence. The virtue is not exclusive, it
exists in relation to other virtues, making it subjective.
I disagree with this explanation on so many levels, starting with the fact
that they eliminated options A and C because they are “adjectives”, which
is absolutely not true in this context.
My friend and I had a huge debate about this question and we would be
grateful if you could shed some light on it.