Which public figures have integrity?

UWC pleads:

I'm having a hard time coming up with many independently and oddly Google is failing to find a list.

Nelson Mandela
Garry Kasparov
Oprah Winfrey
Ellen DeGeneres
David Letterman
Simon Cowell

Help!

How did David Letterman get on that list?  Does Simon Cowell make the cut?  Is it about who has integrity or who is perceived as having integrity?

It also depends who you count as a public figure and whether they still must be living or only recently deceased.  For a few, how about Margaret Thatcher, Hans Blix, Anna Politkovskaya, Ben Goldacre, Lech Walesa, Christopher Reeve, Neil Armstrong, the passengers who downed the flight hijacked by al-Qaeda, leading members of the Iranian opposition, and any number of political dissidents, starting with Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi.  Lee Kuan Yew is a more controversial option; he has been a non-corrupt leader who led his country to a very good place, and more or less eliminated corruption, but he has not always respected civil liberties.  Nonetheless integrity is not the only value and I don't wish to use the word as a stand-in for all other values of import.

Who am I forgetting?  What would Robin Hanson say about this list?

Comments

Comments for this post are closed