## 1. Integrity as Self-Integration



On the self-integration view of integrity, integrity is a matter of
persons integrating various parts of their personality into a
harmonious, intact whole. Understood in this way, the integrity of
persons is analogous to the integrity of things: integrity is
primarily a matter of keeping the self intact and uncorrupted. The
self-integration view of integrity makes integrity a formal relation
to the self.



What is a formal relation to the self? One answer is that a formal
relation can be attributed to a person without evaluating the
relation's components. Strength of will is probably a formal
relation one has to oneself. Very roughly, we might say that a display
of strength of will is a particular relation between a person's
intention and corresponding action: it is a matter of acting on an
intention given serious obstacles to the action. This is a formal
relation to the self in the sense we are after because we don't
need to evaluate the appropriateness, value, justice, practical
wisdom, and so on, either of the intention or corresponding action in
order to identify the whole thing as a case of strength of will. We
might think that all displays of strength of will are valuable, so we
might have certain pro-attitudes to an action simply because it is an
attempt to fulfill an intention in the face of serious obstacles. Yet
we don't need to make this evaluation in order to attribute a
display of strength of will to someone. All we need to do is inspect
the correspondence of intention and action given the difficulty of
acting on the intention. We don't need to evaluate whether the
intention is directed at anything worthwhile, for example. John
Bigelow and Robert Pargetter (2007) argue that strength of will is the
core of integrity (and that alternative conceptions of integrity tend
to confuse integrity with authenticity). The self-integration account
of integrity takes this formal characterization of integrity a step
further. Self-integration is an achievement rather than a quality or
disposition such as strength of will -- though strength of will
is likely to be an important quality in those who achieve
self-integration. Self-integration still represents a formal account
of integrity. In attributing self-integration to a person we are
making no evaluative judgement of the states that are integrated
within the person.



One instructive attempt to describe the fully integrated self is Harry
Frankfurt's (Frankfurt 1987, 33-34). Frankfurt does not
explicitly address himself to the problem of defining integrity,
nonetheless he does describe an important and influential account of
self-integration. According to Frankfurt, desires and volitions (acts
of will) are arranged in a hierarchy. First-order desires are desires
for various goods; second-order desires are desires that one desire
certain goods, or that one act on one first-order desire rather than
another. Similarly, one may will a particular action (first-order
volition) or one may will that one's first order volitions are
of a particular sort (second-order volition). Second-order desires and
volitions pave the way for third-order desires and volitions, and so
on. According to Frankfurt, wholly integrated persons bring these
various levels of volition and desire into harmony and fully identify
with them at the highest level. There are various ideas as to what it
means to fully identify with higher-level desires and volitions.
However, such identification appears to involve knowing them; not
deceiving oneself about them; and acting on them (usually).



A person is subject to many conflicting desires. If one simply acted
at each moment out of the strongest current desire, with no
deliberation or discrimination between more or less worthwhile
desires, then one clearly acts without integrity. Frankfurt calls such
a person a 'wanton' (Frankfurt 1971). Integrity thus
requires that one discriminate between first-order desires. One may do
this by endorsing certain first-order desires and
'outlawing' others. For instance, one may endorse a desire
to study and 'outlaw' a desire to party, and do so by
reference to a higher order desire ranking success over fun.
Second-order desires may conflict. One may value success over fun, but
also both fear that a ruthless pursuit of success will make one boring
and value being fun over being boring. Fully integrated persons will
not fall victim to such conflict; they will either avoid it altogether
(if they can) or resolve the conflict in some way. Resolution of
self-conflict may be achieved by appeal to yet higher level desires or
volitions, or by deciding to endorse one set of desires and outlawing
others. At some point the full integration of one's self will
require that one decide upon a certain structure of higher level
desires and order one's lower level desires and volitions in
light of it. As Frankfurt puts it, when a person unreservedly decides
to endorse a particular desire:



> 
> ... the person no longer holds himself at all apart from the desire to
> which he has committed himself. It is no longer unsettled or uncertain
> whether the object of that desire--that is, what he
> wants--is what he really wants: The decision determines what the
> person really wants by making the desires upon which he decides fully
> his own. To this extent the person, in making a decision by which he
> identifies with a desire, *constitutes himself*. (Frankfurt
> 1987, 38)
> 



When agents thus constitute themselves without ambivalence (that is,
unresolved desire for a thing and against it) or inconsistency (that
is, unresolved desire for incompatible things), then the agent has
what Frankfurt calls wholeheartedness. On one way of developing the
integrated-self view of integrity, wholeheartedness is equated with
integrity. It should be noted that self-conflict is not limited to
desire. Conflict also ranges over commitments, principles, values, and
wishes. Furthermore, all of these things--desires, commitments,
values, and so on--are in flux. They change over time so that
achieving the kind of 'wholeheartedness' that Frankfurt
describes is a never-ending process and task. Self-knowledge is
crucial to this process in so far as one must know what one's
values, for example, are if one is to order them.



Frankfurt's account illustrates one way of describing the
fully-integrated self. (See Taylor 1981 for a different approach.) The
key question, however, is whether the idea of a fully-integrated self
adequately captures the quality we ascribe when we say of someone that
they are a person of integrity. There have been a number of criticisms
of the integrated-self view of integrity. First, it places only formal
limits on the kind of person who may be said to have integrity. People
of integrity, however, are plausibly thought to be generally honest
and genuine in their dealings with others. (See Halfon 1989,
7-8.) Imagine a person who sells used-cars for a living and is
wholeheartedly dedicated to selling cars for as much money as
possible. Such a person will be prepared to blatantly lie in order to
set up a deal. The person may well be perfectly integrated in
Frankfurt's sense, but we should feel no temptation at all to
describe them as having exemplary integrity.



Second, a person of integrity is plausibly said to make reasonable
judgments about the relative importance of various desires and
commitments. Yet, again, the self-integration view places only formal
limits on the kind of desires that constitute a self. (See McFall
1987, 9-11, Calhoun 1995, 237-38). As McFall notes, one
cannot say with a straight face something like: 'Harold
demonstrates great integrity in his single-minded pursuit of
approval.' (McFall 1987, 9; we discuss McFall's views more
fully in Section 4, below.) If integrity is nothing more than the
perfect integration of self, however, it is hard to see how one can
automatically deny Harold's integrity.



Third, on some accounts, the fully and perfectly integrated person is
not able to experience genuine temptation. Temptation requires that
the full force of an 'outlaw' desire be experienced, but
successful integration of the self may mean that such desires are
fully subordinated to wholeheartedly endorsed desires and this may
preclude an agent fully experiencing them. (See Taylor 1981, 151 for
an example of a view like this.) That a person experiences, and
overcomes, temptation would count against their integrity on such a
view. One might think, however, that a capacity to overcome temptation
and display strength of character is in fact a sign of a
person's integrity, not its lack. (Halfon 1989, 44-7 urges
this criticism.)



Fourth, Cheshire Calhoun argues that agents may find themselves in
situations in which wholeheartedness tends to undermine their
integrity rather than constitute it (Calhoun 1995, 238-41; see
also, Cox, La Caze and Levine 2003, 18-2.) Victoria Davion
(1991) argues that a person may change radically and yet maintain
integrity. In the midst of a complex and multifaceted life one may
have compelling reasons to avoid neatly resolving incompatible
desires. The cost of the resolution of all self-conflict may be a
withdrawal from aspects of life that make genuine claims upon us.
Resolving self-conflict at the expense of fully engaging with
different parts of one's life does not seem to contribute to
one's integrity. It seems rather like the sort of cop-out that
undermines integrity. (One should not confuse integrity with
*neatness*.)



Christian Golden (2019, 505) goes further in seeking to avoid
'framing ambivalence and conflict as defects of character and
action', proposing humility as an alternative ideal to
wholeheartedness as a model of personal integrity.



One possibility here is to acknowledge different kinds of integrity.
For example, Matthew Pianalto (2012) distinguishes between
psychological integrity (a form of self-integration) and practical
integrity in order to deal with the integrity of agents for whom
wholeheartedness is not a realistic option. Alfred Archer (2017, 435,
453) argues that an integrated self has value whether or not we equate
it with the virtue of integrity. Its principle value resides in the
effect it has on moral agency. Self-integrated people tend
overwhelmingly to be better, more effective moral agents than people
who are not integrated. Disintegration tends to undermine agency in
general, but most importantly, it tends to undermine moral agency.
Moral exemplars exhibit strong traits of self-integration. The
importance and value of self-integration need not be identified with
the importance of integrity. They may have different foundations.


## 2. The Identity View of Integrity



A related approach to integrity is to think of it primarily in terms
of a person's holding steadfastly true to their commitments,
rather than ordering and endorsing desires. 'Commitment'
is used as a broad umbrella term covering many different kinds of
intentions, promises, convictions and relationships of trust and
expectation. One may be, and usually is, committed in many different
ways to many different kinds of thing: people, institutions,
traditions, causes, ideals, principles, projects, and so on.
Commitments can be explicitly, self-consciously, publicly entered into
or implicit, unself-conscious and private. Some are relatively
superficial and unimportant, like casual support of a sporting team;
others are very deep, like the commitment implicit in genuine love or
friendship.



Because we find ourselves with so many commitments, of so many
different kinds, and because commitments inevitably clash and change
over time, it will not do to define integrity merely in terms of
remaining steadfastly true to one's commitments. It matters
which commitments we expect a person of integrity to remain true to.
Philosophers have developed different accounts of integrity in
response to this need to specify the kind of commitments that are
centrally important to a person's integrity.



One option here is to define integrity in terms of the commitments
that people identify with most deeply, as constituting what they
consider their life is fundamentally about. Commitments of this kind
are called 'identity-conferring commitments' or sometimes
'ground projects'. This view of integrity, the identity
view, is associated most closely with Bernard Williams. It is implicit
in his discussion of integrity and utilitarianism (Williams 1973; we
examine this discussion below) and also features in his criticism of
Kantian moral theory (1981b). The idea is that for people to abandon
an identity-conferring commitment is for them to lose grip on what
gives their life its identity, or individual character. An
identity-conferring commitment, according to Williams, is 'the
condition of my existence, in the sense that unless I am propelled
forward by the conatus of desire, project and interest, it is unclear
why I should go on at all.' (Williams 1981b, 12).



One apparent consequence of defining integrity as maintenance of
identity-conferring commitments is that integrity cannot really be a
virtue. This is Williams's view. He argues that integrity is not
related to motivation as virtues are. A virtue either motivates a
person to act in desirable ways (as benevolence moves a person to act
for another's good), or it enables a person to act in desirable
ways (as courage enables a person to act well). If integrity is no
more than maintenance of identity, however, it can play neither of
these roles. On the identity view of integrity, to act with integrity
is just to act in a way that accurately reflects your sense of who you
are; to act from motives, interests and commitments that are most
deeply your own. (Williams 1981a, 49)



A number of criticisms of the identity view of integrity have been
made. First, integrity is usually regarded as something worth striving
for and the identity account of integrity fails to make sense of this.
(See Cox, La Caze, Levine 1999.) It disconnects integrity from the
prevalent view that it is a virtue of some kind and generally
praiseworthy. Second, the identity theory of integrity ties integrity
to commitments with which an agent identifies, but acts of
identification can be ill-informed, superficial and foolish. People
may, through ignorance or self-deception, fail to understand or
properly acknowledge the source of their deepest commitments and
convictions and we are unlikely to attribute integrity to people who
hold true to a false and unrealistic picture of themselves. (On the
other hand, this view of integrity as maintenance of
identify-conferring commitments recognizes the relevance of
self-knowledge to *acting* with integrity. If people fail to
act on their core commitments, through self-deception, weakness of
will, cowardice, or even ignorance, then to this extent they may be
said to lack integrity.)



Third, on the identity view of integrity, a person's integrity
is only at issue when their deepest, most characteristic, or core
convictions and aspirations are brought into play. However, we expect
persons of integrity to behave with integrity in many different
contexts, not only those of central importance to them. (See Calhoun
1995, 245.)



Fourth, as noted above, the identity view of integrity places only
formal conditions upon the kind of person that might be said to
possess integrity. The identity view of integrity shares this feature
with the self-integration view of integrity and similar criticism can
be made of it on this ground. It seems plausible to observe certain
substantive limits on the kinds of commitments had by a person of
integrity.


## 3. The Self-Constitution View of Integrity



The self-integration view of integrity and the identity view of
integrity, as we described them above, place only formal limits on the
kinds of desires and projects that might constitute an integrated
self. Christine Korsgaard (2009) develops a distinctive picture of
integrity that takes the self-integration and identity views in a
constructivist Kantian direction. According to Korsgaard, integrity is
not so much a condition of excellence we aspire to as a precondition
of being an agent at all. To the extent that we fail to live with
integrity, we fail to live as persons: we fail to be a self, as
opposed to a collection of strivings; we fail to exemplify human
agency as opposed to the unreflective satisfaction of desire.



To live with integrity is not merely to have a coherent life-plan and
the courage to realise it, it is to act in a way that is rationally
endorsed both by oneself as one acts and one's future self. To
do this, one must act on principles and these principles must be such
that they would be rationally endorsed by any future self who reflects
on the matter satisfactorily. Hypothetical imperatives tie our present
plans and our future actions together; they are necessary for agency,
but not sufficient. Categorical imperatives must be brought to bear if
the tie between present and future self is to be appropriately
binding. A future self must be bound to a project in light of the same
principles that illuminated the project's origin, endorsable in
a process of rational reflection parallel to that at work at the
project's origin.



Korsgaard illustrates how this process may fail, and what is at stake
in such a failure, with an example drawn from Derek Parfit (Korsgaard
2009, 185-86). A Russian nobleman wants to create a fortune in
order to give it away to others in need. But he thinks that by the
time he makes his fortune, he will not be idealistic and altruistic
enough to give his fortune away. He will likely regard his plan as the
folly of youth. The nobleman therefore seeks a promise from his wife
that the fortune will be given away even if he protests. He seeks to
use an external force (his wife's agency) to secure his present
plans against his future self's abandonment of them. In such a
case, the present self is treating the future self as a stranger, as a
distinct person. To overcome this, the nobleman must formulate his
plan according to principles that are categorical in nature.
Hypothetical imperatives have no force once their antecedent condition
is abandoned. Only a categorical principle of action will necessarily
form a basis for endorsing a plan now and in the future. The nobleman
must formulate his plan in the light of such a principle and trust his
future self to endorse the plan in the light of the same principle. It
is a risk, of course. But integrity is born of this risk. And if
Korsgaard is right, it is not just integrity that is constituted in
this way, but our becoming a distinctive self is constituted in this
way too.



According to Korsgaard, the categorical nature of the principles
through which we endorse our projects ensures that they will be
morally satisfactory projects. Korsgaard sums up her thinking like
this:



> 
> And in the course of this process, of falling apart and pulling
> yourself back together, you create something new, you constitute
> something new: yourself. For the way to make yourself into an agent, a
> person, is to make yourself into a particular person, with a practical
> identity of your own. And the way to make yourself into a particular
> person, who can interact well with herself and others, is to be
> consistent and unified and whole - to have integrity. And if you
> constitute yourself well, if you are good at being a person, then
> you'll be a good person. The moral law is the law of
> self-constitution. (2009, 214)
> 



The self-constitution view of integrity inherits many of the
challenges encountered by the self-integration view and the identity
view, described above. These challenges are not decisive objections,
but defence of the self-constitution view will need ultimately to take
account of them. In addition, the view appears to rely on a
constructivist account of normative reasons. (See Bagnoli, 2011.) In
particular, the kind of agency Korsgaard appeals to when she
identifies integrity with successful agency and self-constitution must
be inescapable if it is to constitute the very possibility of being a
person. David Enoch (2006) argues that this kind of agency is
optional, and that one could coherently aspire to a distinct form of
agency - he calls it "shmagency" - which
allows one to act in a practically successful way without committing
oneself to universalizable, categorical norms of action. The issue
turns on whether the account of agency developed by Korsgaard is
inescapable; whether is must govern reflection on what to do by any
rational self-conscious being and whether this inescapable
characteristic of agency, if it exists, stretches to an ideal of a
complete life of unified agency that Korsgaard identifies with
integrity.


## 4. Integrity as Standing for Something



The self-integration and identity views of integrity see it as
primarily a personal matter: a quality defined by a person's
care of the self. Cheshire Calhoun argues that integrity is primarily
a social virtue, one that is defined by a person's relations to
others (Calhoun 1995). The social character of integrity is, Calhoun
claims, a matter of a person's proper regard for their own best
judgement. Persons of integrity do not just act consistently with
their endorsements, they stand for something: they stand up for their
best judgment within a community of people trying to discover what in
life is worth doing. As she puts it:



> 
> Persons of integrity treat their own endorsements as ones that matter,
> or ought to matter, to fellow deliberators. Absent a special sort of
> story, lying about one's views, concealing them, recanting them
> under pressure, selling them out for rewards or to avoid penalties,
> and pandering to what one regards as the bad views of others, all
> indicate a failure to regard one's own judgment as one that
> should matter to others. (Calhoun 1995, 258)
> 



On Calhoun's view, integrity is a matter of having proper regard
for one's role in a community process of deliberation over what
is valuable and what is worth doing. This, she claims, entails not
only that one stand up, unhypocritically, for one's best
judgment, but also that one have proper respect for the judgment of
others.



Calhoun's account of integrity promises to explain why it is
that the fanatic lacks integrity. It seems intuitively very plausible
to distinguish between fanatical zeal and integrity, but the
self-integration and identity views of integrity threaten to make the
fanatic a paradigm case of a person of integrity. Fanatics integrate
desires and volitions of various orders in an intimidatingly coherent
package; they remain steadfastly true to their deepest commitments
like no others. On Calhoun's view of integrity, however, we can
locate a distinction between integrity and fanaticism. Fanatics lack
one very important quality that, on Calhoun's view, is centrally
important to integrity: they lack proper respect for the deliberations
of others. What is not clear in Calhoun's account, and is in
fact very hard to get clear on in any case, is what the
*proper* respect for other's views in the end amounts to.
Exemplary figures of integrity often stand by their judgment in the
face of enormous pressure to recant. How, then, is one to understand
the difference between standing up for one's views under great
pressure and fanatically standing by them? Calhoun's claim that
the fanatic lacks integrity because they fail to properly respect the
social character of judgement and deliberation sounds right, but most
of the work is done by the idea of 'proper
respect'--and it is not clear in the end what this comes
to. It may be that integrity involves standing up for one's
views in a way that does not fully respect the differing views of
others. We therefore need an account of the difference between between
failing to respect the differing views of others (which is compatible
with integrity, and indeed sometimes required by it) and failing to
properly respect the differing views of others (something that it
incompatible with integrity on Calhoun's account).



One way to expand upon Calhoun's account of integrity is to
furnish an epistemic conception of integrity. Greg Scherkoske (2011,
2012a and 2012b, see also discussion in section 6 of this entry)
develops such an account. According to Scherkoske "Integrity is
an epistemic virtue: that is, it is a stable disposition that reliably
places its possessor in good epistemic position and leads to cognitive
success" (Scherkoske 2011, 196). Hugh Breakey (Breakey, 2016)
develops an alternative to this approach. He argues that integrity is
a potentially dangerous trait in that possession of it can lead
strong-minded people to act without proper regard for the needs and
perspectives of others. However, he argues, "integrity contains
substantive moral principles that serve to surgically target the
dangers that integrity would otherwise pose." (Breakey 2016,
613) Integrity fits its possessor with what is required to act as a
benign deliberator in community with other deliberators. These are
substantive rather than epistemic commitments implicit in the
possession of integrity, and include such things as trustworthiness,
non-coercion, and sociability. In this way, Breakey proposes a morally
substantive account of integrity that includes, not general kinds of
moral commitments, but specific commitments targeted at the dangers of
being a self-directed and strong-minded individual. By contrast, the
following account of integrity is explicitly concerned with quite
general attitudes towards morality.


## 5. Integrity as Moral Purpose



Another way of thinking about integrity places moral constraints upon
the kinds of commitment to which a person of integrity must remain
true. There are several ways of doing this. Elizabeth Ashford argues
for a virtue she calls 'objective integrity'. Objective
integrity requires that agents have a sure grasp of their real moral
obligations (Ashford 2000, 246). A person of integrity cannot,
therefore, be morally mistaken. Understood in this way, one only
properly ascribes integrity to a person with whom one finds oneself
completely in moral agreement. This concept of integrity does not,
however, closely match ordinary use of the term. The point of
attributing integrity to another is not always to signal unambiguous
moral agreement. It is often to ameliorate criticism of
another's moral judgment. For example, we may disagree strongly
with the Pope's views of the role of women in the Church, take
this to be a significant moral criticism of him, and yet admit that he
is a man of integrity. In such a case it is largely the point of
attributing integrity to open a space for substantial moral
disagreement without launching a wholesale attack upon another's
moral character.



Mark Halfon offers a different way of defining integrity in terms of
moral purpose. Halfon describes integrity in terms of a person's
dedication to the pursuit of a moral life and their intellectual
responsibility in seeking to understand the demands of such a life. He
writes that persons of integrity:



> 
> ...embrace a moral point of view that urges them to be
> conceptually clear, logically consistent, apprised of relevant
> empirical evidence, and careful about acknowledging as well as
> weighing relevant moral considerations. Persons of integrity impose
> these restrictions on themselves since they are concerned, not simply
> with taking any moral position, but with pursuing a commitment to do
> what is best. (Halfon 1989, 37)
> 



Halfon's view allows that integrity is not necessarily
'objective', as Ashford claims, and is similar in a number
of respects to Calhoun's. Both see integrity as centrally
concerned with deliberation about how to live. However, Halfon
conceives this task in more narrowly moral terms and ties integrity to
personal intellectual virtues exercised in pursuit of a morally good
life. Halfon speaks of a person confronting 'all relevant moral
considerations', but this turns out to be quite a formal
constraint. What counts as a relevant moral consideration, on
Halfon's view, depends upon the moral point of view of the
agent. Persons of integrity may thus be responsible for acts others
would regard as grossly immoral. What is important is that they act
with moral purpose and display intellectual integrity in moral
deliberation. This leads Halfon to admit that, on his conception of
integrity, it is possible for a Nazi bent on genocide of the entire
Jewish people to be a person of moral integrity. Halfon thinks it
possible, but not at all likely (Halfon 1989, 134-36).



Other philosophers object to this consequence. If the genocidal Nazi
is a possible object of ascriptions of moral integrity, then we can
properly ascribe integrity to people whose moral viewpoint is
bizarrely remote from any we find intelligible or defensible. (See
McFall 1987 and Cox, La Caze and Levine 2003, 56-68. Putnam 1996
draws on the work of Carol Gilligan 1982 to suggest a different way of
overcoming the problem of the Nazi of integrity.) Moral constraints
upon attributions of integrity need not take the form of
Ashford's 'moralized' view or Halfon's more
limited formal view. One might say instead that attributions of
integrity involve the judgment that an agent acts from a moral point
of view those attributing integrity find intelligible and defensible
(though not necessarily right) --and that this formal constraint
does have substantive implications. It prohibits attributing integrity
to, for example, those who advocate genocide, or deny the moral
standing of people on, for example, sex-based or racial grounds. There
are things which a person of integrity cannot do. The Nazis and other
perpetrators of great evil were either committed to what they were
doing, in which case they were profoundly immoral (or not moral agents
at all) and lacked integrity; or else they lacked integrity because
they were self-deceived or dissembling and never actually had the Nazi
commitments they claimed to have. Judgments of integrity would thus
involve judgment about the reasonableness of others' moral
points of view, rather than the absolute correctness of their view
(Ashford) or the intellectual responsibility with which they generally
approach the task of thinking about moral questions (Halfon).



McFall (1987) contains an interesting discussion of the nature of the
constraints on proper attributions of integrity. She asks 'Are
there no constraints on the *content* of the principles or
commitments a person of integrity may hold?' and then invites us
to consider the following statements (McFall 1987, 9).


1. Sally is a person of principle: pleasure.
2. Harold demonstrates great integrity in his single-minded pursuit
of approval.
3. John was a man of uncommon integrity. He let nothing, not
friendship, not justice, not truth stand in the way of his amassment
of wealth.



McFall holds that the fact that 'none of these claims can be
made with a straight face suggests that integrity is inconsistent with
such principles.' (McFall 1987, p. 9) The question, however, is
whether this is due to the formal constraints or substantive
constraints; that is, whether attributions of integrity are
constrained by the content of principles a person maintains, or by way
certain kinds of principle fail to meet formal constraints on the way
persons of integrity hold to their principles. McFall appears to
suggest the latter interpretation.



In providing reasons for our dismissal of [i] to [iii] she says (1987,
9-10)



> 
> A person of integrity is willing to bear the consequences of her
> convictions, even when this is difficult ... A person whose only
> principle is 'Seek my own pleasure' is not a candidate for
> integrity because there is no possibility of conflict--between
> pleasure and principle--in which integrity could be lost. Where
> there is no possibility of its loss, integrity cannot exist. Similarly
> in the case of the approval seeker. The single-minded pursuit of
> approval is inconsistent with integrity ... A commitment to
> spinelessness does not vitiate its spinelessness--another of
> integrity's contraries. The same may be said for the ruthless
> seeker of wealth. A person whose only aim is to increase his bank
> balance is a person for whom nothing is ruled out: duplicity, theft,
> murder. Expedience is *contrasted* to a life of principle, so
> an ascription of integrity is out of place. Like the pleasure seeker
> and the approval seeker, he lacks a 'core,' the kind of
> commitments that give a person character and that make a loss of
> integrity possible. In order to sell one's soul, one must have
> something to sell.
> 



This is an argument that invokes formal incompatibility between
particular principles or goals and the proper attribution of
integrity. The argument is not conclusive, however. Seeking pleasure,
approval or wealth, is not always easy and it seems possible that
conflict could arise, for example, between determinations to pursue
higher or lower pleasures, long-term pleasures or immediate
gratifications. The ruthless seeker of wealth seems to have a
'core,'--albeit a nasty one--along with a set of
principles of a sort and a set of actions that are ruled out on
principle. If integrity requires a conflict between pleasure and
principle, that would explain why a pure pleasure seeker lacks
integrity. But in this case, it seems that a perfectly virtuous agent
does not possess, or need to possess, integrity. For instance,
Aristotle's model of a virtuous agent contrasts with merely
enkratic agents who must struggle to act virtuously. The fully
virtuous Aristotelean agent would have no need of integrity if
integrity were about the struggle between pleasure and principle. (But
see Kristjan Kristjansson, 2019.) The idea that a fully
virtuous agent lacks integrity does not seem plausible, however, and
this suggests that integrity cannot merely reside in the triumph of
principle over pleasure.



According to McFall, we judge people to be of integrity only if they
have commitments which a reasonable person could accept as important.
She writes, 'Whether we grant or deny personal integrity, then,
seems to depend on our own conceptions of what is important. And since
most of our conceptions are informed if not dominated by moral
conceptions of the good, it is natural that this should be reflected
in our judgments of personal integrity' (1987, 11).



However, she also draws a distinction between personal and moral
integrity (McFall 1987, 14). On her view, a person who, in acting on
some morally deficient principle, does morally abhorrent things may
have personal integrity even if not moral integrity. McFall gives the
example of a utilitarian lover of literature who is willing to stop
people burning books by killing them. She says of the utilitarian
killer (1987, 14), 'Although we may find his actions morally
abhorrent, we may still be inclined to grant him the virtue of
personal integrity. We would not, however, hold him up as a paragon of
moral integrity.'



It may be, then, that a certain kind of integrity -- moral
integrity -- should be defined in terms of moral purpose (perhaps
along the lines laid out by Ashford or by Halfon) and another kind of
integrity -- personal integrity -- defined in terms of other
qualities adumbrated by theorists discussed previously. Defining the
overall integrity of character in terms of moral purpose has the
advantage of capturing intuitions of the moral seriousness of
questions of integrity. However, the approach may also be too narrow.
Halfon's identification of integrity and moral integrity appears
to leave out important personal aspects of integrity, aspects better
captured by the other views of integrity we have examined. Integrity
does not seem to be exclusively a matter of how people approach
plainly moral concerns. Other matters like love, friendship and
personal projects appear highly relevant to judgments of integrity.
Imagine a person who sets great store in writing a novel, but who
postpones the writing of it for years on one excuse or another and
then abandons the idea of novel-writing after one difficult experience
with a first chapter. We would think this person's integrity
diminished by their failure to make a serious attempt to see the
project through, yet the writing of a novel need not be a moral
project.


## 6. Integrity as a Virtue



If integrity is a virtue, the key questions are what sort of virtue it
is; what is its object and characteristic motivation? Bernard Williams
(1981a, 49) claims that integrity is not a virtue because:



> 
> ... while it is an admirable human property, it is not related to
> motivation as the virtues are. It is not a disposition which itself
> yields motivations, as generosity and benevolence do; nor is it a
> virtue of that type, sometimes called 'executive' virtues,
> which do not themselves yield a characteristic motive, but are
> necessary for that relation to oneself and the world which enables one
> to act from desirable motives in desirable ways -- the type that
> includes courage and self-control.
> 



Williams also contends that integrity does not dispose its possessors
towards a characteristic thought--there is nothing in particular
that integrity leads those who possess it to attend to. He writes
"If integrity had to be provided with a characteristic thought,
there would be nothing for the thought to be about but
oneself--but there is no such characteristic thought, only
thoughts associated with projects, in carrying out which a man may
display his integrity" (Williams 1981a, 49). Williams holds this
view because he sees integrity as steadfast maintenance of
identity-conferring commitments, a view we discussed in section 2.
Nonetheless, Williams sets out a clear challenge for those who hold
integrity to be a virtue. They should either set out the
characteristic motivations and thoughts of those who possess the
virtue or explain why it is that integrity is an anomalous virtue, one
not associated with characteristic motivations and thoughts. There are
two main ways this has been approached. One is to claim that the
virtue of integrity need not involve characteristic motivations or
thoughts because it is a special kind of virtue; the other is to claim
that integrity is a cluster concept and thus involves multiple
motivations and thoughts.



Scherkoske (2011, 2012a and 2012b) suggests that integrity is an
epistemic virtue, broadly conceived. In his view this explains why
integrity appears not to furnish its possessor with a characteristic
sort of motivation or thought. According to Scherkoske, epistemic
virtues are distinct from moral virtues in just this way: they neither
dispose agents to particular motivations or characteristic thoughts.
"In the same way that epistemic virtues such as accuracy,
open-mindedness and analytical insightfulness do not specify any
particular content, integrity does not supply a characteristic
thought, either" (Scherkoske 2011, 201). However, it seems that
epistemic virtues do furnish characteristic motivations. An
epistemically virtuous person, it seems, is motivated to discover the
truth, the most justified belief, or something along these lines. A
virtuously open minded person, for example, is not motivated to
entertain new ideas merely because they are new, they are motivated by
the possibility that in new ideas lie new insights and new
possibilities for encountering the truth. A benevolent person is
motivated by the needs of particular others and characteristically
thinks of what will answer these needs. An epistemically virtuous
person is motivated by the search for truth or justification and
characteristically thinks of what will answer this quest.
Scherkoske's contrast between moral and epistemic virtues may
therefore be overdrawn. Scherkoske's view was discussed in
section 3.



An alternative view is that the concept of integrity is a cluster
concept, tying together different overlapping qualities of character
under the one term. Cox, La Caze and Levine (2003) argue that
integrity is a virtue, but not one that is reducible to the workings
of a single moral capacity (in the way that, say, courage is) or the
wholehearted pursuit of an identifiable moral end (in the way that,
say, benevolence is). On this view, integrity is a complex and thick
virtue term. One gains a fair grasp of the variety of ways in which
people properly use the term 'integrity' by examining
conditions commonly accepted to defeat or diminish a person's
integrity. Integrity stands as a mean to various excesses. On the one
side we have character traits and ways of behaving and thinking that
tend to maintain the status quo even where acting with integrity
demands a change. These are things like arrogance, dogmatism,
fanaticism, monomania, preciousness, sanctimoniousness, and rigidity.
These are all traits that can defeat integrity in so far as they
undermine and suppress attempts by an individual to critically assess
and balance their desires, commitments, wishes, changing goals and
other factors. Thus, refusing to acknowledge that circumstance in a
marriage, or one's passionate desire to write a novel, have
dramatically changed (for whatever reasons) may indicate a lack of
integrity--a giving in to cowardice for example, and a refusal to
acknowledge new or overriding commitments. These same factors can
defeat one's integrity, or an aspect of one's integrity,
whether one decides to stay with a marriage or abandon it. In one case
staying may indicate a lack of integrity, while in a different case,
abandoning the marriage would indicate such a lack.



On the other side, a different set of characteristics undermine
integrity. These do not undermine the status quo as much as they make
it impossible to discern stable features in one's life, and in
one's relations to others, that are necessary if one is to act
with integrity. In this category are capriciousness, wantonness,
triviality, disintegration, weakness of will, self deception,
self-ignorance, mendacity, hypocrisy, indifference. Although the
second of these lists dominates contemporary reflection on the nature
of integrity, the first may also represent an ever present threat to
our integrity. The person of integrity lives in a fragile balance
between every one of these all-too-human traits (Cox, La Caze, Levine
2003, p. 41). It is not that integrity stands as a mean
*between* the vices that are represented in these two lists.
Rather, the person of integrity will find a mean between the excesses
of each one of these vices, or traits or practices that can
undermine--that do undermine--integrity. Some people will be
more prone to a certain set of practices or character traits that
undermine integrity than others. The defeaters of integrity are
person-relative, and may even be situation-relative.



One worry with this kind of grab-all approach to integrity is that it
fails to issue in clear moral judgment of individual cases. Robert
Audi and Patrick Murphy call this the blunt instrument problem (Audi
and Murphy 2006, 8). Attributions of integrity leave too much
unspecified to afford clear and determinate ethical judgments, either
of character or action. In saying that a person or an organization
acted with integrity, for example, we fail to pass a clear and
unambiguous moral judgment upon their action. Audi and Murphy's
suggestion is that the term should be used as a complement to other,
more specific, moral terms drawn from theories like utilitarianism and
Kantianism. Self-standing attributions of integrity are of little
practical or intellectual value in their view (Audi and Murphy 2006,
11). Audi and Murphy are surely right that ethical judgment of action
is rarely if ever settled by observing that agents have acted with
integrity. The question remains open, however, about the work that
integrity attributions do. Is there anything in general that
attributions of integrity specifically commend in a person?



On the assumption that integrity is a cluster concept of some kind,
the question turns on whether anything ties together the various
traits associated with integrity in a coherent overarching conception
of integrity, one that makes it a clear virtue. One possibility is
that the traits of integrity are tied together by the idea of
successfully taking one's life seriously either in all its
important aspects (personal, intimate, social, professional,
aesthetic, intellectual and emotional) or in some of them. The variety
of qualities that Cox, La Caze and Levine claim are needed for
integrity might not be an awkwardly heterogeneous collection they seem
to be at first sight if they contribute in recognizable ways to the
business of successfully taking one's life--in itself and
as lived with others-- seriously. Such a view requires
development of the idea of taking one's life seriously, but it
might posses certain advantages. It might have an advantage over
integrationist views, for example, because it promises an explanation
of why integration seems both important to integrity and also
sometimes in tension with it. Audi and Murphy explicitly deny this
tension--they deny that a person of integrity will experience
very much self-conflict except over clashing prima facie duties (Audi
and Murphy 2006, 18). However, the idea that integrity is compatible
with substantial self-conflict is defended by a number of authors (see
the discussion of integrity as self-integration in section 1).



Central to the idea of integrity as the virtue of taking one's
life seriously would be the idea that a pursuit of integrity involves
somehow taking account of one's changing values, convictions,
commitments, desires, knowledge, beliefs and so on over time.
Integrity would thus require a robustly successful kind of
self-examination (an examined life). Further understanding of this
aspect of integrity would likely involve examining the so-called moral
emotions or emotions of self-assessment: regret; remorse; guilt;
shame. These are central to the kind of self-monitoring that would be
part of what it means to have the virtue of integrity, understood as
the virtue of successfully approaching one's life seriously. Far
from being either unnecessary or undesirable, such emotions may be
essential to integrity. (Pugmire (2005) discusses integrity and the
emotions.)



This account of integrity makes it appear that integrity is much more
difficult to achieve than is sometimes thought. It makes integrity a
quality of character that one may have to a greater or lesser extent,
in certain ways but not others, and in certain aspects or areas of
one's life but not others. Having integrity is not on this view
an all or nothing thing. To say a person has integrity is to make an
"all things considered" judgment: something that we may
say of people if we know--and even if they know--that in
certain ways and about certain things, they lack integrity.



A conception of integrity as a virtue--either developed along the
lines described above or along different lines--is compatible
with the existence of constraints on the content of the norms the
person of integrity is committed to. Profound moral failure may be an
independent defeater of integrity, just as hypocrisy, fanaticism and
the like are defeaters of integrity. One might judge as internal to
such a conception of the virtue the idea that integrity is
incompatible with major failures of moral imagination or moral
courage, or with the maintenance of wholly unreasonable moral
principles or opinions. On such a view, the Nazi could not, all things
considered, be a regarded as person of integrity. The Nazi may be
self-deceiver and a liar (which is highly probable), but even if he is
not, his principles and his actions are not rationally defensible
under any coherent moral view. And this latter fact may by itself
justify the judgment that the Nazi lacks the virtue of integrity.


## 7. Types of Integrity



References to different types of integrity, such as intellectual and
artistic integrity, abound in the philosophical literature on
integrity and everyday discourse. Because integrity involves managing
various commitments and values, one might conjecture that such types
of integrity are simply manifestations of a person's overall
integrity, or of their personal integrity. However, there are many
people who we are inclined to say have intellectual but not personal
integrity--or who have more of the former than the latter. If
there is a radical disjunction between the type of integrity which is
demanded in one sphere of life and another, integrity overall, or
personal integrity, may be undermined, or at least profoundly
challenged. There may, for example, be conflict between types of
integrity, such as between intellectual and moral integrity. (See Code
1983, 268-282; Kekes 1983, 512-516.)



Is integrity in one area of life likely to flow over into others? This
is possible, in that the kind of reflection and self-assessment which
goes into maintaining integrity in one sphere of life may help people
to reflect similarly in other spheres. However, given human
beings' capacity and need for compartmentalization, or
psychologically separating out different parts of their lives, this
effect will not necessarily occur. The relationship between different
types of integrity and moral and personal integrity needs to be
carefully charted. Is integrity a zero-sum game, so that for example,
the more artistic integrity a person has, the less she has in personal
life? This does not seem necessarily to be the case. At the same time,
a lack of integrity in one aspect of life does not necessarily mean
there will be a lack in other aspects of life. Presumably, a person
could lack personal integrity, but still have integrity in a number of
restricted areas of life, such as in intellectual and artistic
pursuits.



A related question is how different types of integrity are associated
with moral integrity. Stan Godlovitch (1993, 580) says that
professional integrity, for example, is weaker than moral integrity,
and is more like etiquette. For him (1993, 573), integrity
'trades between the norms of unity and honesty'. More
specifically, Godlovitch (1993, 580) argues that the responsibilities
of performers, for example, are quasi-moral; they are not truly moral
because they are internal to the profession. However, it seems
plausible to maintain that professional integrity is better understood
as an important contribution to the living of a moral life.
Professional integrity is specific to the sphere of a profession, but
not entirely independent of morality.



One can also ask how types of integrity are distinguished from each
other. Halfon (1989, 55) argues that we distinguish between types of
integrity in terms of commitments to specific kinds of ends,
principles and ideals. However, not every end creates a distinct type
of integrity. Trivial ends, like train-spotting, do not introduce a
new species of integrity. To count as being a type of integrity, the
sphere of action and commitment in question should be a complex and
valuable human pursuit that has distinct ways in which integrity is
demonstrated. Robust examples are intellectual integrity and artistic
integrity. On this way of looking at the matter, personal integrity
and various specific types of integrity tend to be run together.
Integrity is seen as the one virtue: essentially the same virtue
expected of one's life partner, a friend, an employee, a priest,
a teacher, or a politician. (See Benjamin, 1990; Calhoun, 1995;
Halfon, 1989; and Grant, 1997.) Professional integrity then becomes a
matter of the extent to which a person displays personal integrity in
professional life. Halfon (1989, 53), for example, argues that types
of integrity may overlap, 'So a person who is an artist by
profession may come to possess professional and artistic integrity in
virtue of performing one and the same action or fulfilling one and the
same commitment'.



There are, however, good reasons to resist this running together of
various types of integrity. In the first place, our legitimate
expectations of people must be sensitive to the roles we have tacitly
or explicitly agreed that they perform. If we expect people to act
with integrity in a certain professional context, then our judgment of
them should be based on an understanding of this context: its special
duties, obligations, rights, competencies, and so on. What it is to
display integrity in one profession need not, therefore, carry over to
other professions; and the difference between acting with integrity in
one context may not share a common currency with what it is to act
with integrity in another context. It seems that the concept of
integrity cannot be demarcated into types without specific
characterization of the kinds of challenges and hazards encountered in
the relevant field of action.



Consider the example of intellectual integrity. The term
'intellectual integrity' is ambiguous between integrity of
the intellect and the integrity of the intellectual. While it should,
in general, be construed broadly, as integrity of the intellect, and
thus applicable to anyone who thinks, here we will concentrate on the
integrity of the intellectual, or integrity as the academic's
virtue, as Susan Haack puts it (1976, 59). Intellectuals may differ in
the extent to which they exemplify intellectual virtues such as
honesty, impartiality, and openness to the views of others.
Intellectual integrity may then be thought of as the over-arching
virtue that enables and enhances these individual virtues by
maintaining a proper balance between them.



Halfon (1989, 54) argues that Socrates had a commitment to the pursuit
of truth and knowledge, and he demonstrated his intellectual integrity
in the face of attacks on it. Socrates may be an outstanding example
of a person of intellectual integrity; nevertheless, there is more to
intellectual integrity than having a commitment to truth and
knowledge. Intellectual integrity is often characterized as a kind of
'openness'-- an openness to criticism and to the
ideas of others. However, if one is too open, one could absorb too
many influences to be able to properly pursue any line of thought. So
an adequate account of intellectual integrity must incorporate
conflicting claims: that one must be open to new ideas but not be
overwhelmed by them. An account of intellectual integrity should
recognize other sources of conflict and temptations that impede
intellectual integrity, such as the temptations offered by the
commercialization of research, self-deception about the nature of
one's work, and the conflict between the free pursuit of ideas
and responsibility to others.



There are a range of commonly cited intellectual virtues central to
our conception of intellectual integrity, such as honesty, courage,
and fairness. Plausibly, such virtues as sensitivity and
perceptiveness or insightfulness should also be added. In *Virtues
of the Mind*, Linda Zagzebski (1996, 114) gives a very
comprehensive list of intellectual virtues, adding such items as
intellectual humility, perseverance, adaptability and
communicativeness. Possession of these virtues is part of what it
means for a person to have intellectual integrity, although they may
exist in varying degrees without undermining a person's overall
intellectual integrity. There are a range of kinds of actions one
might expect from a person of intellectual integrity as well: for
example, being against plagiarism, refusing to suppress
counter-arguments, and consistently acknowledging help. The fact that
there are a number of distinct intellectual virtues, involving
distinct, and sometime conflicting, dispositions to action, means that
we have a need to balance or manage these virtues. For example, a
person who has too much intellectual courage may well become a
dogmatist, and a person who is excessively impartial will probably
lack conviction. It seems plausible to say that intellectual integrity
is that quality that enables a person to balance the various demands
of intellectual work and to manifest intellectual virtues in a proper
order.



This balance cannot be maintained without a certain degree of
reflection on the relationship between different intellectual
commitments. The importance of appropriate reflection to intellectual
integrity indicates that, like personal integrity, it is closely
related to self-knowledge. Self-knowledge appears essential to
integrity in general, and given that intellectual integrity concerns
knowledge itself, the relationship between having intellectual
integrity and self-knowledge is particularly close. This close
relationship might lead one to assume that self-deception is
antithetical to intellectual integrity because it undermines the kind
of self-knowledge, such as knowledge of our intellectual strengths and
capacities, necessary to such reflection. However, self-deception does
not *necessarily* undermine intellectual integrity. In fact,
some self-deception might be necessary to pursue some lines of thought
well. Having integrity may be consistent with--may even
require--self-deceptive strategies to maintain one's
equilibrium in the face of conflicts and obstacles. As Amelie
Oksenberg Rorty (1994, 218) points out, self-deception can be
necessary to be energized to do anything. The mild self-deception that
one has a good idea before one really has an idea at all is often
necessary to get started on a piece of work.



Nonetheless, some forms of self-deception are seriously detrimental to
intellectual integrity. Gabriele Taylor (1981, 146) believes that
self-deception constitutes the most fundamental and important case of
lack of integrity. She discusses an example which shows in an
exemplary manner the dangers of self-deception--that of Casaubon
in George Eliot's *Middlemarch* (1994). Casaubon is a
cleric working on the connections between different religions, a
mammoth scholarly work he has devoted himself to for many years. In
Taylor's view, he is self-deceived about his commitment to
scholarship. Casaubon's problem may be seen as a conflict
between his belief in his capacity and desire to write something very
important and his realization of the truth that he is incapable of
doing so. The kind of failure of integrity here is partly due to
failure to take the views of others seriously, and thus differs from
cases where others might encourage one in self-deception. Casaubon
acted to prevent his wife Dorothea and others from realising the
paucity of his researches. His case is more blameworthy because of
this failure and it demonstrates the way in which self-deception can
undermine intellectual integrity.



Another important type of integrity is artistic integrity. Bernard
Williams (1981) discusses a fictionalized version of Gauguin's
story, a discussion that raises questions about the relationship
between artistic integrity and other kinds of integrity. On
Williams's (1981, 22) account, Gauguin 'turns away from
definite and pressing human claims on him in order to live a life in
which, as he supposes, he can pursue his art.' In other words,
the fictional Gauguin left his loved ones to paint in Tahiti.
Williams's point is that how Gauguin judges himself and how his
actions are judged partly depends on the success of his artistic
project. In Williams's view, if Gauguin's artistic project
fails, we are apt to judge him morally deficient; if his artistic
project succeeds, we are likely to see his actions in a more favorable
moral light. Although Williams's discussion of this case is
focused on the concept of moral luck, there are two important issues
concerning artistic integrity here. First, there is the issue of
whether Gauguin acted with a kind of integrity at all, and second,
there is the issue of whether artistic integrity, if this is what
Gauguin's actions manifest, conflicts with moral and personal
integrity.



Calhoun (1995, 244) notes that '... insofar as we imagine
that Gauguin, in pursuing 'what he found his life bound up
with', acted merely on a psychologically deep impulse without
critically reflecting on the value of doing so, we may suspect him of
not acting with integrity'. He may have lacked personal
integrity because he did not take an assessment of his values and
commitments seriously enough. Calhoun (1995, 244) suggests that
perhaps Gauguin believes that morality does not demand he give up
partiality to his own artistic project. If this is his view, then the
success of his artistic project may contribute to a favorable judgment
of his moral integrity. Williams's argument that Gauguin's
actions are given some sort of justification by the success of his
artistic project is not entirely convincing. There is no reason to
think that Gauguin's project could only succeed if he turned
away from the people that depend upon him, leaving them to a
'grim' life. Posterity may think more of him as an artist
because of his work in Tahiti, but it doesn't follow that we
should think that Gauguin showed artistic integrity in taking his art
to Tahiti, valuing his drive to paint in an exotic location above
other commitments. Nor is it clear that being successful in Tahiti
contributes to our judgment of his artistic integrity. Would our
judgment of his artistic integrity have suffered had he stayed at home
producing his art? Artistic integrity may come into conflict with
personal and moral integrity, but it is surprisingly difficult to
characterize the precise circumstances of such a conflict.
Williams's fictionalized portrait of Gauguin does not
convincingly demonstrate such a conflict (and nor was it devised by
Williams for such a purpose).



There are certainly connections between artistic integrity and the
moral integrity of artists, which in turn is connected to the moral
features of artworks themselves. Novitz (1990, 16), for example,
argues that the values we bring to art are social ones, and that
so-called pure aesthetic values are themselves socially induced. At
the very least, the moral values which artworks suggest or promote are
relevant to considerations of artistic integrity. On the one hand,
artistic integrity and moral integrity can overlap, particularly if
the standards of artistic integrity are high. On the other hand,
artistic and moral integrity can come apart in situations of great
pressure. Circumstances also vary, and with them both the difficulty
of pursuing integrity, and our assessment of its merit. Stewart
Sutherland (1996) argues that the case of Dimitri Shostakovich creates
difficulties for an account of integrity developed in terms of
consistency. The idea is that Shostakovich demonstrated equal if not
greater integrity than other more artistically consistent composers
writing in more congenial circumstances by coding his works with
anti-Stalinist irony. More plausibly, however, one might argue that
Shostakovich showed considerable strength of character in difficult
circumstances whilst also admitting to his many artistic compromises,
compromises which affected his integrity as an artist. Thus, one might
rate his moral integrity more highly than his artistic integrity.
Expectations of artistic integrity have to be tempered by
understanding of the conflicts and pressures, both commercial and
political, involved in pursuing artistic values.



Does having one type of integrity mean that one is, to that extent,
moral? Halfon says that integrity in one sphere of life is admirable,
though less admirable than having integrity overall and a specific
type of integrity may interfere with moral integrity rather than be
expressive of it. Yet overall integrity demands that this conflict be
managed in appropriate ways. Integrity is so broad that it has to
encompass morality in a profound way. Artistic integrity is greater if
it involves not just following the demands of the profession, but
doing so in such a way that one does not diminish others' lives.
Daniel Putnam (1996, 237) expresses the point well when he says:
'Integrity reaches its highest point when it unifies and
maintains a balance of virtues.' In that sense, a particular
type of integrity, such as intellectual integrity, is greater when it
does not interfere with personal and moral integrity.



There certainly can be conflict between types of integrity,
particularly where the demands of a profession interfere with personal
and moral integrity. Pursuit of one particular project can prevent us
from balancing our commitments, as in Williams's fictional
Gauguin case. However, while different types of integrity can be
sequestered from each other, integrity of one type is more likely to
flourish in a context of greater integrity in various spheres of
existence. The kind of virtues and skills which are developed in
maintaining, say, intellectual integrity, are likely to be available
to make use of in dealing with the conflicts and temptations which
threaten personal and moral integrity, and conversely.


## 8. Integrity and Moral Theory



Despite the fact that it is somewhat troublesome, the concept of
integrity has played an important role in contemporary discussion of
moral theory. An important and influential line of argument, first
developed by Bernard Williams, seeks to show that certain moral
theories do not sufficiently respect the integrity of moral agents.
(See Williams 1973 & 1981.) This has become an important avenue of
critique of modern moral theory. (See, for example, Scheffler 1993 and
Lomasky 1987.)



Modern moral theories, the most representative of which are
utilitarianism and Kantian moral theory, do not concern themselves
directly with virtue and character. Instead, they are primarily
concerned to describe morally correct action. Theories of morally
correct action generally aspire to develop criteria by which to
categorize actions as morally obligatory, morally permissible, or
morally impermissible. Some theories of morally correct action also
introduce the category of the supererogatory: an action is
supererogatory if and only if it is morally praiseworthy, but not
obligatory. The two theories of primary concern to Williams are
utilitarianism and Kantian moral theory, and both of these are usually
interpreted as eschewing the category of the supererogatory. (See
Baron 1995 for an argument that Kantian moral theory has no need for
the category of the supererogatory.) Williams maintains that both
utilitarianism and Kantian moral theory are deeply implausible because
of their integrity undermining effects. His argument against
utilitarianism makes the more transparent appeal to the concept of
integrity and it is this argument that we examine here. (But see
Herman 1983, Rogerson 1983, Jensen 1989, and Baron 1995, chapter four,
for critical discussion of the Williams's argument against
Kantian moral theory.)



Williams's argument against utilitarianism is directed against a
particular version of utilitarianism--act-utilitarianism. This
is, very roughly, the view that an agent is to regard as morally
obligatory all and only actions that maximize general well-being. The
act-utilitarian theory that Williams criticizes has an important
feature: it aspires to describe the correct form of moral
*deliberation*. It does more than specify what it is for an
action to be morally correct, it specifies how an agent should think
about moral decisions. Agents should think about which of the actions
available to them will maximize general well-being and decide to act
accordingly. Notice that this theory is completely impartial and that
it makes no room for an agent to give special weight to personal
commitments, causes, projects, and the like. Act-utilitarianism
recognizes no personal sphere of activity in which moral reflection
operates merely as a side-constraint.



According to Williams, an agent who adopted this version of
utilitarianism would find themselves unable to live with integrity. As
he puts it, to become genuinely committed to act-utilitarianism is for
a person to become alienated:



> 
> in a real sense from his actions and the source of his actions in his
> own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of
> everyone's projects, including his own, and an output of
> optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which
> *his* actions and *his* decisions have to be seen as the
> actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with
> which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal
> sense, an attack on his integrity. (Williams 1973, 117)
> 



Williams's argument is based on the identity theory of
integrity, discussed above. Integrity, on this view, requires that
persons act out of their own convictions, that is, out of commitments
with which they deeply identify. Act-utilitarianism seeks to replace
personal motivations of this kind with impartial utilitarian
reasoning. Williams's argument appears to make acting with
integrity incompatible with acting in accordance with
act-utilitarianism.



Williams develops the point with two famous and much discussed
examples (1972, 97-99). The example which best illustrates his
argument involves the figure of George, a recent doctoral graduate in
chemistry who is having difficulty finding work. George has young
children. He also has poor health, limiting his job opportunities.
George's (unnamed) wife must work to support the family and on
Williams's story this causes a great deal of strain on the
family. George has a strong commitment to pacifism, a conviction
amounting to an identity-conferring commitment. A dilemma arises for
George when more senior colleague tells him about a decently paid job
in a laboratory doing work on biological and chemical warfare. If
George does not take up the job, it will almost certainly go to
another chemist, one without George's pacifist commitment, who
will pursue the development of biological and chemical weapons more
vigorously than George. Should George take the job or not?



The most likely act-utilitarian conclusion here is that George should
accept the job. This would contribute greatly to the well-being of his
family as well as probably contributing to general welfare by
forestalling some relatively zealous development of weapons of mass
destruction. Weighed in the balance are George's feelings in the
matter. The utilitarian calculation, if it really does come out this
way, is demanding a sacrifice of George: that he put aside his
opposition to, and distaste for, biological and chemical weapons
development and deal with the anguish and alienation that may result
from working in the laboratory.



According to Williams, however, act-utilitarianism in fact demands a
different kind of sacrifice from George. It demands that he act
without integrity, abandoning or ignoring a longstanding,
identity-conferring commitment to pacifism simply because maximum
general well-being is to be found elsewhere. This is just one,
particularly acute, example of the tendency of impartial utilitarian
deliberation to run roughshod over identity-conferring commitments,
treating them as no more than one source of utility among others. In
general, Williams concludes, identity-conferring commitments cannot
play the kind of role in act-utilitarian moral deliberation that is
required for an agent to act with integrity, that is, for an agent to
act with genuine conviction in matters of grave, identity-determining
importance to them.



Williams's critique of utilitarianism has spawned a large and
important literature in which the argument has been interpreted and
reinterpreted, redrafted, and much criticized. There are, nonetheless,
three main lines of response to the Williams's critique of
utilitarianism. We consider them in turn. The first reply essentially
concedes the point and offers in response a development of utilitarian
moral theory, one aimed at avoiding the flaws that Williams sought to
demonstrate. One way to do this is by watering down the impartiality
of utilitarian theory, explicitly factoring in the permissibility of
giving extra weight to one's own personal projects, commitments,
and so on. (See Scheffler 1993 for a development of this view, and
Harris 1989a and 1989b for criticism of the adequacy of this
response.)



Another way to try and improve utilitarianism in response to
Williams's argument is to advance a less ambitious form of
utilitarian moral theory. Recall that Williams criticizes a version of
act-utilitarian *moral deliberation*, so one may respond to it
by describing a version of utilitarianism that does not directly
dictate the form of moral deliberation. Thus one might subscribe to an
act-utilitarian account of morally correct action whilst not demanding
that someone like George approach life by deliberating in strictly
utilitarian ways. Instead, utilitarianism may be thought to furnish
criteria from which to derive decision-procedures. (See Driver 2012,
Moore 2007, Railton 1986, for discussion of such a view; Cox 2005,
Howard-Snyder 1997, and Harcourt 1998 for criticism of it.)



A second possible line of response to the argument is to deny the
presupposition of Williams's argument that it is absurd for a
moral theory to undermine integrity. It may just be that moral demands
upon us really are very stringent, and identity-conferring commitments
must sometimes (perhaps often) be sacrificed in the interests of, say,
our acting to ameliorate preventable suffering. One might even
consider it a virtue of utilitarianism that it demonstrates how
genuinely difficult it is to preserve one's integrity when
confronting a world of massive and easily preventable suffering. (See
Ashford 2000 for an argument along these lines.)



The third, and most influential, line of response argues directly
against the idea that utilitarianism demands that agents act against
their convictions. Utilitarianism demands that agents adopt
utilitarian ideals; that agents give utilitarian ideals the kind of
priority that would have them function as the central
identity-conferring commitments of their life. Thus utilitarianism
does not demand that one live without identity-conferring commitments
at all, but that one live with *utilitarian*
identity-conferring commitments. Were George a utilitarian, he would
not have been acting against his convictions by taking a job in the
chemical weapons factory. He does not lose his integrity simply in
virtue of his commitment to utilitarianism. Williams appears to
confuse the case in which a utilitarian George acts against his
personal interests (in which case his integrity would be preserved)
with the case in which a non-utilitarian George is somehow persuaded
to act as a utilitarian (in which case his integrity would not be
preserved). Acting as a utilitarian when one has no sympathy with
utilitarianism may well diminish one's integrity, but such a
loss of integrity is not attributable to utilitarianism and has no
bearing on utilitarianism's plausibility as a moral theory. (See
Carr 1976, Trianosky 1986 and Blustein 1991 for versions of this
criticism.)



The matter is not finally settled, however, for notice that
Williams's critique is premised on a version of the identity
theory of integrity. As we have seen, there are other plausible
candidates for an account of integrity and the critique of
utilitarianism may well succeed better in their terms. The key issues
are whether utilitarian commitment is compatible with a fully
satisfactory account of integrity, and if so, whether integrity is of
such value and importance that the clash between integrity and
utilitarian commitment undermines the plausibility of utilitarian
moral theory. An adequate account of integrity needs to deal with
these issues and to capture basic intuitions about the nature of
integrity: that persons of integrity may differ about what is right
but a moral monster cannot have integrity.



Stuart Rosenbaum (2015, 23, 41) claims that 'integrity is the
heart of morality to most people', and that pragmatism alone can
accommodate that centrality. He (2015, 24) argues that pragmatist
conceptions render integrity more than 'useful in efforts to
understand the moral life.' For Rosenbaum (2015, 27), 'The
idea of integrity, focussed through the lens of pragmatism, enable a
cohesive way of thinking about the many and diverse moral dimensions
of life.' He (2015, 22) maintains that the idea of integrity
does not 'play any distinctive role' in utilitarian,
deontological, or virtue ethics; and he laments (2015, 22, 28-33) what
he sees as the baleful historical influence of Platonism in
misdirecting moral philosophers' attention away from ordinary
peoples' actual moral concerns. For Rosenbaum (2015, 34, 65),
integrity is not an *a priori* ideal, but provides for a
context-sensitive, working theory of morality. A person's
integrity consists of their autonomy, their commitment to community
values and traditions, and their commitment to the ideals of self and
community (2015, 87f.). 'Being a person of integrity is doing
one's best given one's values and the social and cultural
conditions of one's environment (2015, 106). Thus Rosenbaum is
in agreement with Williams that integrity lacks determinate content;
but he differs in qualifying the italicized declaration that integrity
'*has no moral content of its own, no essence or ontology of
its own,* apart from the cultures, societies, and psyches that may
realize it' (2015, 20; cf.88). So it is that, although he sees
universal applicability in this concept of integrity, and indeed in
aspects of integrity-based morality more widely, Rosenbaum (2015,
103f.) is able to contemplate the possibility that even a
suicide-bomber may be a person of integrity.



In keeping with Williams' views, Cecile Laborde (2017,
203) defines integrity as 'an ideal of congruence between
one's ethical commitments and one's actions', and
argues (2017, 207) that two tests must be applied to claims (religious
or otherwise) for exemptions from laws. These are the thick sincerity
of the claimant, and the thin acceptability of the proposed exemption
-- which must thus be compatible with the basic rights of others. For
Lori Watson (2019, 656), no exemptions are permissible which are
'incompatible with the project of liberal egalitarian
justice.' Giulio Fornaroli (2019, 659) goes further, concluding
that 'the notion of personal integrity is, by itself,
unnecessary and possibly detrimental in a theory of justice.'



## 9. Integrity in relation to Social and Political Conditions



Even where the social and political dimensions of integrity are
discussed, integrity is often seen as largely a private or personal
affair--albeit one with important implications in the public
sphere. Less attention has been given to ways in which social (e.g.
family, business, religious) and political (e.g. forms of government)
structures and processes may affect personal integrity. They can do
this either by promoting or undermining features essential to having
or practicing integrity; or by aiding, abetting, or being inimical to
the defeaters of integrity (e.g., self-deception). If integrity is as
central and important a virtue as recent work on the topic suggests,
then ideally the institutions--including forms of government and
economic arrangements--that help shape our lives should be
structured in ways that promote integrity. Arguably, this is not the
case, and why it may not be the case, and how to change it, is as much
a problem for social and political philosophy, and ethics generally,
as it is for philosophical psychology.



Susan Babbitt (1997, 118) says that an adequate account of personal
integrity must:



> 
> ...recognize that some social structures are of the wrong sort
> altogether for some individuals to be able to pursue personal
> integrity, and that questions about the moral nature of society often
> need to be asked first before questions about personal integrity can
> properly be raised. Questions about integrity may turn out to be, not
> about the relationship between individual characteristics, interests,
> choices and so on, and a society, but rather about what kind of
> society it is in terms of which an individual comes to possess certain
> interests, characteristics, and so on. This does not imply that
> questions about personal integrity are entirely moral, not having to
> do with idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals; instead, it
> suggests that the very meaning of personal integrity in particular
> cases sometimes depends upon more general considerations about the
> nature of the society that makes some idiosyncratic properties
> identifying and others not. The pursuit of adequate personal integrity
> often depends, not so much on understanding who one is and what one
> believes and is committed to, but rather understanding what
> one's society is and imagining what it could be.
> 



Babbitt explicitly links personal integrity to political and social
structures in a way that broadens the concept of integrity. What she
says is applicable to all of the views that we have discussed. But her
account also enables us to raise questions about the relationship
between social structures and personal integrity. The most general
question is what kinds of society and what kinds of practice within a
society are most conducive to personal integrity?



If society is structured in such a way that it undermines
people's attempt at either knowing or acting upon their
commitments, values and desires, then such a structure is inimical to
integrity. And if integrity is connected to well-being, then adverse
social and political conditions are a threat--not merely an
ultimate threat, but also a daily threat--to well-being. The
twentieth century technical term for this mismatch is alienation.
Alienation results when people are so confused or conflicted--are
relentlessly exposed, for example, to the social manufacture of
incompatible desires--that they take on roles they mistakenly
believe they want or deceive themselves about wanting.



Are political and social conditions in contemporary liberal
democracies conducive both to acquiring the self-understanding
necessary for integrity and, more generally, to the business of acting
with integrity? Historically, one of the governing ideals of liberal
democratic societies is to provide its citizens, not with the goods
they desire, but with certain primary goods, such as freedom, and with
political/social/cultural structures (laws, codes, institutions,
practices, and so on) that facilitate their capacity to obtain goods
they desire for themselves. This is one reason education has always
played a prominent role in discussion of liberal-democratic forms of
life. Education is seen as a crucial structure in the facilitation of
individuals' pursuit of chosen goods. Such an instrumental view
of education is rather narrow and omits any role for inculcation of
the means to choose goods wisely. Integrity requires more than
facilitation of an instrumental capacity to acquired desired goods. It
requires the wisdom and self-knowledge to choose appropriate goods,
worthwhile goals, and so on. It is, perhaps, hard to see extant social
educational structures playing a very significant role in this
process, and harder still to imagine real
institutions--institutions compatible with the demands and
limitations of contemporary life--that would.



If social educational structures fail to facilitate the life of
integrity, other structures may be positively hostile to it. Arguably,
and despite what might seem like overwhelming choice, job markets are
structured by financial and other incentives, restricted opportunities
and economic rents. The result is that many people choose careers they
do not really want and for which they are barely suited. There are
other perhaps more straightforward ways in which social and cultural
structures may be inimical to the pursuit of integrity. The ideology
of love, for instance, may undermine the integrity of lovers, as it
may undermine the possibility of genuine and realistic love. In
professional life, people may be called upon (not only tacitly) to
lie, bluff or manipulate the truth in ways that directly or indirectly
affect their integrity. The construction of a mission statement or a
strategic plan is in some ways an open invitation to dissemble, pander
and obfuscate. The expectation that one 'sells oneself' or
'sells the company' provides explicit reward for
hypocrites and sycophants. And there are many kinds of assessments,
reports and application processes that foster both deception and
self-deception. If this is right, then contemporary society is
inimical to a life of integrity in many small-scale ways. Broad social
structures also have a deleterious effect on our capacity to live with
integrity and here, of course, the effects of totalitarian regimes are
more extreme than those liberal democracies.



Those who are oppressed seem to be in a paradoxical relation to
integrity. On the one hand, members of oppressed groups would seem to
be deprived of the conditions for developing integrity: the freedom to
make choices how to act and think. As Babbitt (1997, 118) notes, one
needs to be able to make choices in order to develop the kinds of
interests and concerns which are central to leading a life of
integrity. On the other hand, oppressed people are often able to
reflect on political and social realities with the greater insight
because they do not benefit from them. They have no incentive to adopt
self-deceptive/self-protective attitudes about circumstances of
oppression or to see past them with convenient blindness. Oppressed
groups therefore have all the more scope to think about social reality
with integrity, and to act out of this understanding with integrity. A
capacity for reflection and understanding enables one to work toward
integrity even if it does not ensure that one achieves an ideal of
integrity.



Any attempt to strive for integrity has to take account of the effect
of social and political context. The kind of society which is likely
to be more conducive to integrity is one which enables people to
develop and make use of their capacity for critical reflection, one
which does not force people to take up particular roles because of
their sex or race or any other reason, and one which does not
encourage individuals to betray each other, either to escape prison or
to advance their career. Societies and political structures can be
both inimical and favorable to the development of integrity, sometimes
both at once.