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Integrity and Moral Danger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Greg Scherkoske
Greg Scherkoske*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, NSB3H 4P9, Canada
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Extract

While it isn't clear that we are right to value integrity — or so I shall argue — most of us do. Persons of integrity merit respect. Compromising one's integrity — or failing completely to exhibit it — seems a serious flaw. Two influential accounts suggest why. For Bernard Williams, integrity is ‘a person's sticking by what [she] regards as ethically necessary or worthwhile.’ To this Cheshire Calhoun adds a helpful negative gloss:

To lack integrity is to underrate both formulating and exemplifying one's own views. People without integrity trade action on their own views too cheaply for gain, status, reward, approval or for escape from penalties, loss of status, disapproval. Or they trade their own views too readily for the views of others who are more authoritative, more in step with public opinion, less demanding of themselves, and so on.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 335 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2010

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References

1 Thanks to audiences at Cambridge University, Dalhousie University, Sydney University, and the University of California at Riverside for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. For detailed written comments and encouragement I am particularly grateful to Sue Sherwin, Steven Burns, Cheshire Calhoun, the editors of this Journal, and an anonymous referee. For helpful questions, thanks to Karen Jones, Moira Gatens, Jimmy Altham, and Rich Campbell. Special thanks go to Duncan MacIntosh, Margaret Chapman and Gary Watson.

2 Williams, Bernard ‘Replies,’ in World, Mind, Ethics, Altham, J.E.J. and Harrison, Ross eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995)Google Scholar

3 Calhoun, Cheshire,‘Standing for Something,’ Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995), 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 ‘Loyalty exhibiting’ is from Alisdair MacIntyre's ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’ The Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas 1984), 4. I say nearly because, as we'll see (Section V), Calhoun clearly rejects a strong loyalty-exhibiting component.

5 Call this the ‘identity’ view of integrity. Read one way Williams offers an identity view in ‘Integrity,’ in Utilitarianism: For and Against, B. Williams and J.J.C. Smart (New York: Cambridge 1973); and ‘Persons, Character and Morality,’ in Williams’ Moral Luck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1981). See also Babbitt, Susan Artless Integrity (London: Rowman and Littlefield 2001).Google Scholar Identity views of integrity are not the only loyalty-exhibiting views. As I show later, other variations on the core of the standard view of integrity — ‘coherence’ and ‘clean hands’ views — share this loyalty-exhibiting dimension.

6 Call these ‘coherence’ or (with Calhoun) ‘integrated self’ variants. Gabriele Taylor: ‘My claim is that the person possessing integrity is the person who keeps his self intact’ (‘Integrity,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 [1981], 148). See also Blustein, Jeffrey Care and Commitment: Taking the Personal Point of View (New York: Oxford University Press 1991).Google Scholar McFall, Lynn ‘Integrity,’ Ethics 98 (1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar takes coherence to be necessary but not sufficient for possessing integrity. Carolyn McLeod (‘Integrity and Self Protection,’ Journal of Social Philosophy 35 [2004]) advances what seems to be an identity view: ‘So one lacks integrity to the extent that one acts in ways that conflicts with what one values’ (216). But there are elements of the integrated self view too: ‘Integrity … involves being ‘in the right relation to oneself,’ which we interpreted above as having one's thoughts integrated with one another and with one's actions’ (226).

7 We can, with Calhoun, call this the ‘clean hands picture’ of integrity (McFall, ‘Integrity’, 11). ‘An attitude essential to the notion of integrity is that there are some things that one is not prepared to do, or some things one must do.’ That these variations are not exclusive, and can be combined, is nicely illustrated by McFall later (12) when she glosses the notion of ‘unconditional commitments’ as that part of ‘ … ourselves beyond which we will not retreat … .’ The clean hands view shades into an identity view in Williams's discussion of George, the pacifist scientist reluctant to accept a job as chemical and biological weapons researcher, in Williams and Smart, Utilitarianism: For and Against.

8 Cox, Damian Caze, Marguerite La and Levine, Michael Integrity and the Fragile Self (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003), 41.Google Scholar

9 While it is true, as Andrew Oldenquist writes, that ‘a loyalist doesn't value something simply because it is his … it must have features that are worth having,’ nevertheless the core understanding of integrity does require a kind of protective stance toward oneself and one's values in a loyalty-exhibiting way that risks just this. (‘Loyalties,’ Journal of Philosophy 79 [1982], 173-93.)

10 Ladd, John ‘Loyalty,’ in Edwards, Paul ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. V (New York: Macmillan & The Free Press 1967), 97–8.Google Scholar I set aside the worry that talk of fidelity to oneself is an illicit extension of the concept from its focal interpersonal use.

11 Schauber, Nancy ‘Integrity, Commitment and the Concept of a Person,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1996), 119–29.Google Scholar Failures of integrity are explicitly characterized in terms of betrayal (and by implication, loyalty) by Cox, et al.: ‘[D]egrading self-betrayal aptly expresses the way a person of integrity would experience their own lack of integrity’ (55). McFall (13) also uses the language of self-betrayal to describe failures of integrity. Christine Korsgaard makes this loyalty exhibiting dimension clear: ‘That is why it is best if we love our values as well as having them’ (The Sources of Normativity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996], 103).

12 The sizable literature would include not only Williams (1973); see also Williams, (1981); Scheffler, Samuel The Rejection of Consequentialism, rev. ed.. (Oxford: OUP 1993);Google Scholar Flanagan, Owen Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge: CUP 1991);Google Scholar Ashford, Elizabeth ‘Utilitarianism, Integrity and Partiality’, Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000), 421–39;Google Scholar Harcourt, Edward ‘Integrity, Practical Deliberation and Utilitarianism,’ Philosophical Quarterly 48 (1998), 189–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 This is purely illustrative: for my purposes nothing substantive turns on which of these very different notions is at work.

14 Cox, et al. ‘On our account of integrity, it appears that one cannot help but strive for it. Striving for integrity is at times identical with the various tasks of living’ (42). McLeod (2004) is more careful, arguing that certain kinds of psychological integration may be necessary for the sort of agency needed to exhibit integrity. For doubts about this link, see Schauber (1996).

15 McFall ‘Integrity,’(12); this is echoed by Noggle, Robert ‘Integrity, the Self, and Desire-Based Accounts of the Good,’ Philosophical Studies 96 (1999), 303–31.Google Scholar

16 The precise relation between integrity and agency is unclear. It may be that integrity is a strong condition on agency (without integrity, there isn't sufficient unity to agency to have a discernable character at all); or maybe integrity is a weak condition on agency; the excellence of integrity consists in the desirable narrative or evaluative or even aesthetic coherence of a person's convictions. Fortunately my purposes do not require making this link clear.

17 Korsgaard asserts a similar link: ‘It is our conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us … [f]or to violate them is to lose your integrity … and to no longer be who you are … It is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead’ (Sources of Normativity, 102). McLeod (2004) defends a more circumscribed and plausible variant of this claim.

18 See Williams and Smart, Utilitarianism; McFall ‘Integrity’; Korsgaard: ‘Unless you are committed to some conception of your practical identity, you will lose your grip on yourself as having any reason to do one thing rather than another — and with it, your grip on yourself as having any reason to live and act at all’ (Sources of Normativity, 102).

19 See note 18. For a compelling skeptical case, see Buss, Sarah ‘Needs (Someone Else's), Projects (My Own), and Reasons,’ Journal of Philosophy 103 (2007), 373–402:CrossRefGoogle Scholar the question of whether to go on ‘is not a question of which identity I should embrace. It is a question of whether to be anything at all … .I do not need to be invested in any projects in order to give it an affirmative answer’ (386). Harry Frankfurt agrees: ‘Surely Williams has it backward. Our interest in living does not commonly depend upon our having projects that we desire to pursue. It's the other way around: we are interested in having worthwhile projects because we intend to go on living, and we would prefer not to be bored’ (‘Getting it Right’ in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values [2004], 192).

20 The explanation for, and extent of, this exemption varies among proponents. For Williams, such ‘ground’ commitments are exempt because they are the very basis for the reasons we could give for any other choice or decision; these commitments determine what we have reason to do. See his ‘Persons, Character and Morality’ and ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in Moral Luck. For McFall these commitments are tied to the conditions for going on as the same person; they are ‘unconditional’ (12) — though qualified, see below. See also Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity.

21 As Nietzsche alleged of punishment: ‘For “punishment” is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it creates a good conscience for itself’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, ‘On Redemption,’ trans. Walter Kaufman). Cf. Williams's charge of self-indulgence in ‘Utilitarianism and Self-Indulgence,’ in Moral Luck.

22 Vices of disproportionality, as Tom Hurka points out, are attitudes that are ‘out of proportion to their object's value;’ other examples are ‘selfishness and cowardice … intemperance, pedantry, nepotism … and laziness’ Virtue, Value and Vice (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 96-7.

23 ‘[I]n times of social doubt and loss of faith in long-established values, there is a tendency to fall back on the virtues of integrity … but they are not sufficient; for their definition allows for almost any content: a tyrant might display these attributes to a high degree … ’ (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice [Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000], 455-6).

24 For a variant of this view, see Babbitt, Susan Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity and Moral Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press 1996)Google Scholar Chapter 5; and Artless Integrity Ch. 3. This view allows for the possibility that we might, in some circumstances, be morally obliged to be less of a person. Thanks to Duncan MacIntosh for raising this point.

25 Thanks to a referee for pressing this objection.

26 Taylor attempts this optimistic line: ‘ … the ruthless egoist will not in fact possess integrity … [when] free from confusion he will get his commitments right’ (158). But the appeal to intersubjective consistency fails to show either that such intersubjective consistency is required for integrity or that people could not consistently hold to ruthless egoism in either the inter-or intra-personal sense.

27 McFall: ‘Unless corrupted by philosophy, we all have things we think we would never do, under any imaginable circumstances, whatever we may give to survival or pleasure … some part of ourselves beyond which we will not retreat, some weakness however prevalent in others that we will not tolerate in ourselves. And if we do that thing, betray that weakness we are not the person we thought; there is nothing left that we may even in spite refer to as I’ (‘Integrity’, 12; italics added).

28 See Harcourt ‘Integrity, Practical Deliberation and Utilitarianism,’ 195, for a reading of Williams's Jim and the Indians example that is similarly grounded in an identity view of integrity.

29 Are there non-standard views of integrity that escape this criticism? A recent view of integrity by R. Pargetter and J. Bigelow might not fall within my characterization of the ‘core understanding.’ Their ‘Integrity and Autonomy,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2007) claims integrity is best seen as governing of one's (lower order) desires by one's (higher order) desires. This at times seems a straightforward coherence view of integrity and would be subject to the criticisms just detailed. Their further gloss on integrity as ‘strength of will’ (and a component of autonomy) complicates this picture, leaving it open that integrity is not loyaltyexhibiting in the sense I reject. This view merits attention, but must await another occasion.

30 See Lillehammer, Hallvard ‘Analytical Dispositionalism and Practical Reason,’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (1999), 117–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 It might seem that McFall's view is not moralized. Two of McFall's examples — that of the pleasure seeker and the approval craver — suggest the following thought: pleasure and approval seekers cannot have integrity for the simple reason that to have integrity one must be resistant to challenge; the pleasure and approval seeker will find themselves not resisting challenges when this will cost them pleasure or approval. McFall says ‘where there is no possibility of its loss, integrity cannot exist’ (9). This is a charitable and attractive reading found in McLeod's ‘How to Distinguish Autonomy from Integrity,’ this journal (2005), 35. McFall seems to resist this nice reading, however, when she grants that the pleasure seeker can in fact fail to live up to her principle, and so could in fact experience a loss — see 10. The other examples that McFall uses suggest a moderate moralized view of integrity — she wishes, e.g., to rule out people who ruthlessly pursue wealth, or influence or favour ‘the fawning flatterer.’ While McFall denies that one must adhere to impartial moral principles, she goes on to claim that ‘one must adhere to some set of recognizable moral principles or commitments. This rules out a singular commitment to art, as well as to personal pleasure, approval and profit’ (15). Thanks to a referee for this challenge.

32 Leaning on a further (moralized) intuition, as does Mark Halfon, in Integrity: A Philosophical Inquiry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1989), e.g., that ascriptions of integrity typically contain a component of positive moral evaluation (and such evaluation is incompatible with base, shallow, or repugnant convictions) is similarly inconclusive. It doesn't establish that integrity is essentially moralized in the relevant way: discretion is a morally admirable trait, but it doesn't follow that discretion has essentially to do with keeping moral or morally appropriate confidences.

33 A more thoroughly defended view is considered below. Halfon's argument runs as follows. He considers a scientist as a paradigm case of a person of ‘intellectual integrity’ (33). He claims that ‘If a person of intellectual integrity has pledged to pursue the truth, then all relevant and available evidence must be examined … the failure to do so … result[s] in a loss of integrity’ (ibid.). Halfon then conjectures: this ‘may not be limited to ascriptions of intellectual integrity.’ From this conjectural basis, Halfon concludes that integrity quite generally requires commitment to epistemic and moral norms (34-6).

34 Korsgaard offers a Kantian version: ‘The function of the normative principles of the will, in particular, is to bring integrity, and therefore unity — and therefore, really, existence — to the acting self’ Sources of Normativity, 229. Very recently: ‘And the way to make yourself into a particular person, who can interact well with … others, is to be consistent and unified and whole — to have integrity … The moral law is the law of self-constitution’ (Self Constitution: Agency, Identity and Integrity [New York: Oxford 2009], 214). See also Graham, Jody: ‘Does Integrity Require Moral Goodness?’ Ratio 14 (2001), 234–51;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Cox, Le Caze and Levine (2003).

35 ‘Utilitarianism, Integrity and Partiality,’ 424

36 ‘Utilitarianism, Integrity and Partiality,’ 423

37 ‘Utilitarianism, Integrity and Partiality,’425. This strategy, and its intuitive basis, is employed by Graham (‘Does Integrity Require Moral Goodness?’), who faces the same problem as Ashford.

38 To be clear: my point is that the arguments here for moralizing integrity are unsatisfactory. It is not to assume that persons renowned for their steadfast adherence to artistic or intellectual ideals are paradigm cases of integrity. Other arguments can be given. For forceful criticisms of Korsgaard's Kantian view of moralized integrity, see Raymond Guess's response in Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity.

39 Calhoun, 259

40 I should also point out that Calhoun frames integrity with the focal question of ‘what is worth doing?’ (257, and again on 258 and 260). This suggests integrity is primarily a practical virtue; my view is that it is an epistemic virtue that ranges over both moral and non-moral judgments.

41 This is anticipated by, e.g., Calhoun's suggestion that integrity involves a kind of epistemic humility: ‘Untempered by the thought, ‘This is just my own best judgment,’ standing for something puts one's own and others’ integrity at risk … even protesters risk losing their integrity to arrogance’ (260). McLeod (2004) suggests that ‘medial self-protection’ lies between a needful protecting of one's agency and what seems a vicious protecting of one's interests (that involves deafness to challenge).

42 In ways anticipated by Taylor, ibid., I agree with McLeod (2005, 116-17) that it is essential to a persuasive conception of integrity that it accommodate the link between integrity and having reasons for one's convictions. I disagree with McLeod's claim that ‘the reasons one has need not be good reasons … . Simply having reasons will prevent one from being dogmatic’ (117). While I cannot argue this here, I think integrity is incompatible with holding one's convictions for manifestly poor reasons: arrogance, dogmatism and obstinacy are not after all unreasoned vices.

43 See Williams, B. Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002);Google Scholar Hookway, C. Roberts and Wood in Zagzebski, Linda and DePaul, M. Intellectual Virtue (Cambridge: CUP 2003).Google Scholar Calhoun suggests integrity is a second-order virtue ranging over mainly moral virtues such as ‘self-knowledge, strength of will, courage, honesty, loyalty, humility, civility, respect and self-respect.’ (260).

44 For seminal discussions of epistemic responsibility, see Code, Lorraine Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover: Brown University Press 1987);Google Scholar Montmarquet, James Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 1993);Google Scholar and more recently Fairweather, Abriol and Zagzebski, Linda eds., Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001).Google Scholar My suggestion that integrity's conditions of circumstance can be given by an independently defensible account of epistemic responsibility invites a worry: does this epistemic reading simply reduce integrity to epistemic responsibility? Since integrity on this sketch involves a certain reflexive appreciation of the reliability of one's judgment — a reliability that comes with being epistemically responsible — integrity is clearly more than just epistemic responsibility. Thanks to a referee for this worry.

45 As when Diana Gould, a housewife present at a Thatcher press conference during the Falklands conflict, called Thatcher out on the manifest inconsistency of justifying the sinking of the retreating Argentine vessel Belgrano as an act of selfdefense.

46 These claims are defended at length in my ‘Integrity and Self-Trust’ [MS].

47 In ‘Integrity and Self-Trust’ [MS] I argue that self-trust is a better way to understand this reflexive relation. For intimations of this in epistemology, see Lehrer, K. Self-Trust (Oxford: OUP 1996);Google Scholar in bioethics, see McLeod, C. Self-Trust and Reproductive Autonomy (Cambridge: Mit 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Thanks to Cheshire Calhoun for the challenge and suggestion.

49 This is too simple, not least for this reason: We should distinguish cases in which one's judgment is typically competent but because of specific factors (e.g.) fatigue, anger or resentment, one is likely to make a bad judgment from cases in which one lacks the competence to make an informed judgment at all. Thanks to Cheshire Calhoun for this way of putting it.