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  • Integrity and Moral Danger1
  • Greg Scherkoske (bio)

I Integrity

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.'2 To this Cheshire Calhoun adds a helpful negative gloss: [End Page 335]

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.3

These glosses capture something close to a core understanding of integrity. As I will show, the core of this nearly standard view sees integrity as a loyalty-exhibiting virtue — integrity is a kind of fidelity or loyalty toward certain features of oneself.4 There are important variations on this theme. According to one variation, the person of integrity shows fidelity to those values, principles or commitments — call them convictions — that are partly constitutive of her identity as a practical agent.5 Another variation has integrity involve an overriding concern with the coherence of one's convictions: integrity requires an unswerving fidelity to the second-order, 'meta-commitment' of making coherent one's first-order convictions.6 A third variation has it that persons of integrity have an unbreakable allegiance to certain 'bottom line' principles.7 This [End Page 336] understanding has obvious attractions. Because we think it important for people to adhere to their convictions, especially in the face of temptation or challenge, this understanding seems plausible and compelling in its own right.

But some recent literature has seen integrity grow well beyond this core understanding into a veritable Swiss Army Knife of virtues. Cox, Le Caze and Levine see in integrity something for everyone:

[Integrity] stands as a mean to various excesses: on the one side, conformity, arrogance, dogmatism, fanaticism, monomania, preciousness, sanctimoniousness, rigidity; on the other side, capriciousness, wantonness, triviality, disintegration, weakness of will, self-deception, self-ignorance, mendacity, hypocrisy, indifference.8

Tellingly, they also see an important link between integrity and morality — an increasingly common claim that will prove important to my discussion:

Over and above these virtuous characteristics … attributions of integrity presuppose fundamental moral decency … immoral people … do not even seem to be candidates for integrity.

(41)

Setting itself against immorality and other unsightly vices, what is not to like about integrity?

As these last comments show, it is tempting to view integrity as the confluence of all good things. This is a temptation to resist. I will for the purposes of this paper adopt a more skeptical stance. I shall question the normative credentials of integrity. I will argue that integrity is typically taken to be a loyalty-exhibiting virtue in a way that has largely escaped attention. That is, integrity is typically assumed to require a stance of more or less uncritical partiality to one's commitments. Insofar as integrity is loyalty-exhibiting in this respect, integrity is itself a source of moral danger: roughly, a person's concern to preserve her integrity threatens to lead her into moral error. This gives cause to [End Page 337] question the value of integrity.9 A natural remedy suggests itself. If a commitment to moral principles, or perhaps correct moral principles, is a necessary condition on exhibiting integrity, this constraint would eliminate the threat of moral danger.

As against this, I will criticize a recent and representative attempt to moralize the virtue of integrity. The challenge to integrity posed by moral danger is better addressed by rejecting the loyalty-exhibiting assumption that creates the problem. I will also argue that, while integrity does require a commitment to having a certain kind of goal, it is not characterized by loyalty to moral convictions come what may, nor by loyalty to any...

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