Weekly reflection on two articles, 500-750 words

Integrity Author(s): Lynne McFall Source: Ethics, Vol. 98, No. 1 (Oct., 1987), pp. 5-20 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381289 Accessed: 16-01-2019 23:48 UTC

REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381289?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

https://about.jstor.org/terms

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Integrity*

Lynne McFall

Olaf (upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat 'there is some shit I will not eat'

[e. e. cummings]'

Integrity is a complex concept with alliances to conventional standards

of morality-especially those of truth telling, honesty, and fairness-as well as to personal ideals that may conflict with such standards.2 When we speak of the integrity of a politician, for example, we mean that she keeps her campaign promises, does not lie to her constituents, is fair to adversaries, will not participate in shady deals, bribe taking, cover-ups, scams of any sort. On the other hand, when Stephen Dedalus declares his independence from all authority except his own, he does so in the

name of integrity but without respect for conventional standards: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning."3 In the first case, conformity to conventional standards of truth telling, honesty, and fairness is required; in the second, it is not. Integrity in the sense of being true to oneself may require being false to others,

in spite of Polonius's famous claim to the contrary.

* I would like to thank James Fishkin, Robert Fogelin, Bernard Gert, Rebecca Holsen, John Kekes, and Brent Spencer for valuable criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.

1. e. e. cummings, Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980),

p. 339. 2. According to the Oford English Dictionary, compact ed., "integrity" means "soundness

of moral principle; the character of uncorrupted virtue, especially in relation to truth and

fairdealing; uprightness, honesty, sincerity." The American Heritage Dictionary says that

integrity is "strict personal honesty and independence." Webster's Third New International

Dictionary defines "integrity" as "an uncompromising adherence to a code of moral, artistic,

or other values; utter sincerity, honesty, and candor; avoidance of deception, expediency, artificiality, or shallowness of any kind."

3. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1968),

pp. 246-47.

Ethics 98 (October 1987): 5-20 ? 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 00 14-1704/88/9801-0003$01 .00

5

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

6 Ethics October 1987

My aim in this paper is to give an account of integrity that does justice to both senses, as well as clarifying the relation between them.

There is a temptation to make this task too easy by drawing a distinction between moral and personal integrity and saying that moral integrity requires truth telling, honesty, and fairness while personal integrity does not. I think this is a mistake, for two reasons.

First, integrity appears to be consistent with deception. If you are living in Germany in World War II and ajew is hiding in your basement, no one except Kant would claim that you suffer a loss of moral integrity if you tell the Nazi at the door that you are the only one home.

Second, whether or not one's principles are conventional, one's relation to them cannot be. This is brought out in Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Ilych."4 Ivan says, "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done.... But how can that be, when I did everything properly?"5 At first he dismisses the possibility that his life has been all wrong; he has, after all, lived in conformity with "legality, correctitude and propriety." It is only after his sickness and being cared for by the peasant Gerasim that he questions this: "It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false."6 The point is not that the principles he subscribed to were "false," although they probably were, but that his relation to them was false, that is, inauthentic. He simply bought "his" principles wholesale from those around them. A merely conventional relation to one's principles seems to rule out personal integrity. One must speak "in the first person," make one's principles, conventional or otherwise, one's own.7

The apparent centrality of honesty to the concept of integrity may reflect a general but defeasible commitment to what is taken to be a "sound moral principle,"8 allowing for cases of deception where this is morally condoned or required, or it may be a reflection of a requirement that is fundamental to both personal and moral integrity: coherence.

4. Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," in The Short Novels of Tolstoy, trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Dial Press, 1946). There is a good discussion of this story in Ilham Dilman and D. Z. Phillips, Sense and Delusion (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1971).

5. Tolstoy, p. 462.

6. Ibid., p. 466.

7. "At the end of my lecture on ethics, I spoke in the first person. I believe that is quite essential. Here nothing more can be established, I can only appear as a person speaking for myself" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted by Fredrich Waismann, "Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein," Philosophical Review 74 [1965]: 16). This passage is also quoted by Dilman (in Dilman and Phillips), who makes this point with respect to a person's moral beliefs (pp. 123-24).

8. See n. 2 above.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

McFall Integrity 7

I shall begin with an account of integrity in its least value-laden

sense-coherence-and attempt to build from there.

COHERENCE

Integrity is the state of being "undivided; an integral whole."9 What sort of coherence is at issue here? I think there are several.

One kind of coherence is simple consistency: consistency within one's set of principles or commitments.10 One cannot maintain one's integrity if one has unconditional commitments that conflict, for example, justice

and personal happiness, or conditional commitments that cannot be ranked, for example, truth telling and kindness.

Another kind of coherence is coherence between principle and action. Integrity requires "sticking to one's principles," moral or otherwise, in

the face of temptation, including the temptation to redescription. Take the case of a woman with a commitment to marital fidelity.

She is attracted to a man who is not her husband, and she is tempted. Suppose, for the purity of the example, that he wants her too but will do nothing to further the affair; the choice is hers. Now imagine your own favorite scene of seduction.

After the fact, she has two options. (There are always these two options, which makes the distinction between changing one's mind and weakness of the will problematic, but assume that this is a clear case.) She can (1) admit to having lost the courage of her convictions (retaining the courage of her mistakes) or (2) rewrite her principles in various ways (e.g., by making fidelity a general principle, with exceptions, or by retro- actively canceling her "subscription"). Suppose she chooses the latter. Whatever she may have gained, she has lost some integrity. Weakness of the will is one contrary of integrity. Self-deception is another.1" A person who admits to having succumbed to temptation has more integrity than the person who sells out, then fixes the books, but both suffer its

loss. A different sort of incoherence is exhibited in the case where someone

does the right thing for (what he takes to be) the wrong reason. For example, in Dostoevsky's The Devils, Stepan Verkhovensky says, "All my life I've been lying. Even when I spoke the truth. I never spoke for the

sake of the truth, but for my own sake."'12 Coherence between principle and action is necessary but not sufficient. One's action might correspond with one's principle, at some general level of description, but be inconsistent

9. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "integrity."

10. I say "principles or commitments" because I don't think it is necessary that one

subscribe to some principle to have integrity, and one can have commitments other than

to principles, e.g., to one's deepest impulse or to a person, without those being redescribable

in terms of principles.

11. Gabriele Taylor makes this point more elaborately in "Integrity," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 55 (1971): 143-59.

12. Quoted by Dilman (in Dilman and Phillips), p. 70.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

8 Ethics October 1987

with that principle more fully specified. If one values not just honesty but honesty for its own sake, then honesty motivated by self-interest is not enough for integrity.

So the requirement of coherence is fairly complicated. In addition to simple consistency, it puts constraints on the way in which one's principles

may be held (the "first-person" requirement), on how one may act given one's principles (coherence between principle and action), and on how one may be motivated in acting on them (coherence between principle and motivation). Call this internal coherence.

An appeal to dishonesty in these three cases-the inauthentic Ivan

Ilych, the self-deceived adulterer, and the lying truth teller-is not nec- essary to justify the claim that these persons lack integrity; the internal incoherence of the inauthentic, the self-deceived, and the impurely mo- tivated is sufficient.

Dishonesty to others might be characterized as a form of incoherence:

between behavior and belief. There is a split between what one believes

and what one says (or otherwise suggests) one believes. So it could be for this reason that dishonesty constitutes a lack of personal integrity.

This requirement, however, may be too strong. What about the honest

deceiver, who says to himself "I am not what I am"? It may be thought that only internal coherence is required for integrity, so that there is no contradiction in speaking of the integrity of an lago or of a Machiavelli.

On the other hand, it seems odd to speak of a loss of integrity in the failure to lie, scheme, and murder or, in general, the failure to be ruthless. But if internal coherence were sufficient for integrity, then internal in- coherence would be the only way it could be lost.

Similarly in the case of the weak-willed. Suppose one's principle is "Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again." In a case where the promising adulterer goes home alone, not through any moral com- punctions but for lack of nerve, it may sound strange to call it weakness

of the wanton will. But our intuitions are pulled both ways.

One explanation of our conflicting intuitions is that we import our own evaluative judgments into judgments of integrity. Integrity is like happiness in this respect. We may refuse to call a person happy if his values seem to us shallow or corrupt, even if he has met his own standards and is satisfied as a consequence.'3 Thus the old dispute about whether the evil can be "truly" happy. There is a demand, legitimate or not, that he get his values right (or what we take to be right).

The same may be true of integrity. Consider the principled adulterer. Although it may seem linguistically odd to speak of weakness of the

wanton will in her failure to yield to temptation, the oddness may come from the moral connotations of temptation or from a false assumption-

that her principle is wantonness-rather than the value that is really at

13. See R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963),

p. 128.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

McFall Integrity 9

stake: romantic love. Most of us take love to be a great if not the greatest good. And it's rare enough. So the principle is not simply a joke. If she holds this value very highly, and if she is prepared to sacrifice social approval and all the other goods that go to the conventionally moral for it, then personal integrity may be consistent with adultery; may even

require it. If, on the other hand, we reject this line of defense (as the

adulterer's husband is likely to do), then we may want to deny an ascription of integrity altogether. Which way we are inclined to go will depend on our own moral beliefs and on our willingness to inflict our moral or personal standards on others.

To summarize the argument so far: personal integrity requires that an agent (1) subscribe to some consistent set of principles or commitments and (2), in the face of temptation or challenge, (3) uphold these principles or commitments, (4) for what the agent takes to be the right reasons.

These conditions are rather formal. Are there no constraints on the content of the principles or commitments a person of integrity may hold?

INTEGRITY AND IMPORTANCE

Consider the following statements.

Sally is a person of principle: pleasure.

Harold demonstrates great integrity in his single-minded pursuit of approval.

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.

That none of these claims can be made with a straight face suggests that integrity is inconsistent with such principles.

A person of integrity is willing to bear the consequences of her

convictions, even when this is difficult, that is, when the consequences are unpleasant. A person whose only principle is "Seek my own pleasure" is not a candidate for integrity because there is no possibility of con-

flict-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. Someone who is de- scribable as an egg sucker, brownnose, fawning flatterer cannot have integrity, whatever he may think of the merits of such behavior. A com-

mitment 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

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

10 Ethics October 1987

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.

The following objection might be raised.'4 Suppose my principle is "Seek my own pleasure," yet I cravenly yield to the temptation to act

from moral conviction, which in calm moments I regard as an unfortunate residue of early socialization. Or I might fail to live up to my principle

simply by sacrificing greater long-term pleasure, for example, putting my extra cash into an IRA, when tempted by lesser but more immediate

satisfaction, buying cocaine, say. A similar case could be made for the approval seeker and the profit seeker.

This objection seems to me sound. Intuitively, though, these three are not even candidates for integrity. How, then, are we to support the intuition that integrity rules out adherence to certain principles or at least to explain it?

Most of us, when tempted to "sell out," are tempted by pleasure,

approval, money, status, or personal gain of some other sort. The political prisoner under the thumbscrew wants relief, however committed he may be to the revolution. Less dramatically, most of us want the good opinion of others and a decent standard of living. Self-interest in these forms is a legitimate aim against which we weigh our other concerns. But most of us have other, "higher," commitments, and so those who honor most what we would resist are especially liable to scorn.

This tendency to objectify our own values in the name of personal

integrity can best be seen, I think, in a more neutral case. Consider the

following claim:

The connoisseur showed real integrity in preferring the Montrachet to the Mountain Dew.

Even if he was sorely tempted to guzzle the Mountain Dew and forbore only with the greatest difficulty, the connoisseur, we would say, did not show integrity in preferring the better wine. Why? Resisting temptation is not the only test of integrity; the challenge must be to something

important. Important to whom? To him, one might reply; to his conception of

himself, the sort of person he wants to be. But a connoisseur of fine wines is, by definition, someone concerned

with the quality of wine, and to such a person the preference for rotgut would be humiliating.

One may die for beauty, truth, justice, the objection might continue, but not for Montrachet. Wine is not that important.

Someone may have died for a bottle of wine (as in Poe's story, "The Cask of Amontillado"), but that is not the point: we (the enlightened majority) do not think wine is worthy of the importance that such an

ascription of integrity implies.

14. I owe this objection, as well as other helpful criticism, to an anonymous reviewer for Ethics.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

McFall Integrity 11

When we grant integrity to a person, we need not approve of his or her principles or commitments, but we must at least recognize them as ones a reasonable person might take to be of great importance and ones that a reasonable person might be tempted to sacrifice to some lesser yet still recognizable goods. It may not be possible to spell out these conditions without circularity, but that this is what underlies our judgments of integrity seems clear enough. Integrity is a personal virtue granted with

social strings attached. By definition, it precludes "expediency, artificiality, or shallowness of any kind."'5 The pleasure seeker is guilty of shallowness, the approval seeker of artificiality, and the profit seeker of expedience of the worst sort.

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.

Natural but not obviously justified. This, one might argue, only shows the coercive power language, which, along with other forms of coercion, a person of integrity will resist. Beyond internal coherence, the concept of integrity itself does not determine whether an ascription of integrity is justified; it merely reflects our tolerance or lack of it. (There may be a "glass house" factor as well: we buy tolerance for ourselves with our tolerance of others-so that even such tolerance may be badly motivated and therefore suspect.) I argue that this view is too liberal.

INTEGRITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND THE OLAF PRINCIPLE

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.'6 I shall call this the "Olaf Principle," in honor of e. e. cummings's poem about Olaf, the "conscientious object-or." This principle requires that some of one's commitments be unconditional.

In what sense?

There are, in ordinary moral thought, expressions of the necessity or impossibility of certain actions or types of actions that do not neatly correspond to the notions of necessity and impossibility most often cat- alogued by moral theorists. "I must stand by my friend" (or "I cannot let him down") may have no claim to logical, psychological, rational, or moral necessity in any familiar sense. There is nothing logically inconsistent in the betrayal of friendship, or one could never be guilty of it. It is not psychologically impossible, since many have in fact done it and survived

to do it again. Rationality does not require unconditional allegiance, without some additional assumptions, for one may have better reason to do a conflicting action, for example, where the choice is between betraying a friend and betraying one's country (although I am sympathetic to

15. See Webster's Third New International Dictionary, s.v. "integrity." 16. See Taylor.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

12 Ethics October 1987

E. M. Forster's famous statement to the contrary).17 Nor is the necessity expressed one that has a claim to universality, for different persons may have different unconditional commitments. Impartiality and absoluteness are not what is at stake, for the choice may be between a friend and ten innocent strangers, and one person may have different unconditional commitments at different times. It is not clear, then, what sense of un- conditional commitment is at issue.

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, power and the approval of strangers; 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 persons we thought; there is nothing left that we may even in spite refer to as I.

I think it is in this sense that some commitments must be unconditional: they are conditions of continuing as ourselves.

Suppose, for example, that I take both friendship and professional advancement to be great goods, and my best friend and I are candidates for a promotion. Suppose, too, that I know the person who has the final decision has an unreasoned hatred of people who drink more than is socially required, as my friend does. I let this be known, not directly of course, with the predictable result that I am given the promotion.

Now in one sense I have not done anything dishonest. My friend may be the first to admit the pleasure he takes in alcohol. It may even be one of the reasons I value his friendship. (Loyal drinking companions are not easy to come by.) But this is clearly a betrayal of friendship. Is it so obviously a failure of integrity?

In any conflict between two great goods, I may argue, one must bh "betrayed." And between you and me, I choose me.

What is wrong with this defense? To beat someone out of a job by spreading vicious truths is proof

that I am no friend. It is in the nature of friendship that one cannot intentionally hurt a friend in order to further one's own interests. So if I claim to be this person's friend, then I am guilty of incoherence, and therefore lack integrity.

Why does incoherence seem the wrong charge to make? The answer, I think, is that it is much too weak.

Some of our principles or commitments are more important to us than others. Those that can be sacrificed without remorse may be called defensible commitments. For many of us, professional success is an important but defeasible commitment. I would like to be a successful philosopher, esteemed by my colleagues and widely published, but neither success nor failure will change my sense of personal worth.

17. What Forster said was: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

McFall Integrity 13

Contrasted to defeasible commitments are identity-conferring com- mitments: they reflect what we take to be most important and so determine,

to a large extent, our (moral) identities.18 It is this sense of personal identity that explains Stephen Dedalus's remark, "I was someone else

then," and Ivan Ilych's lament, "It was like a reminiscence of somebody else."'9

For many of us, friendship is an identity-conferring commitment.

If we betrayed a friend in order to advance our careers, we could not "live with" ourselves; we would not be the persons we thought we were.

This is what it means to have a "core": a set of principles or commitments

that makes us who we are. Such principles cannot bejustified by reference to other values, because they are the most fundamental commitments we have; they determine what, for us, is to count as a reason.20

Different persons may of course have different commitments, and

they need not be moral in nature. Nietzsche, for example, said that

without music, life would be a mistake. Truth telling was an identity- conferring commitment for Thomas More; he went to his death for it. Family loyalty was such a commitment for Antigone. That one is willing to die for something does not make it true, but it is the clearest proof we have of such commitments. There are things we could not do without self-betrayal and personal disintegration. Here both kinds of coher- ence-logical and psychological-meet.

But is this requirement sufficient to discredit the pleasure seeker,

the approval seeker, and the profit seeker? There is something each

would not do: sacrifice pleasure, approval, profit to anything else. Philosophers are fond of the fantastic case. Suppose it is your honor

to either shoot Pedro or let Pedro and nineteen others be shot.21 Or suppose some terrorists have poisoned the water supply in some large American city, you do not know which, and the only one who knows is

John, the terrorists' "main man," and the only way to make him talk is

to torture John Junior.22 What should you do? It has been suggested that in such circumstances suicide may be

chosen, rationally and deliberately, as an act of rejecting both alternatives and a world in which these are our only choices as intolerable.23 Whether or not such an act would be morally justified, this remark seems to me

significant: whatever choice one makes in such circumstances is suicide

18. I owe the distinction between defeasible and identity-conferring commitments to

John Kekes, "Constancy and Purity," Mind 92 (1983): 499-518. 19. Joyce, p. 240; Tolstoy, p. 460.

20. I owe this point to Kekes. 21. J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1973). The example is Williams's, pp. 98-99. 22. This is a test question, slightly modified, of Robert Fogelin's, used in his ethics

course at Dartmouth College.

23. S. I. Benn, "Persons and Values: Reasons in Conflict and Moral Disagreement," Ethics 95 (1984): 34.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

STOP HERE

THE END, STOP

14 Ethics October 1987

of a sort; either action would, in the case of the morally normal, destroy us. Murder and torture are things we could not do and survive as the persons we are.

It might be objected, however, that to grant this point is to put too much moral weight on the word "integrity," when it more properly belongs to the qualified notion of moral integrity. There are conceivable cases in which we would want to grant that someone had personal integrity, even if we were to find his ideal morally abhorrent; if moral justification is what we are after, moral integrity is the place to look.

Suppose, for example, that the greater part of world literature is found obscene according to the prevailing moral code, and the remedy is, in the spirit of Fahrenheit 451, to burn all copies of the offending works. The only way to stop the book burners is to kill them, thereby creating a new moral majority. Faulkner once said that "The Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies, and this point could be generalized and raised to the status of a principle which would support a program of extermination: burn the book burners. (The justification for burning the book burners, instead of merely killing them, is utilitarian: once it is general knowledge that this is happening, the majority vote may change quite naturally, so that fewer book burners will in the end have to be killed.) Now suppose some lover of literature attempts to carry out this program, at great personal risk. 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.

So if we want tojustify the claim that the content of certain principles or commitments disqualifies their adherents as candidates for integrity, we should turn to moral integrity.

MORAL INTEGRITY

If integrity is a moral virtue, then it is a special sort of virtue. One cannot be solely concerned with one's own integrity, or there would be no object for one's concern. Thus integrity seems to be a higher-order virtue.24 To have moral integrity, then, it is natural to suppose that one must have some lower-order moral commitments; that moral integrity adds a moral requirement to personal integrity.

One objection to this commonsense view is that there are two senses of "morality," one personal, the other social, and whatever a person takes to be most important is his personal morality.25

Where there is a conflict between personal and social morality, there are two ways of describing it: "Aestheticists think that one human activity, Art, is more important than any other.... We could describe them as

24. See Taylor.

25. Neil Cooper, "Morality and Importance," in The Definition of Morality, ed. G. Wallace and A. D. M. Walker (London: Methuen, Inc., 1970).

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

McFall Integrity 15

'subordinating' ... morality to Art. But we could also say that their own autonomous morality consisted of putting Art first. As Gaunt says of the Bohemians, 'They had one law, one morality, one devotion and that was Art' ,"26

If this were right, then a fundamental commitment to burning the book burners would be a moral stance; our book-loving exterminator, a paragon of moral integrity. So long as one acted on one's most important commitments, moral integrity would be guaranteed. Thus the consistent pleasure seeker, approval seeker, and profit seeker all would be clear possessors of moral integrity. One could have moral integrity without subscribing to any recognizable moral principle. Even an avowed subverter, not only of conventional morality but of all moral considerations as well, could have moral integrity. "Evil be thou my good" would be a moral stance. That the self-consciously immoral could be correctly described as paradigms of moral integrity seems paradoxical. An "autonomous morality" that exhibits autonomy in relation to all moral considerations does not seem to be a morality.

Further, the appeal to ordinary language does not appear to support this view. Gaunt's claim that the Bohemians had "one morality" seems to be metaphorical rather than literal. We say "Money is his God" without looking for another sense of "God" or assuming that a commitment to capitalism is a religious stance. Morality is one paradigm of an important concern; religion is another. So that when we want to say, in a metaphorical way, what a person takes to be most important, we can use either of these expressions. It does not follow that whatever a person takes to be most important-in this case, art-is a morality.

So it is more plausible to say that moral integrity adds a moral requirement to personal integrity: one must adhere to some set of rec- ognizable moral principles or commitments. This rules out a singular commitment to art, as well as to personal pleasure, approval, and profit.

What makes something a moral principle? One commonly accepted view is that moral principles are characterized

by impartiality and universality. Assuming this is true, it follows that moral integrity will require that these conditions be met.

Is this plausible?

Let us return to the principled adulterer and look at it from the husband's point of view. At first he feels betrayed and is hurt. Then he stops to consider what impartiality requires. Perhaps my wife's new lover makes her happier than I can, he reasons, and the affair will certainly make her lover happier, so there is all that happiness to be weighed against my pain. The children are grown, so it is not hurting them. Impartiality seems to require that I grant her this freedom, even encour- age it.

26. Ibid., p. 95.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

16 Ethics October 1987

Second example. Suppose you are having a bad day. The car breaks down on the way to teach a class in which three students fall asleep and the rest are bored or belligerent. Your latest philosophical masterpiece has come back in the mail with a note from the editor saying that the referees' comments were too abusive to decently pass on to you. During office hours your best student wonders aloud what moral theory has to do with anything that genuinely worries anyone. You have been worrying about that yourself. You wait an hour for a friend who was supposed to meet you at noon but who seems to have forgotten. On the way back from drinking your lunch, just as despair is about to take over for self- pity, you run into K. He sees by your wild eyes that you are in a bad way. He is just going to lunch, he says, and invites you along. You agree, having had nothing to eat since the English muffin your toaster burned for breakfast. While waiting to order, he listens sympathetically to your litany of unrelieved bad luck and real failure. He tries to cheer you up. Feeling better, you express your appreciation, tell him that he is a good friend. He says he is only doing his moral duty. You smile, thinking this philosophical irony. His blank expression suggests you are wrong. Over Caesar salad he tells you about his dear wife, whom he married because no one was more in need of love, nor so unlikely to find it. Somewhere between the main course and the coffee you realize he was not kidding. He is only doing for you what he would do for anyone in your sorry state-his duty.

The fairly simple point of these examples is that impartiality is in- compatible with friendship and love, and so incompatible with personal integrity where friendship and love are identity-conferring commitments.

What does moral integrity require? Any identity-conferring commitment except to impartiality will be

inconsistent with impartiality. If moral integrity presupposes personal

integrity, and personal integrity requires identity-conferring commitments, then moral integrity is, generally, inconsistent with impartiality.

So we must give up the claim (1) that personal integrity requires unconditional commitments, (2) that moral integrity presupposes personal integrity, or (3) that moral principles require impartiality. Which should it be?

The first claim seems to me a conceptual truth, so I won't argue for it, except to tell a story in closing that I hope will make it more vivid.

What about claim 2? On the view I have been defending, moral integrity presupposes personal integrity, but might moral integrity exist without it? I don't see how. If a minimum requirement of integrity is internal coherence, then moral integrity will require it as well. So one's moral and (nonmoral) personal principles could not be inconsistent. If one held personal but no moral principles, then one could have personal integrity without moral integrity. But the reverse does not hold because of the "first-person" requirement. Thus moral integrity presupposes per-

sonal integrity.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

McFall Integrity 17

This leaves claim 3 to be rejected, which I think is right. If we accept

that there are moral duties of friendship and love, then principles that govern such relations will be moral principles, and since friendship and love are characterized by partiality, some moral principles are characterized by partiality.

But this, one might object, begs the question of whether moral integrity requires impartiality. It may be true that there are moral principles that

are characterized by partiality, but it doesn't follow that simply holding such principles is sufficient for moral integrity. Something stronger- moral justification, for example-may be required. And this possibility has been illegitimately ruled out.

We can reject claim 3 and resolve the inconsistency, without begging the question, by making a distinction: between personal and social mo- rality.27

Say that a personal morality is that set of moral principles or commitments that I adhere to that I do not expect everyone to adhere to and that need not be characterized by impartiality.

The belief that friendship is more important than professional ad- vancement might back some such principle: "Never harm a friend in order to further one's own professional interests." I could understand it if others (cancer researchers, say) put professional advancement above the claims of friendship, on the ground that it is likely to promote the general good (although I would not want them for friends). So I do not take my principle to be universal. Since by its very nature friendship is a relationship characterized by partiality, neither is my principle impartial. So "Never harm a friend ..." is a moral principle that meets neither condition-universality or impartiality. Thus it is a personal moral prin- ciple.

A social morality is the set of principles that we adhere to that we expect everyone to adhere to and that are characterized by impartiality.

The difference between them is clearly seen in a case of conflict.

Suppose, in my role as ship captain, that I am charged to take the safety of everyone equally into account. This would be true for anyone in my

27. Another way would be to distinguish, within morality, between special and general obligations (see H. L. A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural Rights?" in Political Philosophy, ed.

Anthony Quinton [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967], pp. 53-66). Special obligations

are based on a special history of relations among persons, e.g., friends, or on a particular

role, e.g., ship captain. General obligations, grounded in impartiality, are owed by anyone

to anyone, e.g., anyone who can save a stranger's life at small cost should. A conflict similar

to the one I discuss arises where special and general obligations conflict (see James

S. Fishkin, The Limits of Obligation [New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press,

1982]). Although the conflict between love/friendship and impartiality could be recast in

this way, in the example I discuss-the ship captain whose spouse is drowning-the conflict

is between two special obligations, one requiring partiality, one impartiality. I think this

makes the conflict more powerful, since it cannot be resolved by denying that we have any

positive general obligations.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

18 Ethics October 1987

position, so the principle, "Guard the safety of all passengers equally" is both universal and impartial.

Now suppose I see that my husband and two other passengers are drowning. My husband weighs what the two others weigh put together. He is drowning on starboard, they are drowning at port. If I save my husband, the two will drown, and vice versa.

As a wife I should save my husband; as ship captain I should save the two strangers. The demands of personal morality conflict with those of social morality.

What does moral integrity require? I want to raise another question in attempting to answer this one.

What makes such conflicts possible? For most of us, both relations of personal affection and social moral

commitments have great if not identity-conferring importance. If they did not, we would recognize no dilemma.

A general argument either way-for the claims of social or personal

morality at the expense of the other-would do violence to our intuitions. If we were to grant supreme importance to social morality, we could honor no personal moral commitments. (Can a utilitarian have friends? Yes, but not of his own.) And conversely. A dilemma, by definition, presupposes a commitment to both sides.

Recent attempts to mitigate such conflicts have been unsuccessful. Lawrence Blum, for example, argues that "friendship does not typically

involve us in situations in which impartiality between the interests of our friends and those of others is a moral requirement," so in acting to benefit a friend we do not typically violate a duty of impartiality.28 What is involved in comforting a friend is particular to the friendship. "I cannot just pop over to someone's house who is in need of comfort and comfort him, in the way I can to my friend."29

This seems to me false. There are many institutional contexts- suicide prevention and rape crisis hotlines, "friendship" programs for the elderly-that employ volunteers twenty-four hours a day to meet such needs. It may be true that we cannot give to strangers what we can give to friends, because of our lack of intimate knowledge and personal affection, but there clearly are limited resources-time and sympathy- that render these concerns competitive and so lead to conflicts. Unless one's friends are numerous and especially needy, or one's obligation to help others is extremely minimal, one will, on a day-to-day basis, have to choose between benefiting a friend (child, lover) and what impartiality requires.

Another attempt to mitigate this conflict is made byJohn Cottingham.30 Cottingham denies the requirement of impartiality except in cases where

28. Lawrence Blum, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 46.

29. Ibid., p. 56. 30. John Cottingham, "Ethics and Impartiality," Philosophical Studies 43 (1983): 83-

99.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

McFall Integrity 19

there is a "specific duty" not to show favoritism or partiality. The mistake that defenders of the "impartiality thesis" make is in generalizing from these special cases to every ethical situation. If, for example, one is the official in charge of the corn dole, then although it may be harsh, one must make one's son wait in line. If, however, it is one's own food to dispose of, then one morally ought to favor one's own child.

What about the case where the agent is the commodity: the ship captain whose spouse is drowning? Here there are two specific moral duties-one requiring impartiality, one requiring partiality-and it is not obvious that the first should be met.31

Cottingham's justification for this position is unconvincing: "I have suggested that the substantial and continuous favorable treatment which we all in fact bestow on ourselves and our loved ones is not only permissible but essential, since without it the very object of ethics, human fulfillment, would be defeated."32 Whose human fulfillment? Strangers suffer and die very much like our own family and friends.

The existence, and persistence, of such cases of genuine moral conflict suggests that the claims of personal and social morality may be equally strong, so that no uniform resolution is possible.

I want to return now to my drowning husband. My own view is this. Whatever choice I make (further extraordinary complications excluded), I would not be morally blameworthy. (Praise we save for those who would do as we do or better.) If I save the two strangers, I am right from the social-moral point of view; if I save my husband, I am right from the personal-moral point of view. And whatever choice I make I am wrong from some point of view. Since both are moral requirements of comparable importance, I am free to choose, based on commitments particular to myself, what I could or could not "live with" (or without).

It may be said that I should not have put myself in the position where such a conflict is possible (ship captains should leave their spouses at home) and that I am therefore morally culpable for the conflict. But as a prescription for how to live, this is naive. By taking part in the wider community-through volunteer work, say, or even employment-we introduce the possibility of conflict, and the only way to avoid it would be to take up residence in our closets.

In trying to elucidate the relation between personal integrity and morality, I have used examples of love and friendship because they are commitments most of us have. But other examples could have been used to make the same point-which is this: if we grant that there are cases where the claims of personal and social morality conflict, and where the conflict may be justifiably resolved either way, without loss of moral integrity, then we do not claim (1) that every person should, under the same circumstances, do the same thing, nor (2) that there is a moral duty

31. See Bernard Williams, who argues eloquently for the second in "Persons, Character, and Morality," in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1- 19.

32. Cottingham, p. 94.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

20 Ethics October 1987

to be impartial. It follows that every morality is, fundamentally, a personal morality.

CONCLUSION

Moral integrity is as much a threat to social morality as personal integrity. The difference is that the attack comes from within the moral point of view, and its target is impartiality. Perhaps, then, integrity should be given up, as having a moral cost that is too great.

I think this would be a mistake. The reason is made graphically clear in a story by the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, called "The Dark Room."33 In this story the narrator, Conway, has a friend named Beck who regularly gives cocktail parties at which everyone who attends is eventually humiliated. A sweet old woman, the author of children's books, tells an obscene story. A man who prides himself on his dignity and decorum urinates on the living room floor. An undercover agent walks up to a CIA man and spills his guts. And at the most recent party, Conway's loyal wife ends up in bed with one of the other guests. This gets his attention; on reflection he sees the pattern of humiliation and resolves to find out what's going on. Breaking into Beck's house while he's out of town Conway comes upon an alien being who has the ability to take on any form, to be whatever people want to see. The alien confesses that he feeds on the humiliation of humans. Without it he will die. He finances the parties for Beck in order to get new victims, whose humiliation he causes. This explanation satisfies Conway except for one thing: why, having attended every party, has he never been humiliated? The alien explains that Conway is an "immune": a creature who cannot be humiliated because there is nothing he would not do.

Without integrity, and the identity-conferring commitments it assumes, there would be nothing to fear the loss of, not because we are safe but because we have nothing to lose.

33. Theodore Sturgeon, "The Dark Room," in The Golden Helix and Other Stories (Gar- den City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1979), pp. 191-227.

This content downloaded from 130.212.18.96 on Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:48:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms