Integrity and the Fragile Self

Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, Michael P. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138724877
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351754255
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2003. What does it take to be a person of integrity? Could those who commit morally horrendous acts be persons of integrity? Is personal integrity compatible with the kinds of ambivalence and self-doubt characteristic of fragile selves and ordinary lives? This text examines the centrality of integrity in relation to a variety of philosophical and psychological concerns that impinge upon the ethical life. Relating integrity to many standard issues in philosophical and moral psychology - such as self-deception, weakness of will, hypocrisy and relationships - the authors present a comprehensive and accessible study of integrity and its types. Drawing on contemporary work in moral and philosophical psychology, ethics, theories of the self and feminist thought, this book develops an account of integrity as a fundamental virtue - as something that is central to all our lives.

Chapter 1

Views of Integrity

Three accounts of integrity have been central to contemporary philosophical discussion: the ‘integrated-self’, the ‘identity’, and the ‘clean-hands’ views. In an important article on integrity, ‘Standing for Something’, Cheshire Calhoun describes them as follows:

... on the integrated-self view, integrity involves the integration of ‘parts’ of oneself – desires, evaluations, commitments – into a whole. On the identity view, integrity means fidelity to those projects and principles that are constitutive of one’s core identity. On the clean-hands view, integrity means maintaining the purity of one’s own agency, especially in dirty-hands situations. (Calhoun, 1995: 235)

Her general criticism of these three views is that:

... each ultimately reduces integrity to something else with which it is not equivalent – to the conditions of unified agency, to the conditions for continuing as the same self, and to the conditions for having a reason to refuse cooperating with some evils. ... Although persons with integrity will sometimes stand up for what they wholeheartedly endorse, or for what is central to their identity, or for deontological principles [views 1–3 respectively], integrity is not equivalent to doing these things. Continuing to be of two minds, conscientiousness about small matters and dirtying one’s hands can also be matters of integrity. (Calhoun, 1995: 235, 252)

Calhoun’s criticism of the ‘clean-hands’ view is particularly convincing. The issue of ‘clean hands’ may impinge on the question of a person’s moral integrity (cf. Griffin, 1989), but it is too narrow to encompass any broader theoretical account of integrity. Benjamin (1990: 46) convincingly argues that ‘an optimally integrated life will, as a rule, require a certain amount of moral compromise’. But moral compromise, in the relevant sense, does not mean abandoning one’s principles or values. It involves the sometimes difficult reconciling of those with ‘the requirements of social as well as individual existence’ (Benjamin, 1990: 46). This often occurs in the context of promoting or placing a higher value, in some particular situations, on some values and principles – such as respect for, and recognition of, other people’s views and values – than on others.¹ We discuss the role of maintaining ‘clean hands’, of refusing to cooperate with evil or refusing to compromise in matters of core values and principles, in the final section of this chapter.

Calhoun’s warning not to collapse an account of integrity into a single-note version of the ‘integrated-self’, ‘identity’ and ‘clean-hands’ views is well taken. Although it is possible to maintain each view independently of the others, independently they do not provide adequate accounts of integrity.² What we propose in this chapter is to examine each of these views in order to reveal the insights they express, the limitations they run up against and the flaws they reveal. An adequate and, inevitably, more complex account of integrity will need to deal with core aspects of each view, but also move beyond them in important ways.

The Integrated Self

One of the most popular philosophical understandings of integrity is that it signifies integration or the unity of the self. As Calhoun puts it, ‘integrity’ is related etymologically to ‘integer, a whole number, and to integration, the unification of parts into a whole. The integrated-self picture of integrity begins from this etymological observation, and the resulting description of the person of integrity as a whole integrated self owes a good deal to Harry Frankfurt’s [1971; 1987] work on freedom and responsibility’ (Calhoun, 1995: 236). Proponents of the integrated-self picture of integrity do not mean to insist that a person of integrity must be a perfectly whole, integrated self. Since no one is fully integrated, no one could have integrity on such an account. That one can neither be fully integrated nor completely lack integration follows from the fact that everyone is subject to features of psychological life such as self-deception and lack of self-knowledge. No one completely lacks integration because everyone’s psychological life has some consistency and continuity.

More importantly, as an account of integrity, the view that the person of integrity is a whole integrated self, that the successful integration of self is both necessary and sufficient for integrity, is oversimplified and mistaken. A person of integrity will undoubtedly have to be an integrated self to a degree, as will everyone. There can be no thoroughgoing ‘wantons’ in Frankfurt’s (1987) sense of one who completely lacks the capacity to deliberate and choose among desires. Frankfurt recognizes this, since he claims that such a being, a complete wanton, would lack a self. As Calhoun points out, even on Frankfurt’s account, non-wantonness falls far short of integrity. Wantonness, says Calhoun, can infect one’s second-order desires:

Thus, even individuals who reflect on the sort of person they want to be may fail to do so in an adequately self-constituting way ... how one comes to endorse a first-order desire matters. If a person adopts values only because her group does without having any reasons of her own ... then her second-order volitions will not really be her own ... . Both the crowd follower and the shallowly sincere exhibit second-order wantonness [cf. Watson, 1975] and a lack of integrity ... . (Calhoun, 1995: 236)

But even further, it would be wrong to suppose that the person of integrity necessarily has a higher degree of self-integration than someone lacking in integrity. One who lacks integrity overall can have a much higher degree of self-integration than one who has an exceptional degree of integrity in particular circumstances, or even overall. An account of integrity developed from Frankfurt’s view of the integrated self would miss the mark because it would identify integrity with integration merely between different levels of desire and volition. Integrity has little to do with the production of an integrated hierarchy of desire and volition, with lower-level desires coming under the volitional control of higher-level desires. Integrity has more to do with the ability to adjudicate wisely between one’s ever-changing values, desires and commitments and self-understanding. The person of integrity is the person that has this ability and uses it to a (sufficient) degree.

It might be thought that such a person is, in the end, identical to Frankfurt’s ‘whole integrated self’. However, this is not the case, for two related reasons. First, there is no guarantee that the person who does the hard examination and makes the difficult choices that the person of integrity has to make, will, in the end, wind up as Frankfurt’s wholly integrated person. Even if they act on their conclusions and convictions, the question of their degree of integration is distinct from that of their integrity.

Second, and more significantly, there is reason to believe that they cannot end up so integrated – that being such a ‘whole integrated self’ is antithetical to integrity since it suggests an end to, or elimination of, the kinds of conflict that integrity is rooted in and thrives upon. Without conflict of commitments, values and desires there can be no integrity or question concerning integrity. Indeed, without such conflict it would seem that much of a person’s psychological life (and life in general) would be moribund. Even if one could imagine a whole integrated self, there is ground for thinking that far from being a person of integrity, such an integrated self would be just the opposite. They would be a psychological mannequin, one who never entertained conflict, countenanced genuine ambivalence or contradiction, or was in the frequent grip of the kind of critical self-assessment that is the person of integrity’s daily bread.

In some circumstances it would be fortuitous, in part, if one was never challenged in such a way that brought integrity into play; if, for example, one never had to decide about a relationship. But while it might be partly a stroke of luck in some circumstances, like finding a mate with whom one is satisfactorily dynamically interrelated throughout life, it could not be regarded as a good thing overall or all things considered, if this always happened. It is a truism that growth and change, for the better as well as for the worse, require self-conflict.

Frankfurt (1987: 33) claims that individuals may fail to have integrity if they fail to identify ‘wholeheartedly’ with their volitions (that is, they have inconsistent second-order desires), or if they are ambivalent about identifying with particular desires. Calhoun explains his position in this way:

Both inconsistency and ambivalence result in there being ‘no unequivocal answer to the question of what the person really wants’ ... [Frankfurt, 1987: 33]. The individual cannot wholeheartedly say ‘I will’, since there is no unified self to back the willing. She lacks integrity. Wholeheartedness, and with it integrity, would require integrating competing desires into a single ordering as well as separating some desires from the self and relegating them to ‘outlaw’ status. ‘It is these acts of ordering and of rejection – integration and separation – that create a self out of the raw materials of inner life’ ... [Frankfurt, 1987: 39]. (Calhoun, 1995: 237)

Frankfurt’s deep antipathy to ambivalence is explained by his somewhat parochial understanding of it. The kind of ambivalence he is talking about is radical unresolvable ambivalence – a degree of ‘ambivalence’ that is at odds (or nearly at odds) with its ordinary meaning. Frankfurt describes the kind of ambivalence he has in mind in the following way. There are degrees of the sort of conflict I am considering. In discussing ambivalence, I am concerned with conflict sufficiently severe that a person: (a) cannot act decisively; or (b) finds that fulfilling either of his conflicting desires is substantially unsatisfying’ (Frankfurt, 1992: 16, n. 11). It is not clear what ‘cannot act decisively’ is in this case, but Frankfurt seems to regard it as true by definition that ambivalence undermines integrity. Of course, ‘ambivalence’, as Frankfurt appears to understand it, is going to undermine integrity, but that is because Frankfurt conflates chronic indecision and/or neurotic unhappiness with ordinary, genuine and healthy ambivalence.

Wholeheartedness may be a good thing to possess in some circumstances, given, of course, that one is ‘wholehearted’ about the right sorts of thing. By itself, however, being wholehearted is hardly sufficient for integrity, since it appears that one may be (more or less) wholehearted about doing something horrible, trivial or destructive. Calhoun rightly criticizes Frankfurt’s account of wholeheartedness in relation to integrity as failing to give proper consideration to ambivalence. As she puts it (1995: 238), ‘integrity may sometimes in fact require resisting the impulse to resolve inconsistencies and ambivalence’.

Calhoun (1995: 238–41) sketches two examples in which she claims integrity requires such resistance. One case describes Maria Lugones’s difficulties in living as a Latina lesbian, and is used to illustrate a situation in which integrity may require resisting resolving inconsistency (that is, the inconsistency between a person’s identity as a Latina and her identity as a lesbian). The case also illustrates how difficult it is to arrive at a clear conclusion about the demands of integrity. It may be that integrity requires resisting a neat resolution of the conflict, but it might also require resolution by standing one’s ground vis-à-vis the Latino community.³ To describe a more clear-cut case, it is unlikely that an Islamic woman would preserve her integrity by refusing to repudiate the tradition of so-called ‘honour killing’ of women by family members in Jordan. Similarly, it is unclear – whether in the 1950s or currently – that one preserves one’s integrity by always turning a deaf ear to racism when among racists. As Calhoun (1995: 240) observes, ‘Practical deliberation over whether a value conflict ought to be resolved’ is key to integrity, and this shows that integrity does not require wholeheartedness. But it is very far from clear when and how the question of such resistance is raised, and how it ought to be resolved.

Integrity can just as much attach to a person who is ambivalent and inconsistent as it can to the person who is wholehearted – and frequently more so. If in fact a person does have ambivalent or inconsistent feelings, then failing to recognize these, or recognizing them but not taking them into account in terms of their plans and actions, indicates a lack of integrity. People are frequently ambivalent, conflicted and act ‘wholeheartedly’ in a way that fails to recognize that this not only undermines one’s integrity, it is also, for obvious reasons, a recipe for trouble and strife – not just major trouble, but also the common or garden varieties that fill lives.

Integrating competing desires into a single ordering, as well as separating some desires from the self and relegating them to ‘outlaw’ status, may lead to integrity but it may also lead to a corruption of the self. Why suppose that having integrity requires such a single ordering? No doubt the desire for it can be explained in psychological or psychoanalytic terms. But, given the natural complexity of one’s desires, values and principles, any such alleged integration is suspect. The person who has things so remarkably ‘together’ as to appear ‘wholehearted’ in Frankfurt’s sense is in all likelihood anything but a person of integrity. They are probably not really wholehearted either.

Frankfurt is right to say that ‘it is these acts of ordering and of rejection – integration and separation – that create a self out of the raw materials of inner life’ (Frankfurt, 1987: 39). Indeed, these acts of ordering, rejecting and integrating form the material basis of the virtue of integrity. Integrity is a matter of the excellence with which the performance of the acts is undertaken. But excellence of performance is not to be confused with a set, determined outcome – wholeheartedness. And it is consistent with outcomes of ambivalence and conflict. Wholeheartedness is not integrity; it does not seem to be a virtue at all.

Calhoun claims that, like the other views of integrity she examines:

... this [integrated-self] picture of integrity has intuitive appeal. It captures our sense that people with integrity decide what they stand for and have their own settled reasons for taking the stands they do. They are not wantons or crowd followers or shallowly sincere. Nor are they so weak willed or self-deceived that they cannot act on what they stand for. The actions of persons of integrity express a clearly defined identity as an evaluating agent. (Calhoun, 1995: 237)

People of integrity do often ‘decide what they stand for ... [and] are not wantons or crowd followers’ and so on. But none of this suggests that Frankfurt’s account of integrity in terms of self-integration and wholeheartedness correctly captures any of these traits pertaining to integrity. If the above criticism of Frankfurt’s account is correct, then, upon reflection, it is a view that has neither intuitive appeal nor captures any of the things that Calhoun or Frankfurt claims it does.

There are, nonetheless, significant points of agreement as well as contention between the integrated-self view as presented above and our view of integrity. The emphasis of the integrated-self view is on ‘deciding what one stands for’ and avowing these decisions. The trouble with this, from our point of view, is that it doesn’t appear to recognize the dynamic character of integrity. People of integrity do decide what they stand for, but this is not a one-time, sometime or even a periodic sort of decision procedure. It is ongoing and more or less constant. Given the subjective and objective changes that occur over time, along with the psychological impediments to integrity, the evaluative procedure that sifts, sorts and chooses must remain active. A more detailed examination of Frankfurt’s views on integrity and whole-heartedness will allow us both to get a clearer picture of the integrated-self view and to assess the criticisms we have levelled against it.

The integrated-self picture of integrity requires a person to resolve conflicts among their desires by endorsing some of them. Stan van Hooft expresses the point in this way:

... the question is, where does ‘the person himself stand with respect to the conflict between desires?’ [Frankfurt, 1988: 166]. ... Frankfurt has made several attempts to solve this problem ... . We simply have to decide which of them [our desires] we will identify with. The decision determines what the person really wants by making the desire on which he decides fully his own.’ Frankfurt goes on to argue that this decision resonates through our whole being and so constitutes who we are in terms of what we consider worth doing. Any subsequent conflicts will not be conflicts between desires, but conflicts between desires and ‘the person who has identified himself with its rival’ [Frankfurt, 1988: 172]. By being decisive, a person makes ‘himself into an integrated whole’ [Frankfurt, 1988: 174] and so establishes his integrity. (Van Hooft, 1995: 253)

Contrary to Frankfurt, it seems that one cannot always decide which desire to identify with. In particular, to decide which desire to identify with is not the same as identifying with that desire. Anybody who has made a choice resulting in disastrous consequences will, or should, know this. How wonderful (at times) and yet utterly different life itself would be if a decision could determine ‘what the person really wants by making the desire on which he decides fully his own’. Life is just not like that, although sometimes our actions provide a reinforcement of a commitment. Ambivalence, according to Frankfurt, is having opposed wills. But he appears to mistakenly think that genuine ambivalence and ignorance of one’s real desires can be extinguished through an act of will.

Frankfurt explains ‘wholeheartedness’ in terms of ‘having a unified will’. But having a unified will is not something itself that one can simply, or even with great difficulty, will. Van Hooft says: ‘[g]iven Frankfurt’s understanding of will as a second-order desire to have a first-order desire to be effective, it would seem that the problem of having opposing wills [that is, ambivalence] is a problem of having conflicting second-order volitions and this would seem to call for a third-order desire or volition to resolve ambivalence ... a regress seems to be in the offing’ (van Hooft, 1995: 254). This regress is a problem for Frankfurt. But the more fundamental problem, and it appears to be one that underlies the regress, is that one cannot make oneself wholehearted – make oneself have a unified will – by willing it. At times, Frankfurt seems to use the term ‘wholeheartedness’ synonymously with integrity. But, given his account of wholeheartedness, this is a mistake. Having a unified will is neither necessary nor sufficient for integrity. While it makes sense to suppose integrity is worth striving for, it is unclear that a unified will, as opposed, say, to knowledge of one’s will, is something that is worth striving for, or even something that one can strive for.

More recently, Frankfurt (1992) appears to have changed his view. He claims that one ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Views of Integrity
• 2 Integrity as a Virtue
• 3 Integrity and Utilitarian Moral Theory
• 4 Types of Integrity
• 5 Striving for Integrity
• Bibliography
• Index