The Journal of Value Inquiry (2006) 40:479–484 DOI 10.1007/s10790-007-9026-3


Springer 2007

BOOK REVIEW

Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael P. Levine, Integrity and the Fragile Self. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003. 188 pp. (indexed). ISBN 0-7546-0656-2, US $79.95 (Hb). Integrity and the Fragile Self is a valuable addition to the philosophical literature on integrity. Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael P. Levine provide a comprehensive overview and a thoughtful critical discussion of contemporary conceptions of integrity. They argue persuasively that contemporary conceptions of integrity suffer from oversimplification and inadequate attention to the normative aspect of integrity. On the view of Cox, La Caze, and Levine, an adequate account of the normative aspect of integrity must both acknowledge and defend substantive moral constraints on its attribution. Their goal is to provide an account that not only recognizes the complexity of integrity and its central role in our lives, but also defends its normativity. They are largely successful. Cox, La Caze, and Levine conceive of integrity as an Aristotelian virtue that is ‘‘intrinsically connected to a theory of the good life and human nature’’ (p. xix). They define a virtue as ‘‘an excellence of character – a set of qualities (including capacities, dispositions, and willings) that contribute to the overall goodness of character’’ (p. 69). Since virtues are ‘‘qualities of good character, not merely good qualities of character,’’ it is conceptually impossible for evil persons to have integrity (p. 70). Although wicked people may exhibit the good qualities typically associated with integrity, since the qualities at issue do not contribute to their having good characters, wicked people do not possess integrity. Instead, they only possess that degree of integrity presupposed by the fact that they are agents. Despite their insistence that attributions of integrity presuppose morally defensible commitments, Cox, La Caze, and Levine refuse to identify integrity with morality since equating integrity with morality is inconsistent with the central role of integrity in everyday life. Cox, La Caze, and LevineÕs emphasis on the centrality of integrity is one of the most distinctive features of their account. As they understand integrity, it is a

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virtue that ‘‘involves handling self-conflict well,’’ where self-conflict is construed broadly to cover all types of conflict among ‘‘values, desires, commitments and principles’’ (p. 4). Thus, persons may demonstrate or fail to demonstrate integrity when deciding whether to change careers, whether to divorce, or whether to succumb to pressure to abandon cherished moral principles. Clearly, self-knowledge is required to manage these and other self-conflicts well, for conflicts must be ‘‘avowed and understood’’ to some degree if they are to be managed well (p. 4). Since there are practical limits to self-knowledge, there is ‘‘a limit on achievable levels of integrity’’ (p. 4). Although managing self-conflict well requires self-knowledge, increased self-knowledge is undesirable when it interferes with ‘‘wisely caring for the self, dealing with its tensions and conflicts’’ (p. 5). Managing self-conflict well also requires that we favor our existing commitments and values, for such commitments and values reflect our ‘‘current state’’ (p. 4). Furthermore, although persons of integrity do seek to resolve existing conflicts, they do not attempt to force resolutions. In the absence of a non-arbitrary resolution, maintaining integrity requires living with conflict. By focusing on the role of integrity in managing self-conflict, Cox, La Caze, and Levine avoid identifying persistent self-conflict with a lack of integrity. Conceiving of integrity as a virtue facilitates an appreciation of the complexity of integrity in an Aristotelian way since the concept of an Aristotelian mean includes the idea that there are multiple ways, some of excess and some of deficiency, in which a person can fall short of virtue. According to Cox, La Caze, and Levine, integrity is a mean between vices ‘‘associated with superficiality and artificiality’’ and vices ‘‘associated with inflexibility’’ (p. 71). The contemporary literature on integrity tends to be focused on vices that fall into the first category while ignoring or only briefly considering the vices associated with inflexibility. Contemporary authors treat self-deception, hypocrisy, and weakness of will as the paradigmatic threats to integrity, giving little attention to stubbornness, sanctimoniousness, fanaticism and similar qualities. Conceiving of integrity as a virtue that consists in a mean reminds us that the threats to integrity are many and various, and that achieving integrity is therefore difficult. While Cox, La Caze, and Levine are mindful of the complexity of integrity, other authors are not so careful. For instance, the identification conceptions of integrity developed by Gabriele Taylor, Lynne McFall, and Jeffrey Blustein are problematic. According to identification views of integrity, integrity consists in living by authentically endorsed commitments, especially commitments that are constitutive of the self. Taylor, McFall, and Blustein assume that inconsistency or incoherence undermines integrity. Similarly, each of them seems committed to the view that

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ambivalence undermines integrity. It is worth noting that Taylor qualifies her objection to inconsistency. In Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment, she claims that inconsistency per se is not a threat to integrity. Instead, inconsistency characterized by ‘‘mutually undermining identifications’’ produces a loss of integrity (p. 129). However, even Taylor puts too much emphasis on consistency. Insofar as Taylor, McFall, and Blustein are committed to the claim that integrity requires the resolution of ambivalence and incoherence, they oversimplify integrity. Forcing a resolution of conflict is incompatible with managing self-conflict well. If integrity is a virtue that enables us to manage selfconflict well, forcibly resolving existing inconsistencies or ambivalence threatens integrity. To demonstrate the superiority of the virtue conception of integrity of Cox, La Caze, and Levine to previous conceptions of integrity, let us consider in some detail Lynne McFallÕs view as set forth in her article, ‘‘Integrity.’’ According to McFall, persons demonstrate integrity by living in accordance with a coherent set of commitments, even when doing so requires sacrifice. McFallÕs conception of coherence is quite strong. One aspect of coherence is authenticity. McFall holds that authenticity requires that a personÕs relation to principles not be ‘‘merely conventional’’ (p. 6). A personÕs relation to principles is merely conventional if the person unreflectively adopts them from other persons. McFall claims that integrity requires coherence among commitments, ‘‘between principle and action’’ and ‘‘between principles and motivation’’ (pp. 7 – 8). According to McFall, people lack integrity in so far as they have conflicting unconditional commitments or ‘‘conditional commitments that cannot be ranked, for example, truth and kindness’’ (p. 7). Were a person to act contrary to one of the authentic, unconditional, identity-conferring commitments, the person would no longer be able to maintain the same view of self. By contrast, conditional commitments have explicit or implicit exception clauses. They are not commitments on which people stake their identity. Still, making arbitrary exceptions to conditional commitments also undermines integrity, presumably to a lesser degree. In sum, on McFallÕs view, people act with integrity only if their actions are consistent with their authentic principles, fully specified. ‘‘If one values not just honesty, but honesty for its own sake, then honesty motivated by selfinterest is not enough for integrity’’ (p. 8). Cox, La Caze, and Levine hold that McFall wrongly equates integrity with personal identity over time, where personal identity is construed in terms of a personÕs unconditional commitments. They argue that McFall places too much importance on commitment. People who have integrity do abide by their commitments. However, since the self is more dynamic than

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static, integrity sometimes requires abandoning commitments to reflect authentic changes in the self. Furthermore, if ‘‘attributions of integrity presuppose fundamental moral decency,’’ authentic commitment is not sufficient for integrity since persons whose authentic principles are morally heinous lack integrity (p. 41). Integrity is thus not to be equated with authentic commitment or with ‘‘steadfast maintenance of commitments’’ (p. 50). As integrity should not be equated with commitment, so it should not be reduced to coherence since this confuses integrity with neatness. Neatness is neither sufficient for, nor necessarily compatible with, integrity. Cox, La Caze, and Levine doubt that any commitments are unconditional. McFallÕs requirement that it be possible to rank conditional commitments is ‘‘insensitive to context’’ and ‘‘oversimplifies the process of practical deliberation’’ (p. 11). Moreover, people may achieve coherence by drastically limiting their commitments. Here, the authors point to Captain AhabÕs obsession with Moby Dick. Since Ahab ‘‘cuts himself off from those around him and from everything that may lead him to genuinely question the point of what he is doing,’’ he ‘‘exemplifies an almost complete lack of integrity’’ (p. 72). Coherence that is achieved by insulating ourselves from evidence that is relevant to assessing the worth of our commitments and values is antithetical to integrity. It seems clear that Cox, La Caze, and Levine not only make integrity central to everyday life, but also avoid the oversimplification that characterizes much of the contemporary discussion of integrity. Furthermore, thinking of integrity as a virtue makes integrity conceptually incompatible with morally indefensible principles. Some philosophers might wonder whether an account that directly incorporates moral constraints on integrity is desirable. They might share McFallÕs concern that when we specify moral constraints, we inevitably simply reflect our own moral perspectives. Formal constraints might seem to be preferable, both because they are morally neutral and because they preclude most evil persons from having integrity. The reply to this objection is that although there is reasonable disagreement about whether particular principles are morally defensible and thus about whether particular persons have integrity, the existence of reasonable moral disagreement is in itself no reason to deny that judgments of integrity are and should be sensitive to moral concerns. Nor is the existence of moral disagreement a justification for developing a purely formal account of integrity. A purely formal account of integrity has the advantage of moral neutrality, but it has the disadvantage of leaving room for evil persons to possess integrity. Let us consider the formal constraints that are often built into accounts of integrity. Many accounts

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of integrity, including those developed by Taylor, Blustein, and McFall, take significant self-deception, hypocrisy, and weakness of will to be contrary to integrity. They also consider authenticity and coherence to be essential to integrity. Cheshire Calhoun, whose conception of integrity is in many respects different from the identification views of integrity, emphasizes the social aspect of integrity. She insists that persons of integrity conceive of themselves as co-deliberators with others who, like themselves, seek to discover what is really worthwhile. Persons of integrity, on this view, are willing both to defend their views and to take seriously the possibility that their views might be wrong. Although it is unlikely that evil persons will satisfy all of the formal constraints, it is still conceptually possible on such accounts for some evil persons to have integrity. Even CalhounÕs robust conception of integrity is compatible with evil persons possessing integrity, for the benefits of codeliberation depend importantly upon the values that are defended by the co-deliberators. Where co-deliberators share the same fundamental values, there is a real danger that they will be blind to deficiencies in their moral perspective. In this way, persons of integrity might embrace principles that are morally indefensible. For Cox, La Caze, and Levine, the fact that purely formal accounts of integrity leave room for evil persons to possess integrity is unacceptable. They insist that we take seriously the reluctance of ordinary language users to attribute integrity to persons who ‘‘are getting things horribly wrong’’ (p. 59). If our attributions of integrity are constrained by moral considerations, then until we have compelling evidence that ordinary linguistic practices are confused, a philosophical account of integrity ought to reflect ordinary linguistic practice. Although Cox, La Caze, and Levine do not explicitly make this argument, it is clear that they believe that philosophical accounts of integrity ought to be sensitive to ordinary usage of the concept. That Cox, La Caze, and Levine accept this assumption is evident in their endorsement of McFallÕs ordinary language argument for constraints on the content of principles a person of integrity may endorse. McFall observes that we commonly restrict our attributions of integrity to persons whose principles seem to us to be ‘‘ones that a reasonable person might take to be important and ones that a reasonable person might be tempted to sacrifice to some lesser, yet still recognizable goods’’ (p. 11). What we consider important will be determined in part by our moral conceptions of goodness. According to Cox, La Caze, and Levine, this argument is promising, since it ‘‘suggests (both) that there are normative constraints on what a person may do and still be judged to have integrity … (and) that there are constraints on the principles and commitments a person of integrity can have and act on’’ (p. 65). Furthermore,

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‘‘if there are moral constraints on our conception of the good, there must be some normative constraints on integrity – on what the person of integrity may and may not do’’ (p. 65). There is one possible cause for concern in Integrity and the Fragile Self. The way in which Cox, La Caze, and Levine build moral constraints into their account is troubling since the assumption that virtues are conceptually incompatible with evil is not uncontroversial. Even readers who are willing to grant this assumption may still suspect that Cox, La Caze, and Levine have simply assumed rather than defended the claim that integrity is a virtue. Fortunately, Cox, La Caze, and Levine do provide reasons for adopting a virtue account of integrity. One reason for thinking that integrity is a virtue is that a virtue conception of integrity, coupled with the assumption that virtues are conceptually incompatible with evil, provides a natural way to incorporate the normativity of integrity. If we think that any successful account of integrity must incorporate its normativity, then this is a reason to accept a virtue conception of integrity. An equally important reason for favoring a virtue account of integrity is that it promises to account for the complexity of integrity. If we also think that integrity is central to everyday concerns, that is yet more reason to consider adopting a virtue conception of integrity. None of this is conclusive. Advocates of non-virtue conceptions of integrity might well be able to defend and incorporate the normativity of integrity and account for its complexity and centrality. The real question is whether philosophers who advance a non-virtue conception of integrity can provide an equally natural account of such aspects of integrity. Cox, La Caze, and Levine provide a well-developed conception of integrity. They succeed both in avoiding oversimplification and in highlighting the central role of integrity in our lives. Furthermore, their account of integrity takes seriously our reluctance to attribute integrity to persons we take to be evil. They also provide a plausible defense of substantive moral constraints. Their discussion of integrity is useful even for those who ultimately disagree with certain aspects of their account. Their book is useful for philosophers who desire to become acquainted with the contemporary literature on integrity and philosophers who are familiar with contemporary discussions of autonomy.

Rhonda D. Smith Department of Philosophy United States Air Force Academy Colorado Springs, CO 80840-6256 USA