Integrity and self-protection

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 216-232

  McLeod, Carolyn ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 78649649676     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2004.00227.x     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Wiwa was hung in 1995 by the Nigerian government for his political action in favor of his people, the Ogoni, who were being exploited by the government and by Shell Oil. See his son Ken Wiwa's In the Shadow of a Saint (Toronto: Random House, 2000).
2. The "minimal, medial, maximal" language comes from Diana Meyers, who discusses minimal, medial, and maximal autonomy in Self, Society, and Personal Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
3. The debate centers on such issues as whether integrity demands consistency and a lack of ambivalence, whether substantive limits exist on the sorts of values that people with integrity can endorse, and whether integrity is a social virtue as well as a personal one. See, for example, Margaret Urban Walker's "Picking Up Pieces: Lives, Stories, and Integrity", in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana Meyers (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997);
4. Cheshire Calhoun's "Standing for Something", Journal of Philosophy 92(1995):235-60;
5. and Lynne McFall's "Integrity", Ethics 98(1987):5-20.
6. See Hill, "Servility and Self-Respect", Monist 57(1973):87-104.
7. See Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, "Integrity: Political, not Psychological", in Integrity in the Public and Private Domains, ed. Alan Montefiore and David Vines (New York: Routledge, 1999), 109.
8. Calhoun, "Standing for Something", 251.
9. McFall, "Integrity", 9.
10. Gabrielle Taylor, "Integrity", in her Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
11. Bernard Williams is probably the originator of such a view. He calls our core commitments "ground projects." See his "Integrity" and "Persons, Character, and Morality", in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (New York: Cambridge, 1981).
12. Calhoun discusses the idea of an "all things considered assessment" of a person's char-acter, which she attributes to Jeffrey Blustein (Care and Commitment: Taking the Personal Point of View [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]).
13. See Walker, "Picking Up Pieces"
14. The phrase comes from Walker, "Picking Up Pieces", 73.
15. Owen Flanagan makes a similar point about the amount of reflection required for having an identity as a person in "Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation", in Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
16. I gained this insight from reading Peter Winch's "Moral Integrity", which was his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Philosophy, delivered at King's College, London, May 9, 1968 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968).
17. On the relational self, see Susan Brison, "Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity", in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana Meyers (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997).
18. Also, see Flanagan, "Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation"
19. See Gabrielle Taylor's "Shame, Integrity, and Self-Respect", in Dignity, Character, and Self-Respect, ed. Robin Dillon (New York: Routledge, 1995), 167.
20. Beyond saying that it concerns what is one's own (one's own acts, beliefs and the like), it is difficult to define authenticity. I will not attempt to do so but will mention that I am persuaded by Diana Meyers' theory of authenticity in "Intersectional Identity and the Authentic Self", in Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self, ed. Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Meyers associates authenticity with integration and disassociates integration from wholeheartedness (consistency and a lack of ambivalence), which is the dominant view of integration in the literature on integrity. For Meyers, authenticity and integration are characterized not by wholeheartedness, but by the exercise of autonomy skills, which brings about such feelings as confidence and security, repose and gratification.
21. On honoring versus promoting values, see Philip Pettit, "The Consequentialist Perspective", in Marcia W. Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997).
22. The term "God's eye point of view" comes from Donna Haraway. See "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective", in her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
23. Calhoun advocates such a view of moral justification more explicitly in "Moral Failure", in Feminist Ethics and Politics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
24. See Adrian Piper's "Higher-Order Discrimination", in Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990);
25. and Anthony Appiah's "Racisms", in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
26. This idea overlaps with a theory by Susan Babbitt that some dignity or self-appreciation is necessary for integrity, although Babbitt does not interpret integrity as a social virtue. See "Personal Integrity, Politics, and Moral Imagination", in Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity, and Moral Imagination (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).
27. See Larry May's "Professional Integrity", in his The Socially Responsive Self: Social Theory and Professional Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 121.
28. Rorty, "Integrity", 109.