Conclusion

December 2006 saw the passing of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile through a military dictatorship that lasted almost seventeen years. Pinochet’s regime, which had its roots in a 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, murdered thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Upon Pinochet’s passing, the Chilean government allowed the military to hold official ceremonies mourning him, but refused to honor the military dictator with a head-of-state funeral....

Organizing Integrity

This opening chapter spells out the key concepts deployed throughout the book. It also contends, against integrity skeptics of various types, that personal integrity, understood as fidelity to one’s fundamental commitments, can actually have independent moral significance. The focus is on two arguments, both revolving around unconditional commitments. The first, the unfairness argument, holds that since morality itself pushes agents to incorporate certain unconditional commitments into their self-conception, it is unfair to criticize agents who go on to treat these commitments as an independent factor in their moral deliberation. The second argument links agents’ unconditional moral commitments to their self-respect. Both arguments allow us to see why one’s integrity is not simply parasitic upon one “doing the right thing.” Rather, integrity can inform the analysis of what one morally ought to do.

Integrity, Self-Absorption, and Clean Hands

Political realities often mean that familiar moral constraints—against lying, manipulating, coercing, and the like—cannot be upheld without serious consequences for a very large number of vulnerable people. It is commonly argued that, under these ubiquitous political circumstances, putting much weight on non-consequentialist integrity reasons amounts to a self-absorbed preoccupation with “clean hands.” This chapter presents an elaborate response to this self-absorption charge, pivoting on two key claims. First, the familiar equation of “integrity” with “clean hands” is misleading: there are important cases where integrity might be compatible with “dirty hands,” and may even actively push agents to dirty their hands. Second, setting up our policy dilemma as a binary choice between “dirtying our hands” and imposing grave costs on many vulnerable people is often problematic. More often than not, such a binary presentation of the policy situation is misleading and self-serving.

Integrity

This chapter begins by introducing a conception of a liberal polity as a collective agent with its own moral integrity, and presenting some initial attractions of conceiving of a liberal polity in this way. These attractions are further developed through various international cases, where the idea of liberal integrity captures important but elusive moral intuitions. Several parallels are presented between a liberal polity’s unconditional commitments and the unconditional commitments of an individual person. These parallels help dispute skepticism about integrity’s independent moral significance, and support the argument that such skepticism is easier to combat at the political as compared to the personal level. After developing two additional arguments reinforcing this conclusion, the chapter closes by considering the objection that the discussion of a liberal polity’s integrity might be a distraction from a proper focus on personal integrity.

Honoring Integrity?

This chapter examines how the integrity framework bears on political honors, understood as any form of special symbolic recognition accorded by political entities to individuals, to particular social groups, or to particular social causes. Rather than focusing on honorees’ personal integrity, the chapter argues that honors decisions ought to focus on marking and reinforcing appropriate moral commitments of the collective in whose name the honor is being (or has been) awarded. Suggesting that political honors can often fulfill their collectivist functions even when they involve no individual politicians, the chapter also shows how the collectivist approach can account for cases where there is a particularly firm intuition that political leaders should be at the center of political honors. Rejecting an individual desert alternative to the collectivist approach, the chapter ends by showing how the collectivist approach can guide decisions regarding the withdrawal of political honors, without falling back either on individual integrity or on individual desert.

“All the Demagogue’s Men”

This chapter revolves around “media demagogues”: politicians who rely on their mastery of the media, and on recurrent lies, as they exploit the electorate’s worst fears and prejudices to gain and retain power. The rise of media demagogues produces integrity complexity for the political actors who surround them, including both political operatives who are considering whether to serve the demagogue, and fellow politicians, who are considering whether to ally with him. From the perspective of both of these kinds of political actors, it may appear as if integrity’s dictates are indeterminate. Should one wash one’s hands clean of the demagogue in the name of personal integrity, or collaborate with him to limit the threats he poses to the polity’s collective integrity? Taking up the cases of Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the chapter shows how the integrity framework can offer a systematic solution to this problem.

Introduction

“Václav Havel has become the symbol of our modern Czech state.” —President Václav Klaus, 20111 1 “Statement by the President of the Czech Republic Reflecting on the Death of Former Czech President Václav Havel,” December 18, 2011, at http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/3002. Two questions, corresponding to two morally fraught situations, provide a useful entry point into the themes of this book. The first situation was described by “the symbol of the modern Czech state,” Václav Havel, in his celebrated 1978 essay ...