Volume 28, Issue 1, Spring 2014
Carol Hay
Pages 71-88
Integrity
The Peculiar, the Arbitrary, and the Different
This paper attempts to address certain shortcomings in the various accounts of the virtue of integrity that appear in the philosophical literature. Specifically, most analyses of integrity fail to give an adequate account of cases where we might want to attribute integrity to certain aspects of a person’s life but refrain from attributing integrity to his or her life as a whole. They also fail to give an adequate account of what we are to say about the integrity of people with peculiar or arbitrary commitments. Attending to these shortcomings will shed new light on an issue that has received considerably more philosophical attention: the question of how we are to judge the reasonableness of others’ conceptions of the good, particularly when these conceptions are radically different from our own.