The value of integrity—fidelity to one’s principles—was once taken very seriously by those concerned with developing the contours of an ethical community. But things have changed. Although contemporary moral philosophers continue to value integrity, they do not, with very few exceptions, value it because of the particular kind of practice that it is. Instead, they value it because the principles that are being pursued with fidelity are themselves considered to be valuable. In other words, they treat it as having a secondary (or derivative) kind of value.

Contemporary political theorists are more open to integrity as a primary value, but they, too, place limits on it as a subject matter. Here the concern is that integrity may be out of place in normative discussions of politics at the institutional level. In some cases, the concern is that states qua collective entities are not capable of moral agency. In other cases, it is that integrity may not be achievable in politics because politics is by nature a matter of compromise. In still other cases, it is that valuing integrity may hold us back from preventing harm in the world.

Shmuel Nili takes on all of these concerns in Integrity: Personal and Political, in an effort to make a place for integrity in both personal and political life. The work is exceptionally good. Indeed, it may well become—I think it should—a classic. In any case, it clearly deserves a wide audience by virtue of its important insights into the nature of integrity, the ease with which it traverses a wide range of disciplines (ethics, political theory, American politics, media studies), its analytic rigor, and its dexterity in bringing theory and practice together.

Nili begins by defending the value of integrity against claims that it always dissolves into whatever principles are being pursued and that it is either redundant or a trivial coda to these principles. He does not dispute the claim that integrity, like rights, requires for its justification a more universal principle, such as human dignity, well-being, or utility. Instead, he argues that integrity, like rights, can both depend for its justification on such a universal principle and have its own value by virtue of the particular kind of practice it is.

What kind of practice is integrity, and what is its value? Nili does not dwell on the psychological value of remaining true to one’s principles or on integrity’s place in promoting self-respect. Instead, he zeroes in on the way in which integrity acts as a barrier against our tendency to rationalize away moral principles when self-interest rears its head or when we are overwhelmed with utilitarian considerations. In Nili’s hands, integrity becomes both a basis for self-respect and a kind of self-constraint.

Key to Nili’s understanding of integrity as a kind of self-constraint are the notions of self-distrust, unconditionality, and preemption. According to Nili, there is an “all-too-human propensity” to rationalize away our moral principles when they become burdensome; hence, the need to develop a “healthy distrust of ourselves” and to acknowledge that “we have strong reasons to pre-empt our rationalizations by adhering to an unconditional fidelity to our principles” (p. 33). In the end, it is the unconditionality of integrity that constrains us.

But is integrity really all that unconditional? Although we can describe integrity as involving unconditional adherence to principle, in practice we have to balance it with other values and in some cases place conditions on integrity as a part of compromise. Nili acknowledges that individuals with integrity sometimes have to dirty their hands, such as saluting Hitler in public so as to be able to fight him elsewhere. But he does not speak to what the necessity of dirty hands in these cases says about the unconditionality of integrity.

What about his treatment of integrity at the state level? Nili assumes at the outset that collective entities such as states are moral agents and, as such, are capable of having integrity; he writes, “I will assume that group agents supervene upon, but are not reducible into, the mere sum of individual agents” (p. 49). To his credit, he acknowledges that he is treating such an assumption as his starting point rather than arguing for it. Yet it is worth pointing out that both the assumption itself and the language of supervention are now hotly contested in philosophical circles.

In his discussion of integrity at the state level, Nili focuses on liberal democratic states. According to him, it is the law of a liberal democracy that makes it a single moral agent, and the projects of this law take center stage in talking about integrity: “if the law of a liberal democracy makes it a single agent in some morally salient sense, then the projects that underlie this law can be described as the core of this agent’s identity” (p. 52). The projects that Nili cites here— universal human dignity, freedom, equality—are, to his advantage, all moral principles.

Integrity in a liberal democracy is for Nili a matter of fidelity to these projects. What does such integrity look like in practice? Nili does not come up with a set of general criteria. Instead, he relies (very effectively) on a cluster of case studies—ranging from the prosecution of white- collar crime in the United States to US involvement in foreign wars to choices about whom to honor in the community—to show how integrity might be manifested in a variety of institutional settings.

Nili’s concern here is primarily with the requirements of integrity in these settings. Yet he concludes with a fascinating portrait of the absence of integrity in the political lives of three world leaders: Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, and Benjamin Netanyahu. He focuses on these three figures because, as media demagogues, they all use the media to undermine the very possibility of integrity. Although Nili takes the particulars of each case seriously, he manages in the end to show on a more general level how the merger of governance with media both guarantees the absence of integrity in government and threatens liberal democracy.

Two important claims that Nili makes throughout the book require further justification. One is that integrity does not extend to “bad” moral principles because it “excludes commitments that are clearly morally untenable” (p. 145). The other is that we do not need to worry about individuals sacrificing something of great value in the process of pursuing integrity because such a sacrifice would signal a “fanatical ordering of moral values,” rather than integrity (p. 145). Both claims make defending integrity easier. However, they bump up against the fact that “moral tenability” is often subjective and the distinction between integrity and fanaticism blurry.

Although Nili might have gone further in exploring what competing interpretations of moral tenability and the fidelity–fanaticism distinction mean for integrity, he has in this work provided a string of very compelling arguments and a framework that is bound to be very useful to anyone concerned with the nature and value of integrity in personal and public life. Indeed, I do not think that it is going too far to say that he has created a new subject matter for us.