Integrity is important, Margaret Walker argues, because it helps to create communities in which we can trust one another to respond appropriately to serious harms (Reference WalkerWalker 2003). Walker's account has broad similarities to other feminist approaches to integrity that see integrity as having not only individual but also social value. In addition to whatever value integrity might bring to an individual herself—internal consistency, self‐awareness, and so on—the practice of integrity is also valuable to the community in which she lives. For Victoria Davion, for example, “integrity” can help an individual to remain the same person over time while undergoing radical changes in worldviews, including gaining feminist consciousness (Reference Davion and CardDavion 1991). For Cheshire Calhoun, “integrity” is a social virtue that provides individuals guidance as they collaborate with others to arrive at inclusive consensus regarding justice and good (Reference CalhounCalhoun 1995). I agree with Walker and with this broader, largely feminist, approach to integrity. I am concerned, however, that the literature has yet to sufficiently address the effect on integrity of living in a structurally unjust society. If a person's integrity cannot be understood by considering only her innermost characteristics (her internal desires and/or the formal relations holding between them)—if understanding a person's integrity requires also an examination of her social relations—the normative features of the background structures that shape these social relations will matter. If social structures are unjust, the social relations that support them cannot help but perpetuate serious and systematic harms (see Reference YoungYoung 2011). How can an individual be said to have integrity when her actions are inevitably directed toward structural ends she does not support?
This article will address this question in four parts. First, in section I, I will provide a working definition of integrity that expresses its key value as facilitating a reliable response to harm. I will argue in section II that structural injustice challenges integrity's ability to facilitate such a response. I will argue in section III that a new meaning of “integrity” emerges in this context; in the context of structural injustice, a person who wishes to show her resistance to structurally produced harm ought not to practice integrity in its more familiar sense but ought instead to practice “meta‐integrity.” Meta‐integrity does not instruct an individual to stop participating in harm, but rather to manage the way in which she participates. In the fourth and final section, I will explain some key differences between the practice of meta‐integrity and the practice of the more familiar first‐level integrity, and in doing so also distinguish my account from other feminist‐theoretical accounts that may otherwise seem similar to mine (specifically, Davion's and Calhoun's). In my explanation, I will also bring out the somewhat different, but still reliability‐centered, social value of meta‐integrity.
I. Integrity and Reliability
One of the primary reasons integrity is valuable is that it promotes a community in which individuals can trust one another to reliably respond to harm. Margaret Walker brings out this point while drawing from moral‐luck literature: in our ordinary lives we quite often accept the fact that moral luck exists, that is, that we might become involved in significant harms despite our best intentions. Taking Bernard Williams's example, suppose a “lorry driver” unintentionally kills a child who darted in front of his vehicle; whatever else we think the driver should do, that the driver “shrug it off” would strike us as quite impermissible (Reference WilliamsWilliams 1981). Because we acknowledge the reality of moral luck, we often hold moral expectations for individuals who become faultlessly implicated in harms; we understand that if they do not respond, the harms they are implicated in may go unaddressed. Fulfilling responsibilities in the face of moral luck, Walker argues, demands the exercise of specific virtues, foremost among which is integrity—“the capacity for reliably maintaining a coherent moral posture” (Reference WalkerWalker 2003, 31–32).Footnote 1 An agent with integrity resists the co‐optation of her moral agency, or being made to support something inconsistent with her claimed values. Where her agency becomes implicated in harm, she does not walk away, but to the contrary, responds to the harm, thus following through on her commitments. An individual with integrity can be counted on to respond to a situation of moral luck—not so much because she believes that she caused it, but rather because she does not stand for it. Integrity is valuable to a community, then, because it provides a source of reliable response to harm; response is not contingent on the harm having a clearly identifiable individual cause.
Even in accounts of integrity that are less socially oriented than Walker's, reliability remains a defining feature. Harry Frankfurt's account of integrity, for example, requires little or no reference to an individual's social context (Reference Frankfurt and SchoemanFrankfurt 1987). For Frankfurt, “integrity” refers to the inner relations holding among an individual's desires. The agent who is most “wholehearted,” most fully in ownership of herself, is the agent who avoids inconsistencies and ambivalence in the ordering and endorsing of her desires. Frankfurt's view has been criticized for being overly individualistic, considering only the formal relations holding within an individual's desire‐set and neglecting to assess the value a community places on those desires. For Frankfurt, an individual who is wholeheartedly committed to her own personal pleasure, for example, might have just as much integrity as a thoroughly committed social‐justice advocate (see Reference McFallMcFall 1987, 9–11, for this line of criticism). Although I agree with this criticism and believe that Frankfurt's account is overly formal, I also believe that his account captures something important about integrity. The consistency and nonambivalence that is central to Frankfurt's account alludes to an individual whose behavior is predictable. An individual who is inconsistent or unsure of her desires (a “wanton” individual, in Frankfurt's words) is not fully in control of her decisions and as such cannot be counted on to stand by or act on any particular value; whether the individual would live up to a given value would be determined largely by arbitrary factors. A person who is wholehearted, however—even if she is wholeheartedly committed to an immoral or nonmoral project, for example, hedonism—can be counted on to do as a hedonist does, and as such, can be managed by others appropriately. To the extent that Frankfurt's account captures something important about integrity, I argue, it is this element of reliability in behavior.
The emphasis on reliability as a central element of integrity does not imply that an individual with integrity must be rigid and unchanging in her commitments. To the contrary, an individual might change even her most deeply held commitments while maintaining her integrity, so long as these changes are themselves expectable given her larger personal trajectory. This is because integrity does not refer merely to the content of a given set of commitments, taken as static; rather, it refers to a “process through which one grows and changes” (Reference Davion and CardDavion 1991, 184). To have integrity is to maintain a kind of narrative coherence in this process. As Davion puts it, the “process from one moment to the next will be connected; it is literally a process from which no part could have been taken and still yield the same result, namely, one's becoming the person one is at any given moment. There will be a certain consistency and coherence in the process” (185). Whereas Davion's immediate purpose is to show that a self with integrity may also be a multiplicitous self, my intentions here are somewhat different. For me, Davion's description of integrity as narrative coherence says as much about multiplicity and change as it does about continuity and stability. Having integrity does not necessarily mean that one's values remain identical over time, but it does mean that at least the most fundamental of one's commitments resemble one another from one moment to the next. Without this resemblance, changes would likely seem to be more of a loss of personhood than its continuance, deterioration rather than growth. An abrupt and radical change threatens both the development of one's personal narrative as well as one's reliability.
Neither does an emphasis on reliability imply close‐mindedness on the part of the agent with integrity. An agent may be receptive to others' moral perspectives, and may even amend her own moral judgments in order to align with others' views, so long as she does so for her own reasons (and not, for example, because she was bullied or bribed [Reference CalhounCalhoun 1995, 249]). As Calhoun's account of integrity explains, “integrity is not just a matter of sticking to one's guns” (259) but is instead about taking seriously one's deliberative role within a wider moral community aiming to answer important moral questions. Practicing integrity requires one to “take a stand for, and before, all deliberators who share the goal of determining what is worth doing” (257). Although an individual ought to put forward her best personal judgments, she must also be aware that her judgments are fallible. As such, an individual with integrity will balance confidence in her judgments with openness toward others' criticisms. Should an individual find that her initial moral perspective is, in her own best judgment, less defensible than an alternative view, integrity does not demand a stubborn adherence nonetheless; to the contrary, it demands revision. Unless and until this better alternative is offered, however, an individual ought to stand by her original judgment. The individual with integrity will be willing to revise her judgments, but whatever judgments she has will be well considered, and she will be unwilling to abandon them for anything but the best reasons.
II. The Effect of Structural Injustice on Integrity
I have described integrity as having a defining feature of facilitating reliable response to harm. I take the moral component of this definition—namely, response to harm—as a given. Accounts that do not include it, such as Frankfurt's, have been widely, and I believe rightly, criticized. To the extent that an account like Frankfurt's can nevertheless be recognized as an account of integrity, it is because of the reliability in values that the account includes. Even accounts that decentralize consistency in values—namely, Davion's and Calhoun's—do not challenge the value of reliability so much as reframe it. Davion's account replaces the need for a long‐lasting set of specific fundamental values with the need for a coherent narrative weaving together and developing a person's values; Calhoun's account specifies the source of consistency in values, namely, well‐considered reasons and not, for example, arrogance or dogmatism. For these accounts too, then, an individual with integrity can be relied on to respond to serious moral harm. An individual who does not either threatens the positive development of her personal narrative (in Davion's terms) or fails to rise to the challenge of “standing for something” (in Calhoun's).
The feature of reliably responding to harm, however, becomes complicated when considered in the context of structural injustice. In the context of structural injustice, one may find oneself implicated not only in “natural” luck but also in what Lisa Tessman calls “systemic” luck (Reference TessmanTessman 2005) (and what Claudia Card calls the “unnatural lottery” [Reference CardCard 1996]). Both systemic and nonsystemic luck are forms of moral luck: both sorts of luck imply that one may, by no fault of one's own, become normatively implicated in harm and gain responsibilities in light of this. In cases of systemic luck, however, one's connection to harm is enabled by one's participation in unjust social structures. One's participation in structural injustice is, in a significant sense, a matter of luck: one has no control over the nature of the social structures one is born into, and one can do very little to change them. Yet one's participation in unjust structures is not for that reason outside the realm of one's responsibilities. As Walker's interpretation of Williams's lorry driver example makes clear, “responsibilities outrun control” (Reference WalkerWalker 2003, 247). An agent within unjust social structures remains a relevant, even if unintentional, contributor toward structural harms. Just as nonsystemic sources of luck can threaten one's moral standing (for example, the wrong place and time can force a lorry driver to hit a child), so too can social‐structural forces (for example, global capitalism can force one to buy from sweatshops).Footnote 2 It is in such unchosen yet morally urgent situations that an agent with integrity is expected to respond, and respond in appropriate ways.
Although an agent with integrity is expected to respond to both natural and systemic forms of moral luck, the content of the responsibilities attached to systemic luck is different from that attached to natural luck. When luck is not natural and unavoidable, but is instead created and distributed through sociopolitical structures, establishing practices of reliability requires not only addressing instances of bad luck but also amending the sources of such luck. Indeed, to respond only to particular instances may end up leaving the structural status quo in place, and so also maintain social‐political unreliability. An individual attorney's pro bono work for a low‐income client, for example, does very little to change that client's tenuous access to the legal system and other social services. It is of course praiseworthy to respond compassionately to someone who is particularly vulnerable to one's choices, but the existence of systemic luck leads us to recognize that some persons are made particularly vulnerable to others' agency—the appropriate goal is not merely to respond to particular others, but is in addition to remove certain categories of vulnerabilities altogether. For individuals to be assured that there will be adequate response to harms that were not caused by isolated individuals but were instead produced in systemic ways, individuals must respond reliably not merely to particular instances but also to the unjust structures that produced them.
One might think that the recognition of systemic luck does not so much problematize the practice of integrity so much as it supplements integrity with a separate set of responsibilities. More specifically, one might think that the recognition of systemic luck merely adds to the demand for integrity the further demand for structural justice. The first is a matter of individual behavior, the second is a matter of social design. Conceivably, the two demands could be carried out by quite different people. So long as there were some sorts of public officials charged with social‐structural policies, for example, individuals in their ordinary lives would not need to consider their demands of responsibility to be influenced by considerations of systemic luck. In this line of argument, attention to systemic luck would not matter centrally to integrity literature; at most, it would give additional importance to social‐policy work, but it would not fundamentally alter the content of responsibilities for ordinary individuals in their everyday lives.
The above, however, is not my argument. I argue that recognition of systemic luck should lead to a significant change in our understanding of the moral demands of ordinary individuals. Individuals themselves must try to change the way in which they participate in unjust structures, and not simply “outsource” responsibilities related to structure to designated others. The reason for this is that, in the context of systemic luck, it becomes necessary for a person with integrity to see her own agency as tied up in the structural processes producing the luck. Although no individual taken in isolation has control over structurally produced harms, each individual nonetheless contributes toward such harms. Even if an individual responds to a particular structurally produced harm, she continues to be implicated in a structure that predictably and alterably perpetuates similar harms elsewhere. It would be inconsistent, and so threaten the reliability of an agent's moral commitments, for an agent to respond to a particular instance of harm while uncritically continuing her participation in social‐structural processes that produced that harm and will continue to produce similar instances. In the context of systemic luck, integrity demands that an agent recognize that it is not only nature, but also social‐structural function that may use her agency as a tool in service of ends she does not support. To maintain a stable moral core, an agent must resist co‐optation of her agency, either natural or systemic.
The latter systemic sort of co‐optation, however, adds significant complications to the former natural sort. To have integrity, one should not merely conform to external standards, but rather should personally commit to some set of values. The lorry driver who responds to harm, for example, does not do so because he was “assigned” responsibility by a third party. Rather, he responds because he “takes” responsibility, accepting that it would violate his own standards of morally decent behavior were he to do otherwise.Footnote 3 Once one recognizes one's agency as implicated in structural functioning, however, this distance between one's own moral agency and external sources of authority is altered. Self‐consciously positioning oneself within an unjust structure requires seeing how one's agency is solicited and channeled into far‐ranging effects—it demands recognition that one does not simply choose one's values, but rather that at least some aspects of one's moral core are influenced by larger structures. In a white supremacy, for example, one cannot help but integrate some degree of racism into one's ordinary conduct. Whereas the lorry driver does not need to consider the source of the bad luck he becomes implicated in or his role in sustaining it, and can assure himself that he is not the kind of person who countenances such an awful situation, this is not the case for an individual responding to racist social structures. One can resist racist attitudes and behavior, but one cannot fully disassociate from their sources and claim that one is not the sort of person who supports them—hence the offensiveness of proclaiming, “I don't see race.” In response to systemic luck, the practice of integrity both demands that one see oneself in structures and—as soon as one does this—that one realize that one does not, in fact, stand by all that one would like to. Exercising integrity paradoxically leads one to recognize that one does not fully have it.
Even having settled on a certain range of personal values, acting from these values presents further complications to the practice of integrity. I have claimed that integrity in response to systemic luck demands that one try to amend the sources of such luck. This sort of work requires one to join with others in organized efforts. Yet organizations' efforts are affected by the same sorts of oppressive influences that affect individuals' choices. As intersectionality theory makes clear, social movements are often successful insofar as they are also exclusive. Support for issues affecting women, for example, turns into support for the most privileged categories of women while leaving in place or worsening the situation for others.Footnote 4 Absent the possibility of any vanguard group, it seems that successful political action will also come with a degree of dirty hands. Yet to refuse to participate in sociopolitical movements at all is to remain passive while one's agency is appropriated by unjust structures, and so presents another kind of threat to integrity. It seems that in showing integrity and taking responsibility in the face of systemic luck, and so working with others to intervene in structural functioning, one simultaneously makes compromises that threaten one's integrity.
III. A Second, “Meta,” Meaning of Integrity
Recognition of a specifically systemic kind of luck implies that individuals, to maintain integrity, must recognize their positions in unjust structures. When persons are vulnerable to one another's agency in unjust and predictable ways, it is not enough for an individual to merely respond to particular instances in which this vulnerability is made apparent but must also address the structural sources that keep such instances of vulnerability coming. The sort of normative demands that fall to individuals in this context rely not on recognition of causal sufficiency or necessity, but rather, integrity—individuals who respond to systemic luck do not necessarily consider themselves to have caused systemic harms but rather have constructed moral selves such that they will not allow themselves to be used toward the production of such harms. While recognition of one's participation in unjust social structures is necessary for integrity, however, the recognition simultaneously problematizes integrity. Recognizing one's position within social structures complicates the practice of integrity, both in self‐consciously claiming one's commitments and in consistently acting on their behalf. As a result, it seems that one should have two senses of one's moral core. On the one hand, it seems that integrity demands that one deny oppression any place in one's set of values, saying, for example, “I am not a racist—no matter what the sociopolitical circumstances, no matter how much I would benefit, I do not endorse such values.” On the other hand, it seems that one should modify this sort of claim in light of one's place in social‐structural processes, owning that one is in fact racist in ways that deeply inform one's attitudes and behaviors. One should not think well of this fact—as the first sort of claim made clear—but it seems that integrity nonetheless requires that one acknowledge it in order to avoid practicing bad faith. Similarly paradoxical, it seems that integrity demands that one participate in social‐political movements that compromise one's values—or, perhaps, refuse to participate and so also fail to resist the unjust structural status quo as effectively as one could.
In a sense, I have argued that integrity is impossible in a nonideal world. No matter what one does or how one thinks of one's values, one will be lacking integrity in some respect. I will now argue, however, that the same feature that makes integrity paradoxical in a nonideal world—namely, unjust social structures—also enables a new, “meta” sense of integrity. The meta level of integrity guides an agent in responding to her failures in integrity on the first level, with the goal of creating a resistant (if not unproblematic) relation to injustice and promoting the reliable presence of social justice movements (even if not fully reliable social structures).
My claim is that in the context of structural injustice, integrity has not one but two meanings—first‐level and meta‐level. My account is different, then, from Lynne McFall's account, which similarly identifies a tension involved in the practice of integrity, and similarly suggests that there may be two different versions of integrity resulting from this tension, but does not put one version in meta relation to the other (Reference McFallMcFall 1987). This is in part because McFall's account and mine focus on different sources of tension involved in integrity. McFall focuses on the potential conflict arising between what she calls “personal” commitments and external “moral” constraints. To have integrity, it is necessary not only that one maintain a certain set of values and principles, but also that those values and principles be considered by others as important. Building on the difference between personal and external moral expectations, McFall suggests that there may be reason to think that there is “personal” integrity, on the one hand, and “moral” integrity, on the other. Depending on the perspective one takes—partial and personal, or impartial and universal—one may come to have different conclusions regarding what integrity requires of one. Ultimately, McFall suggests, one must resolve the dilemma by choosing between one perspective or the other—making all integrity‐promoting actions “personal” in a sense. “Moral” integrity becomes a subset of “personal” integrity: the latter can exist without the former, but the former cannot exist without the latter (Reference McFallMcFall 1987, 16).
In my account, integrity is not only a matter of balancing personal and moral values. Even if one were to “personally” hold to “moral” values, one's integrity would still be threatened due to a further source of tension—namely, one's simultaneously internal and external relation to social structures. Iris Marion Young's work on responsibility for justice brings out this dual relation well. On the one hand, social structures pre‐exist and constrain individuals: structures “are the products of previous actions, usually products of many coordinated and uncoordinated but mutually influencing actions. Those collective actions have left determinate effects on the physical and cultural environment, effects that condition future action in specific ways” (Reference YoungYoung 2006, 113). On the other hand, individuals are not wholly determined by their structures: it is “misleading … to reify the metaphor of structure, to think of social structures as entities independent of social actors, lying passively around them and easing or inhibiting their movement. On the contrary, a social structure exists only in the action and interaction of persons; it exists not as a state, but as a process” (Reference YoungYoung 2006, 112). The internal relation one has to unjust social structures challenges one's ability to have integrity in either of the senses McFall identifies; so long as one is implicated in unjust social structural function, one will be challenged in both the “personal” kind of integrity that aspires to full ownership of one's self and the “moral” integrity associated with upholding ideals of justice.
Moreover, and in contrast to McFall, the two perspectives do not lead straightforwardly to two contrasting versions of integrity. In my account, integrity requires simultaneous attention to both the internal and external relation one has to social structures: one must see oneself both as part of the problem (internal to structures) and as someone capable of resistance (someone sufficiently external in some way as well). To see oneself as simply one or the other would be to lack integrity entirely. It would be to see oneself as entirely internal to social structures and so incapable of promoting justice or, alternatively, entirely external and so uninterested in the sources of structural harm. One would either fail to see that one is involved in structural injustice, or fail to recognize that one can do something about it. Each perspective, then, is lacking in some way—but each, too, contains a corrective for the other. Reliable response to structural harm requires that one sustain both perspectives of oneself, maintaining them in dynamic relation to each other. Doing so, I argue, constitutes the meta‐level practice of integrity. The same thing that problematizes integrity in one sense, then, opens up integrity in another, “meta” sense. To return to this essay's initial reference to Walker, integrity is about appropriate response to events outside of one's control. I am now recommending that one see one's participation in social structures as among these uncontrollable events. That one participates in unjust structures is inevitable. But how one participates is not, and integrity on the meta‐level regards the appropriate response to one's participation.
IV. Practicing Meta‐Level Integrity
I have argued that participation in unjust social structures inherently problematizes the practice of integrity, since integrity requires one to take a reliable stance against harm, and participation in unjust social structures makes such a stance inauthentic. It is also, though, no fault of the agent's own that she was born into the particular social structures she is in, and given the pervasiveness of social structures, exit is impossible. The sheer fact of one's participation should be counted as a kind of “bad luck”—an unfortunate event to which an agent with integrity is expected to respond. Given the problematizing effect of participation on integrity, the agent's lack of integrity should also be taken as unavoidable bad luck, and thus also call for appropriate response. Integrity becomes meaningful again, but now in a meta‐sense: meta‐integrity instructs an agent to respond appropriately to her failures of integrity on the more basic level. The practice of meta‐integrity is structurally similar to first‐level integrity: the most basic elements are that an individual, first, acknowledge her part in the harm and, second, respond appropriately. In what follows, I will bring out the content of the two steps in a way that distinguishes the practice of meta‐integrity from that of first‐level integrity and connects meta‐integrity to a kind of reliability appropriate to a structurally unjust world.
Acknowledging One's Part in Harm
Perhaps the most important distinguishing aspect of meta‐integrity is the acknowledgment that one does not have integrity in its more basic sense. Meta‐integrity is not a way of “gaining back” one's basic integrity, nor excusing oneself from its requirements. Meta‐integrity requires an agent to acknowledge that she consistently participates in social structures she believes are unjust. She understands that she may respond to her social‐structural position, but this view does not cancel out her understanding that she is simultaneously internal to structures and shares responsibility for the harms they perpetuate.
In a way, my account of meta‐integrity is similar to Davion's account of what I am now calling first‐level integrity. Both accounts recognize that an agent with integrity might be expected to maintain dual understandings of herself. But our accounts describe the duality within the self as coming from different places, generating different implications for the ability of an agent to have first‐level integrity. Davion is centrally concerned with establishing a meaning of integrity that is compatible with intersectionality, and so “can be promoted by feminists who do not want to marginalize the experiences of people who need to participate in more than one culture in order to preserve what they value in their identities” (Reference Davion and CardDavion 1991, 189). She argues that her description of integrity as narrative coherence fulfills this purpose: if integrity is a process and not a fixed state, a self might contain many divergent aspects of identity so long as there is still “at least one fundamental goal in common—the preservation of the identity of the being as multiplicitous” (190). Insofar as the continuance and development of a sense of self requires a sense of membership within community, and insofar as at least some selves belong to more than one community, it is not only acceptable but also crucial that at least some individuals participate in plural communities. If an individual claims membership in communities with divergent values, the individual's self may not be unitary but it will still be unified around the common goal of preserving and developing the multiplicitous self that it is.
Davion helpfully defines integrity in a way that makes it compatible with the internal inconsistencies that my account of meta‐integrity requires. However, the specific kinds of inconsistencies that my account addresses are compatible with integrity only on a meta‐level. In my account, the conflicting views one has of oneself trouble one's integrity on the first‐level, for they require one to acknowledge one's ongoing participation in unjust structures. In my account, multiplicity arises not only from the positive, identity‐confirming aspects of the plural communities one counts oneself a part of, but also from the aspects of one's communities that threaten one's sense of self. A person who counts herself as part of a broader community that includes at least some practices that reinforce structural injustice ought to recognize her participation within unjust practices. And insofar as the person takes a stand against such practices, she also takes a stand against some aspects of herself. To fail to recognize one's participation is to fail to recognize the reality of moral luck; it is akin on a theoretical level to the lorry driver “shrugging off” his role in the traffic accident. Davion's account underplays the extent to which, even balancing between multiple perspectives of oneself, one may nevertheless fail to have integrity. This is because having integrity is not only a matter of sustaining a coherent personal identity; it is also about maintaining a certain kind of personal identity, namely, the kind that takes a reliable stance against harm. If it is impossible to do so, self‐awareness of the kind Davion and I both advocate requires acknowledging the impossibility and thereby acknowledging, too, one's failures in first‐level integrity.
That said, striving for coherence in the way Davion recommends is appropriate guidance for the meta‐level of integrity. For Davion, the central demand of integrity is that an individual “monitor her own development” so that she can then create a coherent personal narrative: “When a person takes care to monitor her own development, the process of becoming can be seen as a whole process rather than simply as a set of random events” (185). On the meta‐level of integrity, what is important is not that one refuse to participate in injustice; to the contrary, participation is acknowledged as inevitable. What is important is that one monitor how one participates—that one see one's choices in participation as part of a larger process and not as “random events” with no bearing on one another or one's narrative as a whole. Applying Davion's account to the meta‐level, we can see that integrity is not threatened simply by acting in ways that support unjust structures; it is threatened by the pattern that these decisions form within one's broader narrative. To practice meta‐level integrity is to look out for these patterns; it is to cohere one's choices around more rather than less resistant narratives.
As an example of choosing between more and less resistant kinds of social‐structural participation, consider that it is impossible for an individual to fully reject all of her unjust sociopolitical privileges. Even if a white person does not want to receive race‐based privileges, for example, she will still be recognized as white by others and given certain advantages for it. She will, for example, find it easier to criticize racist social structures without allegations of bias. Even as she speaks out against racist injustice, then, a white person cannot help but participate in and benefit from racist social structures. It would be strange, however, to claim that a white person who speaks out against racism therefore lacks integrity. If it seems that speaking out is appropriate—if it seems that one should criticize injustices that grant one privilege, despite and perhaps even because of the credence that one will be given—then it seems that there are acceptable and even recommendable ways of using one's privilege. Though one must participate in unjust structures, one may still make choices in how one participates; meta‐level integrity requires that one monitor one's choices in participation with the aim of developing them around the story of, say, an ally rather than that of a bystander.
This narrative approach to meta‐level integrity allows for a kind of reliability, though not of the kind first‐level integrity aims at. Meta‐level integrity sacrifices first‐level integrity's ambition of fully disassociating oneself from harm—of reliably responding to any harm that comes one's way. However, it retains the feature of reliability in another sense. Though one must admit that one's actions, taken one at a time, will each contribute to structural injustice, one's overall narrative need not. One can be counted on to attend to the ways in which one's actions, taken together, support or resist larger structural function and—given this understanding—strive toward more resistant narratives. Although one cannot eliminate structural injustice in this way, one can at least promote the continuing presence of social‐justice movements. When one coheres one's actions around a particular narrative, one also reinforces the normative standards by which that narrative makes sense. If one cannot end racist injustice and eliminate the concept of the “racist,” for example, one can at least lend one's support to anti‐racist communities from which the concept of the “white ally” may continue to evolve as a possibility.
Responding Appropriately
The second step in the practice of integrity is responding appropriately to harm. This step becomes complicated on the meta‐level of integrity, for here, one can no longer expect a correspondence between what one considers an appropriate response and what most others will consider as such. This is because on the meta‐level, the harm one wishes to resist is not entirely external to oneself nor entirely external to others within one's moral community. That is, structural harm is a shared endeavor; even if an individual wishes to acknowledge the ways that her everyday expectations connect her to injustice and modifies them appropriately in light of this, there is no guarantee that others will have the same acknowledgment nor go about adjusting their expectations of the individual to fit. In fact, given the enduring nature of structural injustice, one can safely assume they will not. In this context, when not only one's own but also others' agency is a part of the problem that one wishes to resist, resistance to harm is simultaneously resistance against what the vast majority of others think is right.
Part of the work of resisting structural harm, then, is also convincing others that one's resistance is appropriate. The goal is to help build new normative expectations. In this respect, my account is similar to Calhoun's account of what I now call first‐level integrity. For Calhoun, what it means to practice integrity is to work with others to arrive at the best possible answers to shared moral questions. The person with integrity will not assume that the questions are already answered, nor will she back down from a position that she genuinely believes is right for the mere reason that others disagree. The individual with integrity, then, will not assume that our established moral standards are beyond dispute; she will be willing to question even the most fundamental of our moral assumptions, given good enough reasons. And should she find a good reason—for example, resisting structural harm—she will be willing to argue for her view against extensive disagreement.
Calhoun's account supports mine by showing that integrity includes a sense of responsibility to others. However, my account emphasizes the specifically nonideal context in which individuals undertake their responsibilities and, as a result, advocates for different kinds of responsibilities that are specific to the meta‐level of integrity. For Calhoun, to have integrity is basically to follow the rules of ideal deliberative ethics—to put forward one's best judgments, present these views accurately to others, listen to others' feedback and respect others' perspectives as equal in value to one's own. The aim in doing so is “to render … a judgment endorsable by all” (257). In my account, however, where the moral question one wishes to discuss regards resisting structural harm, straightforwardly aiming for universal agreement may impede one's ability to formulate an appropriate response. This is because of the warped deliberative context in which deliberators are located. Structural injustice is in part characterized by hegemonic discourse—shared assumptions about what is worth discussing, who can participate, what sorts of contributions are valuable, and so on that collectively serve to maintain an unjust status quo. In this context, agreement may not signal authentic consensus between honest and capable deliberators interested in justice; it may, instead, signal inadequate attention to deeply rooted falsifications, distortions, and so on that function to uphold injustice. If one aims to gain a fuller understanding of one's role in perpetuating structural harm and opportunities for resistance, it seems that one ought to problematize rather than conform to established deliberative standards.
If one aims to find a genuinely resistant action, one should not aim directly to create consensus around values that one considers fully endorsable. One should instead aim to create agreements within more limited parts of one's community, and one should be willing to compromise one's values for the sake of this consensus. To explain the former qualification first: Regardless of who precisely one considers one's co‐deliberators to be, one cannot consider one's co‐deliberators to include all of one's community. Given the reality of hegemonic discourse, one must assume that the vast majority of one's community subscribes to unjust norms that are to some extent argument‐resistant. Depending on which specific norm one wishes to avoid in one's deliberations, one may have to exclude from discussion a certain segment of the community that is understood to uphold that norm. If, for example, white people are trained in an “epistemology of ignorance” that obliges them to think that race is real and carries moral significance (Reference MillsMills 1997, 18–19), deliberations aiming to find an appropriate response to racism should include at least some discursive space that excludes white people and the associated epistemology. The purpose of doing so, moreover, is not to find a judgment endorsable by all; to the contrary, it is to arrive at judgments that, were white frameworks included, would have been ignored or rejected. The aim is to find a judgment that some people, insofar as they are defined in part by an epistemology that upholds oppressive social relations and insofar as that epistemology is invulnerable to argument, cannot endorse.
To explain the second qualification: Not only should one's aim not be construed as rendering a judgment that is universally endorsable, it should also not be understood as arriving at a judgment one wholeheartedly considers good. To return to one of Davion's main points, individuals, as intersectional selves, belong to multiple communities. And these communities are not necessarily aligned with one another; worthwhile values of one community might conflict with worthwhile values of another. As a result, an individual may come to find herself committed to an action that she believes genuinely is best, but that she also cannot fully endorse. Take, for example, the issue of same‐sex marriage as it has evolved in recent decades in the United States. The movement for same‐sex marriage provided a crucial way of resisting heterosexist social structures aiming to relegate lesbian and gay sexualities to the margins of social life. As a participant in the LGBT community, an individual would likely support same‐sex marriage campaigns; opposing or working to undermine them in some way would likely feel like a betrayal of her core values. However, the success of same‐sex marriage campaigns relied on framing the issue in neoliberal terminology. The scripts provided to volunteers working at phone banks and canvassing neighborhoods, for example, drew from such assumptions as the primacy of negative freedom, state noninterference within the private realm, individual (rather than state) responsibility for meeting basic needs, and so on. In this context, the same individual, insofar as she also identifies herself as a member of the left wing, may well have felt that support for same‐sex marriage meant “selling out.” Given a plurality of communities standing in different relations to dominant social‐structural norms, and absent a vanguard group, an individual who belongs to more than one community will find it difficult to fully include all of her values in her response to the “what is resistance” question. Whatever answer she considers best will also not likely be an answer she considers fully endorsable—at least, not when viewed from a holistic perspective taking into account all of the plural values that constitute her moral self.
If one practices first‐level integrity by aiming to achieve consensus over values one believes should be endorsed by all, as Calhoun suggests, then first‐level integrity is thoroughly challenged in the context of structural injustice. Calhoun's description of “standing for something,” however, may be appropriately reintegrated specifically on the meta‐level of integrity. Here, the judgment that one ought to be willing to stand by is not one's direct answer to the “what is resistance” question, but rather the standards by which one arrives at one's answer. Meta‐level integrity may require one to exclude some members of one's community from one's deliberations, or to misrepresent one's views—but it also requires that one be able and willing to explain who one excludes, what one misrepresents, and why. One might explain, for example, that deliberations excluding white people are necessary in order to weaken the influence of white‐supremacist hegemonic assumptions. Or, for example, one might explain that arguments in favor of same‐sex marriage coming from more left‐leaning perspectives are currently politically untenable; given the importance of same‐sex marriage campaigns, misrepresentation of one's reasons for supporting same‐sex marriage is necessary. As in the first‐level application of Calhoun's approach, one ought to maintain a balance between confidence in one's judgments and open‐mindedness to alternatives. If, for example, someone offers a way of navigating the same‐sex marriage/neoliberalism conflict in a way one considers better, one should change one's mind accordingly. But until then, one ought to stand by one's judgment.
By offering up one's explanation for one's violations of ideal deliberative ethics, one maintains for others the same kind of balance one maintains for oneself regarding internal and external relations to structures. When one excludes or misrepresents one's views, it is because one understands others as internal to structures—one believes that argument is of little use and people will simply continue to do what they do in conformity with unjust practices. White people will by and large keep employing racist assumptions in their everyday attitudes and behaviors; members of social‐justice groups—LGBT organizations, left‐wing organizations, and so on—will generally continue to define group interests around the interests of the most privileged group members (that is, transparent interests; see Reference LugonesLugones 1994). When one presents one's explanations for one's violations of deliberative ethics, one demonstrates one's belief that while individuals in general will act in certain predictable and problematic patterns, any given individual is able to externalize herself from these patterns sufficiently to critically reflect on them. When one offers one's explanation, then, one re‐initiates a collective deliberation regarding important moral questions. The scope of one's co‐deliberators will be smaller than one's moral community writ large, and the questions will not involve such grandiose topics as goodness and justice, but rather, more narrow questions regarding appropriate compromise in the absence of full goodness and justice. The deliberation, nonetheless, will occur, and occur between individuals who respect one another as deliberative equals aiming to articulate their authentic judgments about what is best.
The practice of meta‐level integrity allows for a kind of reliability, though again, not of the kind first‐level integrity aims at. Integrity at the meta‐level abandons the goal of universal consensus over values one considers fully endorsable. In a sense, it allows individuals to be unreliable participants in moral deliberations, and it abandons the aim of society‐wide reliable adherence to morally defensible values. However, the practice of meta‐level integrity promotes reliability in other ways. Individuals cannot be counted on to reject all violations of deliberative ethics, but they can be counted on to provide acceptable reasons for their violations and, confronted with compelling criticisms or better alternatives, to modify their tactics accordingly. These efforts cannot eliminate structural injustice, but they can at least maintain a space for dialogue, and so too a space for social‐justice‐oriented community‐building. If we cannot in our current conditions participate in an authentic moral deliberation within a fully inclusive moral community, we may at least be able to build the conditions wherein this deliberation may become possible.
