Many claim to value integrity. We admire people who are able to stick to their convictions in the face of disagreement or challenge. We demand it from politicians, scientists, artists and even sports stars. Yet trying to get a grip on how this virtue should be understood is tricky. It is usually assumed that integrity is a moral virtue. In this groundbreaking work Greg Scherkoske argues that we should instead view integrity as an epistemic virtue.
The starting point for Scherkoske is that integrity is ‘an elusive virtue’ (1) that previous attempts to characterise the virtue have failed to adequately capture. The first stage of this inquiry is to present various platitudes or data points that an adequate account of integrity should seek to capture (6–8). Integrity involves sticking to one's convictions, resoluteness of behaviour and a commitment to truthfulness and fair dealing. This resoluteness and stickinness of convictions is not restricted to the moral domain, it can also apply to aesthetic or epistemic convictions. These convictions must also be formed in an appropriate way. To have integrity one must respond appropriately to reasons, be free from moral insanity and form convictions that are coherent. As a result we place great value on the judgement of those that possess integrity. Scherkoske claims that an adequate theory of integrity should be capable of reconciling these platitudes (5) or at least of providing an error theory for those that it cannot accommodate.
Scherkoske's aim is to give an account of integrity, ‘That betters rivals at accounting for the data points, and is not merely descriptively and normatively adequate, but positively compelling’ (20). He begins this task by laying out the various ways in which others have attempted to make sense of the virtue. These include ‘Integrated Self’, ‘Identity’, ‘Clean Hands’, ‘Strength of Will’, ‘Moral Purpose’ and ‘Proper Regard for One's Own Judgement’ accounts.
Scherkoske argues that all of these accounts face two problems. First, they fail to capture all of the data points and so fail as adequate descriptions of the virtue. In particular, all of these accounts are unable to give a satisfactory explanation of the ‘moral sanity’ platitude. This is problematic, says Scherkoske, as we would not be willing to say that those with morally abhorrent views possess integrity. This leads to the second problem. Because these views fail to account for the ‘moral sanity’ condition, they fail to explain why we should value integrity. Scherkoske places particular weight on this point, devoting a chapter to explaining how all of the extant views of integrity make it a morally dangerous virtue. Scherkoske argues that all of these views are committed to the thought that integrity is a loyalty-exhibiting virtue. This is problematic because it means that integrity is likely to lead us into moral error (46–48) which, in turn, makes it hard to explain why we should value it (48–50).
Scherkoske argues that these difficulties are avoided if we view integrity as a commitment to stand by one's defensible convictions (59). On this account, integrity is an epistemic virtue. By this he means, ‘a complex set of dispositions that reliably and non-accidentally, place their possessors in a good epistemic position’ (60). Viewing integrity in this way avoids the risks of moral danger, as possessing integrity makes us more likely to avoid moral error (61). Moreover, it points towards a clear explanation of the value of integrity. Integrity on this account is of instrumental not intrinsic value. It is valuable because possessing it will make us more likely to obtain various epistemic goods, such as justified beliefs, trustworthy testimony and well-conducted inquiry (64).
Of course, by denying the intuitively plausible link between integrity and loyalty, Scherkoske needs to explain why so many have made this error. The epistemic view of integrity, however, is capable of giving a plausible explanation for this intuition. According to Scherkoske the reason why we associate integrity with loyalty is that the most obvious examples of people with integrity, such as Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., involve people sticking to their prior convictions in the face of danger or temptation. In these cases, though, the agent's prior judgement is also her best judgement (63). The temptations these agents face are temptations to abandon or act contrary to their best judgement. In such cases it might seem like we are admiring the refusal to abandon a prior conviction in the face of temptation. However, what we are actually admiring, according to Scherkoske, is the refusal to act against one's best judgement in the face of temptation.
Scherkoske claims that two observations made by Bernard Williams provide further support for the claim that integrity is an epistemic virtue. Williams points out that integrity seems to lack both a distinctive motivational profile and a distinctive thought.Footnote 1 This is problematic for the claim that integrity is a moral virtue, as moral virtues tend to have both of these elements. To have benevolence, for example, is to think positively of other people and be motivated to help them. There is no equivalent thought and motivational profile, though, for integrity. However, Scherkoske argues that epistemic virtues do not have a characteristic thought or motivational profile (90–91). Scherkoske supports this point by claiming that accuracy, open-mindedness and analytical insightfulness all lack a characteristic thought and motivational profile (90). The lack of a distinct thought and profile then gives us reason to think that integrity is an epistemic rather than a moral virtue. This account also benefits from being able to explain the reason responsiveness platitude and to give an account of integrity as a distinct virtue rather than an amalgam of other virtues, such as honesty or fair dealing (91).
Scherkoske spends two chapters investigating different problems that might be raised against this view of integrity. The first issue he considers is that of testimony. How, Scherkoske asks, can his view of integrity accommodate the fact that most of our convictions are sourced from testimony? Most, if not all, of our convictions are ‘borrowed’ either from others or from our former selves (107). In most cases where we act on our convictions we do not have access to the reasons that support them. This raises a problem for Scherkoske's view of integrity, as it is not clear how we can be said to stand by our best judgement when we are not in a position to make such a judgement. To make matters worse, we will often find others who disagree with our convictions. Scherkoske response to this problem is to claim that integrity involves well-placed self-trust (129). Given that people with integrity will only form their beliefs in an epistemically responsible way, they are able to have well-placed trust in their convictions.
The next issue Scherkoske considers is how his account can accommodate the thought that integrity involves a performative dimension. In order to possess integrity people need to do more than simply maintaining their own convictions. They must also be willing to stand for their convictions in the face of resistance from others (148). How, then, can we reconcile this with the claim that integrity is an epistemic virtue? The answer is that integrity helps to support flourishing epistemic relations between people (150). Those with integrity can be relied upon to be good sources of belief, as they only form beliefs in an epistemically responsible way. Moreover, because the person with integrity has convictions that are founded on good reasons she will be disposed to defend these convictions in front of others.
The final two chapters are devoted to attempting to reconcile integrity with an impartial view of morality. The difficulty in reconciling the two is an objection Bernard Williams raised against utilitarianism,Footnote 2 though Scherkoske takes it to present problems for any impartial view of morality (186). However, while Kantians have made what Scherkoske takes to be forceful responses to this objection, consequentialists remain troubled by it. In the first of these two chapters Scherkoske attempts to show that even if we grant Williams his view of integrity his objection is unpersuasive. In the second of these two chapters Scherkoske argues that Williams' argument highlights problems for Williams view of integrity that Scherkoske's own view avoids. Without getting into the details of Scherkoske's arguments, this approach struck me as somewhat odd. Given that the reader has spent the previous chapters being persuaded of the merits of Scherkoske's view of integrity, there seems little need to show that Williams' argument fails on Williams conception of integrity. It would surely have sufficed to show that Scherkoske's own view avoids the charge of being incompatible with impartial moral views.
Scherkoske offers persuasive arguments against the existing views and there is a lot to be said in favour of the move away from assuming that integrity is a moral virtue. However, I have some doubts about whether it offers a complete picture of integrity. First, while Scherkoske considers and rejects the view that there might be different forms of integrity (98–101) and rejects the view that integrity is fundamentally a moral virtue, he does not consider the possibility that integrity might be both an epistemic and a moral virtue. Those persuaded by Scherkoske's claims that integrity is fundamentally an epistemic virtue might think that it should also be considered as a derivative moral virtue. This seems like a view worth considering, as in the examples that Scherkoske gives of paradigmatic cases of integrity (Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr.) the virtue seems to dispose the agents to perform morally good actions. We might think that this is enough for a character trait to count as a moral virtue. This is not a major problem; at worst it would call for a minor concession on Scherkoske's part.
The second worry is that it is not clear to me that judging someone as being guilty of major epistemic irresponsibility is incompatible with judging her to possess integrity. For example, an atheist might judge a priest to be someone of great integrity despite thinking that by basing at least some of her beliefs on faith rather than reason the priest is guilty of major epistemic irresponsibility. Scherkoske might respond by saying that the atheist should view this as a partial flaw in the priest's integrity that is outweighed by her other responsible epistemic practices. This would allow Scherkoske to say that it is not incompatible for the atheist to judge that the priest is guilty of some epistemic irresponsibility and yet think that overall she counts as possessing integrity. However, I am not sure that this response will suffice, given the fundamental role that the priest's belief in God no doubt plays in her life.
Finally, I would have liked to have heard a bit more about how this account of integrity can be reconciled with other uses of the word ‘integrity’. Buildings, for example, can possess integrity, as can novels. It strikes me that those giving an account of integrity ought to have something interesting to say about how the form of integrity that people possess relates to these other kinds of integrity. This though, seems to be a gap that is present in much of the literature on the topic and there is no reason to think that Scherkoske's account would be in a worse position to explain the relationship between these notions than any other account of integrity.
Despite these concerns, this book marks an important advance for the literature on integrity. It will serve as essential reading for anyone interested in this elusive virtue and this account will no doubt be one that anyone attempting to defend an alternative view of integrity must respond to. It will also be of interest to anyone working in ethics or epistemology, particularly those seeking to understand the difference between moral and epistemic virtues.
