SETTING THE STAGE

The first step in constructing the idea of liberal integrity is to provide a working account of the concept of integrity and its moral significance.

Following Bernard Williams, I will presume that an agent's integrity consists in the pursuit of the projects or commitments that the agent considers constitutive of its identity.Footnote ⁴ Two related reasons can explain why this pursuit can be morally significant. First, it is often morally significant that agents avoid deep conflict between their actions and their constitutive projects. In extreme cases, such conflict might generate a situation where the agent is unable to make sense of itself; that is, it is unable to give an account of how the actions it takes in the world cohere with the commitments essential to its identity. An agent experiencing such “psychological fragmentation” (Ashford Reference Ashford2000, 422) is alienated from itself. With Williams, I assume that any normative theory should take this kind of alienation as at least a potential cause for concern. Second, constitutive projects or commitments—as the core of an agent's identity—provide the agent with reasons for existing. Having “identity-conferring commitments,” as Williams (Reference Williams1981, 12) writes, is “the condition of my existence, in the sense that unless I am propelled forward by the conatus of desire, project and interest, it is unclear why I should go on at all.” When an agent's actions conflict with its identity-grounding projects, in other words, this can undermine the very reason for the agent being in the world. Like Williams, I assume that any normative theory should be concerned about a world of such despairing—and potentially disappearing—agents.

With this basic view of integrity's importance in the background, let me make three clarifications concerning the ideas about political integrity that follow. The first clarification concerns a distinction that often causes difficulty in normative discussions of identity and integrity. This is the distinction between what the agent may deem important to its identity and integrity and what morality deems important simpliciter. This distinction might seem to cause difficulties even when the focus (as here) is solely on liberal agents; that is, on agents whose identity is compatible with the idea of the equal moral worth of all human beings. After all, we can imagine a liberal individual who obeys the moral constraints generated by others’ equal rights and standing, but who does not see morality as an identity-grounding project.Footnote ⁵ However, the case of a liberal polity is different. Insofar as we can talk of a liberal polity as an agent with an identity (and I contend later that we can and should talk this way), I argue that all liberal polities must see a morally crucial task—the realization of their citizens’ equal rights—as an identity-grounding project. Thus the distinction between what the agent and what morality deem important will not undermine the discussion of a liberal polity's integrity.

An additional clarification has to do with the relationship between ideal and actual liberal identity. My focus is on what the identity and conduct of a liberal polity ought to be when conceived ideally, from a purely normative perspective. However, I also suggest that the language of liberal integrity casts in the best possible light actual practices of existing liberal polities, including, crucially, their efforts to overcome manifestly illiberal elements of their histories.

The final clarification has to do with the relationship between the idea of liberal integrity and familiar liberal values. Some readers might worry that the idea of liberal integrity does not really add anything to the liberal moral vocabulary—that all the real normative work is done by familiar liberal values, making talk of “integrity” merely a distraction. Although I anticipate specific variations of this concern as the argument progresses, a more general clarification might be useful in this early stage. I do not intend to argue that the idea of liberal integrity is entirely distinct from familiar liberal values. Nor do I not intend to argue that the idea of integrity is more foundational than familiar liberal values or that liberal integrity exhausts the universe of liberal political morality. Rather, I claim that the notion of liberal integrity casts a distinctive light on familiar liberal values. It provides a novel organizing framework for liberal values that currently seem disparate. It also captures important moral intuitions as to how the tainted histories of actual liberal societies should bear on their global conduct. And lastly, the notion of liberal integrity allows us to explain, in a way that a simple appeal to familiar liberal values arguably cannot, why is it exactly that liberal polities have identity-based moral reasons not to entangle themselves in manifestly illiberal practices beyond their borders. In order to see how these contributions come about, we now need to turn to explore the identity—and integrity—of a liberal polity.

THE INTEGRITY OF A LIBERAL POLITY

We speak of the “identity” of a liberal society when we treat it, at least in some normative contexts, as a unitary agent. One such central context is liberal law. From a normative perspective, we often consider the laws of a liberal democracy to be the creation of the sovereign body politic, conceived in turn as a unitary group agent.

One way to evince the normative significance of this group agency is through the body politic’s moral responsibility for the content of the laws. Consider, for instance, the moral responsibility that the American body politic had for the legal institution of slavery in the United States. It would be misleading to simply disaggregate this responsibility, so as to focus solely on the particular actions of each individual American citizen towards each particular slave. It is clearly more apt to understand this responsibility as lying with the American body politic as a group agent—an agent which imposed and retained the laws of slavery.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, this normative thought obtains even if, as an empirical matter, only some American citizens actually owned slaves, or took part in slave trade.Footnote ⁷ And as long as we endorse this thought, we already endorse a basic moral sense in which collectively sovereign citizens form a group agent when enacting law. To borrow a term from Ronald Dworkin’s conception of “law as integrity,” we already accept, at least for the sake of normative reflection, the assumption that the legal order they establish turns collectively sovereign citizens into a “community personified” (Dworkin Reference Dworkin1986, 167, my italics).Footnote ⁸

Now, if we assume that the law of a liberal polity makes it a single agent in some morally salient sense, then the commitments that underlie this law can be described as the core of this agent's identity. No legal system, in turn, can be liberal unless it is committed to the realization of the equal rights of all citizens: That is the fundamental project of liberal law. One way to see this is to note that the law cannot revolve around a collectivist project. A polity cannot be liberal if, for example, it takes “the glory of the nation,” not reducible to individual citizens and their rights, as its ultimate goal. At the same time, the law can only aim at the realization of the equal rights of all citizens, unless it is to embody a conception of natural moral hierarchy among individuals that is inimical to liberalism. Therefore, insofar as the commitments that underlie the law can be seen as the core of a liberal polity's identity, we can say that any liberal polity must understand the realization of its citizens’ equal rights as an identity-grounding project.

How does this point lead to a picture of a liberal polity's integrity, and how might this integrity be threatened? We can begin to see the answer by noting that, for a society to have a liberal identity, it must formally and effectively instantiate equal rights through its legal system. One can accordingly say that from a liberal society's identity-grounding commitment to equal rights follows a certain set of identity-grounding institutions that guarantee equal rights for all citizens. Admittedly, it can be difficult to define with perfect precision which institutions are necessary instantiations of equal rights and thus fall under the rubric of identity grounding.Footnote ⁹ Yet for our exploratory purposes, a fairly intuitive list should suffice, including core liberal institutions such as legal protections of bodily integrity, property, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and a ban on racial, religious, and gender discrimination. These institutions are necessary corollaries of a liberal commitment to citizens’ equal rights, under any plausible account of liberalism.Footnote ¹⁰

In turn, if in order to have a liberal identity at all, a society must have specific effective legal institutions, then a society with a liberal self-conception would not truly be able to live up to its self-professed identity if these legal institutions did not exist, existed formally only and were ineffective, or were removed or distorted. Just as a person's integrity is threatened when her identity-grounding commitments fundamentally conflict with her actions, the integrity of a polity with a liberal self-conception is threatened when the institutions that its law enacts conflict with, or fail to take seriously, its own grounding commitment to equal rights.

Examples abound. If the law of a polity with a liberal self-conception professes a commitment to equally respect the rights of all citizens, but denies the vote to women, treats them as the property of their husbands, or refuses to recognize marital rape as a crime, this polity suffers from a failure of liberal integrity. If the law mandates respect for the life and property of all citizens, but law enforcement authorities never enter the poorest parts of a polity and knowingly leave them segregated and mired in de facto anarchy, this is a failure of liberal integrity. If the supreme law of a purportedly liberal land prohibits racial discrimination, yet gives policy discretion to subordinate governmental units dominated by racists, knowing that many of these units will make provisions of racial equality a dead letter, this too is a failure of liberal integrity. In all of these cases, by flatly contradicting its own core commitment to equal rights, the law of a polity that professes a liberal identity fails, to borrow another phrase from Dworkin (Reference Dworkin1986, 165), to “speak with one voice.” Indeed, just as when a liberal person loses her integrity she cannot make sense of herself because of the deep conflict between her actions and her identity-grounding commitments, when liberal law does not speak with one voice we can say that the polity it governs also, in losing its integrity, cannot make sense of its liberal identity.

These remarks, however, are only a first step. They may make the language of liberal integrity somewhat more intelligible, but they do not yet make it useful. For it is not clear yet what are the philosophical benefits of describing political failures to realize liberal equal rights—or successes in advancing liberal equal rights—in terms of liberal integrity.

We can start with four benefits. First, by highlighting the thought that the realization of liberal rights and equality is an identity-grounding project, the language of liberal integrity captures a key element of liberal societies’ actual practices. This language captures the myriad official ways, in which actual liberal societies mark both their failures and their achievements with regard to fundamental liberal values, as failures and achievements that are constitutive of the national identity—of “who we are as a people.”Footnote ¹¹ The idea of liberal political integrity thus provides a ready way to think about official traditions (national holidays, official ceremonies) commemorating iconic figures who played a key role in the struggle to realize liberal values in the polity, and about official traditions marking the polity’s past grave violations of liberal norms. The idea of liberal integrity similarly makes sense of the emblematic public monuments that celebrate successes in affirming liberal values of rights and equality, as well as of other emblematic monuments that display public memory of victims of past rights violations. And the idea of integrity makes sense of the fact that both these successes and failures play an important role in the educational system of many liberal societies, as an essential part of the national history and national ethos.

However, second, the idea of liberal integrity is not only a way to make theoretical sense of ongoing practices, which officially recognize successes and failures in realizing liberal values as constitutive of national identity. This idea also provides a way to ground the thought that it would be morally wrong if such official recognition did not exist. It seems plausible to hold that a liberal polity must officially recognize, as constitutive of its identity, profound historical failures and achievements tied to the realization of liberal values. Such recognition is not only necessary as a way to properly respect in the present those whose equal rights were violated in the past. Nor is it only a proper way to give their due to admirable figures, who have sacrificed much to advance the struggle to realize equal rights. This official recognition is morally necessary also because of the enormity of the moral stakes involved in the ongoing struggles to realize equal rights within liberal societies—from the efforts to end racial discrimination, through an end to religious discrimination, to the realization of the equal rights of women. The sheer scope of these moral struggles is such that officially integrating them into the national identity, making them a part of “who we are” as a people, is a way of respecting morality itself—giving morality itself its due.Footnote ¹²

With these claims in view, we can turn to a third benefit of thinking about political failures to realize equal rights—especially failures of the law—in terms of a failure of liberal integrity. When we understand a manifest failure to realize equal rights as a “disintegration” of a liberal polity's law, we can see more immediately how this failure undermines citizens’ reasons to respect the law—to obey it for the sake of duty, rather than out of mere fear of punishment. The internal coherence of the law, at least in matters that clearly bear on its grounding moral principles, is essential to its moral claim to obedience. When this coherence is deeply undermined, the demand that citizens obey the law is significantly weakened. The more the law of a self-professed liberal polity contradicts its own grounding moral principles, the more the law fails to take itself seriously, and if the law does not take itself seriously, it is not clear why any citizen should.Footnote ¹³

This thought leads to a final, related yet broader notion. Understanding the realization of equal rights as an identity-grounding project captures immediately the fact that political institutions that realize rights are neither easily created nor maintained: Like all significant projects, they require continuous effort and sacrifices. Obedience to the law frequently requires individual citizens to sacrifice various things (autonomy, resources, and so on). Yet there are many contexts in which broader sacrifices and efforts are needed—especially through various forms of civic engagement—to achieve reform of the law and ensure that it fulfills more of the liberal promise of equal rights. By casting the realization of equal rights as a collective project, the idea of liberal integrity brings these potential sacrifices to the fore. Yet at the same time, the aforementioned suggestion that identity-grounding projects provide agents with their reason to exist also alerts us to the opposite possibility. A polity's failure to realize equal rights might in extreme cases be so pronounced, and so entrenched by widespread societal attitudes, that one might consider oneself relieved from the duty to make sacrifices for the sake of reform, given others’ manifest failure to do their part and the extraordinarily high hurdles facing reform (for claims along these lines, see Murphy Reference Murphy2000). In such extreme situations, the polity's failure to fulfill its constitutive project can be so profound that a conscientious citizen could actually give up and lose a moral stake in the polity's existence—whether this loss is translated into emigration, into indifference as to how the polity fares against existential threats, or into a principled refusal to make sacrifices to combat these threats.

If what I have said in the last four paragraphs is plausible, then the idea of liberal integrity provides important theoretical gains already at the domestic level. It expands our moral thinking by highlighting the broader moral implications of successes and failures to realize equal rights, going beyond the obvious implications for the rights bearers. At the same time, by tying together these implications, which might otherwise seem disparate, the idea of liberal integrity increases the unity of our moral outlook. With these domestic contributions in the background, we can turn to the global context that triggered our inquiry.

LIBERAL INTEGRITY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

Reflection on the roots of liberal law's commitment to the equal rights of all citizens immediately suggests that liberal integrity must have some global dimension. If nothing else, this is because the effort of liberal law to realize the equal rights of all citizens must be at least partly grounded in the deeper notion of universal human equality. One way to see this point is to note that a polity that realized the equal rights of its citizens through blatant violations of noncitizens’ most basic rights (through conquest and colonial exploitation, for example) could not coherently claim to be liberal. Another way to see why universal human equality must be an underlying principle of any liberal law is to consider who may become a citizen of a liberal polity: A polity that professes a liberal identity (arguably) ought to allow at least those outsiders who are willing to immerse themselves in its political culture, language(s), and traditions to (eventually) acquire citizenship, meaning that it must see all of the world's individuals as potential citizens.Footnote ¹⁴ What both of these thoughts suggest is that liberal integrity cannot end at the border. The question is therefore not whether liberal integrity has global implications, but rather what these implications are.

I believe we can make progress on this question through the following test, which we might term simply the global integrity test. When assessing a foreign political or economic practice, a polity with a liberal self-conception ought to ask itself whether it would still be able to retain its identity-grounding commitment to equally respect the rights of all of its citizens if the same foreign practice were institutionalized, through its legal system, within its borders. Where the answer is clearly negative—where the practice in question is incompatible with any plausible interpretation of what it means for a government to equally respect the rights of all of its citizens—perpetuating, legitimating, or reaping benefits from this practice through its own law threatens the polity's liberal integrity. If the polity perpetuates, legitimates, or reaps benefits from a manifestly illiberal foreign practice through its own law, then, when set against its constitutive domestic elements, its law is self-contradictory in much the same way as described in the domestic context.Footnote ¹⁵

There are two main kinds of benefits in thinking about liberal entanglement in manifestly illiberal foreign practices as a threat to liberal integrity. First, in the global as in the domestic case, the language of liberal integrity highlights how the entanglement of liberal law in manifestly illiberal practices threatens this law's claim to obedience. This is particularly true with regard to actors—especially corporations—whose global economic interests push them to engage in a variety of transactions with ruling elites in manifestly illiberal foreign regimes, which would never be legal within a liberal polity. If the laws of a polity that professes a liberal identity nonetheless condone such transactions, or even officially legitimize and incentivize their continuation, liberal law arguably fails once more to take itself seriously, since its elements concerning foreign dealings blatantly contradict its domestic foundations and principles. When we think of the result as the disintegration of the law, we can again see immediately why the moral claim of liberal law to deserve actors’ allegiance—this time, corporations’ allegiance—is substantially weakened.Footnote ¹⁶

This problem is particularly evident where the laws of a liberal polity formally legitimate and incentivize the violation of foreign laws whose domestic parallels are essential to liberal government. Consider, for example, the decades during which the laws of many liberal democracies considered corporate bribery of foreign officials, formally prohibited in the relevant foreign countries, not only legal but even tax deductible (Pogge Reference Pogge2001, 174). During this period, liberal lawmakers would have had obvious difficulties appealing to “the dignity of legislation”Footnote ¹⁷ to explain why the same corporations ought to obey domestic prohibitions on bribery. The same problem can remain, however, even if the manifestly illiberal foreign practices are declared legal by the relevant illiberal regime: Even such circumstances would not necessarily preserve the integrity of liberal law nor repair its damaged moral claim to obedience. To continue with the bribery example, suppose, for instance, that a democratically elected government abroad is overthrown in a coup, leading to the rise of a severely oppressive regime, which promptly cancels official prohibitions on bribery—or perhaps even announces formal regulations that require all foreign corporations that wish to conduct business in the state to transfer sizable sums to personal bank accounts associated with the ruling elite. The same financial transfers that would never be legal within a liberal polity are therefore now legal abroad. But does it really follow from this change that liberal law could retain its integrity and its claim to obedience unharmed if it recognized such transfers as permissible and even tax deductible?

With these points in mind, we can move to the other key global contribution of liberal integrity, which again parallels the domestic context. At the domestic level, I suggested that, by framing the realization of equal rights as an identity-grounding project for any liberal polity, the idea of liberal integrity provides an immediate way to see the moral value of making historical struggles to realize equal rights constitutive of the polity's collective identity—of “who we are as a people.” I now want to suggest that, because it accounts well for the moral significance of these historical struggles, the idea of liberal integrity can also clarify some of our more elusive moral intuitions regarding liberal entanglement in illiberal foreign practices.

Let me give a specific example to illustrate these claims. Consider again the example of the customary ties between the United States and South Africa's apartheid regime. At the beginning of the article I suggested that even if apartheid's victims would have opposed U.S. divestment from the South African regime, the United States would still have had important identity-based moral reasons to cut off ties with that regime. What arguably explains much of the instinctive force of these reasons is the particular history of the United States. Even in a scenario in which apartheid's victims would have wanted these ties to continue, it seems clear that for the American polity to legitimate, perpetuate, or benefit from South Africa's racist regime would profoundly conflict with this polity's own historical—and continuing—struggle against racism. What is less clear is how to explain the impact of this conflict on our moral thinking.

The idea of liberal integrity provides the needed explanation. By casting the realization of equal rights as an identity-grounding project—one that, like any other project, unfolds over time and requires effort and sacrifice—the idea of liberal integrity can explain why the historical struggle of American society to overcome its racist heritage would have made continued ties with the South African regime particularly morally loaded. Such ties would have blunted the sense of American progress in the long march toward ending racial discrimination. These ties would have (arguably) conflicted with the acknowledgment of the tremendous sacrifices made over generations for the sake of ending racial discrimination within the United States. And they would have conflicted with the moral promise, both explicit and tacit, to treat racial discrimination as constitutive of what American society is not going to be, endorse, or condone.Footnote ¹⁸ The idea of liberal integrity captures these historically driven concerns, explaining how and why they have moral force.

I should clarify that this historical perspective is meant to be circumscribed, in the following sense. It is perfectly compatible with my view to say that liberal polities have reasons of integrity that go against entanglement in illiberal foreign practices, even in contexts that do not bear in any way on their own historical struggles. So, to continue with the apartheid scenario, it is perfectly compatible with my view to say that any liberal polity, even one that had no loaded racial history, would have had reasons of integrity to reform customary ties with the South African regime. What I am suggesting is that such reasons would have been particularly strong for polities that did have the relevant history.

It might be helpful to demonstrate this point through another hypothetical example. Imagine a liberal democracy whose collective identity is constituted to a large degree by its successful effort to overcome a history of brutal dictatorship; this effort is enshrined in its current constitution, education system, public monuments and ceremonies, and so on. Suppose, however, that this polity is now forced to fight a war in self-defense and that as part of this war it is systematically employing the worst methods of the past dictatorship, including even the systematic torture of enemies. Whether or not we think that morality, all things considered, treats such methods as permissible under the circumstances, it seems hard to deny that these practices threaten the polity's own identity-grounding historical achievement of breaking free from the shadow of dictatorship. These methods generate an acute sense of the polity going against its own identity-grounding moral journey. Hence it is not only the general moral question of what the polity is fighting for that clearly looms large here, and that ought to loom large for any liberal polity in such a situation, regardless of its history.Footnote ¹⁹ There is also a more specific conflict between the identity-grounding commitments of this particular liberal polity and its actions.

Accordingly, it may be plausible to see this polity as suffering from a kind of alienation from its actions, paralleling the kind of alienation that a reformed criminal might experience if circumstances forced him to go against his identity-grounding journey to break free from a life of violence. Both cases feature a kind of self-betrayal. The actions of the reformed criminal pose an especially severe threat to his integrity, to who he is and to what his life is about, because these actions take him back to the kind of person he promised himself never again to be. But the same is also true for the liberal polity that undertakes actions that clearly conflict with its identity-grounding moral efforts—these actions take it back to what it has decided never again to be.

LIBERAL INTEGRITY IN THE PRESENT: BUYING NATURAL RESOURCES FROM DICTATORSHIPS

I hope to have done enough by this point to show how the idea of liberal integrity elucidates the hypothetical apartheid scenario with which we began. I now want to turn to an actual, ongoing case of liberal entanglement that has important moral similarities to this scenario: the case of trade in state-owned natural resources, ongoing between dictatorships and corporations based in liberal democracies. A prominent normative argument emphasizes that at least some dictators ought not be recognized as legitimate vendors of natural resources, because they cannot claim valid authorization to sell these resources from their peoples—the real owners of state property. In the lack of such authorization, at least some dictators should be seen as stealing state property from their people, and corporations based in liberal democracies who transact with these dictators should accordingly be seen as trafficking in stolen goods (see, e.g., Pogge, Reference Pogge2001; Reference Pogge2008; Wenar Reference Wenar2008; Reference Wenar2011, Nili Reference Nili2011a; Reference Nili2011b; Reference Nili2011c; Reference Nili2013a; Reference Nili2015a; Reference Nili2015b). Most philosophers who have discussed natural resource trade with dictators have accordingly taken it for granted that this trade ought to be reformed and that the challenges involved concern institutional design, rather than any normative conundrums (see, e.g., Macedo Reference Macedo2003, 1732; Heath Reference Heath2005, 198; Freeman Reference Freeman, Martin and Reidy2006, 251).

However, this widespread assumption ignores an important problem, which remains even if one endorses the idea that dictators are violating their peoples’ property rights over natural resources. There is no assurance that stopping natural resource trade with dictators will make the peoples living under them better off. And in the lack of such assurance, the peoples living under dictators might very well consent to customary trade in their natural resources continuing, even if they do think that these dictators are violating their property rights. To take just two important examples, many Russians might view Putin's dictatorship as a “third world kleptocracy” that is systematically stealing the Russian people's natural resource wealth.Footnote ²⁰ But there is no certainty that disrupting customary ties with Putin's regime will make ordinary Russians better off, and so many might very well consent to the continuation of customary transactions in their natural resources. Similarly, consider the claim that by purchasing oil from the Saudi royal family and by making such purchases legal, the corporations and governments of liberal democracies are heavily implicated in the royal family's violations of the property rights of the Saudi people (see, e.g., Pogge Reference Pogge2008, 148; Wenar Reference Wenar2016). Yet it is far from obvious that ordinary Saudis would be better off if the royal family could no longer sell oil to liberal democracies. And so, even if a growing number of Saudis complain that the royal family is illicitly treating the vast oil riches that are public property as private “spoils” (The Economist 2012), ordinary Saudis might nonetheless consent to liberal democracies continuing their customary dealings with the Saudi royals.

Once we consider this possibility, the case of natural resource trade with dictators becomes similar in important respects to the hypothetical scenario regarding South African apartheid. In both cases, the victims of a blatantly illiberal practice might very well consent to liberal democracies continuing their involvement in this practice, even if the victims do see the practice itself as violating their rights. In both, it seems difficult to appeal to victim-related reasons to justify why liberal democracies ought to disengage from the practice in question. There is no obvious reason why respect for either victims’ rights or their equal moral standing straightforwardly requires that liberal societies stop practices that the victims might very well want to see continuing. Therefore, in both cases, it seems that if we want to retain the intuition against liberal entanglement in a manifestly illiberal practice, we have to look beyond familiar victim-related reasons. And once again, the idea of liberal integrity provides the needed expansion of our moral outlook.

The best way to see this contribution is to return to the global integrity test presented earlier. Could a polity that professes a liberal identity retain its claim to be a liberal society, if it instantiated, within its borders, the practices of the House of Saud or of Putin's regime regarding state property? It seems safe to say that the answer is “no.” As Allen Buchanan (Reference Buchanan, Buchanan and Moore2003, 234) writes, the “gospel of liberalism, at least in its democratic variants [has involved] the message that the state. . .is not the property of a dynasty, an aristocracy, or any political elite, but rather ‘belongs’ to the people.” To accept that a state's de facto rulers are also the de facto owners of state property would be to accept a fundamentally illiberal doctrine. To formally enact this doctrine within the jurisdiction of a liberal polity would be to distort beyond recognition a core element of its identity-grounding institutions. Hence it seems that, through the global integrity test, the idea of liberal integrity is able to capture the intuition that liberal polities have identity-based moral reasons against entanglement in dictators’ violations of their victims’ property rights—reasons that exist independently of whether the victims consent to third parties’ dealings with the perpetrators.

There is, however, an added complication. It seems that concerns regarding liberal entanglement would have been more pressing in the hypothetical apartheid scenario than they are in the ongoing case of natural resource trade. This difference might be explained in several ways, but there is at least one explanation that the idea of liberal integrity again captures particularly well. If liberal entanglement in dictators’ control of their peoples’ property is less immediately morally disturbing than entanglement in South Africa's apartheid, this is, at least in part, because of collective identity considerations. Simply put, the struggle against racism is a more fundamental component of the collective identity of contemporary liberal democracies than is the struggle against manifestly undemocratic forms of control over state property. This difference might be due to the fact that, whereas the fight against racism in many liberal democracies is still ongoing, the struggle against manifestly undemocratic control over state property seems lodged too far in the past of many liberal democracies to really play a formative role in their present collective identity. Or it might be that this struggle is easily absorbed under the broader category of struggles against authoritarian rule, which play a more central role in the collective identity of many liberal democracies. Finally, it might be that the abstract notion of state or public property is not tangible for individual citizens in everyday life in the same way as is racial discrimination, especially of the formal, official kind. But whatever the precise cause, the threat to the self-conception of liberal polities, to the coherence of the moral struggles and achievements constitutive of their contemporary identity, seems greater in the case of apartheid than it does in the case of natural resources. The idea of liberal integrity captures this comparative point, and brings it to the fore as an element of our moral reasoning about the complex forms of liberal entanglement confronted here.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LIBERAL INTEGRITY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

I have argued that liberal polities have important identity-based reasons against entanglement in manifestly illiberal foreign practices, and that the language of liberal integrity is useful in capturing and elucidating these reasons. I do not have the space here to specify when the claims of liberal integrity would outweigh opposing moral reasons that push to retain liberal involvement in illiberal practices abroad. But I do want to indicate why it would be worthwhile to pursue such an “all things considered” inquiry, and to anticipate two objections associated with that inquiry.

There are several reasons why the claims of liberal integrity can have special relevance in a global context. First, these claims sidestep the status quo bias that often inhibits global reform efforts (Nili Reference Nili2015c). The structural limitations of social science in a global context, such as the inability to compare global institutions across “parallel worlds,” result in endemic social-scientific uncertainty concerning the effects of global reforms. This uncertainty reinforces a tendency toward “system justification,” casting the status quo as “the least worst” feasible state of the world (see, for example, Jost and van der Toorn Reference Jost, van derToorn, Van Lange, Kruglanski and Higgins2012). This tendency, in turn, is particularly problematic given that it yields self-seeking rationalizations of the status quo. As long as powerful actors can attach social-scientific uncertainty to almost every global reform proposal, we are bound to see a proliferation of self-serving moral justifications for why it is morally permissible to avoid reform. To employ our key examples again, just as the Reagan administration sought to explain how the aforementioned “constructive engagement” with apartheid was not meant only to maximize profits, so can powerful oil corporations seek to explain why oil trade with kleptocratic dictators actually has a chance of improving the condition of their victims—emphasizing that these victims might very well be disposed to consent to the continuation of such trade or that it might very well be in their rational interest to so consent. It should be obvious, however, that if agents may gain from foreign violations of victims’ rights as long as these violations could somehow be shown to be in line with the victims’ interests, then we are bound to see many agents seeking to protect their amoral (if not immoral) interests under the veneer of morality. The claims of liberal integrity anticipate such hypocritical moves, insofar as they push each liberal polity to respond to foreign rights violations in certain ways, independently of questions about the rights bearers’ consent.

Another related benefit of the claims of liberal integrity is that they dissolve collective action problems endemic to global politics. As long as the reason to end entanglement in illiberal foreign practices is contingent on the ability of reform to realize the rights of the victims of these practices, each state can exempt itself from any duty to initiate reform. This is because each state can point out that, in the absence of an overarching authority above states, there is no guarantee that other states would join the reform effort and that, without them doing so, the moral gains from solitary action would be miniscule (the level of pressure would not suffice to realize victims’ rights) while the cost that the solitary polity would have to bear would be significant. Furthermore—the excuse will continue—were that state to act alone, it would only incur absolute and relative costs in relation to its competitors (on such excuses see Nili Reference Nili2014 and Pogge 2008, chap. 5). Yet collective action excuses cannot affect integrity reasons to end entanglement in foreign rights violations. Consider again the apartheid example. If the United States had strong reasons of integrity to divest from South Africa's apartheid regime, independently of whether doing so would have precipitated apartheid's demise, then it would have been beside the point for the United States to invoke collective action problems as excusing continued customary ties.

The final reason why the claims of integrity deserve special attention in the global context has to do with the difference between repeated and exceptional threats to integrity. In the enduring absence of an overarching global sovereign that can sanction rights violations, entanglement in these violations is always likely to be an ongoing affair rather than a one-off aberration. In such a context claims of integrity are bound to be especially forceful.

This point can be illustrated through a domestic analogy that is arguably not too dissimilar to the case of natural resource transactions with kleptocrats. If the mafia has taken over your store, but you ask one of your regular customers to nonetheless buy your goods from the criminals just once, this is a very different case than if you ask the customer to continually cooperate with the mafia, In the former case, assuming the customer is a morally decent person, she might still say that cooperating with, and thereby legitimating the mafia, does not really represent “who she is.” But saying “that is not really me” clearly rings hollow if this person finds herself routinely transacting with the mafia. In such a case, the threat to her integrity and the sense of going against her identity-grounding commitments are tangible. Once routinized, in other words, the threat to her integrity, rather than being mitigated, only becomes more pronounced. If what I have said so far is cogent, and we can meaningfully speak of a liberal polity as an agent that has integrity in a way that parallels the integrity of an individual person, then we can apply the same idea at the political level. We can see how threats to the integrity of a liberal polity become especially pronounced when this polity legitimates, perpetuates, or benefits from manifestly illiberal practices beyond its borders, not merely as a one-off aberration but rather as an ongoing reality.

These claims provide further reasons to inquire into the practical weight of liberal integrity. Some readers, however, might object that such an inquiry could take away the philosophical value of liberal political integrity. One form of this concern has to do with liberal normative individualism. Some might object that, to remain liberal, an all-things-considered inquiry would ultimately have to refer only to individual persons, rather than any collective entities. If the claims of integrity are to be decisive in deciding how liberal polities ought to relate to illiberal foreign practices, that will ultimately be because of the integrity of their individual citizens. But if that is the case, then talk about collective integrity is a distraction from the real site of the normative action.

The first step in addressing this objection is to note that individual identity—and therefore integrity—can be intertwined with collective identity in many ways. One does not have to endorse communitarian critiques of liberalism to agree with Joseph Raz (Reference Raz1986, 209), for instance, that there are important “aspects of the personal sense of identity which are inextricably bound up with. . .communities and their common culture.” This is true, furthermore, not only as a matter of empirical observation but also as a matter of normative principle. Thus, for example, it is commonly thought that there is moral value in citizens identifying with the constitutive moral achievements of their political community, including even past achievements for which they can claim no credit: There is moral value in citizens shaping their fundamental worldviews and aspirations in light of these moral achievements, and even in deriving pride from them. Along the same lines, there is arguably a moral need for citizens to integrate into their personal identity, at least to some degree and over some time period, their polity's constitutive moral failures, even when they carry no individual responsibility for these failures.Footnote ²¹

All of this matters here, in turn, because if individual identity is often intertwined with collective identity as an empirical matter, and should (in some sense) be intertwined with collective identity as a normative matter, then it is mistaken to say that a focus on collective identity and integrity is a distraction from the truly significant individual level. We can see this point by considering the example of Rawls's theory of justice. Assuming Rawls is correct that a society's “basic structure” has “profound” effects on individual citizens that are “present from the start” (Rawls Reference Rawls1999a, 7), there is no reason to think that his focus on fundamental collective institutions is a distraction from an individualist viewpoint. The same is true in the case of collective identity and integrity: Insofar as collective identity has and ought to have a profound impact on individual citizens, there is no reason to think it is merely a distraction from an individualist perspective.

These points still leave aside, however, a final objection. We can imagine a critic who argues that a focus on the collective integrity of a liberal polity is a distraction not because it diverts attention from the individual level, but because the integrity of any agent—whether individual or collective—should be entirely derivative from the all-things-considered moral judgment as to what a given situation requires. If agents do what morality ultimately requires of them, then there is no reason for them to feel that their integrity has been compromised at all.

I have not considered this objection up to now, because I believe that the best way to meet it goes through the preceding arguments regarding the significance of agents’ moral history. To see how, note first that a critic who espouses this objection necessarily denies that agents’ identity-grounding moral projects can ever conflict with what morality requires. Therefore, the objection commits such a critic to deny also that the different moral histories of different agents—the histories that underlie their moral projects—should factor at all in their moral reflection. If someone said, for example, “I have struggled for years to break free from the mafia, and doing business with the mafia now will go against this identity-grounding struggle,” our critic would have to respond as follows: “Your moral situation is not different in any way from the situation of people who lack this kind of history. You are precisely in the same moral position as they are.”

Such a response, however, reflects an impoverished understanding of actual moral experience. To demand that an agent simply forget its particular moral history—to engage in moral reflection that entirely “subtracts” this history—is to ignore what the agent cannot and arguably should not ignore. It is implausible, for example, to say to a man who has struggled throughout his adult life to combat his racist upbringing that he should simply forget this struggle if morality, all things considered, requires that he does business with racists. And it is similarly implausible to say to a polity struggling to combat centuries of racism that it should simply forget about this struggle if morality, all things considered, permits its doing business with a racist regime. It is plausible to say that an agent might sometimes be permitted or even obliged to do things that conflict with its constitutive, identity-grounding moral struggles, even if this requires “dirtying hands.” But it is very much implausible to say that the agent should not give any moral weight at all to this conflict.Footnote ²² Even when the claims of integrity are outweighed by opposing considerations, there is a genuine moral loss that should be kept in sight—and that the idea of liberal integrity brings into view.

I hope to have shown, even to readers deeply skeptical of “integrity talk,” that this enriched perspective is valuable, and that the idea of liberal integrity is well worth accounting for in our moral reflection. If I have provided a systematic framework for grasping this elusive idea and its moral force, that is important in and of itself.

INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION: ON CONTESTED LIBERAL IDENTITY AND ILLIBERAL INTEGRITY

I want to end by commenting on two issues that I have put aside here. First, through the idea of liberal integrity, I have emphasized a specific, moralized form of liberal identity, highlighting the moral importance of treating fundamental failures and successes in realizing equal rights as constitutive of the identity of a liberal polity. Some readers, however, might wonder how this moralized notion of liberal identity relates to disagreements regarding liberal collective identity and its practical implications. My answer is that the view presented here is best seen as constraining these disagreements, rather than as settling them completely. My account provides another way to see that citizens ought to put certain interpretations of liberal collective identity “beyond the pale”: It provides another way to see why citizens ought to treat as illegitimate, for example, blatantly misogynist or racist policies that seek to dismantle official recognition of struggles to realize gender and racial equality. This kind of official recognition, we might say, ought to be treated as a non-negotiable component of the identity of a liberal polity, because measures that sought to undo such recognition cannot plausibly claim to reflect what a liberal political community stands for. Following the reasoning developed in the previous section, a parallel point obtains at the global level. Policies seeking to dismantle official recognition of blatant wrongs that the polity has inflicted on noncitizens beyond its borders would be morally illegitimate in exactly the same way.

This normative constraint, to be sure, still leaves a great deal of space for disputes regarding liberal collective identity and the practical implications of liberal commitments. But this is as it should be. We should be able to argue that our interlocutors’ practical proposals do not represent in the best light neither what we stand for as a political community—what our collective identity is about—nor what we ought to stand for. However, not any policy that might be unjust or wrongheaded from a liberal perspective is also ipso facto a threat to liberal integrity. Some citizens may find unjust the policies that a majority enacts on a plethora of issues, from free speech through redistribution to multiculturalism. But as long as these policies are grounded in plausible interpretations of the core liberal commitment to equality—both the equality of citizens and universal human equality—there is no reason to see them as a threat to liberal integrity. The idea of liberal integrity is thus compatible with enduring disagreements both regarding liberal justice and components of the collective identity of any particular liberal polity.

Underlying the last two paragraphs is a point that I have made already in the opening section—namely, that I do not take the idea of liberal integrity to exhaust the universe of liberal political morality or to be more fundamental than familiar liberal values. This point, in turn, connects to another issue that I put aside and with which I close: the potential claims of integrity that might apply to illiberal polities. There are three reasons why I did not discuss these claims earlier. First, it is not clear that global concerns are relevant to the identity of an illiberal polity to the same degree as they are in the liberal case. Insofar as the identity of any liberal polity necessarily features universalist elements, the kinds of blatant contradictions between domestic and global practices that I have described earlier always pose a threat to its integrity. Yet the identity of an illiberal polity may not feature universalist elements. Hence even a deep contradiction between domestic and global practices may not suffice to trigger a threat to the integrity of an illiberal polity.

Second, there are at least some manifestly illiberal polities—at the limit, ones featuring clearly despotic regimes—for which it seems normatively misleading to think of the sovereign body politic as a group agent, and therefore as an entity that might have integrity. “A group agent that is constructed around a dictator,” as List and Pettit (Reference List and Pettit2011, 59) note, “can be seen as just an extension of that individual's agency rather than as a group agent proper.” Hence, when it comes to at least some manifestly illiberal regimes, discussions of the integrity of the sovereign body politic might be fundamentally misconceived.Footnote ²³

The final and most important reason why I have not discussed the integrity of an illiberal polity is the following. We can imagine a manifestly illiberal polity that believes that its own integrity is undermined by support for certain practices beyond its borders. We may imagine, for instance, a racist polity that sees a threat to its integrity in supporting other regimes that are committed to racial equality. But because this kind of threat is clearly not morally disturbing, it only reaffirms the point I have made at the outset: The moral importance of political integrity should not be separated from familiar liberal values or treated as more fundamental than these values. Rather, it should be seen as a way of clarifying and unifying these values. My main aim here was to make progress toward this clarity and unity.