Agents are commonly said to display moral integrity if they stand for their deepest ethical commitments when recanting them would be expedient. For example, a junior employee who calls out her managers for nepotistic hiring practices when this is likely to imperil her chances of getting promoted would likely be praised for being a person of integrity instead of a soulless careerist. When people act in this way, we tend to think they exhibit a particularly important kind of virtue.

Yet numerous philosophers, living up to their reputation as unlovable gadflies, have recently questioned whether moral integrity is all it is cracked up to be. These “integrity skeptics” argue, first, that invocations of integrity are morally redundant because sticking to one's deepest ethical commitments is only valuable when and because an agent chooses to do what is right, all things considered. In the aforementioned example, then, the employee chooses correctly because nepotism is straightforwardly morally unacceptable, and this, rather than the supposed integrity-conferring nature of her actions, explains why we should praise the employee's decision-making.

Second, the integrity skeptics more ominously claim that invoking one's own integrity can actually be dangerous because it is likely to licence forms of morally self-indulgent behavior. Consider a counterfactual situation in which the ex-British prime minister John Major had refused to negotiate with the Irish Provisional Army because doing so would have violated his principled belief that the British government must not negotiate with terrorist organizations (a commitment Major frequently proclaimed). Counterfactual John Major may have maintained his moral integrity, but he would have done so at great cost to the people of Northern Ireland. According to the integrity skeptics, this kind of case illustrates that agents sometimes have very good reason to sacrifice their integrity and that if they do, they should be applauded, not maligned.

In this book, Shmuel Nili challenges this now widespread philosophical scepticism about integrity by arguing that an agent's consideration of how they can act with integrity can play a valuable and important role in their moral and political decision-making. The book has three key theoretical aims. First, it aims to show that an agent's moral integrity does have independent, if defeasible, moral value. Second, it argues, in a refreshingly counterintuitive way, that it is actually easier to defend this claim when one considers liberal peoples as collective agents rather than individual persons reflecting on how they should act. Third, Nili explores the complicated relationship between the integrity of individual persons and the kind of collective integrity he discusses. These claims are articulated and defended over five short and highly engaging chapters which, given Nili's accessible style, could profitably be used for teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

In chapter 1, Nili argues that personal integrity does have an important kind of independent moral significance in its own right. He carefully and patiently traverses a range of the central objections made by integrity skeptics, offering convincing rebuttals of their central moves. Chapter 2 is perhaps the most important chapter of the book. Nili utilizes List and Pettit's influential account of group agency to argue that liberal democracies can be regarded as agents with their own integrity; that this form of political integrity can be an independent factor in their moral deliberation; and that this form of integrity is even easier to defend from integrity skeptics than the form of personal integrity he examines in chapter 1. He expounds the attractions of this view through intriguing discussions of the moral claims of collective history and a “global integrity test,” which he claims liberal states can employ to determine whether they ought to partake in various practices or if doing so will threaten their integrity. The test is remarkably straightforward: liberal states must question if they could implement the practice within their own borders while retaining their identity-grounding institutions. If they could not do so, Nili insists, then they have weighty moral reasons to refrain from the proposed course of action.

Chapter 3 addresses the second prong of integrity skepticism: the worry that considering one's own integrity is likely to cause an agent to prioritize keeping their hands clean instead of doing right by others. This claim is subject to careful critique by Nili. He argues both that there can be cases in which one's integrity can push agents to dirty their hands and that when one reasons in this manner, one must reflect seriously on the relevant causal issues. If one does, Nili maintains, the allure of the self-indulgence charge largely disintegrates. Though he does not deny that there can be genuine conflicts between an agent's integrity and the needs of others, he suggests that this conflict actually arises in a much smaller range of cases than is commonly supposed and is no more damaging to an integrity-based approach than it is to many mainstream forms of deontological ethics.

The final two chapters apply his account of personal and political integrity in fascinating directions. Chapter 4 considers political operatives who seek to justify serving political “media demagogues” (Trump, Berlusconi, and Netanyahu are considered in great detail) in the belief they may minimize the harms such leaders are likely to inflict on their subjects. Nili bracingly argues that in such cases, given the kind of leaders such political operatives are trying to constrain, there is very little reason to think that such an enterprise is going to succeed. In this sense, he maintains that integrity considerations give us multiple reasons to condemn political operators who ally with media demagogues.

In the final chapter, Nili examines how his framework can help us to make headway in the increasingly heated debates about the appropriateness of certain kinds of political honors (from statues and monuments to the award of certain official titles, and so on). He argues that, rather than attempting to honor political leaders’ personal integrity, we should think in more collective terms about the fundamental values we may seek to promote as a political collective.

By defending the claim that integrity is an admirable quality of personal character and arguing, in a genuinely original way, that it ought also to be regarded as a virtue that liberal political institutions should strive toward, Nili speaks to some of the most pressing political questions of our age in a unique and philosophically provocative way. Though one certainly might raise questions about the very idealized understanding of liberal politics that drives his argument (in which disagreement and conflict about the core commitments of liberal democracies or the histories of particular liberal states seem largely absent), or quibble about some of the specific conclusions he draws in chapters 4 and 5, he has undoubtedly written a rich and analytically sophisticated work of moral and political philosophy. Indeed, I suspect that Integrity, Personal and Political will drive the discussion of integrity in moral and political philosophy for many years to come.