Integrity and Morality

Abstract

This paper defends a strong link between personal integrity and morality in a way that preserves the overriding and universal authority of impartial morality. I argue that, when we are committed to a personal project or relationship, we hold ourselves accountable, from the perspective of a corresponding practical identity, for living up to the commitment. Under the right conditions, this generates an obligation to ourselves. Supposing that holding someone accountable constitutively presupposes a version of Kant’s Formula of Humanity (as Stephen Darwall argues), such obligations of integrity turn out to be moral obligations. Although the picture presented here resembles Christine Korsgaard’s account of the link between integrity of morality, it has several advantages over that account.