The Virtues of Integrity (original) (raw)

I would also like to thank the University of Virginia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for a research fellowship during AY 2006-07. I also owe a great personal debt to Joy Meyer, who has been a wonderful source of greatly needed love and encouragement during the time it has taken me to finish this project. I dedicate this work to her and to one other person: my grandfather, Charles L. Moseley, a man of great integrity. Chapter 1 The Elusive Nature of Integrity I. Integrity: Religious and Secular Conceptions. The story of Job is one of the most memorable of the Bible. Readers of the book will probably remember these highlights. Yahweh proclaims that Job is his most faithful servant. "The adversary" 1 bets Yahweh that Job will lose his faith if it is tested. Yahweh accepts the adversary's wager and allows the adversary to test Job's faith. Job's life is shattered in many ways by the onslaught of miseries that are deviled out to him. Job's family, farm and health are diabolically destroyed. However, Job keeps himself together by staying true to his Lord throughout his suffering: Job remains whole by being an obedient disciple of his Lord and His law. At the end of story Job's obedience is rewarded: Yahweh restores his health, enhances his wealth and holdings and provides Job with a new family. 2 Job is perhaps best known for his patience but his distinctive form of integrity is a recurring motif in the major monotheistic traditions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach that integrity consists in obedience to God and His law. Moses Maimonides expresses this idea in the maxim, "Everything that you do, do for the sake of God." 3 1 The Hebrew text does not provide a name for this character: he is given a definite description that is often translated as "the Satan," "the accuser," or "the adversary." There are interesting questions about the relation of the adversary to the serpent in Genesis and the diabolical characters in other books of the Bible. St. Thomas Aquinas also writes of the religious and moral significance of obedience to God: "[T]he virtue of obedience is more praiseworthy than other moral virtues, seeing that by obedience a person gives up his own will for God's sake, and by other moral virtues 2 The Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac provides another striking example of the arduous demands that God may place upon his faithful servants. In the story Yahweh commands Abraham to kill his only son Isaac. When Abraham is about to thrust a knife into his son Yahweh grants Abraham permission to kill a ram instead. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (in Kierkegaard's Writings, 6, trans., Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983) examines several perspectives on the story of Abraham and Isaac while also exploring the nature of religious faith and its relation to moral commitment. 3 I owe the quotations from Maimonides and Aquinas to Stephen L. Carter, Integrity (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996, 8). 8 This passage is from one of Nietzsche's journal entries and the quotation is from Wurzer, Ibid., p.236. Wurzer contends that Nietzsche's conception of integrity is a precursor to his later idea of the will to power. Nietzsche's second claim, that integrity is "something in the becoming" that may be cultivated or restrained according to our inclination, is complex and I shall only briefly discuss it here. Nietzsche's idea that integrity is "something in the becoming" suggests that integrity is essentially concerned with the way that individuals experience the world and shape their characters through their actions, and Nietzsche's idea that integrity is something "which we may either cultivate or restrain, according to our inclination" suggests the related idea that integrity is established and sustained by an individual's feelings or passions rather than depending upon, at least a narrow conception of, rationality or reason. Chapter 2 discusses these ideas in the context of Bernard Williams's early writings on integrity. Nietzsche's third claim, that integrity is a virtue 9 The main arguments provided by Socrates in both Gorgias (trans., Donald Zeyl, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987) and Republic (trans., G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1992) defend the view that the virtue of justice (in individuals) consists in a type of harmony of the soul: just persons have harmoniously integrated souls, whereas unjust persons have fractured and chaotic souls in which the parts of the soul are at odds with one another. 10 Here I am referring to Plato's descriptions of Callicles in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus in Book I of the Republic. The spirit of Nietzsche's critiques of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (trans., Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966) and in The Genealogy of Morals (trans. and ed., Walter Kaufmann.New York: Vintage Books, 1967) echoes the voices of Callicles and Thrasymachus.