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This book provides a novel account of integrity and its relevance to both individual and collective conduct, and analyses a wide range of practical policy problems.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Organizing Integrity
- 2: Integrity: Political, not (only) Personal
- 3: Integrity, Self-Absorption, and Clean Hands
- 4: 'All the Demagogue's Men': How a Liberal Democracy Disintegrates
- 5: Honoring Integrity?
- Conclusion
About the author
Shmuel Nili is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and a Research Fellow at the School of Philosophy, the Australian National University. His publications include The People's Duty (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and he has published numerous essays in leading journals such as Ethics, The American Political Science Review, The American Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics.
Summary
Conventional philosophical wisdom holds that no agent can invoke its own moral integrity -- no agent can invoke fidelity to its deepest ethical commitments -- as an independent moral consideration. This is because moral integrity simply consists in doing what is, all-things-considered, the right thing. Integrity argues that this conventional wisdom is mistaken with regard to individual agents, but is especially misguided with regard to liberal democracies as collective agents. Even more than individual persons, liberal democracies as collective agents often face integrity considerations of independent moral force, affecting the moral status of actual political decisions. After defending this philosophical thesis, this book illustrates its practical value in thinking through a wide range of practical policy problems. These problems range from 'dirty' national security policies, through the moral status of political honours celebrating political figures of questionable integrity, to the 'clean hands' dilemmas of political operatives who enable media demagogues to scapegoat vulnerable ethnic and racial minorities.
Additional text
Integrity has received a mixed press from political and moral philosophers. Many regard it as at best unnecessary and at worst pernicious. Against this view, Shmulik Nili proposes an innovative account of integrity as a valuable and necessary quality of personal character and especially of political institutions, supporting rather than hindering morally and politically appropriate action by citizens and politicians. The resulting defence of integrity is both highly original and, as his discussions of Berlusconi, Trump, and Netanyahu reveal, extremely timely.
