Michael P. Levine

What does it take to be a person of integrity? Could those who commit morally horrendous acts be persons of integrity? Is personal integrity compatible with the kinds of ambivalence and self-doubt characteristic of fragile selves and ordinary lives? This book examines the centrality of integrity in relation to a variety of philosophical and psychological concerns that impinge upon the ethical life. Relating integrity to many standard issues in philosophical and moral psychology—such as self-deception, weakness of will, hypocrisy and relationships—the authors present a comprehensive and accessible study of integrity and its types. Drawing on contemporary work in moral and philosophical psychology, ethics, theories of the self and feminist thought, this book develops an account of integrity as a fundamental virtue—as something that is central to all our lives.

Our first aim is to spell out central accounts of integrity from Cheshire Calhoun, Mark Halfon, and Aristotelian virtue theorists and indicate some of their strengths and weaknesses. Part of what is intriguing about the concept of integrity is its relationship to other moral concepts. Our second goal is to examine the relationship between integrity and the concepts of regret and moral luck. Moral luck is a phenomenon in which a person’s moral qualities come to depend on factors outside of their control. To what extent is integrity dependent on moral luck? We come to regret past actions in many ways and for many reasons. Would a recognition that we have lived with integrity mean that we have no grounds for deep regret?

Integrity is one of the most important and oft-cited of virtue terms and perhaps the most puzzling. For example, one may acknowledge a person to have integrity even though that person may hold what one thinks are importantly mistaken moral views. When used as a virtue term, ‘integrity’ refers to a quality of a person’s character; however, there are other uses of the term. The most philosophically important sense of the term ‘integrity’ relates to general character. Philosophers have been concerned to understand what it is for a person to exhibit integrity throughout life. What is it to be a person of integrity? Ordinary discourse about integrity involves two fundamental intuitions: first, that integrity is primarily a formal relation one has to oneself, or between parts or aspects of one’s self; and second, that integrity is connected in an important way to acting morally, in other words, there are some substantive or normative constraints on what it is to act with integrity. How these two intuitions can be incorporated into a consistent theory of integrity is not obvious, and most accounts of integrity tend to focus on one of these intuitions to the detriment of the other. A number of accounts have been advanced, the most important of them being: (i) integrity as the integration of self; (ii) integrity as maintenance of identity; (iii) integrity as standing for something; (iv) integrity as moral purpose; and (v) integrity as a virtue. These accounts are reviewed and we then examine two issues of central concern to philosophers exploring the concept of integrity: the relations between types of integrity and between integrity and moral theory.

We live in an age of heroes. What is a hero? Why is our need for heroes and our desire to be heroic as insatiable as they are pervasive? Kierkegaard’s “Knight of Faith” and Nietzsche’s “Superman” both depict the heroic as involving a commitment to inner knowing along with a faith in one’s own abilities, despite being unable to communicate these reasons to anyone else. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche use the notion of “hero” to make a moral claim with respect to how we should lead our lives and endure—even love—the lived human experience. There is no diminishing of the modern appetite to consume and act out “reassuring” narratives about how we are all the hero of our own personal journey. Psychoanalysis gives an account as to why the appeal of the hero is inextricably tied to the human psyche. Jung explains the appeal of heroes in terms of archetypes, and Freud speaks of our orectic natures—nature driven by desire, appetite, and wish-fulfillment. Times of crisis and insecurity will always be coincident with an age of heroes, and the proliferation of heroes in film and television, as well as imaged heroes in real life, suggest these times are troubling if not dire. This paper explores why it is that heroes are always there, indeed must be there, when we need them most and considers the educative potential of such narratives.

This philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of racism brings together some of the most influential analytic philosophers writing on racism today. The introduction by Tamas Pataki outlines the historical and thematic development of conceptions of race and racism, and locates the following essays against the backdrop of contemporary reactions to that development. While the framework is primarily analytic, the volume also includes essays deeply informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminist and social theory. The fourteen chapters in this collection address three interrelated questions: What is racism? What are the causes of racism? and What are the moral and political implications of racism? Although their approaches are wide ranging, the contributors to Racism in Mind broadly endorse a psychological-characterological approach to the understanding of many aspects of racism.

The shift from the logical to the empirical argument from evil against the existence of God has been seen as a victory by analytic philosophers of religion who now seek to establish that the existence of evil fails to make the existence of God improbable. I examine several arguments in an effort to establish the following: (i) Their victory is pyrrhic. They distort the historical, philosophical and religious nature of the problem of evil. (ii) In attempting to refute the empirical argument they rely on disguised but well-worn strategies. (iii) A refusal to let evil count in any way against the probability of the existence of God indicates that their rejection is ideological and contrary to traditional theism. (iv) Aspects of their arguments are morally repugnant. (v) Their arguments are indicative of a lack of vitality, relevance and “seriousness” in Christian analytic philosophy of religion.

Many people who do not believe in God believe that 'everything is God' - that everything is part of an all-inclusive divine unity. In _Pantheism_, this concept is presented as a legitimate position and its philosophical basis is examined. Michael Levine compares it to theism, and discusses the scope for resolving the problems inherent in theism through pantheism. He also considers the implications of pantheism in terms of practice. This book will appeal to those who study philosophy or theology. It will also be of interest to anyone who does not believe in a personal God, but does have faith in a higher unifying force, and is interested in the justification of this as a legitimate system of thought.

Many people who do not believe in God believe that 'everything is God' - that everything is part of an all-inclusive divine unity. In _Pantheism_, this concept is presented as a legitimate position and its philosophical basis is examined. Michael Levine compares it to theism, and discusses the scope for resolving the problems inherent in theism through pantheism. He also considers the implications of pantheism in terms of practice. This book will appeal to those who study philosophy or theology. It will also be of interest to anyone who does not believe in a personal God, but does have faith in a higher unifying force, and is interested in the justification of this as a legitimate system of thought.

This chapter argues that Hume’s argument against justified belief in miracles in Part 1 of his essay is a priori and applies to firsthand experience of a miracle as well as to testimony. The disputed issues cannot be decided on how closely one reads the text or on what Hume “actually says” but are interpretive and require setting them in the context of Hume’s Treatise—his peculiar empiricism, his account of causation, and his theory of a posteriori reasoning. But even if, contrary to the a priori reading of Hume’s argument in Part 1, Hume never thought it impossible to justifiably believe in a miracle, and even if Hume’s argument in Part 1 fails, this does nothing to support the view that anyone has ever been “justified” in believing in a miracle or that “difficult and delicate empirical investigations” are needed before one justifiably rejects such belief.

While accepting and welcoming our main thesis and project, Schäfer and Hühn’s Commentary on our paper focuses on two main criticisms, both of which seem to us mistaken. The first of these is that our paper falsely argues “that the existing definitions of leadership out there fall short in describing the role of ethics in leadership.” The second seems to be a belief that (i) we claim to be offering an entirely new definition of leadership and misrepresenting its nature because (ii) in the view of Schäfer and Hühn this supposedly new definition “is essentially un-Aristotelian.”