The article aims to distinguish autonomy from integrity. I claim that integrity is different from a form of autonomy at least, but that integrity and autonomy overlap considerably. Integrity itself is a form of autonomy: what ethicists call ‘moral autonomy.’ (They tend to distinguish between personal and moral autonomy.) Autonomy is the genus, one might say, with integrity (i.e., moral autonomy) and personal autonomy being species of it.

Self-protection seems to be negatively correlated with integrity on the standard conception of that virtue. To be self-protective is to lose some of our integrity. In this paper, I pursue the somewhat unlikely claim that a certain amount of self-protection is consistent with integrity and is even required by it in many circumstances.

Three pictures of integrity have gained philosophical currency. On the integrated self picture, integrity involves the integration of "parts" of oneself into a whole. On the identity picture, integrity means fidelity to projects and principles constitutive of one's core identity. On the clean hands picture, integrity means maintaining the purity of one's agency, especially in dirty hands situations. I sketch each picture and suggest two general criticisms. First, integrity is reduced to something else with which it is not equivalent--to the (...) conditions of unified agency, to the conditions for continuing as the same self, and to the conditions for having reason to refuse cooperating with evil. Second, integrity is understood as a personal, but not also a social virtue; this limits the analysis of what integrity is and why it is a virtue. In the last section, I suggest a way of understanding integrity as the social virtue of standing before others for what, in one's best judgment, is worth persons' doing. (shrink)

Many of us took pride in never feeling violent, never hitting. We had not thought deeply about our relationships to inflicting physical pain. Some of us expressed terror and awe when confronted with physical strength on the part of others. For us, the healing process included the need to learn how to use physical force constructively, to remove the terror—the dread. —bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.